Sometimes, far down below us, a car passed, taking the through-route from the Harrow Road to St. John’s Wood. Usually the cars were driven quite slowly but one came very fast. We heard a squeal of brakes and then a revving of the engine as the car moved off again. We looked over the parapet at the street lined with cars on both sides and Silver asked us if we realized that for the whole of our lifetimes we had never seen streets without cars parked nose-to-tail between the curb and the roadway, we had never seen streets looking the way they did when they were first built. The problem with traffic was more than vehicles jammed to a standstill or crawling in a close-packed herd. It was also the covering of streets by day and night, endlessly, with shiny metal capsules, millions of them edging the pavements like the permanent scarring left by a wound.

It was better up on the roofs. No cars there, no danger, and no noise. We sat down by the dead tree and smoked. Liv asked if her money was safe and I said I had checked earlier in the evening, when I took Mabel home. She had an idea, she said. Did we think that if she gave him the money, all of it apart from her airfare home, Jonny would go away and leave her alone? Go back to his room in Cricklewood and forget her? It was quite a lot and he was always wanting money, more and more of it.

I didn’t know, I couldn’t imagine it would be as easy as that, but Silver said he’d had more than enough of that money, he was sick of hearing about it, it wasn’t hers to keep or give away. He had said in the beginning she ought to send it back to Claudia and James. If she did that she need not be afraid of them any longer. She’d be able to go out into the streets without fear, get a job or go home to Sweden if she wanted to.

“But it is all I have,” she said. “I need it. Besides, if I am giving it back they will know I steal it before.”

This seemed unanswerable. Silver refused to talk about it and soon after that Liv went back on her own to the roof of 15 Russia Road and in through the window to savor the pleasures of having a room to herself without Jonny. She had only been gone five minutes when he appeared, walking along from the opposite direction and just inside the parapet. He had searched the roofs from the Castlemaine Road end of Russia Road, across the Italianate house that stood alone, all along Torrington Gardens and Peterborough Avenue as far as the cross street.

“She’s got that slippery bastard to hide it for her. I’ll kill him.”