“The girl I was at Queen Mary’s with. You’ve met her a couple of times. Morna, remember? Big dark girl, beautiful face.”

That was the first jealousy I felt with Silver, a thin shaft of it going into my side like a long pin, and I resolved to crush it if it came again.

“It doesn’t matter,” Silver said. “The point is only that she said she saw him, Andrew Lane, I mean. Coming out of a shop in Elgin.”

“He wasn’t coming out of a shop when I saw him,” said Wim. He lit a cigarette and passed around the pack. “He was in a room in a flat and she was there. Not the boy, though. I expect the boy was in bed.”

I hadn’t expected an interest in people from Wim, and perhaps the kind he had was more anthropological than social. He liked to see how they behaved when they didn’t know they were being watched. He wanted to see their faces when they thought they were alone. Jonny, bent on a rather different assessment of flat-dwellers, best pleased when they were absent from their homes, made his reconnaissance from balconies. Wim lay on the mansard, head-down, and peered over the top edge of dormers. It was much to his advantage that few people on the top floors drew their curtains or pulled down their blinds.