It was one in the morning and the whole of 19 Russia Road was in darkness. I crept down the iron staircase, the cold fronds of ivy tapping against my face, and let myself in. Once Mabel would have been there to greet me or, uncurling her body and rolling on her back with waving paws, have welcomed me to bed. The place seemed disproportionately silent and dark. Having been out in the open for most of the day and up high in the sky for half the night, I felt more oppressively than had become usual with me, the dull misery of life in a basement. It was deep night, the beginning of the small hours, but it might as well have been a spring morning or summer noon, nothing of the sky and nothing of sunlight was ever visible down there. I got into bed and lay with the light on, thinking about those two, Lane and Barrie, to stop myself mourning Mabel. How long had they been in a top flat in Torrington Gardens? Was the boy with them? Precisely which house was it the flat was in? Had Wim taken the number or simply counted the dormers? And how were they living in there? On what? Had they money? Morna had seen Andrew Lane out shopping, so presumably they had enough.

Thinking about money reminded me. I had omitted to check on Liv’s £2,000, something I did most days. I got up. Walking through old Mrs. Fisherton’s to the dining room I felt the whole weight of that big tall house pressing on me and it suddenly seemed remarkable that a house like this one should stand and go on standing for a hundred years and more. It was quite fragile, it must be, bricks on timber, bricks on bricks, thin slivers of mortar, top-heavy surely. For a moment I was almost afraid of its sudden collapse, a soft rushing sound first, increasing to a rumble and a roar as the whole edifice came tumbling down, engulfing me in broken bricks and debris and splintering wood. Of course, I knew it was only my claustrophobia that made me fancy such things, that I could be buried under the falling house, suffocated under it, my mouth full of plaster dust and sticky cobwebs, but I really did feel a terror of it for a few seconds. I had to stand still and breathe deeply before I opened the door that was always kept closed and let myself into old Mrs. Fisherton’s nasty dining room.