Wim remained on the roof. He hung over the dormer from the top and announced in a whisper as we approached that all the lights were out in the flat back and front. For all that we waited awhile, hoping and half-expecting the table lamp to be switched on. The truth was that we could scarcely imagine people voluntarily going to bed at ten at night. But after awhile we left and Wim said, perhaps by way of consoling us for our disappointment, that he’d help us onto the roofs of Formosa Street. He had brought his ropes and with the help of them and a chimney stack would get us up the gable at the Warrington Crescent end. We walked along the almost flat roof. The shops below us were all closed but a restaurant was open, its lights making window-shaped patterns on the pavement. The sound of talk and laughter and the rattle of plates reached us. To the west rose the pagoda-roofed blocks of flats built to replace slum streets, their windows brighter than the yellow moon, and on the far side of the canal the byzantine spire of St. Mary Magdalene, its nave fitting with such architectural cunning into the triangle beyond the gleaming grass of Westbourne Green.

We heard the sirens before we saw the smoke and flames. Their wailing was commonplace around there and might have come equally from police cars or ambulances as from fire engines. Some extra sense must have alerted the people in the restaurant to excitement, for they poured out into the street. We were wary about climbing down with all that crowd to see us, but we moved back to the end of the terrace and it was from there that we saw the thick black smoke billowing and surging into the night air from what seemed, shockingly and awfully, to be the top of a house in Torrington Gardens. Bright red sparks leapt and roared through the column of smoke. By then we could hear a crackling and a roar, quite different sounds from the dismal howl of the sirens.

“Is it them?” Silver said.

We both knew exactly what he meant. Was this inferno in the top of 4 Torrington Gardens?

“It’s more like twenty or twenty-two,” said Wim and we breathed again, for we trusted him to know. The idea of those people we already called “our three” being smoked out of their home like bees from a hive seemed a dreadful ineluctable fate, for it precluded all possible escape. “We’ll go to the other end and climb down where no one can see us.”