“And I thought he’d be thinner,” I said. “Come on, let’s go back.”

When we got home, intent on baths or most probably a shared bath, for we were coated in balcony grime, Liv came out of her bedroom, whimpering that the sound of the sirens had frightened her, she had thought they were made by the police coming after her. Told by Silver that the sirens belonged to fire engines, not police cars, that there had been a bad fire in Torrington Gardens, she became exultant in a quite unseemly way, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. While we had our bath she sat in the bathroom and talked to us, something we disliked as we had our own prudishness and objected to being seen together naked. But there was never enough hot water to take two baths in succession and no one had ever thought of equipping that bathroom with a shower. Liv sat on the stool where the dangerous electric heater usually stood and talked to us about her money. Or Claudia and James’s money.

“Where is it now?” Silver asked and, seeing her wide-eyed frightened small-creature look, said, “You needn’t mind telling us. Jonny isn’t here. Come to think of it, he hasn’t been here for a while, has he?”

“No, thank God. And perhaps will never again?”

Silver said he wouldn’t bank on it and where was the money?

“It is under the floor!”

She explained. The floors at Silver’s were all covered with fitted carpet, a different color in every room, greenish and fawnish and reddish, all very worn and battered by then, with threadbare bits covered up with rugs. In Liv’s room that had been Jonny’s room, this carpet was in a worse state than anywhere else and there were several rugs. While Jonny was at work, Silver and I out somewhere, and Wim no doubt on the roofs, she had lifted up a rug, pulled out whatever fastenings there were to pin a corner section of the carpet to the floor and found floorboards of raw unpainted wood beneath. These she had prised up with a tool, probably a chisel or an abused screwdriver, she had found in a toolbox in the utility room on the lower-ground floor.

“The basement? You went down to the basement?” said Silver. “Congratulations. It must be the first time.”

It was. Liv looked proud of herself in a shamefaced sort of way. “I am very scared when I am doing this. But I do it—did it. And I am taking up a bit of floor and putting my money into the hole and putting the bit back again and then the carpet and the thing on it.”

“The rug.”

“Yes, the rug. And now I am making a plan for what I am doing about the money and Far, my papa, and getting away.”

“Getting away?” I said.