As soon as the tarpaulins were up on the burned roofs, the temporary scaffolding down, and the workmen gone, all of which happened in the space of three days, we went up there to see how safe it would be to walk on. Of course, we hadn’t absented ourselves from the roofs on the nights immediately following the fire. We had several times climbed the scaffolding between the last terrace in Torrington Gardens and the first in Peterborough Avenue and walked along to assess what the builders had done that day. And we had twice crawled under the topmost windows of No. 4, but without catching a glimpse of the people who lived there. Silver and I were afraid this particular scaffolding might soon be taken down. The painting, which was the purpose of putting it there in the first place, was almost done. Once the scaffolding went, approach to 4E would be nearly impossible for us.

We failed in our attempt. The tarpaulin was there and the battens that held it in place. None of us was heavy but when we tentatively tried standing on the temporary roofing it sagged and a creaking sound came from underneath. Wim ran lightly across the tarpaulin from roughly the top of No. 24 to the top of No. 18 and back again. It was all right if you did it fast, he said, if you had a contingency plan in your head for what you’d do if the floor started to give way under you. He didn’t say what contingency plan he had and we didn’t ask. We sat inside the parapet on the top of 26, ate the Mars bars he had brought with him and smoked his Marlboros. Since the fire the weather had been wet for part of every day—sod’s law again, for it would have been helpful if it had rained the night of the fire—and even the safe parts of the roof were slippery. Rather reluctantly Silver and I decided not to risk crossing the tarpaulin. Not, at any rate, on a dark wet night.

So we sat up there and talked about how to be sure the three in 4E were indeed Andrew Lane, Alison Barrie, and Jason Patel. Until we were certain of this we felt we could make no progress. We had seen the woman and the boy at the same time and we had seen the man alone but so far we had never seen all three of them together. And we were unsure about the man. Morna had seen someone out shopping that she identified as Andrew Lane but, as Silver reminded us, Morna tended to give well-known names to people she saw in the street.

“You mean, we mightn’t have thought the man we saw was Andrew if Morna hadn’t told us about him first?” I said.