We smoked one more cigarette. We watched and waited. Nothing happened for a long while. Wim, who had stubbed his out, had snaked to the edge of the mansard and hung over it. He turned his head to us and put one of those exaggerated fingers to his lips. I heard the window go up, perhaps to its full extent, a rasping rattling sound. Then a grunt as from someone not as used to clambering out of windows as we were. Wim mouthed, in a soundless whisper, “He’s on the balcony.”

I suppose we knew then. We knew our test had worked. We heard him walk along, picking his way, treading cautiously, as if this nineteenth-century walkway would disintegrate when obliged to carry twelve stone of twentieth-century humanity. He walked a little way to the right, then back and a little way to the left. Law-abiding he might not be but in the past he had been. This was a man who would balk at trespassing on his neighbor’s property even when he had seen three desperate villains attempting to break in. He gave another grunt as he climbed back into the room. The window rattled and closed with a bang.

“Isn’t this going to make it harder for us to show ourselves to them when we do?”

I asked this after we’d gone down the scaffolding and were walking back along the street. To our surprise Wim was still with us. I always thought there was something incongruous about seeing him at ground level, though that was where I had first seen him. He turned to me.

“I shan’t be there. You’ll do it alone.”

“Why won’t you be there? Because you think it was you who principally scared them?”

Wim first yawned, then smiled. “Not really, Clo. I’m not interested.”

I was still on the alert for police sirens, knowing too that the three of us, with our dirt-smeared faces and grubby clothes, would be prime targets for the police to stop and question, to ask what we were doing out at that hour and where were we going. But there were no sirens and no police. I hoped that the three in Flat 4E were in bed and asleep, no longer frightened, but somehow I doubted that. We climbed the stairs at 15 Russia Road, I especially feeling weary after my hard day’s work in the Houghtons’ garden.

“We know it’s them now,” I said.

“We know it’s them.”

Silver went to make us tea while I washed my hands and face. Wim went into the bathroom immediately after me and emerged with his long sheepskin coat covering his nakedness. He disappeared into Liv’s room, closing the door behind him. Silver looked at me and put up his eyebrows.

“It makes a change for him to go to her.”

“Yes, but where’s Jonny?”