No cars went by. In the flats opposite windows were wide open and music drifting out, something quite unusual in Russia Road. But the weather was unusual, even for that warm summer. The sight of a man riding past on a bike set Liv shaking again. Silver suggested she walk down two steps but she was adamant she had done enough. He shepherded her upstairs again, if that’s the word, for shepherds don’t actually hold on to their sheep and manhandle them, which is what he had to do if she wasn’t to collapse on the stairs and go into one of her fetal positions. Once back in his flat he made her have a bath, actually running the water for her. Being a nurse must be like that, he said to me, only nurses do it all the time and he had only had one afternoon of it.

It would be good for her to come out with us that night, he said. She hadn’t even been up on the roofs for weeks.

“She could get the same attitude to the roofs as she has to the ground level,” he said. “It could get to be a phobia of any sort of outside.”

I asked him what he thought had happened to Håkan Almquist. “Gone off with someone he met while he was here on his own,” he said. “Woman or man, I don’t know. The temptation of that money was too much for him. Liv doesn’t know her dad as well as she thinks she does. Maybe we don’t any of us really know our parents. After all, they don’t know us. But don’t worry. He’ll turn up.”

After we’d eaten some of Silver’s bean soup (very unsuitable for the weather) and a not very successful lentil dish of my own with multigrain bread, Liv attempted another phone call to her mother. She went into our bedroom and, this time, her mother still being away from home, left a long message. We could hear her but of course we couldn’t understand. She translated for us.

“I am saying to her, Far has disappeared, he has stolen my money. I trust him and he is doing this terrible thing to me. All this I am telling her because she should know it. But she cannot do anything for me, for she is there and I am here. But she should know what he is doing to me.”

Silver sighed. “Did you leave this number?”

“She is knowing it. Don’t you remember Mor is phoning me here when Clodagh is making me tell them I live here?”

“Come on,” said Silver, “we’re going to make ourselves known to 4E Torrington Gardens.”