Liv demurred a bit. Her excuses were plainly just that, excuses. Her mother might call back, the hotel might phone to say the money had been found, she was too tired and ill with the worry of it. It looked as if Silver had been right in forecasting an extension of her agoraphobia to the roofs. But he really wanted her with us, not for her company, of which both of us were weary, but because presenting Andrew and Alison with a man and two women rather than a woman and two men would make them feel more secure and encourage them to trust us. He told Liv this and she seemed flattered. At any rate, she agreed to come.

I was rather pleased Wim was still absent. Present in my mind and constantly recurring was a picture of those two people clinging to each other at the sight of us. Alison’s scream still rang in my ears. It was Wim who had done this, I believed, who had provoked this reaction, his startling face and physique, so attractive to Liv, his shaven head, his eyes and the black clothes he wore. And of course he had made the threatening gesture of breaking in. Even though it was he who had discovered them in the first place, we’d be better off without him.

The problem we hadn’t thought of was how to get her onto the top of 4E without crossing the tarpaulin that covered the burned area of roof. The only way was the one we intended to take, that is by way of the street and the scaffolding. But Liv, of course, wouldn’t go down into the street. We all climbed out of Silver’s window and followed our usual route. It was about nine, later than we had meant to be, but much time had been taken up in arguing with Liv and persuading her to come. The evening was warm, almost all light faded from the clear deep purple sky. Liv lit two candles and carried them along, one in each hand. Down below us lay a greenish-golden sea, the glow of street-lamps shimmering through spread plane leaves. There was no wind, not even the faintest chill in the air, and strangely no smell of exhaust or cooking or humanity, only the scent of lavender from one of the gardens down there, where they grew that pleasant herb to the exclusion of all else. We walked along inside the parapet and stopped when we reached the tarpaulin to survey what lay before us.

“I can walk across,” Liv said. “I am not so big. I am not so many kilos.”