He couldn’t deny it. He said nothing. Liv, who had been crying again, dried her eyes and said she’d like to go all the way down to the basement and try going up the area staircase. She said it as if it was an inspiration of her own rather than Silver’s idea. It was a Saturday and I didn’t have to go to work, so we both took her all the way down to the lower-ground floor. It wasn’t a bit like old Mrs. Fisherton’s but bare of furniture, all the walls painted a stark white that made it seem fairly light. I still felt the walls and the whole mass of the house above us as oppressive weights and the absence of the sight of a sky as suffocating. But I said nothing of this to Liv in case she decided to become the world’s only claustrophobic agoraphobe. The area door was unlocked. We got her outside into the moss-grown well, always damp as these places are even in the heat, and slowly mounted the stairs.

There was a gate at the top, exactly the same as at Max’s, a wrought-iron gate in a wrought-iron railing. I went first with Liv behind me and Silver following her. Things seemed quite promising as we stood on the paving, feeling the sun lay a skin of heat on our faces and looking over the low hedge at the street beyond. Then the last thing Silver and I wanted happened.

Two people appeared on the other side of Russia Road, walking along from the right-hand side toward us, a man and a woman in their thirties, she too well dressed for a Saturday-morning stroll, in a smart blue silk trouser-suit, he in jeans and a sports jacket. Liv screamed when she saw them. She covered her mouth with her hand but too late, as such gestures always are. Her scream brought them to look in our direction, but as far as I could see they gave no sign of recognition, simply checking, I suppose, that no one was in trouble.