They gave the impression of not caring much now Elsie Almquist had been located. Had she been sent for? Or, informed, had decided she wanted to be with her husband? I had the mean thought, not expressed aloud, that all those phone calls made to Kiruna had been a waste of money.

“No mention of a black leather backpack with £2,000 in it, you’ll have noticed,” said Silver as we went back to the flat. “Do we tell them?”

“I suppose so. I don’t know. We’ll have to tell Liv.”

She was still asleep. Wim turned up before she woke, descending gracefully through the window in spite of carrying a bag of cans of fruit juice in one hand, the other full of chocolate biscuits, crisps, cakes from the patisserie, and pizzas. It was unusual for him to cross the roofs resplendently clad, but that afternoon he wore a new (or new secondhand) tunic of lemon-yellow silk embroidered with birds. I said it reminded me of a vase Max had called famille jaune and he laughed and said he had never been called fragile before. I was to remember that remark of his—with bitterness.

We made tea and told him about Liv’s father. You could see he didn’t want to know. He never treated her the way Jonny did, he had too much finesse for that. He never used her and I’m sure he gave her great sexual pleasure, but he wanted nothing serious to enter their relationship, nothing that might hint at commitment. Perhaps any liaison he had with any woman would have been the same.

“She’ll have to go out now,” he said, bored. “She’ll have to go and visit him. Have another biscuit, Clodagh. The coconut ones are great.”

Of course Liv soon appeared, fetched out by the sound of Wim’s voice. She had washed herself and combed her hair. The tear marks were eradicated and she had put on a clean white T-shirt, more a low-necked vest, that showed off her splendid breasts and tiny waist. Wim’s boredom went and he looked interested. Strange he might have been but he was, after all, a man.

Giving me a resentful glance, presumably because I was sitting next to Wim, Liv got down on the floor at his feet and, when he showed no reaction beyond giving her a small smile, leaned her head against his knees. Silver drew breath and told her about her father, that he was in the hospital with a fractured skull. I expected a violent reaction but she only stared, nodded, and said, “So that is where he has been.”

“Your mother’s here. She’s with him. I don’t know where she’s staying.”