For they too, like Liv, had a secret hoard. Where they kept it no one told us for a long time. But it was unlikely they had taken up a floorboard and hidden it underneath. After all, it was legitimately theirs. It was a substantial sum, it must have been, for they had emptied their joint bank account and sold all their assets before they left, and, after that early staying in an hotel and a B-and-B, had spent very little. But having no income, only this capital, they were anxious about it. They watched it dwindle. They had nightmares, Alison told me, about having nothing left, about need compelling them to give themselves up.

Meanwhile Liv’s worries obsessed her. Someone must find out what had happened to the black leather backpack. Did we think an insurance company would pay the money she had lost? I find it extraordinary how many people think insurance companies will compensate you for any loss, almost irrespective of whether you have a policy with them, that this is what they exist for, to keep irresponsible wastrels happy. Liv had no insurance of any kind but she still seemed to think application could be made to someone or other for repayment of the lost money. When we said it was impossible she shrugged and smiled as if she had secret knowledge and turned her attention to her father. He must be visited, someone must go to the hospital. She couldn’t, she was ill again, since seeing James and Claudia she was worse than she had been before her agoraphobia therapy began.

The locksmith came on the day Silver and I went to the hospital to visit Håkan Almquist. We had to ask Morna to come so that there was someone there to let the locksmith in. Liv’s father was getting on quite well, dressed and sitting in a chair, though with a big bandage around his head. He remembered nothing about the attack on him and very little about what had gone before. The name of the hotel he had recalled only when the police reminded him, but he had forgotten where his daughter was living and Elsie Almquist seemed never to have known, beyond the fact that it was in London. Into the great gaps in his memory had fallen everything to do with the backpack and its contents. The first the police knew of its existence was when Elsie asked them where it was. She insisted that her husband had taken it with him to London and suggested that the hotel had stolen it.