ELSIE ALMQUIST CAME AROUND to Russia Road while I was conducting an agoraphobia therapy session with Liv. I was standing just inside the front door, trying to cajole her into taking a step outside. Clinging to my arm, she had begun shuffling over the threshold, her entire body shuddering, when her mother came across the road and up to the gate.

The previous evening, before we went on the roofs, I had been to the Hindes’ house, rung the bell and, when a girl answered the door, said I was from Westminster City Council. I said I was carrying out a survey into what residents thought of the council’s waste-disposal system. At this point a woman came down the stairs and a man came out from the doorway on the left. Perhaps they had learned something from their experiences with Liv, for James Hinde asked me to produce identification. I retreated, quite satisfied. Whoever that couple Liv saw in Russia Road might have been, they weren’t James and Claudia.

But when Liv heard I had been to the Hindes’ house she was aghast. They’d have followed me, they’d trace me here, there was probably someone watching the house even now. We could only get her downstairs by posting Judy at one end of the street and Morna at the other. But neither of them, of course, were on the alert for a middle-aged Swedish woman with a worried expression and a London A–Z guide in her hand. Liv, who these days reacted like this to almost anything unexpected, screamed shrilly. I pushed her back into the house, asked Elsie Almquist in and got them both up the stairs.

I know now that Liv was ill and that we were quite wrong to try and treat her ourselves. But we were very young. Getting her to a doctor was virtually impossible, while bringing a doctor or some psychiatric social worker to her never occurred to us. We never realized how close to the edge of paranoid schizophrenia she was. And her mother simply thought she was being difficult, “being a teenager,” when she rolled herself up into a ball in the place at the end of the sofa we had come to call “Liv’s corner.” She went over to her and shook her, taking her by the shoulder and jerking her arm back and forth. Liv reacted not by lifting her head or uncurling herself but by lashing out, striking her mother, who was still bending over her, a sharp blow on the chin.