But all of us, Elsie included for all her brave words, knew that was impossible. Liv was nineteen, she was an adult and could live where she pleased. She muttered something to her mother, then addressed everyone. “I stay here, in this flat. Silver is liking me here and Wim is.” She looked sternly at me. “Wim is, very much. Maybe it will be years and years. I don’t know. I must get back my money. But it is here I stay.”

With that, she went into her bedroom and we heard the key turn in the new lock. It was then, at this point, Silver told me later, that he understood what had happened to the £2,000. He didn’t know how he understood, it just came to him out of the air in a sudden revelation. We were on our way to Cricklewood on the bus, it being one of those evenings we didn’t go to 4E Torrington Gardens. The day had been sultry and humid, very warm but sunless, and now at eight the sun shone at last, low in the sky, a dark red globe glaring out between bars of black cirrus. We sat on the top, at the front, the better to contemplate awful Kilburn High Road and the incongruously pretty streets that turn off it, the dusty trees, the sari shops and secondhand clothes shops, the squalid clubs, the supermarkets absorbing and disgorging crowds, the Tricycle Theatre and the pubs. The bus stopped approximately every thirty seconds at a red light.

“It was Jonny,” Silver said. He looked into my face. “You’re not all that surprised, are you?”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“He knew about that money from the first. Well, we all did, but none of us had designs on it. I think he knew everything that happened to it, you taking care of it, you bringing it back, Liv hiding it for a second time. I don’t think he knew where it was hidden the first time but he did the second. He was probably thinking of taking it when I exiled him from her room.”

“He must have kept watch on the house. But he still had his job then. I don’t see how he could have.”

“He was just lucky. He saw Liv’s father come and knew the sort of time he came. As for the date of his return to Sweden, Liv very likely told him herself. He guessed she’d hand the money to him the day before. And he need not even have guessed. She may have told him everything, that her father was going home and taking her money with him.”