Silver set first one foot, then the other, onto the tarpaulin. The timbers underneath creaked but they held. I followed, trying to tread lightly, as if going on tiptoe would somehow reduce my weight. Safe on the other side, he put out his hand to me, I took it and jumped the last bit onto the firm slates. We went into each other’s arms, hugged and kissed because we had achieved the crossing without coming to harm. It must be rare in life to regret not meeting with an accident but later I had good reason to be sorry that the tarpaulin had held that night, that it didn’t sag and give way, dropping us, perhaps without serious injury, in among the burned joists and ruined masonry beneath. And that the broken balcony hadn’t subsided under the shock.

We let ourselves into the flat to find Andrew and Alison sitting in the living room, clearly doing nothing but waiting for us. Jason had gone to bed. Silver and I had no idea how much our visits had come to mean to them. We thought of ourselves in this context as simply messengers and carriers of provisions. To them, though, as Alison later told us, we were messengers of the gods, angels, which she said is what the word means. Our appearance on the balcony and our entry through the window was the high spot of their day, while the times we didn’t come were lifeless and dreary. We were something to look forward to in their prison, the long hot summer waning away outside, life going on but inaccessible to them, suspended as they were in that place, the innocent Jason serving time for an accident of birth.

We asked for their shopping list, we told them what the papers said about them, we reported that they had been seen in Aberystwyth, in Columbus, Ohio, and in Paris. The Mail on Sunday had published a letter purporting to come from Andrew, setting out conditions under which they’d be willing to return home. The Sunday Mirror carried a photograph, taken on a Leeds shopping mall’s closed-circuit television, of a man and a woman and a little boy hurrying through the crowd as if afraid they’d been spotted. Andrew said he had written no letter. If he had, we’d know because we’d have posted it. As for Leeds, they had none of them ever been there.