I asked her where she was going to live and she said she’d taken a flat in Dolphin Square for six months. “It’s packed with Members of Parliament, darling, and you never know, do you?”

Returning home in a reflective mood, I thought about Max and Selina and saw that though I was in no possible way to blame for Max falling in love with Caroline Bodmer and she, presumably, falling in love with him, but for me they’d never have met. But for the towpath being impassable on a certain day and this leading to my failure to keep my appointment with Caroline, she’d never have phoned 19 Russia Road. And another result of that was that I had met Silver. So I’d found my love and Selina had lost hers because a woman had been murdered on the canal bank. I thought of the great casual chain of events, trying to get back beyond that murder to the man who had carried it out, perhaps just someone who had flown into a rage because the dead woman had refused him money or sex. Or been unfaithful to him. As Max had been to Selina and perhaps Silver would be to me.

Letters had begun arriving from Sweden. The Almquists, who had never written to Liv before, now bombarded her with daily admonitions. Håkan wrote in English. I can only suppose this was so that Liv could show his letters to the rest of us and he’d thus win our support in sending her home. They phoned too, and almost every day. One morning, when I answered the phone, Håkan launched into a great defense of himself in respect of the missing money. He had no memory of ever having been given it, I must believe that, he said, he couldn’t remember coming to 15 Russia Road that day or leaving it or carrying the money with him or being mugged. He knew only that he had been told these things were so. I had to fetch Liv out of bed. Since Wim had been sleeping with her on an almost regular basis—that is, for the past three nights—she had been calmer. She got up now with a smile on her face and stood there quite naked, rotating her body, showing off its magnificence. I think she was saying to me, look at this, you can’t compete with this, and to Wim that it was all for him. He watched her with greedy eyes, a look on his face I had never seen there before. She bent over and kissed his mouth before pulling the T-shirt he had discarded onto the floor over her head and going off to talk to her father.