One of the great things about Silver was the way he always rose to the occasion, kept his cool, was never wrong-footed. “Clodagh Brown and Michael Silverman,” he said. “How do you do? Mr. Francis, I presume?”

“Well, yes.”

“My friend and I have been watering Mrs. Nyland’s houseplants. We run a home-tending service for clients away on holiday.”

Whether he swallowed this we’d no idea at the time, but he went back into his flat and closed the door. I said to Silver as we came out into the street, “Can we talk? Can we go on the roofs and talk?”

He nodded. He seemed to understand. Not only were the roofs our element, they were also almost the only place, apart from his bed, we could go and be sure of being alone. We climbed up the scaffolding and walked along inside the parapet, not holding hands this time. While we were together in the past we had talked all the time, we could never make an end of finding new things to say to each other, but that night we walked in silence, looking upward at the heavy clouds, lit to a deep sepia brown by the yellow chemical lights below. The wind was warm. It carried with it the faintest scent of green curry from a restaurant in Sutherland Avenue. We sat on the slates between a chimney stack and the tarpaulin. Silver gave me a cigarette.

“I know what you’re going to say. That I shouldn’t have said I was Michael Silverman when we’ve told Andrew and Alison we’re both called Brown. It was a slip of the tongue. But the chances of their ever meeting and comparing notes are pretty remote.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” I said. Once he had always been able to make a good guess at what I was going to say.

“What, then?”

There were so many things. The one I most wanted to ask I shied away from. “Who’s going to pay for your proposed trip to Australia with Jason?”

“Andrew and Alison have money. They’ll pay for themselves.”

“I expect they will, but I’ll be very surprised if they finance a separate flight for you and Jason. You’re planning to pay for it yourself, aren’t you?”

“What if I am?”

“It’ll cost thousands. And there’ll be a hotel to pay for and cars to and from airports. And these passports, who’s going to pay for them? False passports— have you any idea what you’ll have to pay for them?”

He looked away from me. “You think having money is bad for someone my age. This would be a way of getting rid of it. You can’t have it both ways.”