A name they chose, Silver said, had better be one that had no connection with their past or present. Not even a cousin’s name or something taken from a W9 street or a current newspaper story, nothing that rhymed with their names or simply had the initial letter changed. Not, for instance, Fane or Parry. Alison fetched the phone book and finally they chose to call themselves Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Gerald and Pamela Rogers.

Jason, who wouldn’t be traveling with them, would seem to have no connection with them, would become James Robert Desai.

His mother’s story, which I read while they picked the photographs they thought approximated least to the reality and most to their disguised selves, sounded like the invention of a romantic novelist, and an old-fashioned one at that. It read as if the words had been put into her mouth by someone whose whole concept of present-day existence involved hard-done-by young women, virtuous, brave, and selfless, and attractive, callous, mean-minded men bent only on seduction. Nelima Patel had been married and divorced since Jason’s birth, her husband also having deserted her. She had three more children and a new partner, was unemployed as was he, living on the dole, bitterly regretting, according to the journalist, abandoning Jason into the care of the local authority. Once he and his abductors were found, she would fight to get him back. While no one was looking, I took the double page on which the story appeared out of the paper and stuffed it into my pocket.

“I saw you. You did the right thing,” Silver said to me when we were climbing down the scaffolding. This was the only sign of approval I had had from him for some time.

“What would Jason have thought if he’d seen it? I can’t imagine it. People fighting over—well, ownership of you. Your real mother with three more kids but not with you.”

We dropped to the ground. Wim had gone. His new interest in Liv couldn’t keep him from the roofs and he had departed along the highway of Sutherland Avenue toward Harrow Road. Silver started talking about the lost three days of his life, the time someone had taken him away, hidden him, cared tenderly for him, and then, inexplicably, returned him near the place he had been snatched from. For Diana Lomax to find and take back to Jack Silverman. He talked as if to himself or to an unseen audience, not to me.