Once inside the house our only fear had been of encountering Sean Francis but in the few days since she had made herself known to him, Judy and he had spent a lot of time together. He accepted our visits to the house, still I suppose believing we were there to water the Nylands’ plants, for Judy had said nothing to him about who lived on the top floor. One disquieting thing, though. He knew someone was up there. Once, before we began to do the shopping for them, he had seen Andrew, seen him only from the back as he let himself out of the front door, but that had been enough to intrigue him. Up till then, he had believed the top floor unoccupied. The next time he had spoken to Mrs. Nyland he had asked her if she had heard anything overhead and she had told him that once, one very warm day when her windows were open, she thought she had heard a woman’s voice, but it might have come from the house next door. All this had been imparted to Judy, who was waiting for the right moment to tell Sean who was actually up there. Or not to tell him if she sensed his sympathies wouldn’t be with us.

The Nylands were due back in the following week, so our excuse of watering their plants would no longer work. Judy would have to tell him the truth or we would have to resume our visits from the roof. And if he remained in ignorance of what we were really doing in the house, he might, almost certainly would, mention us and our activities to Mrs. Nyland.

But none of this worried us much that evening. Upstairs, on the top, we always rang the bell, though we had a key to Flat 4E as well. It was as if we now only went there as invited guests. We had a code for the doorbell, two long rings and a short one. Jason let us in, ecstatic as usual to see us. We were invited into his bedroom to see a painting he had done. It was a picture of a ship in a bottle, he had used the real one he had as a model, but on the deck stood a boy waving at something or someone, the shore perhaps, a desert island or a crowd on the beach. Who knows? A psychologist might have said that instead of just drawing a boy on a boat he had drawn a boy on a boat in a bottle because the bottle represented his prison walls, transparent but also impassable. Silver picked up the bottle itself, seemingly fascinated by it as he had been when we were once before in that room.