“Could you see that it isn’t in his room when we come tomorrow, please?”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “Are you insinuating I don’t intend to pay you?”

“Look, you can think what you like,” Silver said, and while he talked his eyes had gone to the little china birds, a greenfinch, a thrush, a wren, clustered on the bookshelf. “You can think what you like, but I’ll just ask you one thing. Don’t you understand that with anyone else of our sort of age, you’d have to have given them the money for all this first, not expect them to fund you and you owe it to them? Don’t you?”

“Why are you looking at those birds?” Alison said as if he hadn’t spoken.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve seen them before but I don’t know.”

Andrew said, “How much is it? How much do I owe you?”

Silver seemed in a dream. From the birds he had moved his gaze to Alison. He was staring at her as if he had never seen her before. Women of her age, when their faces are free of makeup, can look surprisingly young. The only light in the room came from a low-wattage table lamp. He looked at her and seemed to have difficulty wrenching his gaze away. “It’s £5,000 but I don’t expect you to pay Morna’s fare.”

“I should think not,” Andrew said, though why he should think not was a mystery, since she was going to Australia in his service as courier to the child he regarded as his.

“The bill comes to £3,890. I’ve a receipt but I haven’t got it with me. I’ll show you the check stub if you like.”

A conman could write anything he liked on a check stub, was probably what was going through Andrew’s mind. And then I could see—for the first time—that in their eyes we might not be the creatures of probity we were in our own. It was true we had procured passports for them and Silver had the airline tickets in his hand but they had no guarantee these were genuine. Experienced forgers could produce airline tickets with ease. They had our promise but only our promise to take Jason to Australia and get them safely out to Heathrow a day later. Only a promise from people they knew nothing about . . .

Silver pulled his checkbook out of his pocket. It had been folded in half and looked rather shabby and disreputable. He had forgotten and I had forgotten we had told them, weeks ago, that we were both called Brown. We live in a society in which surnames have less importance than they have had since perhaps the Middle Ages. To them we were Silver and Clodagh. Andrew looked at the check stub and looked at the next, unused, check in the book.