“She does a bit. I saw that too when we first met them but I didn’t know it. I think it’s what drew me to them, a kind of familiarity. Not that Alison reminded me of the woman who had taken me away but that she looked like Diana Lomax. I was saying my dad wasn’t attracted by her. For one thing, I’m sure he’s strictly monogamous, he adores Mum, and for another, Diana—I don’t like saying this about a woman, it reminds me of Jonny—but she was quite plain. I expect she’d been prettier a long while ago but she was very wrinkled by then and very thin and sort of scrawny.”

“I’m thin,” I said.

“You’re young. Oh, Clodagh, hug me, hold me. Let’s go to sleep.”

Morna came with us to see Wim. She was excited about her new man and the long night they had spent together. Her face was radiant, her eyes brilliant, and I wondered if I too had been given something approaching beauty when I was first with Silver. Wim barely seemed to know who she was. He had a drip going into his arm, suspended from a kind of hat-stand affair, and was on anticoagulants because a blood clot had formed in the injured leg. He turned his face away from us. Our hands were not to be held that day.

After awhile he found a voice. The police had been with him most of the morning. Jonny had been charged but they wanted more information. Where had the ax come from that Jonny used? How did he get into the flat? What did he mean, across the roofs? They had questioned the Asians, Dr. and Mrs. Clark, and even Max and Caroline Bodmer, so convinced were they that Jonny must have come out of the window of another house in the terrace.

We had brought Wim several half-pound bars of fruit and nut chocolate. He let them lie on the bedside cabinet, barely looking at them. Five minutes before we left he pulled himself up a little and said, without preamble, with nothing to preface such a declaration, “When I get out of here I shall kill myself.”

What does one say? “You’ll feel differently when you get home” or “You mustn’t talk like that”? Where, anyway, was home? What do you do when your true home is no longer accessible to you?