The police car was no longer there. We let ourselves into 4 Torrington Gardens, closing the door as quietly as we could behind us. Putting my ear to the keyhole, I could hear Sean’s television, most likely a video of one of his films he had put on for Judy’s entertainment. He had never let us know what he had decided to do about distracting Vivien Nyland. We had been trying to get in touch with him but he must have unplugged his phone. The voices from above we heard as we began to climb the first flight of stairs, Vivien talking to a man. The voice wasn’t her husband’s. We went back down. The hall, from which Sean’s front door opened, bent around at a right angle at the end where a cupboard held electricity and gas meters. Hidden in this small lobby, we couldn’t see the man come downstairs but we saw him step across the wide area of hall and head for the front door. He was just a man. Young middle-aged, going bald, wearing gray flannel trousers and leather shoes and a green anorak. Silver said only policemen dressed like that, a remark I thought a wild exaggeration.

We went very carefully upstairs, shoes in hand once more. There were a thousand reasons why a police officer, if police officer he was, might have called on the Nylands. I remember Liv’s panic when one had called on us. Their car might have been broken into. They might have had their car stolen and the policeman came to say it had been found. Or they had had a burglary, or Vivien had lost her purse in the supermarket. A thousand reasons. The last thing the policeman had been thinking about was who lived upstairs and if Vivien had ever seen them. If he was a policeman. Very likely he was her brother-in-law or the man next door or someone from the Maida Vale Society.

Her door was shut. We went on up, relieved to be out of her range. Silver dreaded seeing Alison. He was in a curious relationship with her, an embarrassing, intensely awkward kind of closeness. There was something sexual about it which he hated. She had bathed him and fed him and, no doubt, cuddled and kissed him, yet his attitude toward her couldn’t be what it might have been to someone who had been his nanny or baby-sitter, for Alison’s brief presence in his life was illicit. He said it made him feel the way he imagined you would if you had been seduced into a one-night stand when drunk by someone years older than yourself, someone you wouldn’t normally have looked at and whose character and personality and manner of speech were repugnant in the cold light of day.

“I’m making a fuss, I know,” he said. “Ignore me. I’ll shut up.”