They were both on the balcony, on one side of the widening crack. I don’t know what possessed Alison, I shall never know. She looked down. She and Andrew had denied that any of them was afraid of heights but she was. It takes one to know one, and I could always recognize a phobic. She looked down over the sagging iron balustrade, down through the swinging thready branches and the shuddering leaves, to the paving and the grass plots forty feet below. Pools of light lay down there and blocks of shadow. She looked down and then she ran. As Jason had run but at twice Jason’s weight. One of her feet caught in the crack, and as she stumbled and pulled it free, the stone walkway began to split. It seemed to happen very slowly, to take a lifetime, as the two sides parted with a grinding crunching sound, the fissure between them gradually widening. Then the half farthest from Silver separated itself, appeared for a moment to hover in the air, and fell away. A lifetime, it seemed, it was probably about thirty seconds, just as the time it took to fall was no more than half that. The silence was broken by the sound it made landing on the paving below, a splintering and an echoing roar.

Alison’s feet slid from under her and she fell backward, her body on the intact half of the balcony floor, her legs hanging over the fractured edge. It looked like a miracle that she hadn’t gone down with the mass of masonry. Beryl told me afterward that the crash its falling made brought crowds pouring out into Torrington Gardens. Meanwhile, the police cars’ headlights flared and the car moved faster than I’d have thought possible, turning, snaking in and out, tearing up the street. Somewhere another siren blared. On the far side of the tarpaulin Andrew had been squatting. He got up and, with Jason behind him, came to the parapet and looked down.

Children have a completely different idea of danger from ours. They think themselves and everyone close to them immortal. If they have confidence in the grown-ups in whose care they are, they trust them to take care of them and themselves. So I suppose it was with Jason. With absolute reliance on Andrew to be in control of the situation, he was getting bored with it. He wanted something else to do. The bag Andrew was carrying was his bag, so without bothering to look down, with no interest whatever in what was going on in the street or on the broken balcony, he undid the buckle on the bag to take a look inside, at the same time easing the strap off Andrew’s shoulder. A gust of wind blew the freed flap back and banknotes spiraled into the air.