I’M EXPECTING HIM HOME within two hours, just time enough to finish this. To put the diaries away, because I made no more entries for a year, and write from memory. Perhaps to get some of the time scale wrong and put events in the wrong sequence. To remember and do my best. Even if I get things in the wrong order, the facts will be as they were.

After we had been brought down by the firemen, after we had been arrested and Alison’s body taken away, more and more people flocked into Torrington Gardens. They were after Andrew’s money and they went on coming for days. The £20 and £10 notes littered the pavement and stuck in the trees and drifted under the wheels of cars. Some sandwiched themselves between the little leafy twigs of privet hedges, some caught under windscreen wipers. And they were always on the move because the wind kept up all night.

It was Beryl who told me this, making a story out of it that would become a legend in Maida Vale. “They was mostly deadbeats as came. Bagwomen and dossers. Like bundles of rags, some of them was. There was one old bugger as broke his wrist trying to get a tenner out of a drain, they had to take him to St. Mary’s. Mind you, there was tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, down there, untold thousands. I picked up fifty meself.”

How much money did Andrew have in that school bag? More than we guessed, far more than he had led us to believe. But still nothing like the vast fortune that was rumored.

All that was much later. We were taken to Paddington Green police station and spent the night there. In the morning, the day Morna was to call for Jason and take him to Heathrow and thence Sydney, we appeared in court, Silver’s hands white bundles of bandages. We had forgotten all about Morna, which wasn’t perhaps surprising. She went around to 4 Torrington Gardens at the appointed time, found no one in 4E and finally got the facts out of a furious Vivien Nyland, or the facts as she knew them.

They threw the book at us. I think that’s the expression for when the police find as many charges as they can to level at you. Some of them were absurd, some justifiable enough. I suppose we were guilty of conspiracy, we did aid and abet an abduction and false imprisonment and we did resist arrest. A manslaughter charge against Silver was mooted and dropped. It all came to nothing much in the end. In the Crown Court we were given conditional discharges, which meant we were free but would have a criminal record forever. Before that, we got bail.