I went to London to look for him. Jack and Erica had changed the lock on the front door and my key no longer worked. What no one knew or had forgotten was that I still had a key to No. 19. It was February, just before my twenty-first birthday. Eleven in the morning seemed a good time to effect an entry, as the police say. They said it several times to us while we awaited our first court appearance. I went stealthily down the iron staircase and let myself into old Mrs. Fisherton’s. There were no longer any signs of Caroline’s occupancy. No doubt she had moved upstairs with Max months before. It seemed darker, mustier, and drearier than ever. As I had guessed, no one was in. The house was empty. I climbed out of Max’s study window onto the roof.

It was bad being alone up there. A pang seemed to pierce me, a thrust of pain and longing for what had been and for Silver. How could he have abandoned me? How could we have been so quickly and easily parted? The only explanation seemed to be that he no longer cared for me, yet his look had been full of love, our old early love, when he said I had saved his life.

I hung down over the parapet, Wim-wise, to look in at the window we had always used. It was shut. All the windows were shut, it was a cold raw day. It gave me a shock, what I saw inside, for someone else appeared to be living there. The old furniture was gone, the leather sofa, the scuffed chairs, and the gateleg table, the old stained threadbare carpet. The walls had been painted duck-egg blue, the same color as the covers on the three-piece suite, only these had pink and yellow flowers on the blue chintz. I could see a calendar of Venetian scenes and a bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was enough. This was no place for Silver.

I walked to the end of the terrace, dropped over the edge onto the house that stood alone, climbed up the nailhead steps and onto the roofs of Torrington Gardens. The tarpaulin was gone, the burned area replaced and the leads back. I looked down over the parapet, saw a builder’s truck parked below and a pile of builder’s rubbish in the front garden where Alison had fallen to her death. Remembering made me wince and I felt the pain again.

The broken-off piece of balcony hadn’t yet been restored. I suppose they had put the roof on first to make the place weather-tight for the winter. Here Andrew had leaned over and seen Alison fall and Jason, in his innocence, had undone the strap on the school bag and released the money. I put my hand into the cavity at the base of the chimney stack. The passports were still there.