“You sit down. I won’t keep you. Don’t you want to know how the cops knew where those three were, the two of them and the kid? Of course you do.” He paused, smiling, keeping me in suspense, for by then it was suspense. “I told them.” He said it triumphantly. “Silv, he was banking on me never saying a word to the police. Nor I would’ve but they’d got me in custody. I told them in the hopes I’d get a lighter sentence.”

Through him Alison had lost her life, Jason his happy childhood, Andrew his life savings, and I’d lost Silver and he me. “And did you?”

He shrugged. “I got off. They hadn’t got nothing on me. No one to identify me, see?”

“So something good came of it,” I said, though knowing he wouldn’t appreciate irony, and I got up and walked off without saying goodbye.

And that’s nearly all.

I had another year to do at college. By then I was having a half-hearted relationship with a fellow IEE. And I thought of Silver every day. I was living at Beryl’s again, for my college was in London, and her place felt more like home than anywhere I had ever lived apart from Silver’s flat in Russia Road. One day I ran into Judy by chance. It was near Lisson Green. I had just walked through the passage above the canal that leads through from Aberdeen Place to Lisson Grove and there she was, coming down from the Grove End Road direction. We hugged each other, there in the street, we were both so pleased.

She and Sean were living in Violet Hill and had been for two years. It was one of those unhappy noncoincidences that we hadn’t met a dozen times before. My heart in my mouth, I asked her if she had ever heard from Silver.

“We see him sometimes,” she said. “He got his degree. I think it’s some charity he’s working for, but it’s here in London. He asks about you all the time but we didn’t know where you were.”

I was so flooded with joy and bliss I wanted to shout aloud and dance. Judy said I had gone dark red and my eyes as bright as live coals. “Tell me where you live and I’ll pass it on.”

I wrote my address down on the back of a bus ticket, adding that the bit of the Harrow Road where Beryl’s block stood was opposite the turning into Cirencester Street. After that I waited to hear from him. It was quite a long time before I found out Judy had lost the bus ticket. She tried to remember Beryl’s address but somehow got it into her head I was living in Cirencester.