One evening I saw in Beryl’s Evening Standard that a George Rathbone, of Blaker Street, Brighton, had been found drowned. His fully clothed body had been washed up on the beach. There was nothing to show whether it was murder, suicide, or an accident. Jonny’s father had been called George Rathbone and Jonny had told Silver he intended to kill him as soon as he had enough money. On the other hand, this man was eighty, younger than Jonny’s father would have been, I had never heard he lived in Brighton, and I couldn’t see why you needed to be rich to drown someone.

It must have been a week or so after that, perhaps a fortnight, that the electrics in Beryl’s tower block failed. A couple of men were working on it when I got home. I went over to talk to them about it and at first they didn’t take me seriously but once I had convinced them I knew what I was talking about, they were quite pleased and forthcoming. (The story of my life as an electrician, incidentally.) Still, unless I was prepared to wait down there for an hour or two, I’d have to walk up.

“Go around the corner for a pint, why don’t you?” one of the men said, hugely amused by his own wit in treating me like the man they thought I ought to be or wanted to be.

I walked up. Beryl’s block is twenty stories high and there are two flights to every story. It’s a long haul, forty flights of stairs. And it’s not as if there’s anything to look at on the way, only gray concrete and graffiti. If I had known what was waiting for me at the top, I’d have done my best to run. I didn’t know and I toiled up, once pausing to give myself a Polo Mint out of a packet in my bag, the second time to blow my nose. A woman came out onto the seventeenth landing and said it was a disgrace, all councils were a disgrace, she had lived in seven blocks like this one all over London and the lifts were always breaking down. She seemed somewhat cheered when I told her work on the lifts was progressing satisfactorily.

At the seventeenth floor I wished I had taken the men’s advice and gone down to the pub. At the nineteenth, for variety, I ran up the first stairs two at a time and turned onto the final flight. Silver was sitting on the top step, looking down at me and smiling. He put out his arms and I ran up and threw myself into them, toppling him over backward and me with him.