“Wim and Jonny. We’re quite slack at the moment.” He spoke as if he ran a boardinghouse, which in a way, I suppose, he did. I followed him into the kitchen. No one seemed to have washed any dishes for days. Crumbs on the floor were mixed with what I thought might be mouse droppings. Silver filled the kettle and switched it on. It was one of those jug kettles and had once been white but was now encrusted with a thick uneven brownish-gray film. “You’re right about the mice,” he said, though I hadn’t expressed my thoughts aloud. “Liv likes them, she’s mouse-crazy. It’s a sure way to get them to come out at night, put a heap of crumbs in the middle of the floor.”

We took our tea back into the living room. In spite of what Silver had said, Liv didn’t wake. I didn’t hear a sound, not a creak or footfall, and when Silver said in his tranquil easy tone, “Ah, here comes Wim, I think,” I looked toward the hall and the front door. Silver was laughing.

A pair of long legs had appeared at the window on the extreme right. They slid through the open casement, feet in black trainers dropping to the floor. The man I had seen on the canal bank had come in through the window, come from nowhere, out of the sky, for all I knew. He stood there, his eyebrows up, looking at me and smoothing away from his face with long brown hands his nonexistent hair.

Chapter 8

8