It was this accumulating of money that didn’t belong to her which stopped her getting in touch with the London branch of the agency. If she complained they’d find out. They might also find out how often she screamed at Cyrus and how, more than once, she had hit Marcus. Her own parents she did tell of her plight, but not about the money, making frequent phone calls to Kiruna at James and Claudia’s expense, though she knew that if she told them they’d have waved away her offers to pay for the calls and said she was welcome. Her mother said she should try it a little longer, that was no way to start out in life, giving up as soon as something was more arduous than you had bargained for. What she was making so much fuss about, her father said, he didn’t know. Looking after children came naturally to women. She had no chores to do. He was deeply impressed when she let slip that Georgia’s disposable diapers were delivered to the door.

In the night, when the children’s screaming woke her, she would get out of bed, light the candle she preferred to a bed-lamp, find the dragée tin at the bottom of the cupboard and count the money. Sometimes she took the tin back to bed with her and held it, as a child might hold a teddy bear, until she fell asleep. It comforted her, it was like a hot water bottle. Before she came to London she had never thought much about money. At home they lived comfortably but not luxuriously—her father constantly complained of Sweden’s high taxes—she had her small allowance and supposed that one day she would earn for herself. The Hindes corrupted her. They taught her the ugly side of money. They earned it and spent it, wallowed in it and threw it about with a feckless disregard for what happened to it, for more would come. Yet they weren’t entirely profligate. Once, at a rare moment on a weekend when both Hindes were at home, she heard Claudia shouting angrily down the phone at some dress-shop manager who had overcharged her by £25. She’d noticed only when she got her credit card account. Liv’s English was getting better and she had no difficulty in understanding Claudia’s abusive language, that the woman was a disgrace to the famous shop she worked for, that she was a thief and a perpetrator of fraud.