“I’ll come down and let you in,” he said. “Give me a minute to climb back through the window.”

He was very quick. He looked approvingly at my clothes, jeans, T-shirt, and trainers, though this was my invariable get-up.

“It may be cold up there later. No, don’t go back. You can have a sweater of mine.”

We ran up the four flights of stairs. He got to the top without flagging or gasping. I both flagged and gasped but not until after the third floor. Liv was in the flat with Jonny, the boyfriend I was still to meet, and a girl called Morna, who Silver knew from university. He introduced me. Jonny said, “Pleased to meet you,” and looked me up and down the way someone might a piece of furniture he considers buying. He wouldn’t have bought me, I could tell that. He was a small neatly made man, older than the rest of us by maybe five or six years, dark but with very light blue ice-cold eyes, his features blunt with an unfinished look. There was no feeling in his face and no animation. Like us, he wore jeans and trainers but a collarless white shirt instead of a T-shirt and over it the jacket of a dark pin-striped suit.

“Let’s have a drink,” he said. “Celebrate.” His voice was a grating metallic cockney. “What you done with the bottles I fetched in, Liv?” He pronounced her name as in “live and let live.”

“I won’t drink, thanks, Jonny,” Silver said, “not before going on the roofs.” He saw me shaking my head. “And Clodagh won’t. What about you, Morna?”

She had been up there only once before. The experience she had found exhilarating but it had frightened her too. “It’s scary. I should have gone up again the next day but I didn’t. It’s a bit like crashing a car. If you don’t drive again straightaway, you never will.”

This, of course, was the cue for Liv to tell her story all over again. Morna had never heard it. Jonny cast up his eyes and went off in search of drink. In a whisper, respectful of Liv as raconteur, Silver said we’d eat first, he had got soup and a Tuscan bean stew. Wim ought to be along in a minute. That sounded fine except that I was longing to climb out of the window and get onto the upper slope of the mansard. Liv reached the bit where she’d run away to Jonny and he had brought her here, and then she added something I didn’t know.

“Since it is happening I haven’t been outside this apartment. Not down there in the street, I mean. I have been on the roofs.” She laughed. “No one can catch me on the roofs.”

“No, you can just fall off,” said Morna. She was a big dark girl, dramatically good-looking, with large brown Irish eyes. “Do you think they’re looking for you?”