Four, five, six—Emily counted seven bookcases inside his small home. The flat smelled of cigarettes and cleaning products and did not, to Emily, feel like a place anyone except her father could stay for long. ‘Sit down, please,’ said Asquith, and he gave her a glass of water into which he’d squeezed lemon juice. The late afternoon sun shone through the trees and rooftops and spotlighted books on the wall, and the ashtray on the arm of a vacant chair, and Asquith’s head of grey hair.

‘You’re still tremendously young,’ he said. ‘If I go away, if I’m gone, you won’t lose much, if one presumes to say that you’d lost anything.’

‘I don’t understand, Daddy.’

‘I’ve thought about going away. I even made some preparations. But look. Here.’

He handed her the birthday gift: a gaudy painting of a restaurant. The restaurant was in Australia, he said, and he’d copied the picture from a black-and-white postcard. He’d thrown out the postcard, he added, though in hindsight he should have held on to it. Asquith told his daughter he lived in consuming thoughts about decisions he’d made yesterday, last week, decades ago. It was difficult to surrender the past!

Emily asked if that’s where he was going, to Australia, when he spoke about travelling somewhere.

‘Not at all, too far away. Do you like your painting?’

‘I love it, Daddy.’

Asquith cast around the room for something, settling at last on his bookshelf. ‘Would you like me to read to you?’ he asked.

Emily said yes, she would, and he took down The Iliad and read aloud from the beginning, before deciding no, this wouldn’t do for a child, and he turned to Middlemarch and read her chapters one and two, about Miss Brooke, and next his favourite Waterloo scenes from The Charterhouse of Parma, after the performance of which there was a knock on the door.

Asquith put the novel back on the shelf and in a hushed voice told Emily she must take the painting home with her. ‘Please don’t forget. It’s your birthday present. And don’t touch the paint.’

Two Metropolitan Police constables announced themselves through the door, then knocked with amplified force. Asquith raised a finger to his mouth: quiet, not a sound. Emily thought: Am I in trouble? Her father closed his eyes and gently nodded his head, as if someone spoke into his ear.

When the knocking stopped and the police seemed to have left, Asquith took her hand and opened the door, tightening up his face against the noise of the hinges. Emily thought: are we sneaking up on someone?

‘What are we doing, Daddy?’

‘We’re making a getaway,’ said Asquith.