Jane nudged her son, and he produced his gift, a little parcel. Billy Macrae came forward and unwrapped it. It was an elephant, carved of black stone.

Jane smiled. “Jack chose it himself from my shop. The rock’s basalt. Lava. The youngest rock on the planet. So it’s appropriate.”

Macrae nodded, and put the knick-knack on the shelf over the gas fire. “We got a lot of flowers. People put them in the lift. But they get robbed, of course. The council say they will put steel plates on the lift doors to stop the kids breaking in, fat lot of good that is now.” He eyed Jane. “You’re the one who runs that shop in Waverley Market. Rocks and stuff. Crystals.”

“That’s right.”

He looked at the elephant. “I saw it, you know.”

“What?”

“I was on the seventh floor, talking to a mate up there. The windows in the lift shaft doors are broken there. So I saw him fall. Terrible crashing and screaming.”

Jane sat silently, and the boys looked at their feet miserably. It sounded as if Macrae was beyond grief, as if he’d told this story a hundred times over already, as if he couldn’t stop telling it; his voice and face were empty of expression.

“Lift surfing, they call it,” he said now. “Bloody stupid.”

Jane forced a smile. “I used to play chicken on the motorway. All kids are stupid, until they learn better.”

Macrae didn’t seem to have heard. “They jam open the shaft doors, see, and that stops the lift going down. Then they get on the roof, and they know how to set the engineer’s switch to ‘test’, so they can control the lift. Joe got his bloody hand caught, and for some reason the lift started going down, and he fell down behind it, in some kind of maintenance shaft. And that’s what I saw. Crashing and screaming. The thing of it was, at the bottom, he looked all right. Except for his mangled hand. Just asleep…”

And so on.

She stayed for a while longer, letting him talk out his grief a little more. Jack was restless, but she made him sit through it. Survival lesson, she thought. Listen and learn.

But it was hard. It seemed a long time before little Billy led them out.

In the yard, they all cast double shadows from sun and Venus, twin stars, and Jane shivered again.

“It was our Hamish,” Billy said unexpectedly.

“What?”

Hamish turned out to be the elder brother of Billy and dead Joe. Eighteen years old. Jane realized, in retrospect, that there had been no sign of Hamish in his father’s flat.

Hamish, it turned out, had led on the others.

“Hamish used to take stuff up there,” Billy said.

“Stuff?”