‘We’re going to run away,’ I said.

‘No, you’re not,’ Lisa said calmly. ‘Rich people suddenly disappearing makes waves. You’re going to go to work at Lennard and Mavor on Monday, just the same as always.’

She did not deliver this as an order, but as a self-evident truth, like a mother telling her young son he was not going to become an astronaut. By making our plans seem ridiculous, she immediately cut me off from my little stash of defiance. Any words of resistance dried in my throat.

‘You’ll keep an eye on him for me, won’t you, Jessica?’

‘I will,’ Jessica said.

Her answer was a blade and a balm at once. She was siding with Lisa, and any chance I might have had of setting my will against her evaporated instantly without Jessica’s assistance. She was implicitly discarding our plans together, that had so recently been the foundation of my fondest wish. But she was also promising to see me again, to stay close enough to me to monitor me, and to take responsibility for my life.

Lisa looked at us both, and then clapped her knees, pushing herself forward and out of her seat. ‘Well, this was a treat. We got to do this every decade.’

‘Your kids are beautiful,’ Jessica said as she showed us out.

‘Yeah,’ she said, smiling for the first time, ‘they are. Joe’ll drop you wherever you want to go. No need to be a stranger. See you round, then.’

She closed the door on us and left us on the doorstep, where a few moments before I had stood in fear of my life.

‘Where to?’ Joe said, settling into the seat of the van like an affable cabbie. ‘Back to Hoxton?’

‘Yes, yes, take us back.’ I jumped on his question, not wanting Jessica to have time to give her own address. I did not want us to part company before we had had a chance to talk over the morning’s events. She did not protest, and sat with her eyes unfocused, her gaze bobbing away on an ocean of thought.

As the suspension bounced us back through the sleeping policemen of the suburbs, I thought of how many things I had misunderstood, and how those misimpressions had been the mould in which I cast my life. I wondered how I would live without my fears to guide me.

What would Francis have thought? I could see him in my mind’s eye, clapping his hands with delight at the deception, smiling as Lisa confirmed the esteem in which he had always held her. It was a habit of mine, to imagine his reactions to the things that happened to me, and though in this case it seemed appropriate to bring him to mind, I decided that in future I would try to suspend my internal critic. In plays and stories, the ghost always returns to see the conclusion of unfinished business, to see their murderer punished or their fate discovered. I wondered if Francis might be ready to quit the long corridors of my thoughts, now that the events which he had set in motion had finally rolled to a halt, a decade later in the snowy streets of suburban London. He had lived long for a personal ghost, his young clothes were starting to seem old-fashioned in photographs, the music he had liked no longer played on the radio. Even his youth and beauty themselves were becoming out of date for me, a charming irrelevance in the midst of adult business. It occurred to me that there was nothing in my world that would casually call him back, if I could stop invoking him myself. I could lay him to rest.