‘How long?’ I said, unwilling to understand.

‘How long. As in sentence.’

‘I’m not a criminal solicitor.’

‘Oooh . . . evasion. That can’t be good.’ She smiled. I saw that my discomfort provided her with relief from her own. I could help her by emphasizing my fear, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I relented. ‘Well, there are all kinds of circumstances that could be mitigating, but if it went wrong . . .’

‘Then?’

‘Seven years, give or take.’

She was silent as she absorbed the information.

‘I’d be thirty-nine,’ she said quietly, looking out of the window at the rain.

Too old for children. The thought scuttled out of some mental crevice, and I crushed it quickly underfoot. ‘You’d be out in five for good behaviour.’

‘What makes you think I’d behave?’ she said, and grinned.

This was the kind of response we had always adored in her. Yet now, made in the dingy confines of my living room, with no one to hear her defiance but herself and me, and no one at all to believe in it, it seemed a tired routine. I was surprised to find I remembered how she took her coffee. I went into the kitchen and made her a cup, whilst she sat at my dining table (there was dust on all but two of the seats) and scrutinized the pink pages of my FT with the attention of a general studying the maps of his campaign. I topped up my cup with the bottle from the cupboard. We each took advantage of the few minutes we had apart, and when I came back into the room it was to find her calm. She had removed her suit jacket. The blouse underneath was white, and she wore it with the sleeves rolled up. She held her coffee cupped in both her small hands, and leant forwards with her elbows on her knees. It occurred to me how unfair I had been in assuming she wanted money. She needed a different kind of support, and one I was far less willing to give.

‘Are we fucked?’ she asked, taking just a hint of relish in her own frankness. She seemed invigorated by the danger, or perhaps by being brought back into proximity with the past. She looked alive. She removed a cigarette from her bag and lit up without asking.

My emotions were stiff and weak, like unused muscles, and they protested under the weight of this moment. I was struggling to find the right mixture of feeling, as if trying to speak a foreign language in which I used to be fluent, searching forlornly for the right word to break the spell of incomprehension. ‘I don’t know. Have you contacted Lisa?’

She looked down at the table and tapped off a length of ash. It lay like a dead insect in the bottom of the glass. ‘You’re the lawyer. We made a deal with her. You remember.’ It was not a question, it was a statement of fact. Neither of us could have forgotten the last time we had seen our silent partner.