Capital

August 2008

64

‘They love it,’ Shahid said to his brothers. ‘All this fussing, running around, calling meetings-’

‘There are no meetings, plural, this is the first,’ said Ahmed.

‘First of many – meetings, speeches, demands, fussing. It’s that great British middle-class battle cry: “Something must be done!” Same as the war. “Something must be done!” That can lead anywhere, with people like this. They’ll stop at nothing once they get their indignation going. “Something must be done!”’

‘They didn’t do much about the war, did they?’ said Usman. ‘It probably didn’t have the same effect on property prices.’

‘That’s our neighbours and our customers you’re talking about. Talking rubbish about,’ said Ahmed.

All three Kamal brothers were hunched over against fat August raindrops as they swerved and slalomed around the commuters heading home from the Underground station. It was shaping up to be yet another lousy summer. Faced with the rain, Ahmed, typically, was trying to hurry, and Shahid, typically, was trying to take his time. Usman, also typically, was hanging a couple of steps behind and was trying to send signals that the other two men were nothing to do with him. Ahmed and Shahid had both separately been very surprised that Usman wanted to come to the meeting, but he seemed to be taking a special interest in what had been happening in the street. Normally he acted as if everything to do with the shop was so far beneath him it was barely visible.

The brothers were walking towards a special meeting convened by the local police Community Action team. The gathering was being held in the hall attached to the big church on the Common – a first for all three of them, since they had never been inside a Christian church. The meeting had been convened because the phenomenon of the postcards and videos and blog, all with the slogan ‘We Want What You Have’, had, for the residents of Pepys Road, gone past the tipping point. It had begun with abusive virtual graffiti on the blog, and had escalated through abusive postcards delivered to the houses. Then there were three incidents of graffiti in the street; ‘cunt’ and ‘wanker’ were spray-painted on the side walls of the houses at numbers 42 and 51 – a place on the buildings it was hard to spot from the street, so it wasn’t clear how long the abuse had been there before it had been detected. Then envelopes containing truly disgusting things had begun to arrive at the houses: some residents were sent dog excrement in jiffy bags – reeking, horrible jiffy bags. And then, one night in late June, somebody or somebodies had run a set of keys down the cars parked on the even-numbered side of the street – every car, all along the street. The damage ran into many thousands of pounds. A number of residents had complained to the police, who had bounced the query back to the local Neighbourhood Watch to ask how many people had been affected. It was this criminal damage to the cars which really got the police’s attention. When it turned out that everyone in the street had had some encounter or other with We Want What You Have, it had been decided, just as Shahid said, that Something Must Be Done. Hence this meeting.

‘It makes them feel important,’ said Shahid. ‘This is a rare example of Usman being right about something. It gives them an excuse to talk about property prices. It’s the only time they’re ever allowed to talk openly about money, so it’s no wonder it gets them excited.’

They came into the church grounds and could see the side door to the hall, held open by a man and a woman talking. As they walked past they could hear her saying,

‘… that’s if it doesn’t drive prices down, which is a real worry, because…’

Shahid flicked his brother on the bum with a rolled-up copy of Time Out. Ahmed swatted him away.

The hall was a square room, decorated with posters of a Christian, charitable and ecological nature. One wall was dominated by a large stencilled painting of a white dove with a leafy green branch in its beak. There were a hundred chairs laid out in ten ranks of ten, and the room was about half-full with locals, some of them known to Ahmed by name and more or less all of them by sight. The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood at the end of the room on a low dais next to two uniformed policemen, one in his late twenties and the other at least two decades older. Ahmed smiled and nodded at everyone he recognised. People didn’t seem keen to chat. They were eager for the meeting to begin.

Roger Yount came into the hall, direct from work, his pinstripe suit emphasising his height and posture: the kind of figure to gladden any mother-in-law’s heart. Looking at him, women would often find themselves wondering: tall, rich, well-dressed, clean: why isn’t he sexy? Roger looked around the room, ignoring everyone until he saw Arabella, who was sitting with her head down composing a text message to her friend Saskia:

‘Can’t m8k libertys 2mrw, hws dy aftr? A x’

The two women had decided that they had a knicker crisis, and the plan was to go shopping for new ones. Arabella felt she had been so incredibly good since the non-appearing Christmas bonus horror, she deserved a little discretionary spending. She and Saskia would hit the shops, then a restaurant, then would accidentally drink a couple of glasses of champagne and then perhaps have a wander down Bond Street. Matya was looking after the boys. What was the point of living in London if you couldn’t splash a bit of cash about every now and then?

Mary Leatherby had come down from Essex for the day. Her builder had started work on renovating number 42, so she wanted to have a look at how things were going. From peering around, she realised that she now didn’t know a single soul in the entire room. Zbigniew had told her about the graffiti on the side of the house, and the jiffy bag of excrement which had lain unopened on the floor until it started to stink. He had thrown it away, but not without calling Mary to tell her what had happened. Mary had wanted to come to the meeting to find out if anyone knew what was going on. Her plan was to catch the train home afterwards, even if the old house was habitable; she felt she had moved on. She didn’t plan to spend a single night there before the house sold.

Mickey Lipton-Miller was there, and not happy. The cards, the blog, the graffiti and nasty pranks, it was a wind-up, and somebody needed to get it sorted. Thanks be to God, his Aston hadn’t been parked in the street when the cars were keyed… If there was time, he was planning to hit his club afterwards for a G and T and a game of snooker. But work came first. And he had a theory about the bastard who was responsible for all this.

The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood and put her hand to her mouth while making a harrumphing cough – evidently this was her way of calling the room to order. A pool of silence began in the seats closest to her and then spread until the church hall was quiet, broken only by a mobile phone playing the opening bars of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and then abruptly cutting out.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve all been concerned about this… this business. So I have invited our local bobbies to talk to us, and they’ve gone right to the top, so that Chief Superintendent Pollard, the divisional commander, has come to fill us in on the situation as it stands, and he’s brought Detective Inspector Mill. And then afterwards they will take questions. So without further ado, Chief Superintendent Pollard.’

The policeman was one of those men it was difficult to imagine without his uniform: he seemed to wear it on the inside as well as on the outside. He had a rough London accent.

‘I’m Chief Superintendent Pollard,’ he said. He found it hard not to sound menacing, so even stating his own name came across, faintly but perceptibly, as a threat. ‘I’m here about these occurrences. You’ve been getting postcards. You’ve been getting DVDs. There’s stuff on the internet. Abuse. Vandalism. Harassment. Graffiti. Criminal damage. I don’t need to tell you, that’s why you’re here. What’s it all add up to? Who’s behind it all? My colleague Detective Inspector Mill will fill you in on the details. He is going to be in charge of the inquiry, with me’ – and here the older man made no attempt to restrain his air of threat – ‘keeping an eye on him.’

The other policeman stood up at the lectern. He was a well-groomed young man and as soon as he began speaking it was clear that there was some strange class reversal taking place, since while the Chief Superintendent spoke in broad cockney, the Detective Inspector was impeccably middle-class, verging on outright posh. It was as if the enlisted man had mistakenly been put in charge of the officer. The impression of the Detective Inspector’s poshness was enhanced by a gesture he made just before he began talking, when he brushed the hair off his forehead, as if he were worried it was going to get into his eyes. His hair wasn’t in fact long enough to get in his eyes, but this gesture was like an atavistic survival of a period during which he had a long, floppy fringe. So for a moment everyone in the room glimpsed him with that languid public-school hair.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you all too, ladies and gentlemen. The question to which we’d all like an answer is, who is doing this? I imagine some of you at least will be thinking that the simplest way of finding out would be to trace the owners of the blog. We’re going to get it taken down, but that’s not the same thing as finding out who the person or persons responsible are.’

The inspector talked a little bit more about how clever they were going to have to be to find out who was behind the ‘campaign’ – that was his word. When he finished he asked if anyone had any questions. There was a little muttering and murmuring, and then Usman put his hand up. Beside him Ahmed went rigid with irritation and embarrassment. The senior policeman pointed at him. His extended finger looked as if it was making an accusation.

‘The gentleman there.’

Usman, putting on his sweetest and most reasonable voice, the one he most liked to use when being deliberately irritating during family arguments, said, ‘How do you know the damage to the cars was done by the same person who did the other stuff?’

From the stillness with which the Chief Superintendent and the Detective Inspector greeted Usman’s query, and their failure to look at each other to decide who was to answer it, it was clear that they considered it an awkward question. The younger man spoke first.

‘Yes. I see where you’re coming from. The short answer is, there are indications which we can’t go into here. These… incidents fit into a pattern and therefore our advice, our judgement, is that they are the work of the same person or persons.’

The way the policeman finished, his body language and the intonation, did not solicit a follow-up question, but Usman gave him one anyway.

‘And harassment, that’s just something in the head, isn’t it? So it’s just in the mind of the person who feels harassed? Like, if I feel harassed by you, that counts as harassment?’

Ahmed sat next to his brother in motionless horror. I wonder, Ahmed thought, if I killed Usman right now, just struck him down dead, I wonder a. if Allah would forgive me and b. if a British jury of my peers would acquit me.

‘I think we’re straying from the point,’ the policeman said, smoothly. ‘The majority of the people in this room are here because they feel upset and distressed by these things that have happened. It isn’t fair to call it just “something in their heads”. People feel stalked by the individual or individuals who are doing this. So we’re going to find them and punish them, but we need your help.’ Then the Detective Inspector talked for a while about how everyone in the street could be the police’s eyes and ears, and how they wouldn’t be able to solve the crimes without everybody’s assistance. Ahmed could tell that his brother wasn’t quite finished, so he pinched his leg, hard, to get him to shut up. Usman looked at him, annoyed, and Ahmed looked even more annoyed back.

‘Will there be any compensation?’ somebody asked. ‘Are we eligible for anything?’

‘I fear that isn’t a police matter,’ said the Detective Inspector. He really was terribly smooth. There were a few more questions, and then the woman in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch stood up again, thanked the two policemen, and declared the meeting over. There was some more chat, people coming up to him and the Chief Superintendent and, basically, wittering on, and then he and his boss were able to get out into the fresh air on the Common for a quiet word between themselves.

‘OK,’ said the Chief Superintendent, lighting a cigarette as the two policemen headed back together across the open space. The rain and wind were such that he had to stoop over to do it. As a side effect of the weather, everyone around them was scuttling, heads down. A few yards away, two crows stood face to face, their luminous blackness seeming to absorb and reflect light. Mill thought, in his shiny uniform, the boss looks a little bit like a crow. ‘That’s the PR bullshit finished with. Keep checking the postmarks and the DVDs. See if forensics have anything on the cars. Then if something more happens, at least our arse isn’t hanging out the back of our trousers.’

Detective Inspector Mill unwillingly found himself thinking about his superior officer’s exposed behind. The image made him want to smile.

‘Maybe that stroppy Asian guy was right,’ said Mill. ‘I’m not sure that we need harassment now that we’ve got criminal damage to the cars.’

‘Yeah, well, let’s just keep everything we have in the tool kit. We don’t know what we might need.’

With that, and without a farewell, the Chief Superintendent was off in the other direction, trailing smoke – to a meeting? To the pub? To the bookies? To a mistress? He was the kind of man whom you couldn’t ask. Mill was amused by his senior officer, and tried not to let it show, out of an intuition that he would dislike being thought of as a source of private entertainment.

‘Can I trouble you for a moment?’ said a voice. A sharp-featured middle-aged man in a light summer suit had come up to the DI while he was watching the Chief Superintendent disappear across the Common. Mill assessed the new arrival rapidly: good citizen, well-off, something he wants to confide or complain about. That was one thing he was still unsure about, in his job: the view of your fellow Britons it gave you, from the sheer amount of whining and complaining and lying you heard.

‘Of course,’ said Mill.

‘Michael Lipton-Miller,’ said Mickey Lipton-Miller, his manner confidential and blokey, that of a man well used to having a sidebar with the police. ‘Just came out of that meeting you were in. Wanted to have a quiet word.’ He had come close enough to the DI to cover him with his umbrella.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Detective Inspector Mill.

‘I’ve got a theory about who might be responsible for this,’ said Mickey. Oh, sweet Mary and Jesus and all the saints, he’s a nutter after all, thought Mill. He said:

‘How interesting.’

As he said this Mickey took out his wallet and took a card out and handed it to the DI, not easy to do while holding the umbrella above both their heads. DI Mill looked at the card, saw that Mickey was a solicitor, and became aware of the need to be professionally careful.

‘I know what you’re thinking. I’m not a nutter,’ said Mickey. ‘It’s only this. Whoever’s doing this knows the street well, yes? Has gone up and down Pepys Road lots of times. Practically lives there, if he or she doesn’t actually live there. A fixture. Someone who fits in, part of the landscape. Not someone you notice. Comes and goes without a trace. Fits in. Yes? Like one of those detective stories, nobody notices the postman. Who does that sound like? Not the postman, obviously. You’d notice him going around with a bloody great camera filming everything. So, another angle. Who’s got a camera? Comes and goes, nobody notices, has a camera. No idea, fine. Add something else. Comes and goes, one. Camera, two. Three, whoever it is has a grudge. Yes? Right? It’s obvious. This isn’t the work of Norman Normal, this is someone with a major beef. With society, with the world, with Pepys Road. Angry. Who’s angry, in general? The kind of person everyone is angry at. It’s one of those turnaround things. Right. So who’s a. got a reason to be in the street, b. got a reason to have a camera, c. angry at everyone because everyone is angry at them? Once you see it like that, it’s obvious: a traffic warden. Or wardens, plural.’

‘So this is all the work of an angry traffic warden.’

‘Or plural, wardens. Everybody hates them, so they hate everybody. It’s clear enough once you spell it out.’

Mill had a talent for extricating himself from situations: he thanked Mickey and said goodbye at the same time, nodding energetically as he turned and headed back to the station. Mickey thought: that’s a polite young detective. Mill thought: that man is a little bit mad, but it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, and it certainly falls under the category, the important category, of being seen to do something. Mill would open yet another file, talk to a few people at the Post Office, talk to somebody on the web side of things, talk to a traffic warden or two, and then go back to hoping the whole business went away.

65

Experience had taught Rohinka Kamal that the most useful way to think about visits from her mother-in-law, Mrs Fatima Kamal, was as a form of natural disaster. Just as you could take sensible precautions against earthquakes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, but there was no real point in worrying about them, similarly, there was no point dreading Mrs Kamal’s biennial trip to London. You could take steps to mitigate the effect, maybe, but the steps might not work, and either way it wasn’t worth losing sleep over.

This would be Mrs Kamal’s fourth visit to London since Rohinka had married Ahmed, and although the focus had changed from nagging, criticising and undermining them about when they were going to have children, to nagging, criticising and undermining them about how the children were being brought up, the emotional dynamic was as it had always been. Mrs Kamal would start complaining and being difficult on the way back from the airport – no, she would probably start at the airport; she would have detailed, passionate grievances about the food on the plane, or the in-flight entertainment, or turbulence, or the state of Heathrow, or the rudeness of the immigration officials, or the traffic. Whatever had happened would be the fault of whomever she was talking to – though there was often a tremendous subtlety to the way she did that, for instance in her talent for complaining to Rohinka about Ahmed in a manner which made it clear, while also leaving it entirely unspoken, that the reason he was such a useless man was that she was such a useless wife.

In advance of the visit, Rohinka and Ahmed had fallen into doing what they usually did, which was to make jokes about how awful it would be, as a means of reducing the strain on their relationship when Mrs Kamal ran through her repertoire. Her talent, her genius, was for what Rohinka called ‘needles’. These were comments designed to be hurtful, but not so much so that the recipient felt he or she could draw attention to them.

The night before she was due to arrive, Rohinka lay on her side in bed facing Ahmed and, keeping her voice down so that it wouldn’t wake light-sleeping Mohammed, said:

‘It’s like she thinks I’m just intelligent enough to notice, but not intelligent enough to say anything back to her. So she says, “Ahmed is looking very well-fed,” or whatever – I don’t have her gift, I can’t get the perfect example, but it’ll be something like that – no, I can remember one, from last time, she said, “Fatima looked so lovely yesterday in her dress.” Of course she is stressing the “yesterday” because Fatima was wearing the same dress that day because the washing machine was broken. So what I am supposed to say is, “Thank you very much for telling me that my husband is fat and my daughter is filthy. What a fortunate daughter-in-law I am!” I’m supposed to be just enough aware to hear the sting in what she says, but not enough to say anything back to her. I’m supposed to collaborate in putting myself down! I lend her the use of my own brain to get the point of the barbs she sticks into me!’

Ahmed chuckled, which made the bed gently bounce.

‘What do you mean, well-fed?’ he said.

‘Fat boy,’ said Rohinka, poking him in the side with her finger. ‘It’s the way she can say ten critical or negative things in a row. You can actually count them, add up the sequence. She’s a machine for denigrating people.’

‘She lives in Lahore.’

‘Not for the next few weeks she doesn’t,’ said Rohinka, and rolled away to her other side.

The next morning there was a family summit meeting, prior to setting out for the airport. All three brothers, Rohinka, and the two children sat around the kitchen table while a friend of Shahid minded the counter. It had been decided that the whole family would turn out to meet Mrs Kamal. The last time, Ahmed had gone to meet the 8 a.m. flight on his own – which wasn’t so unreasonable, he felt. He had to get up at six to make sure he was there on time, and he went on his own because Rohinka was fully engaged with Mohammed who had just been born, and because somebody was needed to look after the shop. Mrs Kamal was still referring to her ‘unenthusiastic’ reception when she set off back to Pakistan a month later. (‘I’ll make my own way to the airport, I know how inconvenient it is for all of you to make the effort.’)

‘Shock and awe,’ said Shahid. He was in a good mood. He had been able to use the fact of his mother’s arrival to get rid of the Belgian, Iqbal, whose ability to ignore hints and suggestions and open but polite requests to leave had gone from being annoying to borderline psychotic. Seven months!

‘Moving on soon’ was what he would say when Shahid brought it up. ‘Moving on soon.’

But the imminent arrival of Mrs Kamal had done for him. Shahid was proud of his own brilliance here. He knew that Iqbal knew that the whole family was genuinely frightened of her – or maybe frightened was the wrong word; maybe they just dreaded her. Whichever it was, Iqbal knew that she was a living terror. Shahid didn’t have to lie about that. All he had to do was lie about where she was going to stay when she came to London, and stick to the lie – and that’s what he had done. As soon as Mrs Kamal had said she was coming to visit, Shahid had gone steaming straight to his flat, told Iqbal he had to get out, and given him the date. Iqbal, amazingly, had had the front to complain, and to act as if it wasn’t fair. The Belgian had more front than Selfridges. With bad grace, he had eventually conceded that he had to go. And then, yesterday, most amazing thing of all – he had gone! Moved out! Vamoosed! Iqbal was out of there! Elvis had left the building! The fat lady had sung! Mandela had been freed! Shahid had his life back! He could lie on the sofa watching his own TV programmes, surfing his own websites, breathing the smell of only his own socks and farts! They think it’s all over! It is now!

‘We will overwhelm her with our love and devotion,’ Shahid went on, to the family breakfast table. ‘She won’t know what hit her.’

‘That doesn’t sound like Mamaji,’ said Usman. This was hypocritical, since he was Mrs Kamal’s favourite, for no reasons the other brothers could understand except that he was the youngest – the bad-tempered, sulky, charmless, semi-fanatical youngest. Ahmed gave Usman a warning look: he and Rohinka were careful not to speak ill of Mrs Kamal in front of her grandchildren. They had a strict no-badmouthing policy about her. This was partly to set a good example for their old age, and partly because they were worried that Fatima would pass on anything they said.

‘We’ll love-bomb her,’ said Shahid. ‘It’ll be like the Moonies.’

‘Lub bob!’ said Mohammed.

‘Everybody ready?’ asked Ahmed. Rohinka slid around the table, attending to their breakfast plates so briskly and efficiently she might have been a Hindu goddess with more than one set of arms, clearing and stacking and sweeping and racking, and then bumping the dishwasher door closed with her hip before setting it going. Fatima was in a bright green dress – a clean bright green dress – and Mohammed was wearing his smartest red jumpsuit. He was carrying his favourite Power Ranger. The two younger brothers were dressed as if for manual labour, and Ahmed was wearing pressed jeans and a smart leather jacket. They piled out into the people carrier, Ahmed’s huge VW Sharan, and set off for Heathrow, the traffic predictably rubbish, the weather predictably rubbish.

As they crawled out through West London, Ahmed was reminded of how his world had contracted around work and the children. The shop, the kids – it felt at times as if that was all there was. Even though the big car was full of his family, he felt a sense of the bigger city around him as they struggled past the amazing size and variety of London, the feeling that everything had a history, and the press of the present too: roadworks, billboards, a small accident where a white van had driven into the back of a milk float and the police had closed a lane, as well as that good old favourite, ‘sheer weight of traffic’. Sheer weight – how much of life was sheer weight of something? Then the traffic eased and they were out towards the elevated section of the M4, and the road rose and curved through office buildings that had once looked like someone’s idea of the future. It was a different London from the one Ahmed knew, and he liked it.

Shahid decided to make his own entertainment.

‘Let’s have a bet on what she’ll say first.’

Usman scowled: gambling was unIslamic.

‘Not a real bet, dip-’ and then remembering Mohammed and Fatima and cutting himself off before he could say ‘dipshit’, ‘stick. Dipstick.’ Ahmed tried to give a silencing glare via the rear-view mirror, but Rohinka spoiled everything by chuckling, which Shahid took as permission to go ahead. ‘I’ll go first. It’ll be: “Ahmed, you are fatter than ever.”’

‘Daddy fatty!’ said Mohammed.

‘The flight was a horror,’ said Rohinka, adding some Lahore and deepening her voice half an octave and, it had to be said, sounding unsettlingly like Mrs Kamal.

‘Hello!’ said Fatima. ‘She’ll say hello!’ There was applause, and it was agreed that she was a clever girl – and Shahid realised that he had better be careful what he said.

Heathrow, never a pleasure to visit, was even worse than usual, thanks to a combination of roadworks and increased security measures. Ahmed could feel his stress levels rising as they sat immobile, moved ten yards, then sat immobile again. The smells emanating from the very back of the car indicated that Mohammed, who seemed entirely content and was looking out the window from his child seat with a certain lordly calm, had nonetheless had an incident in his nappy.

‘We’re going to be late,’ said Usman. The unhelpfulness of this observation was compounded by its truth. They had allowed two hours to get to Heathrow, but it wasn’t going to be enough. Ahmed could feel their mother’s visit sliding towards disaster before it had even begun – because if there was ever a person capable of spending four weeks punishing you for turning up late to meet her at the airport, that person was Mrs Ramesh Kamal of 29 Bandung Street, Lahore. Ahmed tried to imagine what he could do; but they weren’t even through the Heathrow access tunnel yet – they weren’t even at the roundabout where there used to be a model of Concorde, before the plane crashed and was withdrawn from service – and they’d never make it on time on foot, even if they were allowed through the tunnel on foot, which Ahmed didn’t think people were. He could turn around and go home and pretend to have got the day wrong… no, what was he thinking?, the others would never keep that secret. And then suddenly, in its mysterious way, the traffic eased. The brake lights of the cars in front went out, the cars first bumbled, then crawled, then they were actually, genuinely moving. Allah be praised. The policemen with machine guns standing at a checkpoint were, for whatever policemen’s reason, now letting all the traffic through. Ahmed turned into the short-stay car park, a little too briskly so the near front wheel rode up on the divider, took the ticket, parked, shooed his family out of the car, helped Rohinka unfold the pushchair and load it with Mohammed, who took all this fussing with great equanimity, and hurried everybody over the concrete walkway, following the signs, rushing, Ahmed pushing the pushchair, Rohinka pulling Fatima by the hand, the two younger brothers behind, Shahid laughing and Usman scowling, through the crowd and the professional drivers holding signs and the tearfully hugging silent couples, the tour party gathering around a raised umbrella, the family group all crouched by a wheelchair, rushing into position by the arrivals area, the oddly free-form Heathrow arrivals area where it’s hard to tell arrivals from arrived, exit from concourse, and just as they arrived, just as they started to compose themselves, there was Mrs Kamal, frowning and pushing a trolley with three suitcases on it, her expression not changing as she caught sight of them and steered the heavy luggage towards them, all six of her family, three sons and two grandchildren and daughter-in-law, all with their greeting faces on. Mrs Kamal pulled the baggage trolley to a halt and said:

‘So who is minding our shop?’

66

In a café in Brixton, holding himself as still as he could in front of his plate of bacon, eggs, sausages, beans, chips and toast, sat Smitty.

Smitty had a fabricator whom he employed to make the things he used in his pieces. He gave the man the designs, they had a conversation, the man knocked up some 3D images on the computer, then made a prototype, then he made the object for real. His factory was in Brixton, so when they had a piece on the go, Smitty would regularly be schlepping backwards and forwards on the Victoria line, if he was in a hurry, or in his Beemer, if he wasn’t. At the moment the man was working on perfecting a nine-foot-high dildo in concrete treated to look as if it was plastic, or silicone, or whatever it was dildos were made out of. Smitty wasn’t yet entirely sure what this was for. He just liked the idea of this thing which looked as if it had to be made out of one thing which was by definition lightweight and pleasant to the touch, which turned out to be this other thing which was immovably heavy and nastily abrasive. Dildos were private, statues were public. It would be a piece about, about, about… about something. The tricky thing would be moving the nine-foot concrete dildo into place, but that was a problem for another day. Smitty had two more immediate concerns.

The first was that he’d come to the factory and his man wasn’t there. The building, a former warehouse a bit like Smitty’s own studio, was chained and locked. No reply on the entryphone. There had been a cock-up. He’d have liked to blame the fabricator, but he couldn’t, because this just wasn’t the sort of thing his guy got wrong. So the cock-up was almost certainly at his end. Probably it was his new knob-head assistant, the replacement for his old knob-head assistant. To be fair, as knob-heads went, this new Nigel was much less of one than the last Nigel. Humanly, he wasn’t a knob-head at all, and had the great virtue of showing a proper respect to his betters, i.e. to Smitty. But he did make knob-head-type mistakes, and the timing of this meeting looked like being one of them. So Smitty was going to give it another half-hour and then piss off back to Shoreditch.

The result was that Smitty was sitting in a café a hundred metres down the road from the warehouse, having a cup of tea and putting himself outside a Full English. That wasn’t a typical breakfast for Smitty, he was more a slow-carb, bowl-of-microwaved-porridge person, but he was having this monster fry-up because of the second thing which was wrong with his day: his colossal, reeking, throbbing, ear-ringing, cloth-mouthed hangover. A mate had had a do the night before, there was an eighties theme, and it had been good fun. There were people dressed as New Romantic pirates and dandies, there was Duran Duran and Wham!, and as a further concession to the theme, there were tequila slammers. At some point early on in the evening, that had seemed like a good idea. Smitty was, as a rule – it really was a rule – as careful with drink as he was with drugs, but a tequila slammer and an eighties theme night was just something you had to go with. The result was the way he felt now.

Smitty made a point of never taking a day off when he’d overdone it. Part of the reason he was so careful about not overdoing it was because of this rule, so it was a win-win: he got off his face less often, and he got more work done. Because you could have lie-ins and free time whenever you wanted as an artist, the temptation was there to go it slightly too large, slightly too often. Smitty had mates who did that. So it was part of his samurai-style code that he had forced himself across town to this meeting, which was why it was doubly annoying that the whole thing was a cock-up.

Unfortunately, telling yourself you were adhering to a samurai-style code did not help you feel any less hung-over. From that point of view, things were touch and go. The fry-up had looked challenging when it arrived, generously coated with visible grease, but he had felt better after the first couple of mouthfuls. Then he had started to feel worse again. Now Smitty was taking a moment before returning to his plate.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. That would make a good name for the giant-concrete-dildo piece.

The café was rough, the kind of place Smitty liked. It had one of the things Smitty always thought a good sign in a café, restaurant or pub: a table of four men all wearing yellow high-visibility jackets. A radio was tuned to Heart FM. It would all have been perfect, if he wasn’t having to concentrate so hard on not being sick. To take his mind off his waxing nausea, Smitty picked up the South London Press. The front page was about a stabbing at a bus stop, a black teenager. Smitty had long been of the view that if middle-aged white people were stabbed with the regularity of black teenagers, the army would be on the streets. Page two was objections to a new Tesco somewhere – no prizes for guessing who would win that one – page three was people getting their knickers in a twist about parking (‘local residents say they are at breaking point’), page four was protests about a prospective library closure, and page five was, at the top of the page, a picture of a child sitting on a donkey at a fairground, and on the bottom, a short item about the road where his nan had lived and We Want What You Have. Apparently the cards and whatnot had kept coming, and there had been a Neighbourhood Watch meeting.

Smitty sat up. He had mentioned the cards to his mother, and she in turn had mentioned them back once or twice, but the house was being done up by a builder now and he had no idea there had been what the paper called ‘a sustained campaign’ or that it had included ‘graffiti and obscene abuse’ as well as ‘criminal damage’ and ‘items sent through the post’. The paper said that a copper called Detective Inspector Mill had promised ‘prompt investigation and decisive action’, which sounded to Smitty like rozzer-speak for ‘we haven’t got a clue’. Smitty still had the folder of cards and the DVD back at his studio. He’d been interested in it, whatever it was. Graffiti, obscenity – it was his kind of thing.

As he had that thought, Smitty had another one. It came unbidden and he couldn’t have said how exactly he knew what he knew, but even as he had the idea Smitty felt certain that he was right: that he knew who was the person behind We Want What You Have. That it was this person didn’t make complete sense – there was something funny about the chronology – but at the same time he was sure. Yes: he knew. And he also knew that there wasn’t a blind thing he could do about it. He could go to the cops, yes, but the cops would immediately want to know who Smitty was and how he knew, so there was no way he could do that without giving away the secret of his identity, the single most precious thing he had. Oh, it was clever. It was evil. Clever evil weaselly fucker. Part of the point, Smitty guessed, was that he would work out who it was, and how limited his options were. Well, that had happened. Smitty knew who it was, and he couldn’t do a thing about it. He put down the newspaper, pushed away his fry-up, and picked up his car keys. He felt an overwhelming need to be somewhere else.

67

‘Bogdan!’ said Arabella, opening the door of number 51 to Zbigniew, her mobile tucked under her ear. ‘Darling! You don’t need one of those parking thingies, do you? Five seconds, literally five seconds, OK?’

She showed him through to the drawing room and retreated back into the hall. Why would she think I need a parking permit? wondered Zbigniew, as he looked around the room, which seemed substantively unchanged from the last time he had done some work for the Younts. Today, Arabella had asked him in to see if he could ‘chuck a few splashes of paint about’, which he guessed meant repainting one or more of the bedrooms and perhaps the hall too. At a guess – since she liked him – he would be the only person tendering at this stage, so he would not have to give his most competitive quote. Well, he didn’t need the work anyway, now that Mrs L had given him the job at number 42 and he had half a million pounds in cash hidden in a suitcase to worry about. He would have a look-see and politely turn it down. But there was no cost attaching to finding out the size and nature of the job, and if he passed it someone else’s way he would accrue credit in somebody’s favour-bank.

After a moment he realised that something about the room was different. Zbigniew had a strong visual memory and noticed these things. Perhaps there was a new sofa, or a new table, or something. No, it was a new mirror, antique and gilt, on the far side of the room. The mirror faced the door, and as Zbigniew was looking at it, a very small child, a small child, and a slim young woman with black hair came into the room. The small child and the woman stopped and the very small child came over to him and put one hand on his leg and said,

‘You’re It.’

Zbigniew, taken by surprise, didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. The slim young woman, who was Matya, gave him a moment and then came towards him to take charge of Joshua. A typical useless man, she thought. He can’t be bothered. Zbigniew thought: that is the most attractive woman I have ever seen. I want to have sex with her.

‘We were playing a game,’ she said, not liking the fact that she felt herself wanting to explain, but managing at the same time to imply to Zbigniew that he was emotionally stunted, frozen, imbecilic, full of himself, and if it were up to her, he wouldn’t be allowed in the house.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am here to see Mrs Yount. I-’ he found that he had temporarily forgotten the English word for painting, so he made an up-and-down motion with an invisible roller brush. Joshua and Conrad were now clinging to Matya’s legs, one to each of them, both of them with their thumbs in their mouths, both of them looking up at Zbigniew as if he were something entirely new.

Joshua took his thumb out of his mouth. ‘I haven’t done a poo today,’ he said, kindly, to help break the ice.

Zbigniew grunted. It was supposed to indicate mild amusement, but came out sounding surly. Joshua put his thumb back in his mouth. Zbigniew wondered what to say. Well done? That’s good? I too have been to the toilet, would you like me to tell you about it? What were you supposed to say to children? And also: I wonder what she thinks of me? If he had known what Matya was thinking he would have been mortified, because what she was thinking was: typical arrogant Pole, can’t be bothered, thinks Warsaw is the capital of the universe, useless with children, vain, conceited, lazy about everything except work. Matya hadn’t yet found what she was looking for in London, but since her evening out with Roger she had a clearer idea of what it was – something to do with money, and space, and a bigger perspective. Something to do with looking out the window of a black cab in the small hours of the morning, and a house with a garden with roses in it, and children of her own. It was not to do with Polish builders who hadn’t grown up yet.

Zbigniew, if he had known, would have thought that very unfair. He thought he had changed a lot; he thought he was a much more mature person than six months ago. The old lady’s death, the horrible thing with Davina, had marked him, he felt. Also, he was spending hours a day wondering what to do about his magic windfall. His thoughts began with the practical – how to launder the cash and get it paid into a bank account, how to put it to use – and then slowly, as if by their own volition, turned to the question of just how morally wrong it would be to take the money. He started with rationalisations for why it was all right: because the Leatherbys didn’t know the money was there, it was in effect already lost, ownerless; because they had no need of it, given that the house was worth millions; because his father was a good man and deserved what the money would bring. But then his grip on the rationalisations would weaken, his self-justification would start to slip through his fingers, and he would, by an act of will, force himself to think about something else. He was struggling with this, every day. So Matya’s thoughts would have seemed a terrible injustice, and even though he didn’t know them, he could tell that first impressions weren’t going well. In his experience with women, it was difficult to recover once things began to go wrong – once they had unreasonably decided that you were a person with whom they were not under any circumstances ever going to have sex.

Arabella came back in the room.

‘Mi dispiace, darlings, I’m racked with guilt, do forgive me Bogdan, I’m now absolutely a hundred per cent all yours. Can I show you my little thingies?’ With that, she ushered him out to the hall, and then up the stairs to the bathroom he had painted for her seven months before. She wanted to change the colour to ‘one of those Swedish types of white, you know, they’ve got sixteen different ones, this is sort of warmish, clean but not antiseptic, like, I don’t know, apple juice or something, only white’.

Zbigniew told Mrs Yount that he would think about it and give her a quote. It made no sense to take the job on, but he hated to turn work down, and a voice in the back of his mind told him that by coming to the house he would have another chance with the sexy nameless nanny.

68

On Sunday morning at his flat, Usman opened up his laptop and took out his 3G mobile to do a bit of net-surfing. This was his preferred way of getting news and entertainment. He did not like or trust the kafr media and for the most part avoided it. The two exceptions were football and The X Factor, which he had first watched when babysitting Fatima and Mohammed one Saturday night. Fatima had heard about the programme from her peers and was able to insist that everybody watched it. Usman wasn’t sufficiently experienced as an uncle to see through the manoeuvre. So the first time he saw the programme was on the TV next to the counter, with Mohammed asleep upstairs and Fatima sitting on the floor, her chin on her fists, utterly rapt. It was rubbish, of course it was, but there had been one or two occasions since when he happened to be near a TV on Saturday night, and there didn’t happen to be anything much else on, and he happened to find himself watching it, not in any concentrated way, obviously, but keeping an interest, staying in touch with the distractions of the masses… Know your enemy…

As for football, Usman loved the fact that Freddy Kamo lived a few houses away – well, a hundred yards away – in the very same street. The first time he’d heard of Freddy he had been incredibly excited for more than one reason, since Freddy was a brother Muslim, and there was something extra-cool about that, even though this was a fact that he’d never seen mentioned anywhere in the press, not once. Nobody seemed to know where Freddy went to mosque. It would be cool to go to the same mosque, to worship next to him at Friday prayers, maybe to fall into conversation afterwards, discover the Pepys Road connection, maybe even become mates… Freddy was Usman’s favourite footballer and he had watched YouTube clips of him dozens, maybe even hundreds of times. He loved the way he looked as if he was crap but then you actually realised he was brilliant. He loved his youth too. As the youngest brother, Usman was always on the side of the youngest person or entity. Islam was the world’s youngest major religion and the only one that told the truth – see?

It was desperately sad about what had happened to Freddy. The game had been televised and Usman had been watching at a mate’s house; an old mate from school, whose lifestyle was unIslamic because he drank alcohol, but he and Usman had known each other for so long that he was, in his mind, partially exempt from the rules. Besides, he had Sky Sports. The tackle which smashed Freddy’s leg was shown, in the usual way, about ten times, and it was something that made you feel sick when you looked at it. Freddy had always seemed vulnerable; that was part of what was so thrilling about him, that he looked vulnerable but never got caught or hurt. Now that he had been, it all felt different.

Usman wouldn’t have minded having a look at some clips of Freddy in his prime, but this particular technique for surfing the net was too slow for that. He had broadband, obviously, but there were some things he didn’t like to do over his own internet connection. Usman was, always had been, careful about stuff like that. A neighbour had until recently had an unencrypted wireless connection which he used for his own surfing when he wanted to do something that couldn’t be traced, but the neighbour – he didn’t know who but he guessed it was the flat in the basement – had wised up and gone to WPA encryption about three months ago. So now Usman used a pay-as-you-go 3G mobile phone which he’d bought for cash and was therefore untraceable, and tethered it to his laptop. He ran the browser with all its privacy settings on, via an anonymising service. An electronic spy or eavesdropper would have no way of knowing who he was.

Not that Usman did anything against the law on the net – nothing illegal, not exactly. Looking at or downloading Al Qaeda training manuals, for instance, was a criminal offence. Usman had no wish to go that far, even in the privacy of his own head. As for whether the people who did go that far were all wrong, well, he would once have said that if you have no other way of getting attention for your grievances, then it may be regrettable but there was sometimes no other way than violence. But now, without fully adopting another position, he had gone a long way to abandoning that one. The bombings of 7/7 had been in large part responsible for that. Seen at close hand in the city where he lived, the violence was too stupid and too random to be a viable course of action. The engineer in him rebelled at the sight of something so ugly and wasteful and so – in his heart he could admit this – wrong.

He still had an appetite for the conversation, though. He still liked to know what the angry people were saying. A global conspiracy to destroy Islam was something he no longer believed in, but the idea that there was a fundamental anti-Muslim bias in the attitudes of the developed world was, in Usman’s view, manifestly true. Mind you, if anything could put you off that idea, it was the kind of people you found contributing their rants to some of these websites. Usman had contributed a few times himself, but even when he was hiding behind a pseudonym and using a completely anonymised technique for accessing the net, it made him nervous. Too nervous to keep on doing it. A common theme, indeed a common obsession, on the sites was how thoroughly they were penetrated by spies and provocateurs and informers. No doubt that was true. Contributing to these forums when so many of the people on them were trying to find out who you were and get you in trouble, to trick you into saying things or giving things away – that was scary. And then there was the fact that the (by local standards) moderate and reasonable arguments he was making immediately generated flame wars in which people accused him of everything from being a stooge to a phoney Muslim to being himself a spy/provocateur/informer – that was too much. Usman stopped posting. Now he just lurked.

There wasn’t much to read today. Iraq and Afghanistan and the global conspiracy and all the usual. A long rant about how Al Jazeera was a tool of Western oppression and how the Qataris who funded it weren’t real Muslims. The connection over the 3G was slow today, and Usman found his taste for the debate just wasn’t there. He logged off the site he was reading and went back to his Google home page. On impulse, just for old times’ sake, he typed in ‘We Want What You Have’ and told Google that he was feeling lucky. To his amazement, there the blog was, hosted on a new platform, but with everything that had been on it before and a whole load of new stuff too. Usman was so surprised it was as if someone had jumped out of the computer and shouted Boo! He clicked on the links and looked through the pages that came up. More images, some of them now with virtual graffiti. Nasty stuff for the most part. Abuse was tagged onto most of the houses in the street. Even – sacrilege! – to the house where Freddy Kamo lived. An image of their own shop at number 68, the old image that had been on the site before, was defaced with the word ‘Bell-end’.

That made Usman smile. His brother could certainly be a bit of a bell-end. But what had happened to the site was weird and disturbing, and Usman didn’t understand it at all.

69

It would not be entirely fair, Rohinka realised, to blame Mrs Kamal for every single thing that was wrong with the Kamal family dynamics. But it would be a little bit fair. Taking in the deliveries at five o’clock in the morning, she found herself reflecting on the fact that she had been braced for irritation, had psychologically prepared herself to feel irritated, to breathe deeply, to rise above it – and yet here she was, unpacking cartons of milk, stripping the wrapping off newspapers with a Stanley knife, waiting for the grocery truck, irritated.

That was the main thing wrong with Mrs Kamal. She spent such an extraordinary amount of mental energy feeling irritated that it was impossible not to feel irritated in turn. It was oxygen to her, this low-grade dissatisfaction, shading into anger; this sense that things weren’t being done correctly, that everything from the traffic noise at night to the temperature of the hot water in the morning to the progress of Mohammed’s potty training to the fact that Fatima wasn’t being taught to read Urdu, only English, to the fact that Rohinka served only two dishes at dinner the night of her arrival to the cost of the car insurance for the VW Sharan to the fact that Shahid didn’t have a ‘proper job’ and seemed to have no intention of getting one, let alone a wife, to the unfriendliness of London, the fact that it was an ‘impossible city’, to the ostentatious way she complained about missing Lahore, especially at dinner time, giving meaningful, sad, reproachful looks at the food Rohinka had cooked. I should poison the bitch, that’ll show her. In her head, Rohinka growled and muttered and seethed with – and she was well aware of the irony – irritation.

She could hear movement upstairs. There was no way this could be a good thing: either it was Mrs Kamal, preparing to announce that she had had no sleep, which was a declaration that she would be in an even filthier temper than usual, or it was Fatima, announcing that she was now awake, and required entertaining. The steps paused for a moment, as if in thought, and then headed towards the stairs: a small person making thumpy steps: Fatima. She came around the bottom of the stairwell.

‘Mummy, I’m freezing.’

‘It’s quarter past five in the morning. You should be in bed.’

Fatima put her hands on her hips.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘I bet you could if you tried. Think how warm and cosy it is in bed. Under the duvet. With your toys.’

‘I hate my toys!’

This was such a lie that Rohinka just looked at her. Fatima took a moment to listen to what she herself had just said.

‘Not all of them,’ Fatima admitted. ‘I don’t hate Pinky,’ a doll she’d been given for her last birthday. ‘I could get in bed with Daddy, I bet it’s extra-warm.’

Inside Rohinka there was a violent but short pitched battle between her conscience, which told her she should wrestle her daughter back into bed, and her wish for a quiet life, which told her to let Fatima get into bed with Ahmed, and maybe, just maybe, they’d both sleep; knowing perfectly well that she was likely to wake him and try to make small talk for an hour or two. She looked at the piles of work she still had to do.

‘Maybe you should try Daddy,’ said Rohinka. I’ll make it up to him, she thought. Fatima rocked her weight from foot to foot while she considered the proposition.

‘Don’t want to,’ she said. Rohinka sighed. She hated the feeling of being already tired from the day’s events, right at its very start, before the real day had even begun, but she pointed to Fatima’s favourite stool. ‘Ten minutes, and back to bed,’ Rohinka said. ‘Or you’ll be too tired to go to school.’ Then, when her daughter hopped up and down, clapping with delight at being allowed to stay with her, she felt guilty.

Rohinka had wanted to be married, had wanted to have a husband and a family, and a family’s life together, and as the middle of five children had a pretty good idea, she thought, of what family life meant; but nothing had prepared her for the sheer quantity of emotion involved, the charge of feeling. There could be wild mood swings, tantrums, exhilaration, giggling laughter, a sense of the complete futility of all effort, a grinding realisation that every hour of the day was hard, the knowledge that you were wholly trapped by your children, and moments of the purest love, the least earthbound feeling she had ever had – and all this before nine o’clock in the morning, on a typical day. It wasn’t so much the intensity of the feelings as the sheer quantity of them for which she had been unprepared. Rohinka had a guilty secret: sometimes, out walking or shopping with Fatima and Mohammed, she would look around at people who didn’t have children and think: you don’t have the faintest idea what life is about. You haven’t got a clue. Life with children is life in colour, and life without them is black and white. Even when it’s hard – when Mohammed is sitting in the supermarket trolley breaking open yoghurt cartons, and Fatima is screaming at me because I won’t let her stock up on sweets at the checkout, and I’m so tired my eyes are stinging and I’ve got my period and my back hurts from carrying the children and stacking shelves and everyone is looking at me thinking what a bad mum I am, even then, it’s better than black and white.

And maybe that’s what had happened to Mrs Kamal. Maybe it was the sheer quantity of feeling that had got to her; that had somehow mismatched with what she had expected life to be, what she had wanted for herself. Or maybe it was like a chemical reaction gone wrong. She was supposed to feel x but instead she felt y. The things that were supposed to mature her had instead curdled her, so instead of being older and wiser she had got older and more and more irritated, so that now she had become someone who carried irritation around with her like a smell. The irritation was catching in the way that yawning was catching. Rohinka could see, now, that this was why the Kamal boys were the way they were. All of them were, in most of their dealings, reasonable men (with the exception of Usman, who was in many respects still an adolescent). They were calm and sane and functioned well; men who could be talked to, reasoned with, who saw things in proportion. With each other, though, and with their mother, and in everything to do with the Kamal family, they were all irritated, all the time. It wasn’t that they rubbed each other up the wrong way, it was that things always started up wrong and never improved. Ahmed, who was annoyed by very little – his disposition was so even, it verged on being a culpable passivity, a failure to get-up-and-go – was annoyed by his siblings and his mother. It was as if, in each other’s company, the Kamals all went into their special irritation room, like the panic room in the Jodie Foster film.

Blame the mother – that’s right, blame the mother. Since becoming a mother herself, Rohinka had been sensitised to just how many explanations for everything that happened boiled down to: blame the mother. It couldn’t be the real answer for things nearly as often as people said it was. But on this occasion, she did think it was true that Mrs Kamal was to blame. Rohinka wouldn’t be like that with her own children, definitely not. She looked around the room at the undone work, the papers still unwrapped, the shelves still unstacked, the first customers due before long, and sighed again.

‘Are you cross, Mummy?’ said Fatima.

‘No, I’m not cross. Not with you. I was thinking about grown-up things.’

So now it was time for Fatima to give a big, theatrical sigh. Rohinka beckoned her onto her lap, and her daughter hopped up.

‘I’m never cross with you, not deep down. Even when I’m cross I still love you.’

‘I know that, Mummy,’ said Fatima, who did. She bounced and wriggled on Rohinka’s lap to get more comfortable, and it was from that position, in a moment of complete happiness, that Rohinka looked up to see the door opened, tentatively at first, and then very abruptly, and then shouting men dressed in black and blue came into the room, several of them, moving quickly and loudly and creating such an impression of violence and disorder that it took her a few seconds – it can only have been a few seconds, but at the time it felt much longer – to realise that the men were shouting ‘Armed police!’

70

It would be impossible to list all the ways in which Shahid’s quality of life had improved since Iqbal had moved out, but one of the particularly important changes, for Shahid, was that he was sleeping better. He had always been a champion sleeper, which was just as well since he needed his sleep to function properly; but the toxic Belgian, lounging around the flat, blocking the route to the bathroom, had got into his head enough for him to be aware of his movements at all times. That was bad, because Iqbal moved around a lot at night, using the kettle, running taps in the kitchen and the bathroom, putting on the television at a volume where it was too low to hear exactly what he was watching (usually – when Shahid went through to check – some rank action movie: Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal). Or he would be on the computer. A faint light under the door, a silence that wasn’t quite silence, all this at three or four in the morning – this meant that Iqbal was surfing the net. As for dawn prayers, forget about it. The problem wasn’t that Iqbal got up to pray: if it had been that regular, Shahid would have learned to tune it out. The problem was that he got up to pray when he felt like it. Some weeks that was every day, other weeks it was no days, or it was day-on, day-off, or two-on one-off, or the other way around, or whatever. And this wasn’t something you could complain about, especially as a non-dawn-prayer yourself. Excuse me brother, but would you mind regularising your fajr schedule, because IT’S DRIVING ME INSANE.

All now a thing of the past. For the first four days after Iqbal left – which he only managed to get around to the day before Mrs Kamal arrived, stalling and digging in right to the end – Shahid slept the beautiful, untroubled sleep of the just. Then he’d wake and for a moment he would get ready for the first irritation of the day, the trip to the bathroom, with the unwanted Belgian jihadi sprawled on the sofa in his greying underpants – and then, joy! He would realise that Iqbal wasn’t there! No one was there! It was his flat, his very own flat, peeling paint and creaking windows and semi-functioning stereo system and all, all his! He could go to the toilet naked! He could do a handstand in the sitting room! No one to stop him! It was the sensation of pure happiness that came from waking up and realising that a bad dream wasn’t real. And Shahid had this sensation for four days in a row, and felt that he was enjoying some of the best sleep and the happiest wakings of his adult life.

The fifth morning was different. Shahid went to bed at about twelve, read a Stephen King for about fifteen minutes to help knock him out, then put out the light and slept like a baby until about half past four, when he began to have a dream, a dream which, even inside the world of the dream, felt strange and violent, a thriller gone wrong, something about armed men, about shouting, about people breaking into his flat, and then abruptly it wasn’t a dream but it was real, there were shouting policemen in his room and two guns were pointed straight at his face from no more than two feet away. ‘Armed police!’ was what the men were shouting – it was quite hard to make that out because several of them were shouting it and they tended to overlap each other. There were crashing noises from elsewhere in the flat. Well, somebody certainly has screwed up, big time, Shahid thought, as one of the policemen reached forward and pulled the duvet off him. He felt his consciousness split into several different parts, different voices, with one part of his brain crying out, Please don’t shoot me, while another said, I’m glad I put on clean boxers last night, and another said, I wonder whose fault all this is, and another said, It’ll make a good story one day, and another said, It would be much easier to understand them if they stopped shouting. And then in addition to all these voices there were the plain facts of the matter, which were that five armed policemen were in his room pointing guns at his head.

‘Turn over, turn the fuck over,’ shouted the nearest policeman. Behind and outside he could hear an extraordinary amount of banging and crashing. Shahid had once, when he was in bed with flu, seen a television programme in which a group of people with ambitions to be builders had knocked down and torn out everything inside a house except the supporting walls. The noises they had made were similar to those now coming from his sitting room and kitchen. That was part of what he said to himself; while at the same time, and suddenly, he felt a surging, physical fear. I might die here, right now, today. He turned over. Something – with a man’s full body weight behind it – pressed down on the point between his shoulder blades, while his arms were very roughly pulled behind his back. There was a touch of cold plastic and a click as what must be handcuffs were put on him. What they never showed you on television was how much the position of being cuffed hurt, and how uncomfortable it was, and how completely vulnerable it made you feel. Face-down and cuffed, he was as immobile and trapped as a beetle on its back.

Two or more sets of hands pulled Shahid up and began shoving him out of the room. He could see six policemen in front of him, and hear others behind, and knew that there were others elsewhere in the flat. All of them were white and all of them looked pinched and angry. As he collected himself a tiny bit, Shahid could see that about half of them were firearms officers, and the others were gloved and overalled for searching. One of them had already booted up his computer and was sitting at the keyboard. Whatever they were looking for, they were certainly looking for something. Through the bedroom door he could see that all the drawers in the kitchen had been turned out on the floor. He’d never realised just how much cutlery and crockery he had.

From behind, so he didn’t see who did it, somebody put a waxy jacket over his shoulders and then another policeman stood in front of him holding up a pair of tracksuit bottoms. For a moment Shahid didn’t understand. Then he realised that he was supposed to put the tracksuit bottoms on. From shouting at him, the police had now gone silent, as if they expected him to work out for himself what he was to do. The policeman held the trouser legs up and Shahid, like a child being helped to put on his pyjamas, stepped forward into them. Then his treatment abruptly became ungentle again as he was shoved forwards, out through the chaos, the flat full of police but looking as if it had been burgled, and then downstairs, this frightening as he was half pushed and half carried, never really in balance thanks to the handcuffs, skidding down the stairs, past the café’s side door which he could see opening just as he was carried out the front of the house.

A police van was outside the building; it was stopped in the middle of the street with its back door open, facing the flat’s front door. If it were a civilian piece of parking it would have been illegal. The man pushing Shahid, always keeping him at the limit of his balance so he felt he could fall at any moment, pushed him against the back of the van so that he barked his knees. Then another policeman banged on the back of the van three times, and another one opened it from the inside, and he was pushed, roughly but not violently, upwards, and hoicked into the back of the vehicle, where two policemen, not firearms officers, were sitting waiting for him. The van had benches along the sides, and a railing from which sets of handcuffs hung suspended. There was a thick glass wall between the passenger compartment and the front of the van, and there was also a separate compartment, a kind of cage with metal bars, in which a prisoner could be kept separate from other passengers. Shahid could not stop himself from thinking random, completely inappropriate thoughts, and one of them, looking at this cage, was: if I was Hannibal Lecter, they’d put me in there.

The two policemen who had shoved and pushed him into the van sat down on either side of him, so now there were four of them in the back. The door was slammed shut from the outside, and the van moved off. Both of the police across from him were staring at him, one of them smiling, the other scowling. The scowling policeman was chewing gum. No one had spoken to Shahid yet, and he began to feel, as well as confused and angry and frightened, a wave of stubbornness. Whatever this is, it’s completely wrong, and I’m not going to play along with it.

The van was travelling at speed. Not much traffic at this time of the morning.

71

From all the police dramas Shahid had seen, he knew that what would happen next was that he would be read his rights, all that stuff about you don’t have to say anything but if you don’t it means you’re guilty, then be taken up to a counter in a police station and booked, have his details taken, his personal belongings logged, then an interview room, and at some point he’s allowed to call his lawyer, all that. If you were lucky the police person in charge of your case would be Helen Mirren, if you were unlucky it would be David Jason, but underneath they were the same hard but fair basically decent truth-seeker.

It didn’t work like that. The van, noisy on the outside and silent within, drove for about twenty minutes, then pulled up in an underground garage. Shahid was pulled and manhandled out of the van, then shoved into a lift, the four policemen with him all the time. Then he was led down a corridor decorated in institutional green paint, and shoved into a brightly lit room, and left on his own. He still hadn’t been spoken to, not once.

There was a toilet in one corner of the room, with no lid and, now that he studied it, no seat. Shahid looked at it for a moment. Rooms did not tend to have toilets in them. There were four strip lights, of which one had a slight flicker, giving the whole room the sense that it was vibrating, uneven, as if something had gone wrong with your head and you were about to have a stroke, an aneurysm, a freak-out. There was a single folding chair at a table with a plastic wipe-clean top, and a horizontal plank in the corner of the room – no, looking at it, it wasn’t a plank. It was a small single bed whose sheet and blanket were folded so tightly they looked like a tablecloth. There was no pillow. The earliness of the morning and the horror of what was happening had slowed Shahid’s brain, but now he realised: this was a cell. He was in a cell. Something had gone horribly, eerily, impossibly, grotesquely wrong. He had an intuition what it was, too. In fact it could really be only one thing. But now there was nothing to do but wait.

72

Detective Inspector Mill had a talent for distinguishing between what needed to be done and what didn’t, between make-work and real work; he was good at asking people to do things and letting them get on with it. A clear brief and a free hand, that was the formula, and how he looked forward to being able to apply it all day long.

At the moment, though, there were times when he had to do a lot of his own shitwork. Routine legwork, routine paperwork, other people’s idea of how his time should be spent. That was how it was. He didn’t enjoy that so much, and a part of him couldn’t help but feel, when he was doing routine repetitive work, that it was the equivalent of harnessing a racehorse to a plough. He was philosophical about it, and his police career would either take off or it wouldn’t; for now he kept his head down and did what he was told. Today, that meant a. getting hold of a list of traffic wardens who served the area including Pepys Road, and b. going to talk to them.

Mill knew that being a traffic warden is a lousy job and as such is done by recent immigrants. They tend to cluster together – somebody from some part of the world gets a job, tells their family and their mates, they get jobs too. Same the world over. In this part of town, most of the traffic wardens were from West Africa, a fact which caused racial tensions, especially with indigenous blacks of Caribbean descent. Mill was braced for a wasted day talking to wary, uncommunicative West African traffic wardens whose skills in English wouldn’t be great and who would be pretending they were even worse than they were. I could quit, he thought. I could quit right now… and that thought helped him to get out of bed and get on with it.

The morning’s work began with a visit to the offices of Control Services, the company which supervised the borough’s parking. The contract for parking had been enforced with such lack of sensitivity, such aggressive pursuit of the officially non-existent quotas and bonuses, such a festival of clamped and towed residents, such a bonanza of gotcha! tickets and removals, such an orgy of unjust, malicious, erroneous, and just plain wrong parking tickets, that in local elections it had cost the incumbent council control of the borough not once but twice. And there was nothing the borough could do, because the terms of the contract were set out by central government, so that there was no effective control, at local level, of this local service. It was a local government classic: it was a total cock-up, it was completely unfixable, and it was nobody’s fault.

A sense of guilt or upset at this state of affairs was hard to discern at the head offices of Control Services; in fact it would be hard to imagine a more fully developed atmosphere of not noticing and not caring. Several bored men and women sat in front of computer monitors while two radios competed, the far end of the office favouring Magic FM while the end by the door preferred Heart. It was OK at either end of the room, but the crossfire in the middle was hard to take. A man with a narrow ratlike face came over to Mill and stood holding his hands clasped in front of him and Mill could tell that the man knew he was a policeman. Mill asked for and was given his list of names and addresses, and went out to wander around the beat and find traffic wardens.

It was a long morning. Mill spoke to a Ghanaian and four Nigerians, none of whom gave any sign of knowing anything about Pepys Road or We Want What You Have. They were variously wary, sullen, and blank, but none of them, to his eyes, looked guilty, there were no clues and no tells. In Pepys Road itself he tried to interview a Kosovan warden who seemed not to speak any English at all, and barely to understand any either. Gradually this whole idea came to seem like a stupid mistake, a notion from another world – the fact that these people were so cut off from the area they worked in was part of the problem, rather than the key to the mystery.

There were four names outstanding on the list. One of the names was an -ic, which presumably meant another Kosovan. All of the other names were African. By about two o’clock, Mill had convinced himself that the idea of talking to traffic wardens was a dud; but he couldn’t stop, since he couldn’t write up the report in a convincingly arse-covering way until he’d spoken to every relevant warden. Then he could stick it in the file and forget about it. That, in this context, would be a result. Mill went into a sandwich bar on the high street, realised that it was more expensive and pretentious than he was in the mood for, but couldn’t be bothered to abandon his place in the queue and go and find another one. He ended up with gouda and prosciutto and rocket on ciabatta, and a two-quid bottle of sparkling mineral water, which would make him burp during his afternoon’s legwork, but the bubbles at least gave the illusion that you were drinking something more interesting. Sitting at a window seat with his five-quid sandwich, leaning carefully forward as he ate so as not to get food on his suit, Mill got out his notebook and checked the names and addresses. Three of them were local, the fourth, incredibly boringly, was in Croydon. He’d start with the nearest, a twenty-minute walk or so. Take advantage of the fact that it was one of the summer’s few rainless days.

Actually it was a good sandwich. Mill didn’t mind paying for things as long as he felt he was getting what he paid for. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and set out down the high street, along the stretch by the side of the Common where a crew of street robbers on bicycles were currently targeting anyone on a mobile phone. Mill had been working on that project until he was pulled off it to do this. The street robbers came from the estate a few streets away, and had all the rat-runs and pavements down pat, so they weren’t an easy target, but the crew had slowed down in the long summer evenings.

A small cluster of school-age teenagers were hanging about by the fishing pond. Term hadn’t finished yet, so they shouldn’t be there. Mill clocked them but his day was already sufficiently pointless without wasting time hassling chav truants – anyway that was a job for uniform. Ah, the uniform. How he didn’t miss it.

He had underestimated the length of the walk – by the time he got to Balham it had been about half an hour and his feet were starting to hurt. Well, at least he’d feel virtuously exercised after his wasted day. He checked the notebook, found the house, rang the buzzer for the second floor. A thick, wary male African accent came over the intercom:

‘Yes.’

‘Kwama Lyons?’

The pause was longer than it should have been and Mill immediately felt more alert.

‘Yes?’

People who can immediately recognise a policeman are usually people who have reasons for immediately recognising a policeman. From its tone, the voice at the other end of the intercom had reasons for not wanting to talk to him.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Mill. I’m looking for a Kwama Lyons, for a routine inquiry.’

‘She is not here.’

‘But this is her home address?’

‘Her home address.’

‘Would you like to check my identification before we go on?’

Legally, the man at the other end of the intercom was not obliged to let Mill into the house – a fact he perhaps knew. He must also know that acting odd would only make Mill more interested. So there was a pause now, during which Mill could hear the man weighing the choice. After about ten seconds he said,

‘I will come down.’

Weighty footsteps approached down the stairs. A heavy-set African man in his thirties, his eyes rimmed with red, opened the door wearing, of all things, a grey cardigan. Mill put his foot over the threshold, good copper’s trick, and stepped into the house while flipping open his warrant card. The man leaned closer to look at it, squinting slightly, and Mill raised the estimate of his age upwards: forty, say.

‘How may I help you?’ the man now formally asked.

‘I’m looking for Kwama Lyons. She wasn’t at her work so I came here. It’s a routine inquiry.’

‘She’s out.’

‘Might I ask who you are?’

‘I am Kwame Lyons.’

‘Are you related?’

A flicker before the man said, ‘Yes.’ Whatever he was lying about, he was certainly lying about something; hard to imagine that it was We Want What You Have, but something smelled wrong. Mill liked, indeed loved, this part of his job – the part when you could tell things were not as they seemed, and there was more to find out. For the first time he felt his full energies gather around this inquiry.

‘What would be a good time to find Ms Lyons?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Does she have a mobile?’

‘I’ll tell her,’ said the man, now moving to close the door, with Mill still half-inside the house hallway. House divided into flats, he noticed. This man not the owner.

‘I’ll be back,’ said Mill, stepping backwards over the threshold.

He meant it, too, but the next day, when he did come back, another man, an Italian man in late middle age who identified himself as the landlord, opened the door. He told Mill that the man calling himself Lyons had moved out the previous night, leaving no forwarding address; that he always paid the rent a month in advance, in cash; that he had lived there for two years; that he was quiet; and that he knew nothing else about him, except that he had frequent brief visitors but lived alone – no wife, no female relation, therefore no Kwama Lyons at that address.

73

One of the things Quentina found strange about being a traffic warden was that despite being on her feet all day and walking what must surely be many miles, she didn’t seem to lose any weight. She brought this up with Mashinko one evening, after they had had a drink at the African bar in Stockwell and were walking homewards. (She made Mashinko leave her at the end of her street; she wasn’t letting him see the hostel, not yet. He lived with his mother, so they couldn’t go there easily. The trials and troubles of young love.) It verged on flirting, this subject, and Mashinko was a very very correct Christian boy, yes with a cheeky side, but he didn’t like anything too sexually joshing – and Quentina, to her surprise, found that she liked that about him, his touch of uptightness which suggested such strong feelings lurking beneath.

‘Anyway, I walk ten miles a day, and don’t lose an ounce.’ Risking it: ‘This is where you say I don’t need to lose an ounce.’

Luckily, he laughed.

‘Of course, of course. Not half an ounce! It is a mystery. We must seek an explanation. But tell me – tell me how fast you walk, when you are at work.’

They were strolling, a nice evening pace. The pavements were busy.

‘About like this.’

‘Like this!’

‘Like this.’

Mashinko shook his head.

‘Too slow. No aerobic effect. Not working hard enough!’ Seeing Quentina’s expression, he hurried to add, ‘I don’t mean, not working hard enough at your work. I mean, not working hard enough to burn fat and lose weight. Science! You must burn calories to lose weight. Like this -’

and he started walking at about twice the speed, swerving around a group of single women who had come out of a bar and were leaning on each other, screaming, laughing, smoking, and coughing. Quentina let him get away for a few yards, then realised that he wasn’t going to slow down, and set off after him. He was fit, he did exercise – football, and although she hadn’t asked, he must do some gym things or press-ups or something too, because he had the upper body to show for it. Hard muscles, tight skin… She had to break into a trot to catch up and was annoyed by the time she did, but he stopped and his smile was so wide and so affectionate she felt her irritation fade.

‘Like that,’ he said.

‘Like it’s the Olympics.’

‘No, just more intense than you are used to. That’s what you need to do if you want to lose weight. Not that you need to!’

Quentina, the following morning, was acting on the advice. Not all day, naturally. When she first woke she was a slow and sleepy mover, not someone who hit the ground running, not quick out of the blocks – she liked to come awake gradually, over coffee and a bowl of the strange British cereal which someone had introduced into the refuge, the coarse meal-like dish known as – the word made her laugh – ‘porridge’. All this in her dressing gown, yawning, shuffling, the other residents doing much the same, except the Albanian Mira, already outside on the landing halfway through the day’s first pack of cigarettes, looking as if she had been up all night muttering to herself. Then back upstairs to dress slowly, the day beginning to take shape in her head, face and teeth to be cleaned, only a little make-up for a work day, pay day in two days’ time and a visit to the hairdresser booked for the day after, another date with Mashinko that same night, things to look forward to. No, it was right now that the new exercise regime could start! A brisk walk to Control Services to pick up her uniform, and then she was away! No dawdling! She was a whole new Quentina!

Of course, when she had to stop to write a ticket, she had to stop to write a ticket, but in the passages in between, she moved like a racing mamba. How she moved! She was rocket-powered! Well, not really. But she did push herself a little faster, down Pepys Road, back up Mackell Road, up the side street Lindon Road, back down the other way, all at a much brisker rate. Or at least she tried to – except that Quentina found she couldn’t stop herself breaking into this small, tight, irritating cough, every time she began to exert herself. I’m so unfit, she thought. I am an elephant. I started doing this just in time. Quentina didn’t mind the idea of turning into a generously built African grandmama one day, and no doubt she would end up like her mother and her mother’s mother, big womanly women, but not just yet. After children, after life settled. Mashinko Wilson would make a good husband, a man it was easy to imagine being good with children, good with money, good with a house, a good man to cook for and to have come home in the evening, a good man for a lie-in at the weekend…

In Mackell Road, Quentina found an Audi A8 with a one-day parking permit in the windscreen. The correct portions of the ticket had been scratched out, day and date and month and year, but the person using the permit had not written in their car licence-plate number. These were always difficult ones. On the one hand the Control Services policy was unambiguous: if the permit had not been filled out correctly and in full, issue a ticket. On the other, the reality was that this was clearly someone visiting someone who lived in the street, who had been handed the permit to park for a few hours and who hadn’t looked at it in sufficient detail. Quentina had a look in the car, and saw a dog-seat and a travel blanket. Someone had travelled some distance to get here. It didn’t seem entirely fair to her, but rules were rules, and if she wrote the ticket she was contributing to her quota, whereas if she didn’t write it, the next warden to come along would do so. Life was not fair. Also, on a lucky day, a fully specced three-litre Audi A8 had a chance of winning the contest for most expensive ticketed car. Quentina wrote the ticket, put it on the windscreen, took the photo. You had to be careful with photos of permits, to make sure the relevant detail was visible on the digital image.

Homesickness, Quentina found, was a strange sensation. Some at the hostel felt it as a constant nag or pang. It was what kept some of them silent, held them inside themselves. Like the feeling that makes people go quiet when they’re starting to feel sick. Quentina didn’t feel it like that. For her, she had specific bursts of homesickness, tied to specific sensations and specific memories. Today, turning the corner of Pepys Road, she caught the smell of burning wood, of hot ash, and was suddenly back on the outskirts of Harare, the smoke either from their own yard or from the neighbours’, a cooking fire or a cleaning fire or just a fire, the smell seeming to seek you out so it could cling to you. An odd time for someone to be burning wood in London; it must be a fire someone had held back because of the terrible weather. The wood was wet, which made the fire smell like autumn, and something other than wood was burning too – there was a chemical note. Plastic melting perhaps. Mother, father, my country, my exile: all this rushed in on Quentina. For a moment she could feel her home around her, the warmth, the dry high air of her home town, the wonderful knownness of the place which held her from her first memories to the day she was forced to leave. She stopped and closed her eyes for a moment. Exercise could take place later. The smoke gathered around her.

When she opened her eyes, Quentina could see two policemen at the other end of the street, on her side of the pavement, walking in her direction, not quickly but not slowly. Without any conscious thought taking place, she felt her stomach turn over. It was a consequence of her condition: police made her nervous. She wanted to have nothing to do with them; no good could come of it. I’ll gently make myself absent. She turned and made to go down Lindon Road, and as she did so a man crossed the street towards her, a smartly dressed young man in his middle twenties, clearly heading for her, and Quentina was, with a growing sense of alarm, wondering why he seemed to be looking at her, when she suddenly realised: it’s another policeman. She thought: change direction! Run away! And her body, seeming to act independently, began to cross the road, the other way from the plain-clothes policeman, so they would cross over without meeting; but he changed course again and stopped two yards in front of her. He was holding up a wallet with a card in it, in front of her face, and smiling slightly, giving an ironic edge to his words, as he said, ‘Ms Kwama Lyons?’

74

From Zbigniew’s point of view, it would be silly to take on extra work at the Younts’. He was struggling at number 42. There was no one aspect of the job which was in itself too much for him, not once he had subcontracted the specialist work to the people he was borrowing from Piotr’s crew – but the fact that all the responsibility devolved on him made the work more stressful than he had imagined. When things went wrong, there was no back-up. The fact that he was sitting on half a million pounds of someone else’s money in an old suitcase made the sense of stress and alienation worse. It was lonely and weird, and then he very nearly had a bad accident. Stripping wallpaper off the second-floor landing, Zbigniew had been horrified to find that chunks of the actual wall were coming away with it – whole lumps of plaster, one of them a ten-kilo chunk which only just missed his head.

It would have been an ugly death, killed by a piece of falling plaster in a house he was supposed to be renovating; his body wouldn’t have been found for days, rats would have eaten him, it would have been a horrible end, and then they would have found the £500,000 in cash, and God knows what they would have thought… When the adrenalin of the near miss wore off, and the thought of how long it would have taken to find his body took hold of him, Zbigniew began to feel ill. Who, in truth, would have found him? He worked alone. He stayed in the house alone. He had no girlfriend. Mrs Leatherby lived in Essex and came down to London only at monthly intervals. Zbigniew called her once a week to keep her informed of progress – part of his do-what-British-builders-don’t-do strategy – and she would probably notice the absence of that call, but it would take at least a week for her to become concerned. Piotr would have called his mobile and got no answer, then he would have left it another day or so, then he would have tried again, then he would have started to get worried, and then, finally, perhaps he would have gone to the house, a little reluctantly and prepared to be angry at Zbigniew for forgetting to charge his mobile, and then he would have peered through the letter box, and then, only then, perhaps, he might have thought, I wonder what’s that smell…?

The thought was slow to get into Zbigniew’s head, but once it did it made him feel shaky. He took a break and went downstairs, stopping at the turn of the landing to look back at the place from where the chunk of plaster had fallen. Motes of dust were still drifting down. It had been a close one. He had the feeling he sometimes had, of envying people who smoked, because they had something to do at moments such as this. Instead Zbigniew simply sat at the bottom of the stairs for ten minutes before trudging back up them and returning to work, ready to leap backwards the moment he sensed anything untoward.

That same day, he went over to number 51 and told Mrs Yount he would do the decorating work for her. He had always half-wanted to do it, not for the money but for the chance to see that sexy, distant Hungarian girl again. It was the revelation of his cut-offness, his isolation in his London life, which made him act. Poland was real in a way that Britain was not, but he had to live here for now, so while he was living here, he might as well try to have a life. That was the idea.

‘Bogdan, I’m thrilled to bits,’ said Mrs Yount. He told her he would start work the following week – it was, he estimated, about a four-day job. It would be a break from his work at number 42, but he would stop in there at the start and finish of each day, just to keep an eye on things, and also to keep his conscience clear. So he would have four days to make an impact on the Hungarian. After that he could leave a couple of tools and brushes there and he would have other opportunities to make contact – but his best chance would be in those four full days.

Day one was a disaster. Zbigniew had not allowed for the fact that because it was summer, Matya and the children spent most of their time outside. Add to that the fact that his painting job was at the top of the house – the third time he had painted these particular walls – and it was a perfect recipe for spending an entire day failing to speak to her. He could hear movement in and out of the front door downstairs, and there was one time when Matya and the children seemed to have come back from their lunch date. Aha! thought Zbigniew. This is my chance! I’ll go down to the kitchen for a glass of water! But by the time he had checked himself in the bathroom mirror and wiped some paint off his face and straightened his hair, and started downstairs, he heard the front door close again. It was unfair. Weren’t these children allowed any rest?

Some builders and painters he knew would have got depressed at going over work they had already done, effectively undoing their own labour, but Zbigniew didn’t allow himself those sorts of feelings. If he wasn’t doing this work, someone else would be; if someone was going to be paid for it, it might as well be him. So he got on with the job and waited for his opportunity. Matya got back at five and Zbigniew recklessly went downstairs to try and start a conversation – only to find that the boys had friends over, and she was cooking tea. She was making what seemed to be an entire restaurant service’s worth of meals: a baked potato with beans (one of the Yount children had baked beans at least once a day), another baked potato with cheese, a carton of chicken and sweetcorn soup to be divided between the visiting children, a portion of spaghetti and pesto which she had planned to share with the other nanny until it emerged that she couldn’t eat anything containing flour, so Matya was eating the pasta herself and had made an omelette for her guest. At the same time, two of the boys were making mess with finger-paints. Matya, doing ten or eleven things at the same time, had the look of a woman who did not want to be courted; who would regard any flirting as somewhere between an irritation and an outright provocation. He got a good view of her bum as she bent over the table to mop up some spilled food, J-cloth in right hand, mobile phone in left. The effect on him was such that Zbigniew forgot to get the glass of water he had come downstairs pretending to want. At six, she left. He heard the door close. At five past six, he left too.

Day two was very similar. Matya and the boys were out, briefly in, then out again. Zbigniew felt he had to be careful – if he did the same accidentally-popping-downstairs manoeuvre, she might see through him and he might begin to seem desperate. The outcome of this sensible strategy was that he didn’t see or speak to her all day. He spent it painting and – since he’d brought his laptop, which still had the Younts’ wireless password on it – intermittently checking on his stocks. He stopped at five thirty, wrote an email to his brother back in Warsaw, and went back to the house.

Day three began promisingly. Zbigniew arrived at eight, while the children and their nanny and their mother were all still at breakfast, so he went straight upstairs and got on with the work. He was ahead of schedule and if this had been a different kind of job might have contemplated a flat-out fourteen-hour day to get it all finished – but that would disrupt his nanny plan, so instead Zbigniew was budgeting for two days of steady progress. He had worked here before and knew the sounds of the house, so he could interpret the noises when Arabella called out her farewells, then went upstairs to shower and get dressed, then went out with more farewells, then came back in again a minute later to collect her car keys, then went out again. It was about nine o’clock. Zbigniew could hear the crashing, scuttling, and laughing noises which meant that Matya and the children were downstairs. There was no evidence that they were about to head out – that took a good twenty minutes, so there would be warning. Excellent. Finally. Today was the day. He would give her a few minutes, then go down and initiate… whatever there was to be initiated. He would make no special preparations for what he should say – something natural, spontaneous, perhaps something based on whatever it was the children were doing. Yes – the children. Ah! Such energy! Something like that. One day, I hope to have children of my own, and hope that they have a nanny just as beautiful, who would bend over the kitchen table and – no, that probably wasn’t the way to go. Small talk about the children, a joke, a drink after work. Yes. And then just as Zbigniew was about to act on his audaciously brilliant plan, disaster. There was a car horn from outside, the doorbell rang, the door was opened, two women’s voices were speaking a loud foreign language at each other – from its unrecognisability, Zbigniew recognised it as Hungarian – there was the noise of a loud car engine, probably an SUV, there were rapid orders, a rapid gathering of coats and toys, and in an unprecedentedly brief time, less than two minutes at most, Matya and the children had been swept out. As for where, Zbigniew didn’t know and didn’t care. It had been a stupid idea taking on this job. Mrs Yount would change her mind about the colour again in a matter of weeks. Matya was out all day every day, she obviously couldn’t stand to be in the house. By the time he left she still hadn’t come back.

By day four, Zbigniew had more or less given up. It had been a moronic idea and he didn’t fancy her that much anyway. The real reason he had taken on the work was that he felt he owed it to Mrs Yount. He felt responsible because it was his paint job that he was redoing. No other reason. Matya, who he didn’t want to speak to anyway, was out all day, just for a change. He heard her and the children leave the house at about nine o’clock, the usual drama with clothes and shoes and last-minute trips to the toilet, and then they were gone. He made steady progress with his painting, finished the dado rails by late morning, then went on to the final details and was done by five o’clock. The Hungarian nanny, who he hadn’t liked much anyway, and her charges still weren’t back. Zbigniew cleared up the paper and cloths he had used to protect surfaces, and wrote a note for Mrs Yount saying that he was done, that he would be round in a day or two to see if everything was all right (and to collect his cheque, though he didn’t say that). He took his brushes and paints downstairs, then went back up to get the note and the coffee mug, and as he did so heard the door open and a stampede of children and nannies come into the house, the nannies issuing orders, the children voicing protests. Zbigniew came down into the mayhem with his note for Mrs Yount and his dirty mug.

‘Aha!’ said the second nanny, another Hungarian from her accent, shorter than Matya, with short hair cut to curve under her chin and bright flirting happy eyes. ‘A man! Perhaps he will eat pizza!’

‘Pizza is horrible!’ said the younger of the two Yount boys, who, like the other three children, was hiding under the dining-room table.

‘They said they wanted pizza. Now they say they don’t want it,’ said Matya, addressing herself to Zbigniew, the first time she had spoken to him. Zbigniew put his set of house keys and the note for Mrs Yount on the table by the telephone, where messages and letters were left, and saw, sitting next to the lamp, a set of car keys and Matya’s phone, a Nokia N60. He had the same model phone. They were meant for each other. Zbigniew had an idea.

‘We want baked beans,’ said a voice from under the table.

‘Perhaps you can help us eat all this pizza?’ said Matya’s friend.

He made gestures to indicate polite refusal and then, since both the girls were eating, said, ‘Just a slice.’ Then he introduced himself.

‘I thought your name was Bogdan,’ said Matya.

‘Bogdan the Builder. A little joke of Mrs Yount’s.’ He saw this register with her.

‘My name is Matya,’ she said, ‘but the children called me Matty.’ She had a nice undertone to her words and eyes – lively and a little sad at the same time. That body too. Zbigniew was convinced. He made some chat with the girls, helped joke the boys out from under the table, and left with his brushes and paints and, in his jacket pocket, Matya’s mobile phone.

75

There was no clock in Shahid’s cell, and no natural light, and he wasn’t wearing a watch when he was taken to jail, so his sense of passing time was limited to the point when his lights were turned out and then turned on a stretch of time later – which, he assumed, meant that a day had passed. That had happened five times now, which meant that five days and nights had gone by. Shahid had not spoken to anybody apart from – he presumed this is what they were even though the thought of what it meant was difficult to process – his interrogators.

Not that they called themselves that. They did not call themselves anything. They were all men and there were four of them, two significantly older than Shahid – in their fifties or so – and two about the same age. One of the thirtysomething men was Asian, a police inspector, and he was the only one of them who wore a uniform. The others all wore suits. They all of them kept asking the same set of questions, over and over again, mainly about Iqbal, but also about his own past, about Chechnya and people he’d known there. Sometimes they showed him photographs, and asked him if he could recognise any of the people in them. When he truthfully said that he couldn’t, they looked as if they didn’t believe him.

Iqbal, however, was the main subject, and the question they asked most often was ‘Where is he?’ Today, the sixth morning after he had been arrested and therefore his seventh day in prison, was no different. It began with the lights being turned on and with breakfast being pushed through a hole in the door: a single poached egg, cold burnt toast, and the most over-sugared tea he had ever tasted. He had a shit, which was the most humiliating thing about the whole experience since it was degrading and defiled to have the open toilet so close to the bed. There was an inspection hole in the window, so anybody could look at him on the bog, which was bad enough. The smell was worse. It wasn’t a chemical toilet, but it had a persistent chemical smell, and the metal washbasin also gave off a faint scent of industrial perfume. He had had an upset stomach, surely caused by stress, and his bowels were loose. The frequent semi-liquid shitting and the toilet and the sink combined together to make a shaming cocktail of odours, which hit him hard when he returned from interrogations.

Shahid washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and waited. About fifteen minutes later, a police officer came in and took the tray, and then another two policemen came in, put handcuffs on him, and led him along the corridor and round two corners to the interrogation room where the Asian policeman and one of his colleagues were waiting. The white policeman was a man who gave an impression of heaviness. It wasn’t that he was fat, but he sagged as if with a moral or psychic burden; his shoulders sagged, his eyes sagged, his suit sagged and he sat sagged in his chair, as if his disappointments with the world were bearing down on him. He made it clear that Shahid was one of these disappointments.

‘Well rested?’ asked the Asian officer. Shahid, who had not lied about a single thing as yet, saw no reason to answer with anything other than a shrug. The interrogators had a varying set of props and tools; sometimes they read files that came in plain brown folders, over the top of which Shahid couldn’t quite see. They might be looking at their horoscopes – you couldn’t tell. Sometimes they had turned on the tape recorder, sometimes they took notes. Sometimes they had cups of coffee, bottles of water (always Volvic; there must be a dispenser somewhere). Once one of the older officers came in drinking a Diet Coke. But the times Shahid found most disconcerting were the occasions, like today, when his interrogators were entirely empty-handed: no folders, no drinks, nothing. They just sat there with their hands in their laps and asked questions. The fact that they made no attempt to record his answers made it seem as if they weren’t listening to him. His answers were being discounted. So he was being grilled and ignored at the same time; Shahid found that hard to take.

The two policemen just sat there and looked at him.

‘I want to see a lawyer,’ said Shahid.

‘Tell us how you know Iqbal Rashid,’ said the other officer.

‘I’ve told you about three hundred times already. I want to see a lawyer. I’m entitled to see a lawyer and I want to see one now.’

‘Iqbal Rashid,’ said the other officer.

‘I want to see a lawyer.’

‘There were just a couple of details we wanted to check.’

‘I want to see a lawyer.’

‘It was in Chechnya, wasn’t it?’

‘You know perfectly well, because I’ve told you a hundred times, that it was on the way there’ – and Shahid was, because it was finally easier than having the same fight all over again, telling the story. They kept interrupting, checking details, going over things, and whenever he resisted or showed how sick he was of going over the same ground, they kept asking the same question over and over again until he gave in and answered. With part of him, Shahid knew that the whole point was that he be as demoralised and shamed and tired and compliant as possible; but this knowledge didn’t seem to help him fight his interrogators. He knew he was innocent. He knew that his intentions were good and that that should be enough. For what felt like the thousandth time he recounted the details of the trip to Chechnya and the people he’d met there and had the sense that he wasn’t being listened to – that nothing he said would ever be listened to.

‘… and no he didn’t always go to mosque or if he did I didn’t see him there.’

Without showing any sign that he was changing gear or changing the subject, without sitting up or showing any increased attention, the policeman said,

‘So where were you going to get the Semtex?’

At which Shahid was so surprised he found he couldn’t speak. They waited for him.

‘What Semtex?’

‘The Semtex you’re planning to use to set off an explosion in the Channel Tunnel.’

76

At the offices of Bohwinkel, Strauss and Murphy, Mrs Kamal sat on a straight-backed chair with her handbag in her lap, her sari tight around her, and the gleam of battle in her eye. Rohinka, whose feelings about her mother-in-law were what they were, was impressed. Ahmed and Usman were both also present but were making only occasional contributions. There was no ambiguity about the fact that Mrs Kamal was in charge.

‘… and as for the idea that Shahid chose to waive his right to see a lawyer, this is a conscious, deliberate, open attempt to insult our intelligence. He has not just come down from the hills. He is not some Urdu-language monoglot from the tribal areas who’s never seen a knife and fork. Do they really expect us to believe that he has signed away his right to legal representation? This is a young man who was offered a place to read Physics at Cambridge University. He is lazy and he has his faults but he is not an idiot and I simply do not believe what the police are asserting in this matter.’

Fiona Strauss was not a natural listener, but she knew how to listen to a client. She sat behind the desk, her fingers arched together, frowning, her mouth pursed. On the wall to her left, there was a photograph in which she could be seen shaking hands with Nelson Mandela. Behind her was a view of Montagu Square, with the plane trees in full bloom and a light spattering of rain hitting the window in intermittent gusts. She was good at pausing: when people stopped speaking she always waited for a moment before saying anything in reply. Even the way her patterned scarf was tied seemed designed to express principled concern.

‘Shahid has been in custody for seven days now, yes? Because he is being held under the Terrorism Act, they can keep him for twenty-eight days without charge. That is a deplorable fact, but it is a fact.’

‘But he hasn’t done anything!’ said Ahmed. ‘It’s ridiculous! Shahid’s no more a terrorist than… than I am!’

‘I believe you. But that doesn’t affect the legal position.’

Everyone in the room could sense that Fiona Strauss was holding back. She was a famous human rights solicitor, and was the first name to come to mind in cases of this sort. She was so well known that Rohinka’s first thought, when she went into her large office and saw her, was that she knew her already: a side effect of her appearance being well known. It was a bit like seeing Mel Gibson in the street and waving at him because you thought he must be an old friend. They expected to have to do no more than tell her what had happened to Shahid, and the blue flame of her indignation would be lit. Then suddenly there would be action, press conferences, an interview on the steps of the police station, and Shahid’s immediate release. The wrong done was to them so flagrant that it was astonishing to find it did not automatically seem so to everyone else. But it didn’t appear to work like that. The lawyer was resisting them, was requiring to be seduced; was requiring – and this was hard to take – to be interested. She had her pick of the world’s injustices, and liked to choose carefully. The Kamal family had expected to be meeting a crusading avenger who wished for nothing more than to pick up a flaming sword of truth and wield it on their behalf, and instead found that they were having to make a sales pitch.

Ahmed began to talk about how his brother was a good boy and wouldn’t have anything to do with terrorism of any kind, about how they as a family were well aware of the virtues of Britain as a free society (Usman was shifting in his chair at this point) and how they were good citizens, a family of practising Muslims who were respectful of other faiths and other paths. The others could hear that he was rambling, in the effort to get the full attention of Fiona Strauss. When he wound down, Usman had a go. He was hunched forward and looked as if left to his own devices he would be wearing a hoodie. For reasons of his own, he roughened up his accent and deepened his voice while talking to the solicitor.

‘The thing is, we know we got rights. We supposed to have rights. So where are they? Who’s gonna help us’ – and then giving the word a flourish – ‘exercise them?’

Usman gradually got angrier and angrier, and as he did so, made steadily less sense. It was clear that he was possessed by a furious sense of the injustice that had been done to his brother, but he was spluttering and going round in circles and his accent kept shifting from his normal educated voice to some version of South London which seemed like a new personality he was trying on specially for the occasion. Ahmed had never seen him so agitated; it was as if he had gone slightly mad.

By way of showing that she appreciated the effort they were making, and also that they had not yet succeeded, Fiona Strauss said,

‘Unfortunately, I say again, the legal position is clear.’

Mrs Kamal gathered a silence around her. Her power of projecting her mood, very often a great burden in family life, became an asset here. She said:

‘Well, this is all very good isn’t it? We are in the country which regards itself as the cradle of liberty. What happens? We are all woken at dawn with a gun stuck in our heads, in a manner which would embarrass a police state. My middle son is dragged off to jail. He is completely innocent of anything and he had never been arrested or charged with anything in his life, not once, not ever, but that doesn’t seem to matter to anyone, and he is held without any information being allowed out, without any contact with the outside world, his signature is forged to claim he is waiving his rights, and that’s it. Shahid would never waive his rights, that is the exact opposite of the kind of boy he is. But never mind. Nobody cares, nobody is willing to do anything, he’s just gone. Why not just bundle him off to Guantanamo and have done with it? That’s what you seem to be saying, Ms Strauss, am I not right?’

‘Mrs Kamal, the legal facts of the case are what they are. In relation to the judicial realities of the matter, my opinions have no status. They have no traction. Merely as a point of fact, you should know that there is not the slightest possibility of Shahid being extradited to Guantanamo Bay.’

This speech made something clear to Mrs Kamal. With her instinct for a weak point, she realised that what the lawyer was seeking was an appeal to her vanity. It wasn’t that she needed to be made to feel important, but that she needed it to be made clear that her clients understood that she was important. Everybody who came into this office was convinced that they had experienced a level of injustice without precedent, and they always thought that their story would do the work of convincing for them – that the story was all it took. So it was as if the story was the most important thing. But for Fiona Strauss, the important thing was herself, and she needed this to be acknowledged before she would take an interest in a case. Then the story could have its due. Mrs Kamal saw this, and acted on what she had seen.

‘But we need you, Ms Strauss. We are lost without you. We have rights on which we cannot act. The door is closed to us. We are excluded from justice. Without your help we don’t even know where to begin to seek it. The legal position may be as clear as you say – I am sure it is as clear as you say – but the moral position is clear also. We know that the fight against such injustices is your whole life. We know that. And all we can do now is ask for your help for us and for Shahid. He is in a dark place. You must help us bring light to him, Ms Strauss, because there’s no one else we can turn to.’

The lawyer separated her arched fingers and briefly, silently, drummed on the desk in front of her. Then she sighed, a sincere sigh, and said, ‘Very well. I will do what I can.’

‘You have no idea what this means to us,’ said Mrs Kamal, seizing her hands. The Kamal family were loud with relieved thanks, with exclamations, with gratitude and approval.

They spent another twenty minutes talking about what to do next. The lawyer promised to make representations to the police, and to explore the possibility of a press conference – exactly the thing the family had wanted all along. The Kamals left happy, except for Usman, who still seemed furious.

In the car on the way home – there had been extended discussions about how to get in to the appointment, and the non-desirability of paying the congestion charge, versus the unthinkability of Mrs Kamal taking the Underground – Rohinka said, ‘Well. That lady lawyer is quite a piece of work.’

Mrs Kamal said, ‘I liked her.’

77

Doctors and lawyers. Lawyers and doctors and men from the insurance company. That, now, was Patrick and Freddy’s life – and because Mickey always came to meetings with them, it was his life too. For the doctors – doctors plural, because they saw several different specialists – they went to surgeries in and around Harley Street. For the lawyers they went to three different sets of offices. The club’s lawyers were in a tall block in the City of London, with a view of other tall City blocks. The fittings were modern, steel and glass and sophisticated coloured plastic. The insurance company’s lawyers were in offices in Mayfair, a Regency building with, again, modern fittings, except in the big conference room where the two sides met, Freddy and Patrick and Mickey and one or two of their lawyers at one end of an oval oak table, which was polished so brightly that the gleam of reflected halogen spotlights made it hard to look at. As for Freddy, his lawyers were in Reading: it was a firm Mickey had briefly worked for and still trusted. The drive out of London to the lawyers’ offices was a relief, even if the only countryside they saw was the fields on either side of the M4.

The whole process felt like a form of torture. It didn’t begin that way – in fact it had begun with a strong sense of optimism-in-the-face-of-hard-times. After the first meeting at the insurance company, Mickey had turned to Patrick and Freddy and had said, ‘Well, that went well.’ He ought to have known better, he thought now, he really ought to have known better. He ought to have known that any case which had so many lawyers and doctors in attendance was a carcass, around which the professionals were clustering to gorge like vultures. But he had allowed himself to believe in the atmosphere of confidence, the sense given that all those present were men of good will whose only interest was in solving the unfortunate problem to the mutual satisfaction of all parties. What had happened to Freddy was tragic, but the system existed to provide a remedy, and only the details were left to be determined.

But what had happened to Freddy? That was the first problem. The doctors didn’t agree. Doctor number one, an orthopaedic surgeon, was a very formal man in his middle fifties with enormous dark-framed glasses who always seemed to be passing judgement on whoever he was speaking to. He had the weirdest body language of anyone Mickey could remember seeing, because he had so little of it: talking or listening, he sat completely immobile. He had done the initial remedial surgery and therefore was the only person actually to have looked not just at Freddy’s knee, but inside it. He was, they were told, the leading specialist in this kind of surgery not just in London or Britain but in Europe; there were, arguably, men his equal or superior in America, but only arguably. He was Mr Anterior Cruciate. His judgement was that Freddy would never play football again; he would never again run or kick a ball with intent. The very best he could hope for was that he might, if he were lucky, walk without a discernible limp.

The second doctor, visited at the insistence of the insurance company, was much nicer. He was a younger, more casual man, handsome and confident and not more than forty, and they saw him on a warm day when he’d taken off his jacket and tie. When they came into his office, he’d been listening to a Bob Dylan CD that he turned off by remote control. He took care to put Freddy at his ease, to smile and say how sorry he was for his trouble. Even his hands, touching and very very carefully manipulating the knee, were gentle. He told them that he had looked extensively at X-rays and at the surgical notes of his distinguished colleague – for whom he had the highest regard – and that in his opinion, Freddy had a 50 per cent chance of being able to play professional sport again. At that point, he gestured to a photograph on the wall behind him of a professional cricket player, a bowler in mid-delivery stride, jumping half a metre in the air, his whole weight – and to Freddy’s eye, he looked a bit fat – about to land on his left, front, leg. The doctor said that he had used a new technique to operate on the cricketer’s left anterior cruciate ligament, which had been in the same condition as Freddy’s after he broke his leg, and that photo, taken over a year ago, was the result. The cricketer was still playing cricket, and bowling quicker than ever. He did not say that the other doctor was wrong but he made it very clear that he believed he himself was right.

So they had to go and talk to a third doctor, one agreed on by both of the other two – a third opinion which both of them could see as an acceptable second opinion. This involved a train trip to Manchester, Freddy playing Championship Manager on his PSP, Mickey driving everyone within earshot crazy by making calls on his iPhone until the battery ran out, and Patrick looking out the window at this country he knew so little about. The countryside looked so empty, the city- and townscapes so old, so crowded, so thick with history and long habitation, and so impossible to know.

This third surgeon was amiable, crisp, and made it evident that in his own judgement he was the clear first choice to provide the opinion and when time came to do the surgery. He had light-coloured hair and fair skin and seemed to have been freshly scrubbed; he radiated cleanness. He listened briskly, asked questions briskly, and examined Freddy’s knee with a brisk air too, as if he thought Freddy might be malingering. Then after all this briskness he would not give them a verdict then and there, not even a provisional one, not even a hint. He would think about it and write to them in a day or two’s time.

The letter, when it came, agreed with the first surgeon. Freddy in his judgement would never play football again. He said that he was very sorry.

All that was the positive, practical, forward-moving part of the experience. It got worse from there, because it was at this point that the insurance company and the lawyers took over. Mickey couldn’t believe it. He knew perfectly well that if you left the taps running in the bath, and water came through the ceiling of the downstairs flat and trashed it, the insurance company would niggle and carp and look for exclusions and exemptions and generally seek every way they could to weasel out of paying. Everyone knew that, it was a fact of life. Or they would screw you so hard by raising the premiums that you would have been better off not claiming in the first place. No-claims bonuses, no-fault car insurance: all these were giant conspiracies against the public. Everybody knew that. But seeing that this was a young man’s whole life – not just his livelihood (though that as well) but his whole life, the thing which was at the centre of his seventeen-year-old existence – Mickey thought they might have shown a bit of ordinary human decency. He thought they might have had the common humanity to treat the case on its merits and pony up. The insurance was for a rainy day, and Freddy’s knee was that rainy day. It was as rainy as it fucking well got.

Well, you might have thought that, but if you did, you were dead wrong. It had become clear that the insurers had no intention of simply paying up. Every letter was answered with the maximum possible delay, every phone call was bounced around between the various senior executives who were ‘handling’ the case, and every opportunity was taken for pissiness or evasiveness or stalling. They sought to explore the possibility of a legal challenge against the player who had tackled Freddy; that was a whole series of meetings between them and their lawyers and Freddy’s lawyers and the club. They then sought to look into the possibility that Freddy himself had been reckless, that his own behaviour – which meant reaching for the ball after he’d turned and spun and flicked it on – was a piece of contributory recklessness. Then they tried to look into the possibility that the first piece of surgery after the tackle, done by Mr Anterior Cruciate himself, had been botched, and had made things worse, and therefore that it was the surgeon – or rather his insurer – who was legally responsible for paying for the damage to Freddy’s knee. They did anything and everything they could to stall, frustrate, delay, and block any resolution of Freddy’s case. The fact that Freddy’s case wasn’t a case, it was Freddy, his whole life, seemed to weigh on them not at all.

78

Roger was sitting in his office, not thinking about anything much, which these days meant he was half-entertaining a half-fantasy about what it would be like to go off with Matya and live somewhere else, Hungary even, her home town, him the exotic sexy British man who had thrown it all up to go and live with his hot sexy Hungarian, eating goulash and making love all morning… or somewhere warm perhaps, yes, that was better, somewhere with palm trees and a hammock, he’d run a little restaurant out of a shack serving nothing but grilled fish, everyone had always said his barbecues were brilliant, yes, that was the one, serving his lovely grilled fish, living in a bungalow near the beach, the shutters open, Matya not wearing anything much except a T-shirt and a bikini and maybe a grass skirt, which was a cliché but what the hell it was his fantasy, and making love all morning, and then a nap in the hammock after the lunchtime rush… and then his deputy Mark appeared framed in the doorway of Roger’s office. This was no mean feat, given Roger’s field of view over the rest of the open-plan trading floor, but Mark seemed to pride himself on his ability to creep up on Roger when he wasn’t expecting it. Roger’s attention came back to the day and the place he was actually in: a set of figures needing to be prepared, a Wednesday morning in the City of London, of course raining, every built and living thing in sight a different shade of grey.

Mark tapped the door frame with his knuckle, a gesture he made into a kind of fidget, and asked, ‘Am I disturbing you?’ This was something he always asked at the start of any conversation at work, and its ritual nature was borne out by the fact that he did not wait for an answer and came straight into Roger’s office.

‘The figures,’ said Roger, not meaning to make it sound like a sigh but finding that he had.

‘The figures,’ said Mark, who came round to Roger’s side of the workstation – this was their routine – and laid out a spread of papers. He began to talk and to go through the numbers, which were neither good nor bad, pointing things out with his red marker pen. Roger grunted and let Mark talk through the data. His attention faded in and out and he kept his end of the analysis up with grunting, nodding, and occasionally pointing at some numbers. He was more and more like this at work these days. It wasn’t a desperate need to be somewhere else, or someone else, it was more a mild longing, a gentle absence; he was partly not there, more or less all the time. After Mark had talked and crunched numbers and made points for about twenty minutes, Roger looked at his watch and said, ‘Time for the show.’ The two men collected their papers and left for the conference room. Roger knew that if there were any difficult points at the meeting, he could bounce the questions over to his deputy.

And as for that deputy, and what he was thinking, well…

79

Mark, looking over Roger’s shoulder while he himself, as usual, did all the work – Mark whose great preoccupation was, and had been ever since childhood, his feeling that he needed the world to acknowledge him as the heroic main character in his own story – Mark was thinking that he, Mark, had been a naughty boy. In fact those very words would sometimes run through his mind, like a nursery jingle or a pop-music ear worm, a tune you’d got stuck in your mind and couldn’t get rid of. I’ve been a naughty boy, I’ve been a naughty boy…

The fright with Jez, when he had nearly been caught at his monitor, had been a real fright. It still wasn’t something Mark liked to think about. Jez might have gone to his boss; might have done anything. And physically, at an animal level, Mark was frightened of Jez. But a strong man with a definite purpose did not over-dwell on such minor setbacks, and all Mark had done was lie low for a month or two and not do any rummaging around other people’s desks or terminals – though, because he was a strong man acting on a plan, he stuck to the plan, and kept on coming in to the office before anyone else. That way there would be no change in his behaviour when he went back to his scheme. This was how you had to think if you wanted to get things done.

After six weeks, Mark had gone back to work on his plan, and had immediately had a breakthrough. One of his old mates from back-office days now worked in Compliance, the section of the bank which monitored staff’s adherence to the various laws and codes of practice and risk-control models. Dropping in to visit him one day, Mark found him out of the room, having left behind on his desk a Post-it pad covered in numbers. The string of digits was, Mark guessed, the strongly encrypted password to something. Taking a big risk, Mark came round to the terminal and checked the log-in and found that while his colleague had a weekly changing password he also – because those passwords were impossible to remember – kept a file of passwords, to which he now, he found, had the key. It was really as easy as that, if you knew what you were doing. Mark had already found an old account which had once been used to balance trades at the end of the day and which was supposed to be for short-term, twenty-four-hour-only use; but precisely because it hadn’t been used in so long, he was now able to delete it from Compliance’s systems without any discrepancies appearing. So now he could log on to colleagues’ accounts without their knowledge, trade, park the profits (and losses, if there were any, though that was unlikely) in the no-longer-dormant account. The system was supposed to flag anything which seemed statistically anomalous – but he could use his access to Compliance to track any alerts, and sign off on them, before anyone else noticed. He was in business.

The plan was simple. Trade, not on his own account, obviously – he was no thief, thank you very much! – but on the bank’s, until he had made, say, £50 million. Serious money. An amount which didn’t risk the bank but which was irrefutable evidence of his talents. Then, fess up. Tell them what he had done and let them draw the obvious conclusion: that he was a risk-taker with a proven talent for delivering spectacular returns, and there were fifty million reasons for giving him what he wanted – which, in the short term anyway, was Roger’s job.

Mark had this very week made his first trades. The City was going through an anxious phase, with rumours of all sorts of nasties emerging from the US derivatives market, but Mark had always believed that it was during bad weather that you found out how good a sailor you were. He had bought some derivatives taking a long – optimistic – position on the Argentine peso, measured against the yen. Within seventy-two hours, there had been a 6 per cent movement in the currency in the right direction. Thanks to the magnifying effect of derivatives and leveraging, Mark had come close to doubling this bet, which meant doubling the bank’s money. He had closed the position and hidden the profit in the no-longer-dormant account. Then he had gone on to make a big bet on the dollar, the highly out-of-fashion dollar, against a basket of other currencies, and that was going so well that he was still running an open position, and was well on his way to doubling his money again. This was not mere evidence that he might have a talent for this kind of thing: it was not an indication: it was the thing itself. This was what genius looked like.

It had been difficult getting to the position where he was able to do what he wanted. That was fine with Mark, the difficulty was part of the point. This wasn’t supposed to be the sort of thing most people were capable of thinking of, or capable of doing. His face, his mask, his Thomas Pink shirt and Gieves & Hawkes suit and Prada shoes might not be exceptional (though to the person who studied them, there were signs that this City uniform was more carefully put together, more thought through, than most), but the person inside them was a once-in-a-generation talent. Given that, it had to be admitted that Roger was a grievous disappointment. Mark deserved a better figure to outwit, surpass and overtake. He had once seen Roger as a worthwhile antagonist, someone who merited his efforts to outdo. But it was increasingly clear that his boss wasn’t that person. He just wasn’t up to the role of Mark’s enemy; he wouldn’t even be a footnote in his biography.

‘Bring the paperwork, would you?’ said Roger, proving the point, as he drifted in his airy, athletic way towards his own office door. For such a tall man he had an indecisive, soft manner of movement, as if his determination to get where he was going might fail him at any moment. He had a folder under his arm, which for Roger, clearly, was good enough reason to let his junior colleague carry everything else. He was just so oblivious, that was the thing about Roger which really irritated Mark – which properly got under his skin. What would it take for Roger to notice what was going on around him? A bomb under his chair? Mark wouldn’t put it past him to not-notice. Well, he’d certainly notice when his deputy turned around and told his bosses – Roger’s bosses – that he had just made fifty million quid while Roger was looking out of the window thinking about how to pay for his wife’s Botox, or whatever it was he thought about. Maybe the inside of Roger’s head was like one of those Simpsons cartoons depicting what Homer was thinking about: tumbleweed drifting past, a mechanical monkey doing somersaults, a hamburger. Yeah, that’s probably what it was like to be Roger. Like being Homer Simpson, except taller and richer and working in a bank. For now, anyway.

Roger, with his thin folder, and Mark, with his armfuls of paperwork, arrived at the meeting room. Lothar was sitting there already at the head of the table, red-faced and fit-looking, his own single folder on the table in front of him, beside a large plastic glass with a bright green liquid inside, presumably one of his nasty-smelling health drinks. Lothar said what he always said at the start of meetings, one of the few words which made his German accent fully apparent:

‘Chentlemen.’ He made it sound halfway between a statement and a question.

80

Shahid had taken to sitting on the floor in the corner of his cell. He wasn’t sure why, and it wasn’t part of a conscious plan; it wasn’t as if it offered him a more interesting view of his bed and his toilet. But since he had found out that the police thought he and Iqbal were part of a plot to use stolen Czech Semtex to blow up a train in the Channel Tunnel, he had lost his earlier confidence that things were somehow going to turn out all right of their own accord. Up until now, although what was happening to him was ridiculous, he had never lost a basic trust that there was a larger justice working in his favour. Now, however, that belief was fading. The plain fact was that the police did not believe him. They thought Iqbal was a bad guy, which as far as Shahid knew might well be true – ‘You know a lot more about him than I do,’ as he kept telling all four of his interrogators, over and over again – but they also thought that he and Shahid were closely involved with each other. Instead of Iqbal, Belgian semi-nutter from more than a decade ago who self-invited, it was Iqbal-and-Shahid, co-conspirators, peas in the pod, two halves of the same naan. It turned out that his internet use was being monitored and that Iqbal had visited jihadi websites, corresponding in encrypted emails, and reading and downloading all sorts of terrorist how-to information – which was nowhere to be found on Shahid’s computer. What that meant was that Iqbal had been doing things on his own laptop. But none of that had anything to do with Shahid. It had nothing to do with him! Nothing! To do! With him! NOTHING TO DO WITH HIM!

‘OK, he’s been using my wireless broadband,’ said Shahid. ‘You know when he came to stay with me. Look at the dates. You can obviously do that. You won’t find a single jihadi site anywhere on the records before Iqbal came to stay. It’s not that hard to work out, is it? Two and two, meet four.’

‘Tell us again about the last time you saw Iqbal,’ replied the heavy, sagging policeman, who was the very worst of them for never seeming to have heard what Shahid said. And they began, all over again, again and again, the same true stories, the same interruptions. It was a small comfort that even his interrogators were beginning to look bored and tired, though not nearly as bored and tired as Shahid himself felt. On and on and round and round and now Shahid was back in his cell, sitting on the floor, which he had come to like doing as he found he lost his belief that things were going to be all right; the contact with the floor and the wall, the fact that to sit like that he had to be curled in on himself, was comforting. Everything else might not make sense, but at least gravity was still gravity.

There was a knock on the door of the cell. This in itself was not routine. When they came to take him for interrogations, they just opened the door; when they brought their terrible bland food, they just shoved a tray through the hatch. Nobody ever knocked. Shahid sat there for a moment, then said, he hoped sounding ironic,

‘Come in.’

The door opened and a policeman came in, followed by a middle-aged woman in a trouser suit, carrying a slim briefcase in brown leather. The policeman nodded at her and then went back out. The woman was smiling in a way which did not indicate any particular emotion other than a desire to indicate that she was well-meaning. She held out her hand to point at the floor beside Shahid and said,

‘May I?’

He nodded. She sat down, cross-legged, in the same position as him.

‘Fiona Strauss. Your family have hired me to be your lawyer.’

Shahid felt his eyes fill with tears. For a moment he could not speak.

‘I’m surprised we can afford you,’ he eventually said. Without knowing it, Shahid had said the perfect thing, because the remark gestured gently in the direction of the lawyer’s importance; and at the same time Fiona Strauss, who was a sincere fighter against the things she thought were wrong, felt that this young man sitting on the floor of his cell needed her. She was a complicated person who took a simple view of things. He was the victim of an injustice, and he needed her.

‘I’m working pro bono,’ said Fiona Strauss, with a faint smile. She took a spiral-bound notebook out of her briefcase, opened it, and held it up in front of Shahid. On the page was written:

‘Assume we are being listened to.’

‘Right,’ said Shahid.

‘I’m told you signed a waiver of your rights.’

‘Excuse my bad language, but that’s crap.’

‘They have the piece of paper, I’ve seen it.’

‘Well, then it’s a forgery. They faked my signature.’

‘OK. I believe you. But for now we must assume it doesn’t matter. Have you been ill-treated? Are you being adequately fed, are you being allowed to sleep, are you being physically abused, are your religious beliefs being respected, are you being threatened, physically or in other respects?’

As she was talking, she turned the notebook over to another page which said:

‘Don’t tell me anything they can use.’

It was a lot for Shahid to take in. What he mainly felt was a sudden sense of connection with his family outside: chubby Ahmed, irritating Usman, sexy Rohinka, and Mrs Kamal, driving everybody nuts and – Shahid had always felt this, even when he had heard nothing, knew nothing about what was happening – doing more than anybody else to try and help him. His eyes teared up again. The lawyer, feeling him struggle, put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Don’t worry, we don’t have to do everything in one go. I’ll be coming back.’

His voice choked, Shahid said, ‘They brought me a bacon sandwich. The first morning. Then they realised.’ And he broke down and began to cry, deeply and fully, the sensation close to one of physical pain, and it came accompanied, even as he cried, by the sense that things inside him were breaking up, like an iceberg cracking or a huge sheet of glass shattering into fragments. It’s all got to me, Shahid told himself, as he cried, it’s all got to me much more than I realised.

Fiona Strauss stayed for an hour and when she left, she took something out of her handbag and handed it to Shahid, wrapped in a piece of silk: his copy of the Qur’an.

81

From that moment on, Shahid’s time in custody divided into two. The first part of it was formless and blurred and, afterwards, he couldn’t remember how it was partitioned into days, or the sequence of what happened before what, or anything to give it shape or order. He had specific memories – the diarrhoea, the time he spilled tea on himself, the inedible fish fingers which were so hard he could have used them to drum on the table, the time all four interrogators had had a go at him – but the overall way in which the time had passed now seemed vague and dreamlike. Then Fiona Strauss had come, and time had shape again. He waited for contact with her, looked forward to it, and his days were now oriented around specific events. It was the weirdest thing.

Now, too, he had his Qur’an. It was wrapped in the gold and green silk shawl that his father had given him over twenty years ago, unannounced, for no reason, just coming home from work and pressing it into his hands. Shahid was not, and never would claim to have been, devout – even when he had been off on his adventures it had been more out of a feeling of solidarity, of brotherhood in the umma, than of pure religious feeling in and of itself. He was an OK Muslim in a B-minus kind of way. He wasn’t going to claim that he had suddenly turned into a devout believer, but the day after Fiona Strauss came he prayed five times, after asking the guard who brought him his breakfast the direction to Mecca – and the policeman had instantly told him, as if he had known all along and been expecting to be asked. Shahid learned something: it turned out that there was a huge difference between washing your hands in the nasty metal sink because there was nowhere else to do it, and washing them in the sink because you chose to do so as part of the ablutions before prayer. The space in the cell, as demarcated in Shahid’s head, changed. It was now his space and he chose to use it to pray in. He had for the first time since his arrest a feeling that he was not just someone who was acted on, passive, done-unto; he could decide what to make of what was happening to him. In his own head, he was free.

Facing his interrogators that day, going over the yet-again questions, Shahid felt different. He felt that it was his questioners who were trapped, who were bound within the narrow circuits of their own suspicions. All they could do was repeat themselves; he was more at liberty than they were. It was almost funny. They had a script that they had to stick to. He was alone – alone in front of Allah – but free. They were all in it together, and they had no choices of their own to make.

Brotherhood in religion had always been an easy emotion for Shahid to locate. This was more elusive, but it had always been this more difficult feeling that Shahid had liked best about Islam: the aloneness before God. Not the imam, not the rest of the umma, but you standing on your own before Allah. No one to mediate the contact. Shahid felt that more purely than he ever had before: the contrast between the human world of institutions and the awful singleness of Allah. On the one hand, Formica table tops, policemen and their questions, plastic cutlery on a shatter-proof plastic tray, rules and human smallness all around; on the other, nothing but you, on your own before the infinite. The religion Shahid had grown up in never reached more deeply into him than when he caught this feeling, the exhilarating bleakness of the desert faith. I am here for a maximum of twenty-eight days, he told himself; after that they have to charge me, and there’s nothing they can possibly charge me with. OK, so Iqbal was up to something. Maybe he wasn’t organised enough to be up to the thing they were accusing him of. But he was up to something. And OK, Iqbal had been staying at his flat. But no British jury would send him to jail for that, so there was no prospect he would be charged with a crime. And even if he were, because he was innocent, and because he was alone before Allah, he didn’t care what happened. No, that wasn’t right: he did care, he cared deeply. But there was a part of him where the events, the what-happened-next, did not reach. A part of him apart.

82

If Shahid had known, there would have been another source of comfort close to hand. The policemen interrogating him did not agree about whether he should be there at all.

Iqbal Rashid had been a person of interest to the security services for some time. He was an associate of Brussels-based radicals who had trained in Afghanistan and who were known to have dealings with Al Qaeda groups in Pakistan. When he first came into Britain he was not subject to close monitoring by MI5 and Special Branch, but they had an eye kept on him, as part of the general penumbra of concern around Al Qaeda affiliates and wannabes. Then police in Belgium intercepted a plot to blow up a bomb and sink a cross-Channel ferry, and because the people involved in that were known associates of Iqbal Rashid, the level of attention given to him was raised. He was subjected first to a raised level of surveillance for two weeks, to see what, if anything, he was up to. During that two weeks he had contact with a number of persons of interest to MI5 and it was decided to make the watch on him permanent while he was in the UK. It was around this point that Iqbal got in touch with Shahid, who was at first completely unknown to the security services. When they looked into his case they found that he had been to Chechnya and had there met people who went on to train in Al Qaeda camps. They began monitoring both Shahid and Iqbal and it became clear that the Belgian was involved in something that was either a sinister and sophisticated plot, at a late stage, to blow up an important piece of infrastructure, thought to be the Channel Tunnel – or it was just a whole load of loose, blabbermouthy talk by angry young idiots showing off to each other. The normal procedure would be to wait until someone actually did something overtly terrorist in intention, and then to arrest all the conspirators; this was the historic preference of the British police, as opposed to the American bias, greatly intensified in the wake of 9/11, to thwart plots by arresting their members at an early stage. But British juries were showing a reluctance to convict people arrested on the basis of these early-stage, putative plots, so the police were strongly minded to stick with their method of arresting as late as possible. Then someone linked to the group had been seized trying to buy Semtex in the Czech Republic and the security services had been faced with the choice of waiting to see what the plotters did next, or stepping in and seeking convictions with the evidence they had. After debating the point, and reluctantly, they had decided to go ahead with the arrests after Iqbal Rashid had left Shahid’s flat and disappeared; and it was as a result of this that Shahid now found himself in a cell at Paddington Green Police Station.

Iqbal’s involvement in the plot, if there actually was one, was clear. Shahid’s wasn’t, at all, and the only evidence against him was the internet use at his flat during the period Iqbal had been staying with him. Jihadi websites had been visited, and encrypted emails exchanged – the encrypted emails being a fingerprint-clear proof of something amiss, since no one without a dark purpose would bother with the necessary weapons-strength secrecy. It seemed entirely obvious to some of the security services – Amir the Asian interrogator, and Clarke the tired heavy Special Branch man among them – that Shahid had nothing to do with whatever was being planned and that he was at worst a kind of useful idiot, willing to give shelter and accommodation to a man he knew was up to no good. To some others, including the MI5 officers who had been in charge of the initial surveillance, nobody could be that naive. His semi-jihadi past combined with his association with the terrorist Iqbal made it self-evident that he was a central member of the plot, and if there was little direct evidence that was nothing more than a sign that he was careful – in other words, the absence of evidence was an important and sinister piece of evidence.

‘Bullshit,’ said Amir. ‘Total bullshit. Catch-22. The fact that there’s nothing on him is proof that he’s a trained operative? Bullshit.’

‘He has the history,’ said the MI5 liaison.

‘No he doesn’t. He has the archaeology – more than ten years ago. So he went to Chechnya. Big deal. There’s nothing else here. There’s no form. Nothing from our people at the mosque, nothing on his record of travel, no pattern of any kind. He would have to be some weird kind of sleeper agent who does nothing for a decade. When he was in Chechnya, Al Qaeda didn’t exist. All bullshit.’

‘Until we find Iqbal Rashid, he’s not going anywhere,’ said the MI5 man. And that was where the situation rested. Shahid had been held in prison for ten days, and did not have to be charged for another eighteen.

83

‘I feel a little bit sick,’ said Matya. ‘What’s it called? Like being in a car. Or on a boat. Sick from the movement.’

‘Cierpiący na morską chorobę,’ said Zbigniew. ‘I don’t know what it’s called in English.’

They were on the London Eye, more than halfway up. Stepping onto the wheel had been, to Zbigniew’s surprise, slightly disconcerting: the implacable way it couldn’t be stopped or slowed. Matya, obviously feeling the same thing, put a hand above his elbow as they stepped on. That was good. Up they went in the clear capsule. They weren’t alone: a number of tourists – seven Japanese and a few southern Europeans – were in the same bubble. The Japanese were jockeying to take mobile-phone photographs of themselves and the view.

The city spread out around them and Zbigniew started by pretending to look at the views – because his real reason for being there was to be with Matya, and he wasn’t that bothered about anything else – and then found himself getting genuinely interested. He had worked in London for three years now but had no idea about most of what he was looking at. London was big and low in the middle, with a higher edge in both directions, like a gigantic saucer. North and south weren’t where he expected them to be and the patch of green, higher, but not much higher, say twenty metres above the river, three or four kilometres away, must be the Common. Zbigniew, who had no feelings about London that he was aware of, was nonetheless impressed. One thing about London: there was a lot of it.

The mobile phone thing had worked perfectly for Zbigniew. He waited for two hours: went home, checked his portfolio at the kitchen table, ate the beef stew which one of Piotr’s crew had cooked, and then, just as he thought he was going to have to take the initiative, the phone rang. The ringtone was ‘Crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley – which might mean that she was a girl who liked her music. Interesting. The number being shown on the screen was his number and it took him a moment to get his head around it: that meant not that he was calling himself but that Matya was calling him, i.e. calling herself, using his phone. The moment of confusion was useful because it meant he didn’t have to act confused.

‘Um, yes, who is this?’ said Zbigniew.

‘Who is that? Why do you have my mobile?’ said Matya.

‘Why do I have your mobile? Why do you have my mobile?’

They sorted it out from there. Bless Nokia for the popularity and ubiquity of the N60. Zbigniew knew that this was a moment to be gallant, and made no secret about the fact that it was all his fault, so he would make everything all right by bringing the phone to her, right now. So she would go to the pub about two hundred metres away from her and he would meet her there in about half an hour.

Zbigniew knew the pub, a cattle market just off the Common. He got there in twenty minutes and took up a position at the bar; she was on time.

‘Completely my fault,’ said Zbigniew, raising his hands. ‘A hundred per cent. Didn’t think, didn’t check.’

‘Well, it doesn’t matter, thanks for bringing it back straight away,’ said Matya, who had changed out of her daytime jeans into a slimline dress which Zbigniew found he both wanted to look at and couldn’t bear to look at, at the same time. She really was lovely. He wished he could think of clever or funny things to say, but all he could come out with was ‘Can I buy you a drink?’

‘No,’ she said, but smiling, looking down and up, before adding, ‘Not tonight.’ And Zbigniew, understanding what that meant, felt a flash of real happiness for the first time in a long time. So they made a date for a week later, she left, and he floated home. Perfect. Could anything be more perfect?

Zbigniew thought long and hard about what to do with Matya on their first date together. Zbigniew’s sense of himself, in the privacy of his own mind, was that he was about as unromantic as it was humanly possible for a person to be. Matter-of-fact, practical, unemotional, temperate, sane. There were few activities which could not be approached as if they had a secret user’s manual. Attraction to the opposite sex and the need to find a mate were practical realities of life and it would be better if they were approached as such. Zbigniew had noticed, however, that this was not the way the world worked. Besides, something about Matya made him feel as if there were perhaps something in this idea of romance after all… And he knew for sure – he could detect – that the right way to treat her was as if she were special. She was not like other girls.

Lurking in this was his memory of Davina. She had been an education in the truth that people did not, in practice, come with a user’s manual. He would not go down that route again; he would not use Matya. He would feel for her what he felt and would not let things get away from him again. He would try to be more like a man. He wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he felt that the idea imposed obligations on him.

The simplest way of treating Matya differently would be to do the things he had never bothered to do with anyone else – the things he had not exerted himself to do. Going to a film would be too easy, not romantic enough, and it was something he had tried before. Restaurants were romantic but also expensive and he did not feel at ease in the kind of places Matya would want to be taken to – French places, Italian places. She would be able to feel his concern about money. Women could sense that kind of thing. A long walk in the park? Too romantic. Too like something out of a film. He would seem desperate, as if he were on the verge of proposing marriage. A trip to the seaside, to Brighton, would be something he had never done before himself, therefore romantic, with the thrill of discovery, but also with much potential to go wrong, and expensive too.

So he took her for a walk along the South Bank. This was something Zbigniew knew people did but had never done himself and when he suggested it, over the phone, Matya paused for a moment and then said Yes, sounding surprised and pleased. He had won points by coming up with something she had not expected from him. (Polish men – very unromantic. That was what Matya’s friend had told her.)

The river scene gave Zbigniew, for the first time, a feeling of being in the middle of London. It was like: London? Here it finally is! He had seen heaving pubs and bars, bodies strewn all over the Common during the freak intervals of good weather, packed Tube carriages, the high streets of South London in their full Saturday-night mayhem; but this was different. This was people from all over the world, in the middle of the city, because they had come there to be there, with Parliament across the dark grey river, tourist buses coughing diesel on the access road, the theatres and museums and concert halls, the railway bridge, road bridge and pedestrian bridge, all busy in both directions, the restaurants packed, jugglers and mime artists wasting everybody’s time and taking up space, children running about, a skateboard park for the teens to show off to each other, couples holding hands everywhere, a policewoman walking up and down with a horse with a child protection phone number written on a cover on its back, presumably because this area was riddled with pimps on the lookout for girls to exploit, street stalls selling tourist junk and portable food, musicians, and lots of people not doing anything much, just being there because they wanted to be there. For once it wasn’t raining and there came a time when the clouds even parted.

‘What’s that yellow thing in the sky?’ said Zbigniew. ‘I feel as if I have seen it before. Not in London. Somewhere else. It burns!’

They argued over whether to buy an ice cream or a Dutch waffle and in the end got one of each; except she was right, the waffle tasted as if it was made out of grilled cardboard. Matya giggled at him as he tried to eat it and then had to chuck it away. As for the sight of her eating the ice cream, chocolate with mint chips, Zbigniew didn’t know where to look. They stopped and listened to a man playing the clarinet, a piece Zbigniew recognised as Mozart. He said so and she was, he could see, impressed. Then – his master stroke – he announced that he had pre-booked tickets for the London Eye. And here they were.

One of the Japanese girls had come over to Matya and by sign language and mime offered to take a photograph of Matya and Zbigniew on Matya’s mobile phone. So they huddled together and the smiling Japanese girl held her hand above her head to indicate, here it comes, and then took the picture. Then Zbigniew (clever Zbigniew) had the idea of asking her to do the same thing with his phone, so that he and Matya would have near-identical Zbigniew-and-Matya-on-the-London-Eye photos on their phones. Then he took her home, in time for the tea date with a girlfriend that she’d warned him about – a clever way of setting a limit to their date; he wasn’t the only one who’d given some thought to stratagems and how to play it – and he took her back to the Tube, giving her, as they parted, a single kiss on the cheek. Well, Zbigniew thought, how perfect was that? And then it was time to think about something else, but to Zbigniew’s great surprise, he found that he couldn’t.

84

On the morning of Monday 15 September, Roger got the sack. He had no preparation, no build-up, and he did not, not even in the faintest way, see it coming. It had been an ordinary morning, with the only noteworthy thing being the fact that a busker was kicked out of the Underground by two policemen, who had clearly moved beyond the stage of negotiating reasonably by the time Roger arrived, because they had picked the musician up and were carrying him bodily out of the station, their hands under his armpits, his feet wildly pedalling. A third policeman, following behind, carried the man’s violin case. It looked like a piece of slapstick out of a silent film, and Roger was still smiling to himself about it at eleven thirty, when he had a message to say that Lothar would like to see him in his office immediately.

Roger sauntered through the trading room, slaloming around the desks, his crew hard at work, the noise levels satisfactorily high – because a loud trading room is a busy trading room. Mark was nowhere to be seen, as indeed he hadn’t been all morning: that was a good thing also. Roger had long since tired of his efficient but shifty and hard-to-read deputy, with his air of aggrievement or underappreciation, or whatever it was; Roger had never been interested enough to find out.

One of the tricks to managing Lothar – managing upwards, that crucial skill for the modern corporate employee – was to always do what he asked immediately. Even if, especially if, the task had no particular urgency, Lothar liked the idea that his will was always turned into action as soon as he expressed it. So Roger felt that this meeting, or chore, or whatever it was, had already got off to a good start when he arrived in Lothar’s office a mere ninety seconds after his phone had rung. Lothar was sitting at the meeting table rather than behind his desk, and he did not look well: he was pale, indeed he was about the same colour as his white shirt. It was as if he’d decided to give up all that skiing-sailing-orienteering-triathlon nonsense and had taken up sitting in libraries, and, over the weekend, he had acquired the complexion to go with it. Next to Lothar was Eva, the head of human resources, an unsmiling Argentinian whose complete devotion to corporate correctness in all forms made Roger nervous. This will be some bullshit thing about a complaint, or a hiring and firing issue. It couldn’t be about Roger discriminating against female colleagues; he hardly had any. Somebody had gone behind his back about something. Such was life.

‘Ah, Roger,’ said Lothar. ‘We seem to have a little problem. When I say “we” I mean Pinker Lloyd. What do you know about the fact that your deputy has been practising criminal embezzlement under your nose?’

Lothar’s voice was cracking slightly and he was, Roger could see, shaking. He realised that his boss was not pale because he had given up outdoor sports; he was pale because he was angry. He was as angry as Roger had ever seen him; he was as angry as Roger had ever seen anyone. Roger had the strong feeling that something had gone very, very wrong.

‘What are you talking about?’ said Roger.

And they told him. He found it hard to take in, but the gist was that someone in Compliance had found something he wasn’t expecting in the records of his own computer use. This was Mark’s mistake: he hadn’t allowed for the Compliance and security people monitoring not just everybody else’s computer use, but their own as well. That was on Friday afternoon, three days ago. The Compliance guy had looked into it, and found that unauthorised – probably illegal – trading had been taking place, had alerted his department head, and a whole group of people had worked all weekend. Mark had traded tens of millions of pounds of stock, and was at first about £15 million up, but then took a hit and was now trading about £30 million down. A team of traders was at this very moment unwinding his remaining positions. As of six o’clock this morning he was in police custody, charged with fraud. He had been doing his unauthorised and/or illegal trading right under his boss’s nose. That was the phrase Lothar used – ‘right under his boss’s nose’ – referring to Roger in the third person, so there was a moment when Roger wasn’t sure if Lothar meant his boss’s or his bosses’. It was the former, because Lothar went on to say:

‘This constitutes gross negligence. You are dismissed immediately, for cause. You have fifteen minutes to empty your desk and leave the building.’

At this moment, the door opened and a large black man in a security uniform stood there with his hands folded in front of his waist.

‘You’re joking,’ said Roger.

‘Fifteen minutes.’

‘This is bollocks, Lothar. Even by your standards this is bollocks.’

‘Goodbye,’ said Lothar. Eva looked up and nodded at Roger, the only time they had made eye contact. She stood up and passed him an envelope.

‘You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,’ said Roger, hearing a tremor in his voice.

‘Details are in this letter,’ she said. For an instant, Roger wanted to say something about the Falklands.

‘Clinton?’ said Lothar. The security guard took a step forward. Roger raised his hands in a don’t-touch-me gesture and led the guard back to his office. Those moments were so horrible that afterwards Roger found it hard to remember them. He had to fight an overmastering wish to look at nothing other than his feet. Finding your way in between these desks is tricky! Must look down! No – Roger tried to keep his head up. But it was hard, because every single person in the room was staring at him, and the trading room, which had been its familiar raucous self only a few minutes ago, was now so quiet Roger could hear a faint electronic hum, coming perhaps from the lights, or from somebody’s hard drive, a sound he had, despite years spent in and around this room, never heard before. He had never seen them, his crew, his colleagues, his soon-to-be-ex-colleagues, looking like this: Slim Tony literally had his mouth hanging open, tough Michelle looked as if she was about to cry, Jez was sitting with a phone handset held up to his ear, but was ignoring it, moon-faced, to stare at Roger. Jez’s eyes moved sideways to look at the security guard for a moment. Then they switched back to gawking at Roger. Then back to the guard. Then back again. It was like he was watching tennis. Never had so many screens of data been ignored by so many traders for so long.

In his office, Roger had a decision to make. Do I close the electronic blinds, or do this with the blinds open? Seem ashamed, or let people see my shame? Luckily, the choice was made for him by Clinton the security guard, who hit the switch, and turned the room opaque – which was thoughtful, or experienced, of him. But there nonetheless was a small humiliation even in that, because right up until this moment no security guard at Pinker Lloyd would ever have dreamed of touching any button, of making any adjustment, in Roger’s office, unless told to do so. Clinton felt right at home here. Clinton was in charge. That was how bad this was. That was how real this was. His passwords would already have been changed to lock him out from the bank’s computer systems.

The door opened. Another security guard, who was also black, came in, carrying an empty cardboard wine carton. He put it on Roger’s desk.

‘For your stuff,’ said Clinton. The guard who had brought in the wine carton – a Sancerre, Roger noticed – helpfully opened the cardboard flaps on top. The guard stepped back but did not leave the room.

Roger went round to the other side of his desk. My stuff. Right. The desk had a photograph of Arabella and the boys in winter clothes, taken two years ago at Verbier, the nanny who had just wiped Joshua’s nose out of shot except for a patch of shadow at the bottom of the frame. Arabella hadn’t liked the picture because she thought the light unflatteringly bright but everyone looked so glowing and healthy that it was one of Roger’s favourite pictures of them. He put it in the bottom of the cardboard box, then followed it with his pen. Then his desk diary. He opened the drawers of the desk, and Clinton came round to stand behind him. Roger knew why: to stop him taking anything belonging to the bank. In theory Roger knew the whole drill, because it was standard operating procedure whenever anybody was sacked. But there was, it turned out, a big difference between theory and practice, and it was this: theory was when it happened to other people. Practice was when it happened to you.

There wasn’t much in his desk, except – and this was something he’d entirely forgotten about – a spare shirt he’d taken in for some meeting a few months before but never bothered to put on, and a pair of trainers he’d taken in to work when he was thinking about using the bank’s gym. There was a Moleskine notebook Arabella had put in his Christmas stocking one year when they gave each other stockings (hers had a spa voucher and a pair of earrings). The notebook was empty apart from a set of numbers which Roger took a moment to recognise. They were the sums he had done back when he was calculating his expenditure and how much money he needed from last year’s bonus. The non-appearing million-pound bonus. He started to put his BlackBerry in his pocket, but Clinton held out his hand and coughed. He and Roger looked at each other.

‘What?’ said Roger.

‘That’s bank property,’ said Clinton. He was matter-of-fact about it. Roger put the BlackBerry back down on the desk. He was almost done. He put in a bottle of wine that a member of his crew had given him as a thank-you for something a couple of months back. His desk diary, largely unused, was the last thing to go in his box, which was about a third full. Roger picked it up.

‘OK,’ said Clinton, now clearly in charge. He opened the door, and Roger went through it, the two security guards trailing behind. This time one or two people pretended not to stare; one or two of them looked as if they wanted to say something but weren’t sure what to do. Slim Tony, bless him, held his hand up to his ear with thumb and index finger extended like a phone: call me, or I’ll call you. Then he made a drinky-drinky gesture. Roger smiled at everyone he made eye contact with, because after all, you had to act as if you could see the funny side.

At the edge of the lift lobby, he stopped. Clinton and his colleague stopped too. Roger straightened his back and, with his box in front of him, raised his head to address the whole room.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been real.’

Then he turned and went out to the lift. It took a very long time to come. Everything seemed too loud: the whirr of the cable as it ascended, the ping of the button announcing its arrival, the faint grinding as the door opened. Down they went. At the ground floor Clinton opened the security gate for him.

‘Do you want my pass?’ asked Roger. Clinton shook his head.

‘It won’t work any more,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’

And Roger walked out of the door of Pinker Lloyd for the last time.

85

Arabella had her good points. She was, in her way, resilient. She had the toughness of her obliviousness. So if he had had to guess, Roger would have guessed that she would be brave and strong about what had happened. Her stronger, stuff-the-world side would kick in and she would be realistic and practical. She would be a rock.

That turned out not to be the case. Wrong, hugely wrong, mega-wrong. Arabella went to pieces, and did so in the most direct way possible: by bursting into tears, falling onto the sofa, and saying, over and over and over again, ‘But what are we going to do?’

The right move for Roger would obviously have been to sit down on the sofa beside her, put his arms around her, and tell her that everything was going to be all right. But Roger found that he didn’t have it in himself to do that. Wasn’t the first stage supposed to be denial? Roger felt a distinct lack of denial. What had happened wasn’t nearly deniable enough.

‘I don’t know,’ said Roger. ‘I have no idea.’

He had been feeling pretty shitty when he walked in, and Arabella’s reaction was making him feel even worse. The trip home had been hell. Not as hell as it would have been if he’d had to take the Tube; that, carrying his box of personal effects, would have killed him. So no, not that bad. But still pretty bad. The cab ride had been nauseating; the driver was one of those cabbies addicted to side roads and back-doubles, and he seemed to pride himself on never travelling in a straight line for more than fifty metres, with a special penchant for targeting streets featuring sleeping policemen, so the cab’s swaying, bouncing motion left Roger feeling physically sick. He also found himself, for the first time ever, thinking about the cost of the cab. All those other times he’d taken taxis, and never given it a thought… the time sweeping through the dark with Matya in the seat beside him, watching her reflection in the glass, looking at her smile, imagining giving her one right there on the wide back seat… and now here he was, his cardboard box and his rising nausea, one eye on the meter. Jesus it was expensive. When had the prices gone up so much? It was going to hit thirty quid, for God’s sake!

And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he’d never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse. What don’t you need, when you’ve just, completely out of the blue, lost your job? What’s literally the very last thing you need? A spouse convulsed with disbelieving grief. That’ll do it.

Arabella was now rocking backwards and forwards.

‘What are we going to do, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know. Where are the children?’

‘What are we going to do? I don’t know. How should I know? Out somewhere. With Matya. What are we going to do?’

‘Well, for a start, we’re going to have to cut back on expenditure everywhere. Everywhere,’ said Roger. ‘No child-support money to spend on frocks, not any more’ – because that was where that £1,500 a year went, a fact he knew she didn’t know he knew. Ha! Take that! Screw you very much! Arabella blinked. He’d got her! Yeah! Take that!

‘Gym membership… lunches out… all that stuff will have to go.’

Arabella kept rocking.

Sod this for a game of soldiers. Roger needed to get some air. He turned and went out the door thinking, I know what I’ll do: I’ll go for a walk. In the five years he’d been living in Pepys Road, this was something he had never done, not once, in the midweek. He had never not been at work and in the holidays they’d always been expensively elsewhere.

Roger strode out the door and down the road. He dodged an Ocado van backing into a parking spot, and then had to pause to allow a dog-walker to sort out a crisis with tangled leads and a large poodle which, from the way it was sitting immobile on the pavement, seemed to be on strike. It didn’t help that the dog-walking man was trying to use one of his hands to send a text. Down the road, Roger could see Bogdan the builder, the Pole Arabella used sometimes, throwing a piece of plaster into a skip. He saw Roger and the two men nodded at each other. Maybe I could be a builder, thought Roger. Do something a bit more physical. It would suit me. Always liked to do DIY, back in the day when I had the time for it. Still got the energy, the physique, the va-va-voom. Life in the old dog yet…

He turned the corner and headed out on the Common. This again was something he’d only ever done on the way to or from work, or wheeling the boys out at the weekend, a time quite a few other bankers could be seen, all in their various tribal uniforms, their pushchairs so big and unwieldy they were like infant SUVs. Weekends were all about the Euro bankers with their sweaters over their shoulders, the yummy mummies on their mobiles, the British military fitness crowd shouting at their idiotic punters, unable to believe that they were being paid for yelling at people to do sit-ups. On sunny days, huge numbers of young people would remove as much of their clothing as was legally possible and sprawl on the grass drinking alcohol. Simple pleasures are the best. There had been far less of that this summer than usual, a fact you could tell just by seeing how green the grass was. The sprawlers looked like yobs and proles, but Roger knew that appearances were deceptive; just because they had their kit off and were getting drunk didn’t mean that they weren’t web designers, secretaries, nurses, software engineers, chefs. It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody.

The Common demographic was different in the middle of the day, middle of the week. It was more underclassy. Four homeless men were sitting on a park bench drinking Tennent’s Super, while a woman, looking just as rough as they did, harangued them about some injustice. They were nodding, agreeing, feeling her pain and at the same time feeling no pain whatsoever.

Three truanting teenagers were practising skateboarding on the pavement and into the road. It was as if by the energy they put into not caring about the traffic they could make the traffic go away. Roger thought about saying, hope you’ve filled out your donor cards, lads – then thought better of it. There were three of them, after all. A few yards away, a scowling skinhead, in his late thirties so old enough to know better, was letting his pit bull shit on the path, and visibly daring anyone to say something to him about it. A couple more truanting teenagers were playing basketball on the netless court, and beyond them, the skateboarders who could actually be bothered to use the skateboard park were practising their stunts and moves. Roger had done a little skateboarding in his youth, but in those days the emphasis had been on what you could do with the board when its wheels were in contact with the ground, whereas now the emphasis seemed much more on lifting the board in the air, or shooting the bottom of the board on the edge of the ramp, or grabbing it with your hand while airborne. A man in a red bandanna rode up to the top of the ramp, flipped up into the air, grabbed the bottom of his board, and came back down with the board on the top edge of the structure, which had the effect of making him fall over backwards onto the wooden floor. Some of the other skateboarders applauded – ironically, Roger assumed.

Actually, Arabella’s question had been a good one. What are we going to do? What am I going to do?

An ice-cream van had set up beside the duck pond, and Roger felt that a large ice cream, a seriously childish one like a double scoop of vanilla with two chocolate flakes, would be the ideal way to celebrate his new-found independence/unemployment/disgrace. But, he realised on consulting his pockets, he didn’t have any money: his cash was in his jacket. He was a man in pinstriped trousers, a City shirt and a tie, walking across the Common with no money.

The sky began to spit. Time to get back home before he got drenched. Roger turned and picked up the pace to beat the squall he could see coming in from the west, the clouds dark and rainy. Other people were having the same idea, and the Common was staging an informal evacuation. By the time he came back past the skateboard ramp, everyone had melted away. The rain abruptly became heavy and vertical. Roger realised he wouldn’t make it home without getting drenched, so he detoured sideways across to the row of shops that ran towards the high street, and took cover under an awning. Other people had had the same idea, and every awning had a small huddle underneath it. Next to him a pair of goths had taken the opportunity to start snogging. Next to them, a cross-looking Indian lady in a shalwar kameez was fighting a losing battle against a folding umbrella which would not unfold. She kept pushing the top back down into the handle and trying to release it, but hadn’t mastered the wrist technique to make it snap open. Roger took pity on her.

‘May I?’ he asked. She handed the umbrella over and Roger click-flicked it into position. As he did so, the rain began to slow down.

‘They’re tricky,’ said Roger as he handed the umbrella back.

‘They’re badly designed,’ said Mrs Kamal. ‘But thank you anyway.’ She headed off into the rain. It was clear that it wouldn’t slow down much, so Roger decided to take the plunge. He hunched his shoulders and got ready to move off, and as he did so, he saw the billboard advertising the Evening Standard, and his heart momentarily stopped. It said

‘Bank Crisis’.

And Roger thought, oh God no. But then he picked up a copy of the paper and his racing heart eased: it wasn’t about the scandal at Pinker Lloyd but about Lehman Brothers. The subhead said ‘US Giant On Brink Of Collapse’. The front-page details of the piece were fantastic. Basically, Lehmans were sitting on a pile of assets which weren’t worth anything, and no one wanted to buy them or bail them out, so they were going to go under. Roger put the paper back, smiled, and set out home through the rain at a slow jog. Nice to know he wasn’t the only one having a super-shit day.

86

Shahid had noticed that the police used a variety of different techniques to start their interrogations. Sometimes they would be waiting for him when he went into the interrogation suite; other times they would make him wait before they came into the room; sometimes they would come in and just sit there for a bit looking over notes; other times they would be barking questions at him as soon as he was through the door. They would be friendly or less friendly, they would try to make him want to please them or they would act as if they had long since given up on him. He assumed it was all a game for them, a set of manoeuvres, and did his best to ignore the inevitable emotional turmoil he felt. He often found himself wondering who was on the other side of the mirrored wall in the suite; what kind of running commentary was happening there.

He went into the room on his fourteenth day in custody and saw that today there was a different policeman, one he hadn’t seen before. Or had he? He wasn’t one of the regulars and yet he didn’t look completely unfamiliar. He was a young man, younger than Shahid, fresh-faced and slim-shouldered, in a nice suit. He was on his own, which was not standard practice.

‘Hello,’ said DI Mill, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Mill.’

It came back to Shahid.

‘You were at that public meeting, the one about the creepy website and cards and stuff,’ said Shahid. ‘I went to that.’

‘I know you did,’ said Mill. He dropped his eyes to the folder in front of him and looked as if he were reading it – a copper’s trick Shahid had got used to by now. The silence stretched.

‘You haven’t turned the machine on,’ said Shahid.

Mill didn’t answer. He gave the impression he was thinking about something else. Eventually he said,

‘Hardly any of my friends understand why I want to be a policeman. They think all you do in the police is go round banging people on the head and arresting drunk drivers. Or something – they don’t really know what they think, they just know they’re against it. But the real problem with the job isn’t anything to do with it being violent or difficult or with what the other coppers are like. The real problem with it is the sheer amount of routine. The drudgery. Most of it’s routine and detective work is no different. It’s not TV. Most of the time you know what’s going to happen. Surprises are rare. Nice surprises are even rarer.’

He fell silent again. Shahid felt no need to say anything.

‘And then something comes along which is a little bit different’, said Mill, ‘and it reminds you why you wanted to do the job in the first place. Like being here, for instance. I’d never been here before. Paddington Green. It’s where they bring terrorist suspects, as you know. Been doing it for years, since the IRA days. I’ve seen it on the news all my life. But this is the first time I’ve ever been inside. That counts as something new. It’s pretty cool. I like new things.’

Mill went quiet again and seemed to be following a train of thought.

‘I’ll tell you what else is cool. Terrorism is cool. I mean, it’s very uncool as an activity, obviously. But the thing about terrorism is, the resources given to it. From a policing point of view. Antisocial behaviour, all of that, it’s not such a big deal for us. People mind about it and all that but it’s not what gets you up in the morning. Somebody’s nicked your bike? Good luck with that. Somebody’s planning to stick a bomb somewhere? Different story. So that’s what’s cool. The amount of resources you get on terrorist cases. The kinds of things you can do with those resources are amazing. Like, getting somebody’s internet service provider to hand over the records of what sites they’ve been visiting over the last couple of years. That’s part one. Part two is getting the manpower to go through that stuff and see where it leads you. And this is where we get to the surprising thing. Surprising to me anyway. You following me so far?’

Mill was looking closely at Shahid. He was looking for signs that Shahid knew what was coming. He didn’t see any. Shahid looked the same way he had all the way along – like an irritable and, it had to be said, not very guilty thirtysomething. He nodded to Mill’s question.

‘What we found was this: that all the initial traffic setting up that blog We Want What You Have – the one which you came to the meeting about – came from your IP address.’

Mill folded his arms and sat back to watch. It was unmistakable: Shahid Kamal’s first reaction was total shock.

‘What?’

‘Yup – it came from your IP address. It didn’t come from your PC, or if it did, you’ve had it professionally cleaned up to target just those files and no others, which my colleagues tell me is unlikely. But it definitely came from your IP address.’

Shahid looked away and thought for a few moments.

‘This is a trick. The reason you aren’t taping this is because it’s all a lie and you’re trying to entrap me into something. You lot have come across no evidence of anything so you’re using this thing which was going on in the street and just chucking it at me.’

In response, Mill reached out and turned on the tape recorder that was always present in the suite, attached to the side wall. He said:

‘DI Charles Mill, 16 September 2008, interrogation of Shahid Kamal, tape starts at’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘14.17, no others present. So Shahid, I’ve just told you that there is a proven link between your IP address at your flat and the blog We Want What You Have, whose proprietor is under investigation for charges of harassment, trespass, obscenity, vandalism.’

‘Vandalism?’

‘Yup, that was when the clever clogs went down the street and keyed every car in it, all the way down one side and back up the other. That’s a lot of damage in a street of fancy cars. Call it ten grand. Custodial sentence, right there.’

Shahid shrugged. He did not look unduly troubled by the thought of people’s SUVs being messed up. Mill went on:

‘And there’s another one, animal cruelty. Dead birds, someone’s been sending them to houses in the street. Blackbirds. Not all of the houses, just some. In A5 envelopes. Bit sick, if you ask me. Know anything about that?’

‘That’s disgusting, but it’s nothing to do with me.’

What Mill did not say was that the dead birds had been sent in the last fortnight – in other words, while Shahid was already in Paddington Green. The link between We Want What You Have and Shahid’s internet access had been found two days before, after the latest wave of activity. By the time they knew about the link with Shahid, they already knew that he couldn’t have been responsible for what was now going on; at best he might be involved with somebody else. But there was a strange pattern to the way the site had worked. When it began, it had been photos of houses taken, Mill had long since concluded, by someone with a strong local interest. Then it went away for a while. Then it came back again, much darker, with abusive labels on the site, abusive postcards sent to the houses, graffiti in the street, cars being keyed. Now dead blackbirds had been sent through the post to seven different addresses. It seemed much angrier. The shift in tone and behaviour was baffling.

Shahid’s eyes were moving from side to side. He was thinking hard.

‘I know nothing about this,’ he eventually said. ‘Try the Belgian, if you can find him.’

‘It began some time before he came and stayed with you. Have you changed the encryption on your wireless internet at any point in the last months?’

‘No,’ said Shahid, unthinkingly – before realising he had just been tricked into giving up a perfect defence. If his internet access had been open, the traffic might have been nothing to do with him. He sighed. ‘It is encrypted and I am the only person who had the password. As you know, I let the Belgian use my internet access but not my computer.’

‘You’ll understand why this looks strange to us. You’re under arrest as a terrorist suspect, now it looks as if you’ve been making all sorts of menaces on the internet, threatening your neighbours, scaring the living daylights out of them. Doesn’t look too great, does it?’

‘I’m starting to get used to being accused of things I didn’t do,’ said Shahid. ‘I have no reason to believe you.’ He crossed his arms and looked over at the one-way glass. Yet again he found himself wondering who might be on the other side and what they might be thinking.

‘So who did this?’

‘No idea,’ said Shahid, and for the first time in their meeting, it seemed to Mill that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.

87

The London centre for asylum and immigration tribunals, where cases concerning the immigration status of asylum-seekers to the UK are decided, was near Chancery Lane. Hearings took place in the complex of court rooms, where the judges shared offices and picked up their weekly paperwork, the whole building having the inconsistently decorated air and too-bright colours of underfunded public-sector work. There were times when the whole building seemed to smell of instant coffee. This was the place where the fate of Quentina Mkfesi was to be decided.

The hearings had a standard format. On the Monday, the judges – a separate inquisitorial service inside the Ministry of Justice – would cold-read a brief and hear evidence from the witnesses, represented by their lawyers, with the government’s case for refusal of asylum being made by another lawyer. On Tuesday they would have more hearings. On Wednesday they would go home and begin to read up on the case. On Friday they would make a decision and write up their judgment, which would determine whether or not the applicant would be allowed to remain in the UK.

It followed from this that the allocation of judge for an asylum applicant was crucial. So although Quentina Mkfesi didn’t know it, her entire future – the next few years of it anyway – hung on the identity of which of two members of HM Government’s immigration and asylum service would be assigned to deal with her case.

On Monday 22 September, Alison Tite and Peter McAllister, both of them immigration judges, arrived at work within thirty seconds of each other. They shared an office on the second floor of the building, clumsily partitioned so that it shared a window with another office. Both of them were carrying coffee, hers a cappuccino in a styrofoam cup from the small Italian deli down the road, his a gigantic milky drink from the Starbucks by Chancery Lane Tube station.

Alison Tite was a thirty-seven-year-old barrister with two small children, married to an actuary, who had initially practised family law, but who had then drifted into immigration work because she wearied of the set cast of characters in her former field, and of the intensely personal bitternesses involved. Immigration work felt more connected to the larger currents of history, which she found more satisfying. Her favourite part of the cases was always the two days she spent reading background information on the specific case files. A recent example: she read The Kite Runner as background to a lurid case about a would-be Afghan refugee whose brother had been stoned to death and whose family shop had been firebombed and then confiscated. Or so he said; there was something convincingly Taliban-like about that sequence, arson before confiscation, and Alison allowed his appeal. Alison liked the feeling that the man in front of her, or woman or child, came as the representative of a world, of a way of life, and she needed to understand that world to make a judgment about whether that man/woman/child should be allowed to stay or had to be deported. Her favourite book was We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.

The great flaw in the system was that deportation did not mean deportation. In almost all cases it was not legal to return the asylum-seeker home to Sudan, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or wherever. In most instances, the asylum-seeker packed off on a plane would face torture or death or both. That was wrong and, more importantly to the system, illegal under European human rights law. So failed asylum-seekers couldn’t be allowed to stay legally: they could not work or claim a full range of citizens’ benefits from the state. And yet they couldn’t be sent back to the country they had come from. Even from the most realistic, least idealistic perspective, it could not be seen as an ideal solution. In practice, what happened to the failed asylum-seekers was that they were sent to detention centres.

Alison knew that the main thing about the system was not her opinion of it, and within the constraints of her power, she did what she could to be as fair as possible. If she was the judge on an applicant’s case, that applicant stood a much better than average chance of winning the right to remain legally in the UK. She had one other thing going for her: she could write very well. That meant that although the percentage of her cases granted PRR (permanent right to remain) stood out as high, when her judgments were read, they were difficult to challenge. When her name was on the docket, the asylum-seeker’s barrister cheered up, and the Home Office’s groaned, and reached for the Red Bull.

Today it was Alison who was groaning. She had period pains, her youngest child had earache and had woken her three times the night before, her sister had invited herself down to stay for the weekend and in consequence had inflicted a double load of everything – cooking, cleaning, washing up, commiserating, hand-holding, and complaining about schools and husbands. The result of all this was that for Alison, in a way she would have admitted to almost nobody, being at work was a relief, verging on an outright pleasure. Gang-raped Somalis, tortured Syrians, genitally mutilated Kikuyu activists, Chinese gangmasters claiming to be political dissidents: bring ’em all on. Not a single one needed to be given Calpol, or told that they still didn’t look a day over thirty. When she arrived in her office, a fat file, tied with the traditional ribbon – the ribbon that always made her think of other people’s fingers, and all the things those fingers must have done – was already on her desk.

Peter McAllister sat on the other side of the same desk, with the same degree of non-view out of the semi-window. He was stretching his arms as far back and up as they would go, and his pinstripe suit was riding up. He was looking a bit porky, Alison felt; as if whatever horse-riding-type exercise he was taking at the weekend was not keeping at bay the effect of his eating and drinking during the week. Her first impression of him, two years earlier, was that he looked like a privileged man passing into early middle age with his early assumptions and prejudices entirely intact. That impression was accurate: that was exactly who Peter McAllister was. He had been to Radley and St Andrews, had been a pupil under an old friend of his father’s, had gone into commercial law but had disliked using his brain quite so ferociously, so had ended up here, where his moral certainty was useful. He was a member of the Tory party and he and his wife, who was the one with the money, were back-and-forthing about whether he could put himself up for a constituency at the next election: realistically, he would probably do best to fight a Labour safe seat this time, then bag a winnable one next time round. He’d be in his early forties then; with a following wind, he’d be a minister within a few years, and after that, you never knew. In the mean time, he was fighting the good fight by injecting the traditional values of Englishness into an immigration system which was always in danger of ‘producer capture’. The people who worked with immigrants always ran the risk of coming to believe that they worked for the immigrants. That was a mistake Peter never made. He remembered who paid his salary. He did not rule for the government (he would have said, for the taxpayer) in every case, but he did often enough to mean that his and Alison’s judgments more or less cancelled each other out. They got on perfectly well, discussed work in neutral terms and mainly when it concerned technical points of law, and never socialised.

‘So what have you got?’ said Peter, unwrapping his own brief, after he’d finished the yawn induced by his stretch. ‘I’m not at all in the mood today, rode ten miles cross-country at Josie’s dad’s place last night and I’m so stiff I can hardly move. Getting too old for it. So what’s on?’

Alison had scanned the first page of her brief.

‘Saudi dissident. You?’

‘Some Zimbabwean woman. Quentina something.’

88

Roger came downstairs in the late morning to find that the post consisted of three bills and a mysterious A5 envelope. It had something in it, something that wasn’t a book or a CD. He pulled the envelope open and his head jerked back when he saw what was inside: a dead blackbird, rigid with rigor mortis. The bird was starting to smell. With it was a card with the usual words written on it: ‘We Want What You Have’. He threw it in the kitchen bin. The perfect start to the day.

The sheer unfairness of life. That was the thing that Roger couldn’t get out of his mind, couldn’t stop thinking about. The sheer unfairness of life.

He had done his job. He hadn’t been flaky or negligent. If he were to be completely honest – if you were to strap him down and pull out his fingernails – he might admit that there had been a passage of time when he was a tiny bit absent minded, a tiny bit floaty, a tiny bit prone to spending the odd hour here or there thinking about how nice it would be to be bending Matya over his desk and taking her from behind. But that had only been for a while and was in any case no worse than anyone else. It was all as if he was being punished for a crime – and what had he ever done wrong, apart from having a deputy who was a crook and a sociopath? It just wasn’t fair.

The worst of it was the maths. The Younts’ outgoings were still what they had been. Two houses to run and maintain, neither of them cheap, clothes and holidays, Arabella’s completely out-of-control discretionary spending – he’d given her a semi-lecture on the subject a few days after he was sacked, and the net effect of that was that she went out with Saskia, got drunk and came back in a taxi with four colossal bags of new clothes, to cheer herself up. Talking to Arabella about money was like trying to talk to a child about nuclear physics. There were the cars, the service costs which seemed to bleed out of them – by chance he’d just had the car insurance and travel insurance bills in the last few days, which had caused him to go and look at the house insurance contracts, which were apocalyptically expensive, even given the fact that they’d shelled out for the also-apocalyptically-expensive burglar alarm and home security – laundry and haircuts and taxis and piano lessons for Conrad and swimming lessons ditto, and food and wine and Arabella’s personal trainer and a constant haemorrhage of house bills for carpets and chairs and kitchen equipment and who knew what, and nursery fees for Conrad in the mornings combined with Matya who was lovely, who was the incarnation of loveliness, but who was not cheap, when you drilled down into what she cost the Younts and allowed for the fact that if they let her go they would be saving some serious cash.

Money coming in, money pouring out had been a source of anxiety to Roger even back in the days when money actually was coming in. This, though, took that to another level. This was Apocalypse Now. The money was still going out – gushing out like a bust tap – but it wasn’t coming in. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big egg. Zip. Sweet FA.

The other possibility was going to get a job. Of course that was the first thing Roger had thought of. He wasn’t going to just sit there on his arse, not him. That wasn’t the stuff the Younts were made of. He called an old chum from school who now ran a headhunting company, and tried to put a few feelers out. But that experiment in testing the water had gone badly; very badly. The first warning had been just how hard it was to get Percy on the phone. He’d called five times in two days. Finally he’d rung and the phone had been answered by a different secretary – Percy’s PA must have been away from her desk – and he’d said ‘it’s a personal call’ with just enough negligent public-school authority for her to put him straight through. When he got through, Percy had been reserved. No, strike that: he’d been outright shifty. He had treated Roger like a down-and-out trying to touch him for money.

‘Old boy,’ said Percy. ‘Always so good to hear from you.’

‘I won’t beat about it, Perce – I’m looking for work. I’ve had a spot of bother with Pinker Lloyd. You might have heard some chat. Somebody stuck his fingers in the till and because he worked in my department, they’re trying to stick it on me. My plan is, get another job and then sue the bollocks off them. I mean, really take them to the cleaners. The advice I’m getting is, we’ll be talking seven figures.’ This was a flat lie. Roger had been so demoralised and taken aback that he hadn’t even spoken to his solicitor about what happened – and the fact was that the bank’s employment contracts were drafted in such a way that he would be unlikely to see any cash at all. Another of life’s lavish unfairnesses, but not one he was about to share with his old school semi-friend. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my rear end counting out the settlement and living off the interest on the interest, so I thought perhaps we’d have a chat, see what’s knocking around out there?’

‘It’s good to have a plan,’ said Percy. ‘Absolutely. Very good.’ Then he paused. He was doing that thing of pretending to have answered Roger’s question, even though he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t.

‘So I was wondering if we might put something in the diary,’ said Roger, advancing over the parapet of his own desperation.

‘Quite so, quite so. Absolutely,’ said Percy. ‘Only – well, I hate to play this card. May I speak to you as an old pro?’

‘That’s why I’ve come to you.’

‘Experience teaches that there are some times when it’s best to let the market come to you. I know you’re a trader at heart, Roger’ – he knew nothing of the sort, not least because it was entirely untrue – ‘and I know you’re a go-and-get-’em type. Like to make your own weather. Create your own reality. A strength, a great strength. Really. In normal times. But – well, there’s a bit of a but knocking around at the moment. Not just the Pinker Lloyd thing but the market in general. Lehmans was a horrible shock. It’s pandemonium out there. People are wondering who’s next. They’re wondering what’s going to jump out of the cupboard and shout Boo! And this doth not for a hiring climate make. Nobody’s taking anybody new on. Nobody feels too sure about being kept on themselves. You follow me? Bad time to go looking for work – don’t want to seem desperate. Very off-putting. I tell my clients, it’s like sex. More desperate you are, more likely you are to have to pay for it! See my point? In your shoes, best course of action is not to act. Not just now. Let it shake down a bit. Dust settles. I tell my client, dust always settles – though it can take longer than you think. Best all round, eh?’

‘I thought that in this case-’ Roger managed.

‘That’s just it, though, Roger,’ said Percy. ‘This is the case. It’s all a question of timing. Long and short of it, speaking both as a pro in the field and as your old mucker, best to lie low for a bit. Trust me.’

And that was that. Percy hadn’t so much given him the brush-off as picked him up bodily by his belt and collar and slammed him head first into a wall. This was made much, much worse by the fact that while Percy was an utterly obnoxious excuse for a human being, exceptionally vile and greed-crazed even by the standards of City headhunters, than which no form of life was generally agreed to be more low – he did know his field. If what he was saying, in effect, was that no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose, then no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose. He wouldn’t be wrong about that.

This meant that Roger would be ill-advised to send out his CV and start touting for work. There was nothing for it except to make massive cuts in expenditure and try and make the cash in their current and savings accounts last as long as possible. Those balances stood at around £30,000 and Roger knew – was horrified to know it, but knew it nonetheless – that at current rates of expenditure the money wouldn’t last two months. Then they would be into his savings, the various assets wrapped in various tax-free devices over the years, and then into his pension fund. In the City, there was a term for this. It was called ‘being completely fucked’.

So there was nothing for it except massive cutbacks in expenditure, starting right now. Action this day! Right now meant today, meant this very hour. Preferably this minute. Showdown with Arabella and then full-scale lockdown on expenditure. The thing was, though, that Roger felt that he didn’t want to do that; couldn’t face it. What he wanted to do, it turned out, was to log on to something called the White Shirt Specialists, which had a new offer where you could order three gorgeous white shirts for £400, a considerable saving from the normal price of nearer £500. Roger had been thinking about this saving, holding it back for a rainy day, and now here was the rainy day and Roger felt himself browsing a range of subtly different collar and sleeve and button and cuff designs, and also the question of monograms, which often struck him as vulgar but which in this case could be made delightfully understated, white on white. He found himself wondering if it were really true that the shirts could be made to fit perfectly with only the requested measurements of height, age, weight and collar size. There was something depressing – or maybe it was liberating? – about the fact that your physique boiled down to just these four measurements. That was all it took to sum you up: 41, 96 kg, 1.90 m, size 17 collar = Roger Yount.

The internet was, in these days when he was getting used to the numb shock of being sacked, unemployable and on the way to broke, Roger’s salvation; or if not his salvation, exactly, it was what he did with most of his time. His favourite thing was reading pieces about the implosion of Lehman Brothers – the amazing idiots, the total fuckwits – and his second-favourite was playing poker online. When he had been in work, supervising a room full of traders all week and therefore responsible for tens of millions of pounds of, in effect, bets, this had had no appeal. Now, though, it was as if the gambling side of his personality needed an outlet, and found it here. He had put £1,000 from his credit card into his Poker Stars account, and was already up by £500. He was loose and aggressive against a lot of amateurs who played tight-weak. It was fun.

Then, five days after talking to Percy, Roger pulled himself together. He went for a walk on the Common, had a double espresso, got his spreadsheet and reran the numbers. Then he called Arabella on the house phone and asked her to come into his study to see him. That, they both knew, meant a Money Talk. It helped that the room had two leather armchairs and a (largely token) cigar humidor, and a vintage nude print of a Parisian whore kneeling on a chair facing away from the viewer, exposing her temptingly large, temptingly white behind. Once his wife came in, Roger simply gave her a sheet of paper with a list of things on it – all her discretionary spending, from shoes to Botox to one-on-one home-visit Pilates instruction.

‘These are all the things which are going to have to go,’ said Roger. It was satisfying. Arabella went pale.

‘We’re broke,’ she said.

‘No. Or yes. As good as, in some respects.’

In a deep dark part of Roger’s brain, one he was reluctant to admit to himself, this felt great. Felt fantastic. It was payback – hard to work out exactly why, but it definitely felt as if it was – for what she had done at Christmas.

And then a thought came to Arabella.

‘What about Matya?’ she said. Roger had known this was coming and had prepared for it. His countess, his lost countess. A masochism strategy, but one that would hurt Arabella more than it would hurt him.

‘We’re going to have to let her go,’ said Roger. ‘It’s clear from the numbers. Matya is a luxury’ – a voluptuous, silky, heart-lifting luxury, a sexier woman and a better mother to our children than you will ever be and the woman I would happily have made love to twice a day for the rest of my natural life – ‘… a luxury we can’t afford.’

‘Oh,’ said Arabella.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Roger. ‘So you’re going to have to be mummy. All night, all day. The whole deal. It’s in the numbers – we have no choice.’

‘Oh,’ said Arabella again. In his head Roger was dancing a gloating, jeering tarantella of victory.

89

It happened very quickly. The Younts gave Matya her notice. The agreed period was a month; Matya said she was sad, but understood. So in a few weeks’ time she would stop working for them, and Arabella would be a 24/7 solo mother for the first time.

When she heard the news – Roger and Arabella sitting across from her at the kitchen table with cups of tea that she had made, while the boys sat in the media room watching a DVD of Shaun the Sheep – Matya felt nothing at all. She had known that Roger had lost his job. It would have been impossible not to know: from one day to the next he had gone from being invisible at home to being omnipresent. Roger’s size made him hard to ignore: in the most basic way, he took up a lot of space. His noise footprint was large. The house seemed immediately smaller. He was constantly in the kitchen, crashing up the stairs to his study to listen to his punk compilation CD at a too-high volume. From wearing, in the week, nothing but classic suits, he was now never to be found in anything except a dressing gown or horrible knee-length khaki shorts with huge sagging pockets. He was always offering to help, and, Matya could not fail to notice, never missed an opportunity to check her out, especially from behind, and especially especially when she had to bend over to stack the dishwasher, load the washing machine, or do anything with the children. It was a bit much.

Knowing that Roger had suddenly and dramatically lost his job, it wasn’t hard to work out that her job was likely not to be long in following. So as soon as Arabella had asked her for ‘a little chat’, Matya had suspected what was coming. It was later, in the course of the afternoon, that she began to think about what it really meant. She would be traipsing around looking for work – something she hadn’t done for some time, and about which she had no illusions. It would be a boring ordeal of smiling and making nice while trying to work out if the prospective employers were sane and reliable and whether their children were the kind she could imagine looking after for nine hours a day. That was a chore but she knew it was one she could do, because she had done it before. The thing which made it worse was that her flat-share had finished and she was having to look for somewhere new to live. That, in London, was more than a chore – the actual physical process of looking, the Tubes and buses and the trudging around, the small ads and want ads and Craigslist-surfing and free-sheet-poring, the texts and appointments and interviews, the vetting of addresses and then rooms and then flatmates, all of it, was exhausting, depressing, remorseless, one of those things which made you feel the oppressive scale of London – but again, it was something she knew. She had done it before.

What she hadn’t done before, what was unknown, was leaving Joshua. All day she tried not to think about it; all day it was on the edge of her mind. She could feel a great pit of gloom opening up beneath her. Who could resist a three-year-old, bursting with love, whose idea of complete happiness was to come and snuggle up with you? Their love affair wasn’t in the early stages any more – it wasn’t quite in early-dates territory; her heart didn’t skip a beat when she saw him – but she was happier with Joshua than she had been with anyone else she had ever known. Matya was aware that this was connected with her childhood: she was rediscovering her lost parents through the love she was able to express for Joshua. It was a way of getting her parents’ love back, of reincarnating them inside herself. But so what? Who cared what the reasons were? What was real was the feel of his hand in hers when they went out in the afternoon to pick up Conrad from primary school. Or the calm, measured way in which he would look upward and say, ‘I love you, Matty’ – and the words had more impact than they ever had from a boyfriend.

So that was what hit her when she got home to the flat at half past six. Unusually, she closed the latch on the door behind her. She sat on the small odd leather sofa – a gift from Arabella, who had bought it for her dressing room and then gone off it – and put her head in her hands and cried. Not for her job or for the other changes in her life, but for Joshua, who she knew she would miss so unbearably much.

90

There was a rattle – a now-familiar rattle – and Shahid’s breakfast was pushed through the slot in the door of his cell. Shahid had been sitting on the floor, not thinking about anything much, since saying his dawn prayers. He had a watch now, but ‘dawn’ here meant whenever Shahid woke up. That usually wasn’t much after six. Breakfast arrived at seven, so there was a decent gap to sit and think.

Shahid thought about Iqbal and how stupid he’d been to let him into his flat. He wondered where he was. He hoped that when the police found him they would kick the living shit out of him.

He thought about what he would do to the person responsible for We Want What You Have when he got hold of him.

He thought about the cell, how he had never known any room he had been in as well as he knew this one. He wondered if a time would come when it wasn’t still imprinted on his mind, every detail of it: a crack in the corner of the ceiling and small fibrous marks on the walls which spread down and outwards so that they looked like the map of a river delta. A patch of damp to the left of the sink which was sometimes cold and wet to the touch. The pipes, which made a rackety clanking noise that at times almost fell into a rhythm, a syncopation – clunk BANG, clank clunk BANG.

He thought about Mrs Principle the solicitor, as he called her to himself. She had the kind of upright, strict, buttoned-up and clipped British manner which made it impossible not to speculate about her sex life. It would be something kinky, definitely, it had to be. Spanking perhaps. Or she dressed up in leather and wielded a whip and made men crawl around the floor saying ‘Yes, mistress.’

Shahid thought about his own sex life – whether he would ever have one again. He had never felt his sex drive so absent. Maybe it was true, maybe they did put something in the food. But he knew that when/if he got out, he would like to have A Girlfriend. He didn’t have anything more specific in mind than that. A nice well-brought-up Muslim girl, a virgin, incredibly keen on sex, would be ideal. But it was more a question of someone to hang out with, to wake up with, to watch TV with, to go clubbing with, to go to Gap and pick out T-shirts with. A girl. That girl from the Underground, the one he’d tried to find via ‘Lost Connections’, the one he still sometimes thought about.

He thought about Ahmed and Rohinka and Mohammed and Fatima and was able to admit that he envied his fat, slow, sedentary, cautious older brother.

He thought about Mrs Kamal and was almost able to smile at the idea of what she must be putting everyone else in the family through. Also any policemen or lawyers or anybody else who got within earshot.

He thought about what he was going to do with the rest of his life when/if he got out of here. Sue them for wrongful imprisonment, for abusing his rights, for locking him up for no reason… that was one thing he could do. But Shahid knew that he wouldn’t. He felt time passing here, felt it strongly, more sharply than he ever had. Time going past, purely going past. It was a paradox of the place. You were locked up, and every day was the same, and nothing happened except the same questions being put to you and you giving the same answers back, so every day was a slow-motion wallow in itself, every hour felt days long – it was so far beyond boring that it was a whole other state. And yet it made you aware, cruelly aware, of how time was shooting past. Shahid could feel his life slipping away. He was thirty-three, and what had he done? How big a hole would there be in the world if he never got out of here? He needed to do something – get back into proper work, not the shop, but go back and finish his degree and get a real job, have a real life.

He thought about the fact that this was his nineteenth day in jail, the nineteenth day since he’d been arrested.

And then he thought about breakfast. It would be cold by now, but then it was never much more than tepid when it came through the door. Today it was scrambled eggs and toast. The eggs had been overcooked, so they were granular and smelled faintly of sulphur. One piece of toast had a very thin layer of butter, barely a scraping, and the other had a compensatory smear of butter about half an inch thick. The tea was undrinkable even when it was hot, so Shahid ignored it as he ate the cold food, much more slowly than he would have done at home.

Some police and warders you heard coming, others you didn’t. This was the second kind. There was a scraping and the cell door was opened by a policeman with a huge circular keyring, a cartoon-like keyring, in his left hand.

‘Ready?’ said the policeman.

Shahid shrugged. ‘For what?’ This was his new thing – wherever possible, to answer a question with a question.

‘Got your stuff together?’

‘For what? What are you talking about?’

‘Didn’t they tell you?’ Now the policeman seemed to be playing the same question-with-a-question game.

‘Does it look like they told me? Whatever it is?’

‘Oh.’ The policeman gave a short bark-like laugh. ‘Now that, that really is typical. You’re getting out today. In fact, right now. Your brief and your family are here to pick you up.’

Shahid did not think it was possible for a thought, a feeling, so be so strong a physical sensation. He felt his heart race, his head fill with blood, he jerked upright and knocked the table, hard, with his thighs. The undrinkable tea spilled on the floor of his cell.

‘You’re joking.’

But the policeman was enjoying the fact of the cock-up so much that there was no possibility he was joking. The cock-up had confirmed his world-view, and in the process made him very happy.

‘Typical, that is. Whatever it is, whoever it most concerns, that’s the person they never tell. Don’t get around to telling. Typical. Classic. That’s this place all over.’

Shahid picked up his prayer shawl, his prayer mat, his Qur’an, his toothbrush, and his sweater. He pulled on his shoelaceless trainers.

‘I’m ready,’ he said.

‘Typical,’ said the policeman one last time, not to Shahid but to the air at large, still happily shaking his head. He led Shahid out of the cell, down the corridors Shahid was starting to know so well, and to the lift. They went down four floors to an office with a counter, on top of which Shahid’s tracksuit bottoms – the ones he’d been wearing when he was arrested – were sitting. The custody sergeant, a fat man with cold eyes, gave him a clipboard with a form to sign, and he signed it. Then the other policeman led him through a glass-metal-mesh door and there were Ahmed, Usman, Rohinka, Mrs Kamal and Mrs Principle, all of them jumping to their feet as soon as they saw him and all of them looking worried, happy, shiny-eyed. Then Shahid’s own eyes began to blur too.

‘Who’s running the shop?’ he tried to say, but his voice cracked halfway through and it came out as a sob, as Shahid burst into tears.

91

It sometimes seemed to Rohinka as if she got no sleep at all – literally none, ever. She knew that she must, of course, because if she didn’t – if she literally never went out, not for a second – she would by now have died or gone mad. But there were times when those two states didn’t seem all that far away. And as for the fact that she never slept, well, one sign of it was that whenever Fatima came into the room in the morning – any time from half past five – Rohinka could hear her coming. Perhaps it was only that she was so attuned to her daughter’s waking that the first footfall woke her from her shallow, expectant sleep. That was more likely, Rohinka supposed. Not that it felt as if it made much difference: either way, all day and every day, she was on the ragged edge of exhaustion.

She was always already awake by the time her daughter came in the room and began her patented three-step process for rousing her mother: first, for about a minute, simply stand beside the bed – very very close to the edge of the bed, ideally about a quarter-inch or so – and wait for the first sign of life. Second, begin to tap her mother on the shoulder with the flat of her hand, a cross between a tap and a pat, not violent, respectful even, but firm, insistent. Third, she would simply clamber over Rohinka, using her as a climbing-obstacle-cum-plaything like something at the recreation centre, and launch herself into the gap in the bed beside her. By that point there was no longer any mileage for Rohinka in pretending to be asleep.

Today was the same. She heard Fatima coming from the landing, her feet light but purposeful, in no hurry – she knew what she was doing. Mohammed, in his cot in their room, showed no sign of waking, as he tended not to do – a blessing, Rohinka supposed. At 5.30 a.m., one child was enough.

So today was the same as always. But today was different too, because today was the day that Mrs Kamal was taking a plane back to Lahore. Usman would be travelling with her, a trip with several overlapping agendas: he would help Mrs Kamal with the journey (though anyone less in need of help Rohinka couldn’t think of – still, her notional frailty had sometimes to be deferred to); he was himself claiming that he wanted to ‘chill out in Lahore for a bit’; and he had succumbed to his mother’s bullying to go and meet some potential marriage partners. Well, maybe it would work out for him. Usman had not been quite himself recently. Not that he spoke more, or showed more interest in the children, or anything like that, but he was less angry and more preoccupied. He had trimmed his beard and stopped irritating Ahmed by pretending to refuse to serve alcohol. Perhaps it was no more than that he was growing up a little.

As soon as Fatima came in the room and stood by the bed, Rohinka did something which amazed her daughter: she got up.

‘Mummy!’ said Fatima. ‘What are you doing?!’

‘Mamaji leaves today,’ said her mother. ‘There’s lots to do. You can help me.’

‘Shall I go and wake her up?’

Fatima, for all her indefatigability, her unstoppability, her take-no-prisoners approach to life, was very wary of her grandmother. (Who, predictably, doted on Mohammed.) She did not go into her room uninvited. It was tempting to let Fatima be Mrs Kamal’s early-morning alarm call; tempting, but probably not a great idea. Woken up in the wrong way, Mrs Kamal could start her last day in a bad mood and colour her departure for everyone. For a moment, Rohinka allowed herself to think about how nice it would be to get her home back: to get past that sense of always having somebody in your space. No one to encounter on a midnight trip to the bathroom, no one to hide birth-control medication from, no one extra to have to cook for or wash up after or do laundry for; it would be nice to have Mohammed back in his room, nice to just have their home back to themselves. Normality had never seemed more attractive. Only the four of them – even the thought felt like a long, relieving exhale.

‘Best stay with me. Or go downstairs and see what Daddy is doing.’

Fatima nodded, her expression serious: she had a mission. She moved around to her father’s side of the bed and got in.

An hour and a half later and they were all in the kitchen, good to go. Even Shahid, who under the circumstances could be forgiven for lying in and giving the occasion a miss, was there. He had been out of custody for three days and was still giddily happy – the main symptom being that he couldn’t stop talking. He had lost weight in jail, five or six kilos, and what with the fresh shave and haircut he’d had on getting out, was suddenly much more handsome. In fact he now looked like someone out of a film, a lean dark good-looking stranger with a past. If it had been him going to Lahore, Rohinka would be willing to bet that he wouldn’t come back single. Now he was sitting next to Fatima, coaxing her to eat her breakfast cereal by pretending to take huge mouthfuls of it himself, then flying it to her mouth making aeroplane noises. Mrs Kamal was sitting next to him, arranging her passport and plane ticket and other documentation on the table in front of her. On the other side of her was Mohammed in his high chair, barely awake. He was not cranky, but he was also not fully conscious, and he was making no attempt to eat or to interact with anyone: sitting there slumped sideways, chubby and skimpy-haired, he had the air of a Sultan recovering from a heavy lunch. Next to him his father too looked tired, and the coincidence made them look very alike; the resemblance, which Rohinka sometimes could and sometimes couldn’t see, was unmistakable. They looked like twins with a thirty-five-year age gap.

Mrs Kamal snapped her handbag closed.

‘It’s time,’ she said.

‘Usman’s brought the car round,’ said Ahmed. The two brothers would take their mother to the airport; Shahid had an appointment with Mrs Strauss the solicitor. They went into their farewells, and then came out in front of the shop, where Usman sat at the wheel of the Sharan with its hazard lights blinking. Ahmed loaded Mrs Kamal’s bag into the back of the people carrier. She had two suitcases and the biggest wheelie carry-on bag Rohinka had ever seen: with its handle extended, it was almost as tall as she was.

Standing in front of her mother-in-law, Rohinka felt a wave of the very last thing she had expected: affection. She had seen what Mrs Kamal had been like when Shahid was locked up, and would never forget it. She hoped Fatima and Mohammed would never be in trouble of that scale; if they ever were, she hoped she could live up to her mother-in-law’s example. But this wasn’t easy to put into words, and she made no attempt to begin. Perhaps she didn’t have to. Mrs Kamal stood in front of her, gripped her arm and said with an amused, knowing look, like a character actor taking applause at a curtain call:

‘Daughter. It has been eventful.’ And then Mrs Kamal turned to get into the car, saying, ‘And now time to see about that upgrade.’