Capital

turn the thing off without Jez seeing.
    ‘Here for Tokyo?’ he said. Jez grunted, a sound which could have been yes or no or fuck off or none of your business. Then he took a step forward, so Mark had no choice but to contort his face and shout –
    ‘Behind you!’
    – and as Jez turned, reach out and turn off the monitor, which in his heightened sense of the moment seemed to take long seconds to fizz and flare and close to a point and go black. Then Jez turned back to him, now unmistakably furious.
    ‘Made you look!’ said Mark. Jez was walking towards him. ‘Sorry,’ he went on. ‘Schoolboy joke. Silly.’
    Jez stopped very close to him; too close. He was invading his space. But this wasn’t, perhaps, the moment to complain. Jez was a big man, seen at close range; bigger than he looked. He smelled of shower gel.
    ‘I don’t see any legal pad,’ said Jez in his estuary accent.
    Mark didn’t know what to say to that. He moved back and sideways to get away, but Jez closed the space between them again, and leaned in towards him. Then he put his face right up to Mark’s, tilting his head sideways, and loudly, deliberately, sniffed. Then he did the same thing again. Jez straightened up.
    ‘You don’t smell right,’ he said. And then he walked away.

61
     
     
    DI Mill sat at his desk, head in his hands, pile of folders stacked up in front of him, and the rest of the room in its usual hubbub. He looked the picture of gloom. The files were those of the We Want What You Have inquiry, and they had now mounted up, because complaints from Pepys Road had kept stacking up. As a brief, it was a nightmare: a significant number of irritable, entitled upper-middle-class people were annoyed, and as a group they were horrible to deal with, not least because they could never get two sentences into any exchange without mentioning how much tax they paid. There were no clear leads, no clear suspects, no apparent motive, and no obvious directions for the inquiry. Up until recently, there was also no obvious crime. It wasn’t clear in what way he/she/they, the person or persons behind the campaign, had broken the law. But then there had been some changes with We Want What You Have. First, some way into the new year, the cards and videos had stopped, and the blog was no longer being updated. It wasn’t taken down but it no longer had any new content. Then, about a month later, the blog suddenly disappeared. When he saw that, Mill, who had the page bookmarked and checked it twice a day, punched the air. Fantastic! It was the best sort of problem, one which had gone away of its own right. The whole episode could be filed in that large, happy category of things you just ignored until they didn’t matter any more.
    Then, about a month after that, disaster. Every single person in the street got a fresh postcard of their own front door, with nothing written on the back except a short URL. Mill typed in the address and sure enough the blog was back up, hosted on a new platform and with all the content that had been there before – only now it was worse. The same photos were there, but they had been defaced by digital graffiti. Somebody had written swear words across the pictures; not all the pictures, just some of them; about one in three. The swear words focused on very simple, very direct abuse: ‘Rich cunts’, ‘Wankers’, ‘Arsehole’, ‘Tory scum’, ‘Kill the rich’, and so on.
    So this should have been a nightmare for Mill. Having gone away, the problem had now un-gone away. That should have been a perfect formula to produce the gloom that Mill, with his head in his hands, looked as if he was feeling. But that wasn’t what he really felt, not at all. What Mill mainly felt was curious. Most police work is routine. Mill didn’t complain about that since the job was the job; also, when the work wasn’t routine, and you didn’t know exactly what had happened, you still in some sense knew what had happened. If some drug-dealing toerag bled to death on an estate stairwell, even if you didn’t know who’d done it, you still knew who’d done it: some other drug-dealing toerag. Kosovan pimp shot outside a kebab shop, ditto. This case was not like that, and though the anthropology of the station prevented him from saying so, he was pleased it was up and running again. He had spent about forty-five minutes looking through the new material on the site, and his main feeling now was happy curiosity, with a twinge