Capital

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