Capital

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