Capital

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