Capital

gesture of some sort, retarded enough to keep doing it even after it starts to get people worked up, and just enough of a geek to do it on the web? Stupid, lazy, politically cretinised, retarded, spends all his time wanking on the internet. Oh of course! My younger brother !’
    Shahid was still standing at the top of the stairs.
    ‘Can I come up now?’ said Usman. Shahid stepped back from the stairwell and Usman took that as a yes. He trudged up. Shahid was stood at the sink with his arms folded. Usman sat down and took a breath.
    ‘Look, I know it makes no difference, and I know it’s too late, but I’m sorry. I’m genuinely and deeply sorry. When you were arrested I assumed it was to do with that idiot fake jihadi. It was only the day before you got out that the lawyer said something to mother and Ahmed about the blog and I realised that was involved. But it didn’t make any sense! I stopped doing that stuff back at the start of the year! I took the site down, everything. And then someone must have screen-scraped all the pictures because someone puts them back up again and starts doing that extra-freaky shit with dead birds and trashing cars and everything and I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t mean things to get out of hand. I didn’t think people would get themselves in such a twist. And all because they thought it might affect property prices! You make a point about Western obliviousness and they think it’s about property prices. You tell them they’re in a condition of complete moral unconsciousness and they worry about whether their house is still worth two million quid! Unbelievable. Then they decide you’re a terrorist.’
    ‘It wasn’t you who—’ began Shahid, and Usman held up his hand.
    ‘I know – it was you who ended up in Paddington Green. But that wasn’t the idea, they got it all wrong, it was that idiot Iqbal, if he hadn’t . . .’ Usman trailed off. Shahid just sat there.
    ‘You had my password,’ he said. ‘You were logged on through my IP address.’
    ‘I got it in the café downstairs,’ said Usman. ‘They get your wireless pretty much full-strength. I worked out your password.’
    Shahid’s password, as it happened, was Shakira123.
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
    ‘Remember when you got the broadband put in? That summer? All the time you were singing and humming that Shakira tune. The one about “I’m on tonight” and “hips don’t lie”. For about six weeks it was all you talked about. I was going through a … through a strict phase and you did it to wind me up. So the first time I tried your password I guessed Shakira. But that didn’t work. So then I thought for a bit and remembered back when we were kids. Remember when you were about ten and I was five? You had a little electronic safe. Dad gave it to you not long before he died. Birthday present I think it was. And you and I spent a lot of time together at that point, you sort of looked after me and we were very close. And you told me your password was Usman123, so I remembered that and I tried it on Shakira. Shakira123.’
    There was a long silence.
    ‘Fuck you,’ Shahid eventually said again. Usman smiled and got up. He fished out his wallet, took out a card and gave it to Shahid. It had a mobile phone number on it.
    ‘What, I call this and I get to go to jail again, this time for drugs?’
    ‘Remember that girl you met on the Underground? You liked her, got her number, then lost it, you put an ad in “Lost Connections”, she never saw it, that was the last you heard of her?’
    ‘How do you know she never saw it?’
    Usman shrugged. ‘She told me. That’s her mobile number.’ He made for the door. ‘And in case you’re wondering, no it wasn’t easy.’
    ‘Fuck you,’ said Shahid to his brother’s back, though with less conviction this time.

103
     
     
    In the days after his visit to Shahid Kamal at Paddington Green station, DI Mill had come to a conclusion about the enquiries he had been making into the Pepys Road harassment campaign. He had talked it over with the DC who’d been working with him, and they agreed: We Want What You Have was two different series of events, run by two different people or sets of people. For the first few months, the postcards and website and the DVDs were the work of a person or persons with a local interest but no particular animus at any individual. There was something almost abstract about it: no