Capital

if they weren’t enforced. It was just that nobody wanted the laws to apply to them. Part of the problem, as Quentina had been told several times, was that ‘the laws against drivers are the only fucking laws that are ever fucking enforced’. But that, Quentina felt, wasn’t her problem. She had no fear of confrontation, which was just as well as it was a very unusual workday that did not feature at least one or two altercations with upset or furious or hysterically weeping or racially abusive or threatening or not entirely sane freshly ticketed motorists. Still, it was better for everyone to avoid ugly scenes, and Quentina was in a good mood as she moved off down Pepys Road. Because she was in a good mood, and because it would have no effect on the quota either way, she merely noted a ten-days-out-of-date resident’s permit on an ’03-reg A-class Mercedes, and magnanimously took no action. Quentina went to spread fear and confusion somewhere else. It was going to be fun after work, showing the photo of the Aston Martin. Quentina planned to tell people she’d personally ticketed James Bond himself. In his tuxedo. And that he’d been with the woman from Casino Royale .

9
     
     
    Michael Lipton-Miller, ‘Mickey’ to his friends, stood in the investment property he owned at 27 Pepys Road with a clipboard under his left arm, a BlackBerry held to his right ear, an iPhone vibrating in his left jacket pocket, a dehydration headache, a solicitor’s letter setting up an appointment to discuss his divorce terms in his right jacket pocket, and a briefcase at his feet. Of all these things, the one which caused him to feel least thrilled with life in general was the clipboard, which held a list of all the things which should have been done at the house to make it ready for a new arrival. Mickey was a qualified solicitor who no longer practised the law but instead worked full-time as a factotum, fixer and odd-job man for a Premiership football club. He loved his work and loved the sense of himself as a man who got things done, whose approach to life was a bit flashy, a bit wide – but had the other connotations of the word ‘wide’ too, a sense of breadth, of generosity, of largeness of spirit. His ideal sense of this did not involve checking over an itemised list of crockery, DVD equipment and toilet paper, but he had sacked his assistant last week (the search for a replacement would be what the vibrating phone was about – there were times, Mickey liked to joke, when putting the phone on vibrate was the nearest thing to sex he got all week) so here he was mired in the daily detail of making spoilt footballers happy. He was fifty years old.
    In front of Mickey was the woman from the contract cleaning agency, whose job it had been to supervise the cleaners. She was tall and lean and had high cheekbones: fit. To Mickey’s eye she looked East African. She had that disconcerting African patience as she stood there while Mickey ranted and bollocked somebody else over the phone; she did not look like someone waiting for a verdict to be passed on her work. Standing next to her, Mickey had a thought he often had about good-looking young women: he was amazed that more of them did not sell their bodies for sex. It would surely be easier and much more lucrative than working – certainly than this sort of work – and could it really be so bad? People would pay hundreds of pounds to have sex with this woman, so why on earth would she instead want to clean houses for £4.50 an hour or whatever the sodding minimum wage was? Maybe he should put in an offer. And then Mickey, in the privacy of his own head, told himself: only joking.
    ‘Right right, sorry sorry,’ said Mickey. ‘Shall we have a look? I’m sure it’s all fine, darling,’ Mickey said, being Good Cop, ‘but you know the powers that be . . .’
    The cleaner was not falling for any charm. She just gave a minimally polite nod.
    Mickey started taking the tour. Because the house was not usually lived in for more than about three months at a time, often less, and because the people who lived there came from all over the place, it was decorated in a semi-expensive version of Hotel-Room Neutral. The players often came from families with no money and their only encounters with affluent style came from hotels, so that was a style they felt was aspirational. The walls were a complicated shade of Swedish white, the furniture was a mixture of modern stuff, the video and