Capital

anything,’ said DI Mill, ‘but if you do say anything it may be taken down and used in evidence against you. It may harm your defence if you do not mention anything on which you later come to rely in court.’
    It was difficult to get through the formal warning. The young man Mill was talking to was weeping uncontrollably. It was less like arresting someone and more like telling someone they’d been bereaved. If you’re this upset, thought the DI, why the hell did you do it in the first place?
    With another part of his mind, he knew the answer. Mill’s experience was that while it was true that some people wanted to be caught, there was another category, less well known, of people who wanted to have been caught. In other words they did not go out of their way to be nicked, but once they had been, they went to pieces with guilt and relief. This looked like being one of those. Mill took out a packet of paper tissues and, catching the eye of his DC who was sitting next to him with his notebook out, handed them over to the suspect. Mill said, ‘There, there.’ The man took out a tissue, blew his nose loudly and at length, then looked around for a bin, couldn’t see one – even though this was his own flat – and dropped the tissue on the floor.
    ‘I didn’t mean any harm,’ said Parker French, Smitty’s ex- assistant . ‘It got out of hand. I really didn’t mean to upset anybody.’
    ‘Start at the beginning,’ said Mill. While the kid had been crying, Mill had had a good long look around the room. It was a sitting room/dining room/kitchen with one bedroom and you could see that it was shared with a girlfriend. The flat was in Hackney and could not be cheap-cheap so either she worked at a paying job or one of them had some family cash. Parker’s accent was neutral educated middle-class, very similar to Mill’s, though just for a pleasant change he both was and looked younger than the DI. There were more CDs than usual for someone his age, and there were quite a few books too, all of them shelved in an orderly way. The TV was a couple-sized normal TV rather than a single man’s monster flat-screen. The biggest piece of decoration was a poster for the Tate’s exhibition of Picasso and Matisse.
    ‘I hadn’t been thinking about it until Smitty . . . until he sacked me. I’m sorry but he was such a total . . . he was just horrible to me. Treated me like all I could do is go out and get his coffee. I’m an artist too! I’ve got the same training he has! He didn’t run around making people coffee, did he? If he wants respect, he should give respect. It’s got to be earned. But no, he’s Smitty, he doesn’t have to do any of that. And then, without warning, I mean completely without warning, he tells me I’m fired. Like, totally assassinates me. I’m supposed to just go off and crawl into a hole and die.’
    Parker took out another tissue and went through the same routine of blowing his nose on it and then dropping it on the floor.
    ‘I got so angry. Not so much that day but later. I got really furious. The disrespect, you know? The disregard. I didn’t matter. Like that thing they call it in Iraq, collateral damage. I was just collateral damage. I was barely shit on his shoes. Well, I got angry, and then I thought about it, and I decided that I wasn’t having it. I decided I was going to do something to get back at Smitty. And make a name for myself at the same time, you know? Do something with a bit of edge. Smitty was always giving these sermons about how the art world worked, how commodification worked, how you had to do something so strange that people noticed it but that didn’t make it look like you were desperate to sell stuff. So that’s what I decided to do. And I wanted it to be something which messed with his head as well. His meaning Smitty’s. I wanted to get into his head and make him feel he was being messed with and he didn’t know why.’
    ‘Pepys Road,’ said Mill. Parker nodded.
    ‘Where his granny lived. There had been these postcards. He was freaked out by them, I could tell. But also fascinated. It was like an art project, it was his kind of thing. He had this folder of stuff on his desk and kept looking at it. It was there for weeks. I looked at it too. The idea didn’t come straight away. But I was looking at the blog and then I saw it hadn’t been updated for a bit and I thought, bugger it. I screen-scraped all the stuff that was already on there. You know