Capital

with a camera held low and tilted upwards so the top of the door frame loomed over the rest and the angles looked funny. The kind of photo which would be crap if it were a normal photo but would be OK if it were consciously artistic. Smitty turned the photo over. On the back it said, in printed black ink, ‘We Want What You Have’. There was no signature and the postmark was indecipherable.
    ‘You seen this, Nan?’ Smitty asked.
    ‘I’ve gone back to English Breakfast. It’s a bit stronger. Oh, that! It’s one of these postcards I’ve been getting. One every fortnight or so for a couple of months. All pictures of the house with the same thing written on them. I’ve kept them. They’re all over there by the dresser.’
    Smitty went over to the dresser. Sure enough, beside photos of his nan with Albadadda, and of his mum and himself and his brother and sister at various phases of development, there was a stack of postcards, all of them pictures of 42 Pepys Road. All of the pictures were different. One of the photos was an extreme close-up of the door number, another was shot from right down the street, as far away as you could go and still pick out the front of number 42. Another was shot from head height, looking straight down at the front doorsteps. Another, from more or less the same angle, looked sideways across the front bay window. One of them had four different pictures cropped into quadrants. Underneath the postcards was a jiffy bag addressed in the same handwriting. Smitty opened it and took out a DVD, with a label which also said ‘We Want What You Have’.
    ‘Have you had a look at this, Nan?’ he asked, knowing what the answer would be. No point sending a DVD to Mrs Howe.
    ‘No, of course not darling, I don’t have one of those thingies.’ She put the cup down in front of him. ‘I always think English Breakfast is nicer with milk, but I’ve got some sliced lemon here if you need it.’
    ‘Sure. Thanks. Listen, Nan, can I borrow this? Do you mind if I borrow all these cards?’
    ‘Of course you can, darling. Drink up, it’s much less nice when it goes cold.’ She put a plate of biscuits beside Smitty, and began unwrapping the posh chocolates so she could offer them back to him.

14
     
     
    The Younts had gone away for the weekend. It was ten days before Christmas and seven days before Roger was due to find out about his bonus. Their host was a client of Roger’s at the bank, a man called Eric Fletcher, who owned a house in Norfolk. This is where the Younts were.
    Eric’s house had a barn, which he had had converted into a spa, for the use of his wife Naima – he liked to joke that building her a spa was the only way he was able to get her out of London. Opposite it he had built another barn, so that the house was now framed on both sides with a courtyard in the middle. The second barn was given over to the business of entertaining children: the downstairs was full of toys and games for small boys and girls, Lego and Barbie and Bratz and Nintendo Wii and Action Men and Brio; the upstairs was equipped for older ones, PS3 and Xbox 360 and pool table. Both rooms had flat-screen televisions and DVD libraries. There were two nannies. ‘The whole point of this place,’ Eric would say, solemnly, ‘is that it’s supposed to be playtime for everybody .’
    All this had come as a very welcome surprise for Arabella. She had not met Eric before and had not known what to expect. Roger had said that he was a yob but that the house would be lovely, and to give Roger his credit, which she was not especially in the mood to do, he had been right. This was a treat; and Arabella had a deep and sincere love of treats. You could not have too many treats. It was perfectly all right to live from treat to treat. Also, Mrs Eric was simply heaven. She was a shortish, plumpish, very chatty half-Asian woman of about forty who at this precise moment was sitting back on the marble seat next to Arabella in the hammam, stark naked except for a towel wrapped around her head to protect her hair from the steam. Arabella, feeling a little shy, had gone into the hammam with her dressing gown but had now joined in by casting it off. Of the other wives, two were now getting massages, one was still in bed, and one was showing off by swimming laps in the pool. Arabella and Naima had already bonded over their shared obsession with The X Factor and their mutual determination to watch all the weekend’s episodes.
    ‘I