John Lanchester - Capital

‘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 what that means, right? I copied it so I could repost it. And then the site was taken down, just like that. Disappeared. So I thought, sod it, and started it up again. Put it on a different blogging platform but gave it the same name. Then I put back up the original material. Then I began adding, with the graffiti and all that. I started with Smitty’s house.’

‘His grandmother’s house,’ said Mill. Parker looked uncomfortable.

‘Anyway. I started with that. But I wanted it to get darker. To have more edge. These wankers, who do they think they are, you know? Do they think they’re, you know, the kings of the world, or something? People are like, starving. People haven’t got jobs. Children haven’t got medicine, you know? And there these posh wankers are… I just wanted to say something, you know? Make a statement.’

‘Was Smitty’s grandmother a posh wanker?’ asked the DI.

‘Well Smitty was a posh wanker, much more than he let on,’ the boy snapped back. ‘It was him I wanted to mess with. I didn’t think his nan would be that bothered.’

‘Did the fact that she died in May make no difference to you?’

Parker was visibly startled by that. His head jerked up. He didn’t reply.

‘The house has been empty for months. Those cards, DVDs, all that, have been going to a vacant address. We talked to Smitty. He had absolutely no idea about what had been going on.’

And now his mouth was flapping open and closed like a fish. A sense of sadness washed over Mill; the boy was about to pay very severely for his misplaced energies.

‘Did someone help you with the graffiti?’ That was the first edge to cross: criminal damage.

‘No. Just me,’ he said in a very quiet voice. ‘I only did it once. I thought the risk of being caught was too high. It’s the cans, the way they rattle when you shake them. It’s hard to do in an occupied area. Once was enough.’

‘The time in May,’ Mill said, while his DC kept writing.

‘Mm,’ said the boy. This would appear as a declarative statement by the time his words had been written up.

‘And the birds, that was you too?’

Now the kid did look embarrassed. He dropped his gaze and muttered something.

‘I missed that,’ said Mill.

‘The first one came from home. My parents’ place. In Norfolk. It had flown into the window, killed itself. I went there for the weekend, it happened that morning. My mum was upset. I said I’d dispose of it but then I was taking it to the compost when I thought, I don’t know what I thought, I thought about Joseph Beuys, you probably don’t know him, he’s an artist and a big hero, I wondered what he would have done, I thought it would be a strong statement. Then the other ones I got from a taxidermist. I don’t know where he got them from. There were only six or seven of them, anyway… It was stupid and I shouldn’t have done it, I saw that afterwards.’

Mill caught the DC’s eye while he kept writing. If the parents confirmed that account there would be no animal cruelty charge. There would be something to do with misuse of the post, maybe. As things stood the kid was guilty but probably wouldn’t go to jail. One big issue left, and Mill could tell that the DC was thinking along similar lines. Occasionally, very occasionally, Mill found himself wishing that suspects did what was right by their own interests rather than what was right by the law. That was what he felt now. This kid needed a lawyer and a few minutes to think what was the prudent thing to say, rather than just to go on relieving his soul. If Mill had been on his own, he might not have pressed the issue; he might have given the boy time to collect himself. The irony was that a real criminal in this position would never, under any circumstances, have said the wrong thing. The law is a brilliant mechanism for catching people who don’t know what to say and do when they are in trouble. With more seasoned criminals it works much less well. Mill said, as gently as he could,

‘And the cars? Was that you on your own too?’

There was no direct evidence linking the vandalism of the cars to the rest of the campaign. Nothing on the postcards or blog had mentioned the incident in which a set of keys had been scratched down the side of cars in the street – an act that had stood out as by far the biggest criminal incident of all in Pepys Road. One probably big enough to guarantee a custodial sentence for the person who had done it, in the very very unlikely event the police caught him. Mill wanted to catch this kid, but he didn’t particularly want him to go to jail, which is why his heart sank when he heard the whispered words,