John Lanchester - Capital

‘Behind you!’

– and as Jez turned, reach out and turn off the monitor, which in his heightened sense of the moment seemed to take long seconds to fizz and flare and close to a point and go black. Then Jez turned back to him, now unmistakably furious.

‘Made you look!’ said Mark. Jez was walking towards him. ‘Sorry,’ he went on. ‘Schoolboy joke. Silly.’

Jez stopped very close to him; too close. He was invading his space. But this wasn’t, perhaps, the moment to complain. Jez was a big man, seen at close range; bigger than he looked. He smelled of shower gel.

‘I don’t see any legal pad,’ said Jez in his estuary accent.

Mark didn’t know what to say to that. He moved back and sideways to get away, but Jez closed the space between them again, and leaned in towards him. Then he put his face right up to Mark’s, tilting his head sideways, and loudly, deliberately, sniffed. Then he did the same thing again. Jez straightened up.

‘You don’t smell right,’ he said. And then he walked away.

DI Mill sat at his desk, head in his hands, pile of folders stacked up in front of him, and the rest of the room in its usual hubbub. He looked the picture of gloom. The files were those of the We Want What You Have inquiry, and they had now mounted up, because complaints from Pepys Road had kept stacking up. As a brief, it was a nightmare: a significant number of irritable, entitled upper-middle-class people were annoyed, and as a group they were horrible to deal with, not least because they could never get two sentences into any exchange without mentioning how much tax they paid. There were no clear leads, no clear suspects, no apparent motive, and no obvious directions for the inquiry. Up until recently, there was also no obvious crime. It wasn’t clear in what way he/she/they, the person or persons behind the campaign, had broken the law. But then there had been some changes with We Want What You Have. First, some way into the new year, the cards and videos had stopped, and the blog was no longer being updated. It wasn’t taken down but it no longer had any new content. Then, about a month later, the blog suddenly disappeared. When he saw that, Mill, who had the page bookmarked and checked it twice a day, punched the air. Fantastic! It was the best sort of problem, one which had gone away of its own right. The whole episode could be filed in that large, happy category of things you just ignored until they didn’t matter any more.

Then, about a month after that, disaster. Every single person in the street got a fresh postcard of their own front door, with nothing written on the back except a short URL. Mill typed in the address and sure enough the blog was back up, hosted on a new platform and with all the content that had been there before – only now it was worse. The same photos were there, but they had been defaced by digital graffiti. Somebody had written swear words across the pictures; not all the pictures, just some of them; about one in three. The swear words focused on very simple, very direct abuse: ‘Rich cunts’, ‘Wankers’, ‘Arsehole’, ‘Tory scum’, ‘Kill the rich’, and so on.

So this should have been a nightmare for Mill. Having gone away, the problem had now un-gone away. That should have been a perfect formula to produce the gloom that Mill, with his head in his hands, looked as if he was feeling. But that wasn’t what he really felt, not at all. What Mill mainly felt was curious. Most police work is routine. Mill didn’t complain about that since the job was the job; also, when the work wasn’t routine, and you didn’t know exactly what had happened, you still in some sense knew what had happened. If some drug-dealing toerag bled to death on an estate stairwell, even if you didn’t know who’d done it, you still knew who’d done it: some other drug-dealing toerag. Kosovan pimp shot outside a kebab shop, ditto. This case was not like that, and though the anthropology of the station prevented him from saying so, he was pleased it was up and running again. He had spent about forty-five minutes looking through the new material on the site, and his main feeling now was happy curiosity, with a twinge of something else. The new material felt, seemed, somehow different.

Taking the top folder down off the stack in front of him, Mill tried to focus on what it was about the new stuff that was hitting a fresh note. Talking it through with the DC who’d been helping him with the first wave of enquiries, Mill had reached a conclusion.

‘It could be an arty thing,’ said the DC. ‘You know, a performance. Something people are supposed to look at. To make them think, you know, stuff.’

He gave Mill a glance which clearly said: you should know, more your sort of thing than mine.

‘It doesn’t seem like that, though, does it?’ said Mill. ‘The photos are a bit shit, as opposed to seeming a bit shit but then when you look at them they’re actually quite good so it’s sort of art. You know that Fatboy Slim video, “Praise You”, where they’re dancing in a mall, really rubbish dancing, then when you look closely, you can see they’re really good dancers pretending to be crap ones? Well, not like that. This is bad photography which when you look closely looks more like bad photography.’

‘But he’s also done nothing violent. He doesn’t seem to single out individuals. It’s more about the houses.’

‘Yes – the houses and the place. It’s somewhere he knows well. And it feels like a he. A bloke. It’s a bit obsessive. A tiny bit OCD or Asperger’s. Going over the same thing over and over. He has feelings about the place, he knows it well. He walks or has walked past these houses over and over again. He’s boiling over with what he wants to say to the people in the houses. So, yes, it’s local. He’s local.’

And that was where they had left it. But now there was a whole load of new material, much darker and more abusive. Mill rummaged through the pile of photos and found the list of Pepys Road inhabitants he and the DC had made when they’d been working on the case, a few weeks before.

His mobile rang. Janie. Mill was pleased and also annoyed – why did his girlfriend always, but always, ring when he was in the station house?

‘I can’t talk.’

‘I know but I’m in Sainsbury’s, I want to do that kale soup I was talking about, the one with chorizo and garlic, but it’s got potato in it, are you still doing that low-carb thing?’

Janie was a serious cook and Mill, as he got closer to thirty, was starting to think about maintaining his weight. Being boyish was not always easy for a detective inspector, but it was better than being fat.

‘That’s correct.’

‘Is this because you couldn’t fit in those jeans? I told you, they’re Japanese, and a Japanese thirty is like an English twenty-six. You’re skinnier than you were when we met.’

They had been shopping at the weekend and Mill had had a denim crisis.

‘I can’t confirm that.’

‘Well, I’m going to make it anyway, there’s about a hundred grams of potato in the whole recipe. So long fatso, love you,’ said Janie and hung up. Mill tried to keep his face straight while he broke the connection, and didn’t quite succeed. Janie knew him too well.

Yes – and that was the thought. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have knew the street well or at least had strong feelings about it. He looked again at the list of names and opened up his web browser again to the new blog page. He scrolled through the list of names and cross-checked with the graffiti that had suddenly sprung up.

Mill’s notes said:

‘51 Pepys Road: Roger and Arabella Yount, two small children: banker and housewife, 40 and 37.’

Written across the top was ‘Tory cunts’. It was a handy generic insult for well-off people who worked in the City, and so yes, that might have been written by someone who knew them. Or it might have been a lucky guess.