‘Thank you, sir. You don’t know how much that means to me.’
‘Keep an eye on your mailbox over the next few weeks. There’ll always be an opening at the Yard for men of your calibre.’
The smile on PC Pilbeam’s face started to spread as the meaning of this remark sank in. Promotion … Fast-tracking through the ranks, and a move to London … This was the beginning of his ascent to greatness. He was on his way.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked, turning to Lucinda.
Apparently she had.
‘I know,’ she said, her eyes shining — almost mistily — with admiration and contentment. ‘Isn’t it wonderful news? Do you want to borrow the key, so you can go and move your things?’
‘What?’
‘You heard what the constable said. That horrible man’s been locked up, so he won’t be staying in the hotel tonight. There is a spare room after all. So that solves our other problem!’
Which left PC Pilbeam with an entire, solitary, brandy-fuelled night to lie awake, staring at the ceiling in his seventh-floor room, and contemplating the unfathomable mystery, the frankly insoluble case that was Severe Miss Lucinda Givings.
~ ~ ~
George Osborne, addressing the Conservative Party conference, 6 October 2009:
‘We are all in this together.’
WHAT A WHOPPER!
1
My name is Livia and I come from Bucharest.
We have a saying in my country: Totul trebuie s aib un început. Which means: Everything must have a beginning. So I will begin my story like this.
I have been living in London for more than five years, and my job is taking the dogs of very rich people for their daily walk. Most of my clients live in Chelsea. I used to live there myself but then the rents became so high that I moved out to Wandsworth so now every day I begin by taking a bus across the river. I look out through the windows of the bus as we cross the bridge, and from that point on, every time the bus gets to another stop I can see the signs of wealth more and more clearly inscribed in the streets and feel the air itself getting heavier with the tangy scent of money.
I get off at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and then walk towards The Boltons. The houses here are big and beautiful. Well-tended gardens hide behind walls which are as smart and politely forbidding as a security guard at an exclusive nightclub. Closedcircuit cameras sprout among the ivy and the sycamore trees. My first call of the day involves stopping outside one of these walls. There is a small green door in the wall and, next to it, a discreet keypad upon which, if you possess the secret knowledge, you can enter a five-digit code which admits you to this earthly paradise. I have been coming here every day for fourteen months but I have not yet been told the code.
Instead, I have to send a text message to a Malaysian housemaid, who shortly afterwards emerges to open the door in the wall. She is accompanied by a large, bright-eyed, restless black Labrador. This is Clarissa. She at least greets me like a friend. So now I take her for her walk. If today is a busy day I will only take her as far as Brompton Cemetery. If I have plenty of time we will go all the way to Hyde Park.
Sometimes in Hyde Park I meet Jane. I can always recognize Jane, even from a distance, by the number of dogs she will have with her. Always four or five; sometimes as many as ten. If the dogs will allow her, we’ll sit at the café next to the Serpentine and drink coffee together.
Shortly after we first met, Jane told me her story. She used to work in the City of London as a trader for one of the world’s leading investment banks. After a while she realized that she had hit a ceiling and would never make as much money as her male colleagues. Also the stress and the long hours were damaging her health. She left her job and spent a few weeks resting. As a favour, she started walking a friend’s dog while he was at work, and then other working people started asking her to walk their dogs for them. She charged her clients £20 an hour for each dog and they paid her in cash. By walking many dogs at once she found that she could sometimes make £500 in a day — or as much as £100,000 every year, but without paying any tax. More than she had earned in the City.
In addition to this, she liked walking, and she liked dogs.
In the middle of the morning I return Clarissa to her home in The Boltons. Once again I send a text message to the housekeeper and we exchange a few words as she takes her back. As I say goodbye to the dog I wonder what kind of life she leads away from me, on the other side of the wall. I have never seen her owners. I know nothing at all about the family she belongs to. All I know is that they never seem to be at home.
But the word ‘home’ can mean different things. Whenever I return to Romania I feel that I’m coming home but I also regard my little flat in Wandsworth as home, even though I’ve only lived there for a year and a half. It feels like my home because I come back to it every night to feel rested and safe, and I’ve filled it with objects that I love because they mean something to me.
These beautiful big houses in Chelsea are not homes in any sense that I understand. For most of the year they stand empty. Or at least, you think they are empty, but inside, there is a kind of life taking place. A phantom life. Members of staff — cleaners and cooks and chauffeurs — dust haunted rooms and polish cars in underground garages during the morning, and then gather together in the kitchen at midday to eat silent lunches. Dogs sit by windows and look out into gardens and wonder why their owners bothered to buy them in the first place. Meanwhile, the family is … where? The father is in Singapore, the mother is in Geneva, the children … who knows.
Other houses here are even emptier. They contain no furniture, no curtains at the windows, no pictures on the walls. They are always dark. In the winter, when I come back from the park or the cemetery to return the last of my dogs to its owner’s house, the silence and darkness of these streets begins to frighten me. It is as if some terrible plague has come to London and everybody has had to leave but nobody has told me. Once I walked back from the park with Jane, through the streets of Chelsea, and she explained to me that people buy these houses now — rich people — and then just let them stand there, watching money attach to them like barnacles to a sunken ship.
‘Think about it,’ she said. ‘A house like this may be worth thirty-five million pounds. Its value appreciates at the rate of ten per cent — three and a half million every year. That’s seventy thousand pounds a week. Ten thousand pounds every day. What else do you have to do, apart from buy it, and then just leave it alone? The people who own this house —’ (she pointed at the white stuccoed mansion opposite us in the street) ‘— are ten thousand pounds richer than when we walked past here this morning.’
I always learn something new, when I talk to Jane. Sometimes what she tells me fills me with a reluctant kind of respect for the people who understand, much better than I do, how to acquire and increase wealth. Other times I think that, just as a certain famous Romanian used to suck the blood from his victims’ necks, now it is money itself that has begun to drain the life out of this great city.
2
Rachel stood still and rested for a while, hands on hips, listening to the noise of the wind as it rustled the branches of the plum tree. It was one of her favourite sounds in the whole world.