'How do you mean it gets dark?' she said. 'How dark? It's not going to be all sex scenes, is it? Because that I would not be happy with.'

'No. No sex . . . Well, actually I don't know yet. But possibly a murder, certainly a suspicious death. It's about this guy who does exactly what I did, right? Screws up, buys a street five minutes before the recession hits and ends up in the same shit as us, right?'

'So far I think people would rather read about magical trolls,' said Monica. 'Is there anything else?'

'Yeah, of course. That's where the plot kicks in. This bloke decides the way out of all his troubles is to do a canoe thing!'

'A canoe thing?'

'You know, that bloke who went off in a canoe and faked his death for the insurance. People are always doing it. There was an MP, John Stonehouse, he left his clothes on a beach and then turned up years later in Australia. That's what my man decides to do. Fake his own death.'

'Maybe he should just try to write a novel like us.'

'No, no. Honestly, Mon, this is great. I've got it all worked out. You remember Bob?'

'Bob?'

'The tramp at Webb Street who sleeps in one of the houses sometimes. He's a total wreck. I told you about him, right?

Every time I go there I expect to find him dead.'

'Oh yes, I remember.'

'Well, get this. My man, in my story, has the same thing, a tramp hanging around his development site. And one day this bloke does find him dead.'

'The tramp?'

'Yeah, that's right. My hero turns up and goes in one of the houses and finds the tramp dead . . . or,' Jimmy's eyes filled with gleeful enthusiasm, 'perhaps my bloke kills him?'

'Why would he want to kill a tramp? Is he a nutter who kills homeless people like in that horrible American Psycho book?'

'No,' said Jimmy, 'he's very sane. Very together. He has a plan and he needs a corpse.'

'I thought he needed a canoe.'

'I'm not doing the canoe story, Mon!' Jimmy was becoming ever so slightly frustrated and suspicious that Monica was being deliberately obstructive because he'd poured cold water on her troll wizard idea. 'That's just an example of a famous insurance scam. My story's totally different.'

'Oh. Well, you didn't say.'

'I'm trying to say. This tramp's got ID, see,' Jimmy went on, 'just like my bloke at Webb Street. It's hanging round his neck, an old Big Issue seller's badge and accreditation. Now it's already occurred to the man in my story that with the way things are going in his life, what with the spiralling debt and fear of bankruptcy and all that, a false ID might not be such a bad thing to own.'

'Is that what you've been thinking, Jimmy?' Monica asked in sudden alarm, 'or did you just make it up for your story?'

'We-ell,' Jimmy admitted, 'it did sort of occur to me before, you know, just as a kind of fantasy thought. But the point is my man has been planning to go through with it.'

'Stealing the tramp's ID?'

'Exactly. At first that's all he has in mind. Pinch his badge while he's unconscious from sniffing petrol and use it to open a bank account. That way if my guy ever gets his hands on a bit of money it won't have to go straight to his creditors.'

'Jimmy!' Monica said angrily. 'You have been thinking about doing this! Don't tell me you've just come up with all this now?'

'I've said it had occurred to me, Mon,' Jimmy admitted, 'but just as an idea. I wasn't going to do it. It's a story!'

'Well, it had better be. Identity theft is a serious crime, Jim, whoever you steal from.'

'Believe me, Mon, this guy would not miss it. I doubt he even knows the ID is still round his neck. I doubt if he even knows his name any more. You wouldn't so much be stealing an identity as reincarnating it.'

'Jimmy!'

'All right, all right,' Jimmy said, smiling. 'I've told you, I'm just using the idea for my story. Anyway, like I say, that's the bloke's plan, pinch the ID while the tramp's asleep. But then of course a better idea occurs to him. Because on the day he's going to do it, he turns up at the street and finds the tramp dead.'

'Of natural causes?' Monica asked.

'If you can call sniffing petrol and drinking meths a natural cause, yes. But maybe, to make the story darker, my man actually kills him.'

'Just to get his ID? I thought you said he could lift it off him when he's unconscious.'

Jimmy grinned.

'Ah! But now he's had a better idea. A canoe idea. You see, he's in so much trouble with the debts that it occurs to my man that the best thing of all would be to . . . disappear.'

'Disappear?'

'Well, not so much disappear actually. But die.'

'The man, you mean? Not the tramp?'

'Yes, the man. You see, if he dies all his problems die with him, all his debts, any other shit I put on him. Maybe he's being done for fraud, I don't know. But whatever, his life is ruined. He needs a fresh start. A clean sheet. If he could "die" he could get all that. What's more, if he can make it look like an accident his wife gets the insurance. A spare corpse gives him the chance he needs.'

'How?'

'Well, it's obvious. The tramp's about his height, right? What my man needs to do is to turn that tramp's corpse into his corpse and then burn it, OK? All he needs to do is to plant a few personal things alongside Bob's body. You know, his watch, his wedding ring, maybe he's got some distinctive dental work which he gets removed and puts in Bob's dead mouth. Of course all Bob's teeth have long since rotted-'

'This is revolting, Jim,' Monica protested.

'It's not a chick book, I'll admit that,' said Jimmy. 'Anyway, my man then torches his own building. A real white-hot conflagration which totally consumes the body. The next day the fire brigade find a few charred human remains, that's all. Remains which, because of the molten watch or the teeth or whatever, are soon identified with the debt-ridden owner of the property who is now clean away with a brand-new identity and all his troubles behind him. What do you think?'

Jimmy sat back with a big smile and stole the last digestive.

'Well, it's not bad, I suppose,' Monica admitted, 'if you can make the characters interesting.'

'Of course I can. It's us, isn't it. Aren't we interesting?'

'Well, we are to us. I don't know about to anybody else.'

'Of course we are. Anyway, I've got a murder. That's always interesting. My man will definitely have to kill the tramp rather than just stumble on his corpse.'

'I suppose so. Proactive is always good in a story,' Monica agreed. 'But personally I still think my troll girl magician is a better idea.'

Coping Jimmy and Monica's new life was coming to seem more and more normal as far as it's possible to be normal when you're living from hand to mouth, huddled together in a six-storey house with the largest whirlpool spa in London slowly stagnating above you and a four-car private garage just a lift ride below.

There was certainly a normality which most Londoners would have recognized to their daily budgetary struggles. Struggles in which every penny was carefully counted and apportioned in order to cover the basic essentials for the family.

There was also a kind of normality (although a far less common one) in Jimmy and Monica's efforts to deal with the increasingly disastrous fallout from their previous existence. They still discussed vast sums of money around the tea table just as they had always done. Twenty grand here, a hundred grand there. This property, that property. Share portfolios. Pension schemes. The only difference was that now the sums they discussed were debts, not assets. When they talked about the price of a work of art they liked, a gorgeous gown or a shiny chrome ten-slot toaster it was with a view to selling it, not buying it.

They divided these two worlds, day-to-day survival and past and future debt, between them, one taking charge of each. Monica looked after what they called 'reality'. It was up to her to make ends meet on the meagre state benefits and emergency hardship payments that she negotiated with Social Security. Jimmy, on the other hand, was in charge of the insanity portfolio, which meant he had to attempt to make sense of the legal and financial issues surrounding their enormous debts.

Two budgets. One tea table.

'If we do potatoes and cheese tonight and tomorrow,' Monica said, pen in hand, making small piles of coins in front of her, 'we will have two pounds fifty left for Sunday lunch so I think we can run to a chop each for you, me and Toby. There's a fantastic two-for-one promotion at Asda, but I'm holding off to see what Lidl offer.'

'Sounds good,' Jimmy replied, punching up spreadsheets on his laptop. 'The Royal Lancashire have foreclosed on Webb Street so it's off our hands now. That means they've taken on the debts on the work done, so David's company are finally off our backs too.'

'Great.'

'Yeah, but this house is all debt. We still owe seven million on it.'

'Oh well,' Monica said with a confused shrug, returning to her own lists. 'Toby's going to need new shoes soon. There's some quite good trainers at TK Maxx for six pounds.'

'Sounds reasonable.'

'Yes, I think it is. But we don't actually have six pounds. Not this week.'

'Oh.'

'Do you think you could get the RLB to add it to what we owe them? Seven million and six wouldn't make much difference to them, would it?'

'I don't suppose it would, but sadly things don't work like that. When you owe a bank seven million they don't lend you any more.'

'No. I suppose not. Well, Toby's going to need new shoes.'

'We could try the BBS.'

'I don't think we'll be lucky.'

The BBS was the Bank of the Back of the Sofa, a blanket term for strip-searching the house. For some time they had been able to supplement their meagre resources by wandering through the Marie Celeste-like rooms of the now-unused upper floors of their house. Digging behind cushions, delving into jars and between cracks in the beautifully sanded and varnished floorboards. They had had some remarkable windfalls that way. Scrunched fivers had been found in old trousers. Dresser tops had revealed treasure troves of foreign coins that could be exchanged at a place on the Portobello Road (at ruinous rates). Toby's desk drawer had contained a bank book started by his granddad at the City Bank which Jimmy had quietly snaffled, leaving behind an IOU. Each trawl, however, yielded less and less and after a few months of trying the same trick Monica clearly thought there was little chance of them lucking upon enough change from their old life to buy a pair of kids' trainers.

Jimmy glanced down at his wrist.

'I could probably get fifty quid for this, you know.'

His fake Rolex. He'd worn it for more than fifteen years. Through all the good times he'd never replaced it. Why bother? The thing worked perfectly well and still looked great as far as Jimmy was concerned. What was more, once he'd got rich nobody ever dreamed it was a fake, which he thought was rather amusing. And of course it had sentimental value. It had been the very first thing that he and Monica had talked about, just seconds after they'd met and he'd tried to pull her and she'd ticked him off for thinking she'd be impressed with a Rolex. Monica had often joked since that if it had been the real thing she might never have gone for that coffee with him at all, because it was one thing to be a cocky little sod who thought ostentatious displays of wealth looked cool, but it was quite another to pay two thousand pounds to be one.

Jimmy smiled at the memory. He saw that Monica was smiling too.

'Hey,' she said, 'you can't flog the fake Rolex. It was the thing that first attracted me to you. That and the fact that you called yourself the Jimster.'

They both laughed.

'Besides,' Monica went on, 'you need a watch, so you'd only have to buy another one. We'll get the shoes. I'll speak to the people at the Social tomorrow. They might make some kind of emergency payment. Otherwise you and me can skip the chops on Sunday and we'll just do one for Toby. That will free up a pound. You can often get a good pair for that from the Oxfam shop.'

'Excellent thinking.'

'And there's the unclaimed lost property at the school. Sharif gets all his stuff from there. He doesn't mind at all.'

'Loving Korfa's dad. Amazing bloke.'

'And Korfa.'

'Absolutely. That friendship's been a godsend, hasn't it? Him and Toby have really looked out for each other.'

'Weird, isn't it?' Monica said. 'That was the thing we worried about most, even more than the knives. I mean if we're honest. All those kids who were trying to learn English as well as keep up with the national curriculum. Classes stuffed with confused immigrants making it impossible for anybody to learn. We were dreading it.'

'I suppose we were.'

'And now a confused immigrant with minimal English has turned out to be Toby's best mate.'

'His English isn't minimal any more either. Thanks partly to Tobes. I'm pretty proud of that actually.'

'Good old Tobes.'

'Yeah,' said Jimmy. 'Nice to know there's at least one alpha male in the family.'

'Jimmy,' Monica said, 'stop it.'

Slippery customer Inspector Beaumont sat opposite Rupert Bennett, trying to decide at what point to show his hand.

It would have to be played so carefully.

The card he held was no ace. A jack at best, or even a ten. He knew he did not have enough evidence to convict Bennett directly. He and his team of police and Inland Revenue accountants were almost there, but not quite. There was easily enough circumstantial evidence to embarrass Lord Bennett severely but there just wasn't enough to secure a conviction.

And of course Rupert was a man who could handle embarrassment.

It was a doubly irritating situation for Beaumont because his target was turning out to be just as smug and supercilious as he remembered from their brief acquaintance in Sussex. Beaumont did not normally take a personal view of anybody in his line of duty, but Rupert really got on his nerves. The man seemed to think himself untouchable. He positively gloated over Beaumont's inability to nail him cold. It was as if it made up a little bit for all the other reverses Bennett had suffered at the RLB.

Beaumont was also forced to admit privately that it was painful to him that Bennett showed absolutely no sign of remembering that they had once briefly shared a house. The incident had left such a deep impression on Beaumont, but had clearly made no impact at all on his sneering adversary.

'You'll find nothing, my friend. Absolutely nothing.' Rupert beamed. 'Principally, of course, because I've done nothing wrong. But if I had done something wrong, which I haven't, but if I had, I think I'm rather too clever a chap to let myself get cornered by PC Plod. You've searched and you've searched and you've come up with zilch.'

'Not quite zilch,' Beaumont pointed out, accepting an elegant glass cup filled with the creamiest caffe latte from a lovely young PA. 'If I had zilch I can assure you I wouldn't be here.'

'Perhaps you just prefer my coffee to the swill I imagine they give you at Scotland Yard.'

They were meeting in the splendid premises of Lord Bennett's aggressive new company. Maximalism offered investment advice to those gutsy traders who were making themselves ready to profit from the much-predicted bounce when it came.

'Zilch in terms of anything that would interest a judge or a jury,' Rupert replied, 'and quite frankly if you continue to waste my time with your silly questions and deeply hurtful insinuations, I may be forced to get my lawyers to make a claim against you for police harassment.'

'I don't deny that I am currently stumped, Lord Bennett,' Beaumont admitted. 'You've been extremely careful in your dealings. You set an excellent example to fraudsters everywhere.'