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are times when it’s impossible to make ends meet. But we are not here to judge. No. That is not our role. And you mustn’t blame yourself, sir. But I do have to point out that my priority, insignificant as it is compared to your own priorities, I know, my priority is not to risk the lives of my staff or those of my customers, but rather to defuse the situation and make sure we all leave here safe and well, sir. With everything that we require. Within reason. So if there’s nothing else...?’
    She had picked up the bags again from the floor and was holding them out to me, nodding sympathetically and smiling. Just for a second, I was sure she was going to wink at me.
    And at that moment, also just for the tiniest of seconds, I wanted to shoot someone. God help me, I actually wanted to shoot someone dead just to make it all stop, to make this whole nightmare stop. But instead I said, in a whisper, ‘No. Thank you. Nothing else,’ I glanced down at her badge, ‘thank you, Kathleen. By the way, shouldn’t there be two p s in happy?’
    Before I knew what was happening I was being bundled to my feet and rushed out of the door, bags in hand, into the street. The door closed behind me with a thunk, and the bolts shot home.
    Somewhere away in the distance, sirens began to wail.
    â€˜Please,’ I whimpered at the heavy wood. I slumped against it, making what I can only describe as a keening sound.
    The whingey ninja had struck again.
    I looked down at my hands and at the three bags of money I now held where there used to be one, I looked at the gun stuffed into the waistband of my trousers, and I looked at the card Kathleen had shoved into my hand that read if your service today was satisfactory, or if you have a complaint, then ring us on —and I run, run, run, run, run…

Interlude 1
    Inspector Mallefant sifts through the debris halfheartedly. Looks despairingly at his feet. Another pair of brogues destined for the bin.
    Ashes to ashes.
    Or it would be ashes if the fire brigade hadn’t reduced everything to a soggy, squelching morass of muddy filth.
    He sighs. He’s been doing that a lot recently.
    He knows that behind his back the constables call him ‘the Flying Scotsman’ as he puffs and wheezes around the office. Or ‘the Sighing Scotchman’. Or ‘the miserable old sod with the slow puncture’. He does not care. Soon he will leave all of this behind.
    If only it could be like the telly, he thinks to himself. Nice clean villains only too ready to confess, in nice clean houses bought from their nice clean ill-gotten gains.
    Inspector Mallefant has been a policeman too long. He no longer yearns for the big cases, the career-makers. He does not wish to be remembered as a gritty cop who always got his man. That way filth and disorder lie. These days he dreams of nothing more than sitting out the rest of his days behind his neat, clean and orderly desk, in his spanking-clean office, in his highly polished shoes. Waiting for the clock to run down so that he can take his orderly and sterile retirement.
    His colleagues think him a joke, a dinosaur. But he has been around too long to think he can clean up the sewer of London. It has no desire to be cleaned – and anyway, no sooner have you cleaned up a little patch than someone else is bursting to evacuate their bowels.
    He could show you the evidence in the newspapers (if the newsprint did not come off all over his hands, a fact that had caused him to give up the Daily Telegraph many years before). Or on the television, those great dust magnets that hoover up the corners of every living room in the country.
    People are obsessed with their own filth, and the filth of others. They cannot get enough of it, and they would not thank him if he were to get rid of it. So they are welcome to it.
    Anyway, he will be off soon to sit in his highly disinfected little corner of society. Funny – people used to worry