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to do with us.”

6
    I t was the three men on the street that alarmed her. Doris Feldman was used to all sorts of comings and goings in that shop across the road with all those strange young men—how oddly they dressed; she would never get used to that—but they were as regular as clockwork, and it was always quiet by seven-thirty in the evening.
    Doris lived in the small flat above the ironmonger’s shop she still owned and ran in Haringey. As she was fond of saying, she was London-born and London-bred, though she was happy to acknowledge that her father had been foreign, arriving from Minsk when he was barely in his teens, with a sack of gewgaws over one shoulder. He’d had a market stall at first, selling flowers, before graduating to fruit and veg, then when he’d scrimped and saved enough to lease a property of his own, it was the hardware business he went into. “There’s money in nails,” he’d liked to say, even in the years when nails were literally ten a penny.
    Never married, Doris inherited the shop when her parents died, which meant nothing much more than some stock and the long working hours needed to sell it. The growth of DIY stores had almost been the death of her small shop, but in this dense and not very prosperous part of North London, not everyone had a car, and her long opening hours and her encyclopaedic knowledge of the stock she kept in the boxes, drawers and shelves of her shop attracted sufficient custom to keep her afloat. “Mrs. Feldman, you are the Selfridges of Capel Street,” one of her customers once told her, and she’d liked that.
    But it didn’t help her sleep. Why was it as she entered first her seventh and then her eighth decade, she seemed to have more rather than less trouble getting through the night? Come two o’clock she’d tend to find herself waking slowly until her mind felt clear as a bell. She’d toss and turn, put on the light, turn on the radio, turn off the light and toss and turn some more, then give up—and finally get out of bed. She’d put on her dressing gown and heat up the kettle while Esther, her cat (and almost as old as Doris, at least in cat years), slept in her basket by the stove like a baby.
    Which was why, this Friday night—Friday? What was she thinking of? It was Saturday already, three o’clock in the morning—Doris Feldman sat in the armchair warming her hands on her mug and looking out of the window at the street. How this neighbourhood had changed, though oddly, perhaps, it was quieter than it used to be. In her childhood there had been her kind, of course, immigrants from Russia and Poland, mixed with the Irish, who sometimes cut up rough, especially on a weekend night after too much time in the pub. Then after the war, the coloureds. Decent people many of them, but goodness they could make a noise, with their music and dancing and life lived on the street.
    Then most recently, the Asians moved in, really the strangest of them all. Quiet people, well behaved—closing time for them meant locking up their newsagent shops, not for them a night out in the pubs. They certainly seemed to pray a lot—she had long got used to seeing the men going to their mosques at all sorts of hours. They’d think nothing of closing their shops right in the middle of the day. But not the bookshop across the street—someone always seemed to be there. People in and out all day long, though they didn’t seem to buy a lot of books.
    Yet at night the shop was closed, and there was never any sign of life in the building. So this Friday night as she sipped her mug of tea she sat bolt upright when she saw three men suddenly appear in the street and gather in a huddle by the front door of the bookshop. They were dressed in dark clothes, jeans and anoraks, and one man wore a leather jacket. You couldn’t see their faces. One of them pointed towards the back of the building,