Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘What?’ said Roger.

  ‘That’s bank property,’ said Clinton. He was matter-of-fact about it. Roger put the BlackBerry back down on the desk. He was almost done. He put in a bottle of wine that a member of his crew had given him as a thank-you for something a couple of months back. His desk diary, largely unused, was the last thing to go in his box, which was about a third full. Roger picked it up.

  ‘OK,’ said Clinton, now clearly in charge. He opened the door, and Roger went through it, the two security guards trailing behind. This time one or two people pretended not to stare; one or two of them looked as if they wanted to say something but weren’t sure what to do. Slim Tony, bless him, held his hand up to his ear with thumb and index finger extended like a phone: call me, or I’ll call you. Then he made a drinky-drinky gesture. Roger smiled at everyone he made eye contact with, because after all, you had to act as if you could see the funny side.

  At the edge of the lift lobby, he stopped. Clinton and his colleague stopped too. Roger straightened his back and, with his box in front of him, raised his head to address the whole room.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s been real.’

  Then he turned and went out to the lift. It took a very long time to come. Everything seemed too loud: the whirr of the cable as it ascended, the ping of the button announcing its arrival, the faint grinding as the door opened. Down they went. At the ground floor Clinton opened the security gate for him.

  ‘Do you want my pass?’ asked Roger. Clinton shook his head.

  ‘It won’t work any more,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’

  And Roger walked out of the door of Pinker Lloyd for the last time.

  85

  Arabella had her good points. She was, in her way, resilient. She had the toughness of her obliviousness. So if he had had to guess, Roger would have guessed that she would be brave and strong about what had happened. Her stronger, stuff-the-world side would kick in and she would be realistic and practical. She would be a rock.

  That turned out not to be the case. Wrong, hugely wrong, mega-wrong. Arabella went to pieces, and did so in the most direct way possible: by bursting into tears, falling onto the sofa, and saying, over and over and over again, ‘But what are we going to do?’

  The right move for Roger would obviously have been to sit down on the sofa beside her, put his arms around her, and tell her that everything was going to be all right. But Roger found that he didn’t have it in himself to do that. Wasn’t the first stage supposed to be denial? Roger felt a distinct lack of denial. What had happened wasn’t nearly deniable enough.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Roger. ‘I have no idea.’

  He had been feeling pretty shitty when he walked in, and Arabella’s reaction was making him feel even worse. The trip home had been hell. Not as hell as it would have been if he’d had to take the Tube; that, carrying his box of personal effects, would have killed him. So no, not that bad. But still pretty bad. The cab ride had been nauseating; the driver was one of those cabbies addicted to side roads and back-doubles, and he seemed to pride himself on never travelling in a straight line for more than fifty metres, with a special penchant for targeting streets featuring sleeping policemen, so the cab’s swaying, bouncing motion left Roger feeling physically sick. He also found himself, for the first time ever, thinking about the cost of the cab. All those other times he’d taken taxis, and never given it a thought . . . the time sweeping through the dark with Matya in the seat beside him, watching her reflection in the glass, looking at her smile, imagining giving her one right there on the wide back seat . . . and now here he was, his cardboard box and his rising nausea, one eye on the meter. Jesus it was expensive. When had the prices gone up so much? It was going to hit thirty quid, for God’s sake!

  And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he’d never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard work and London, was something simpler: the fact that added to any equation, Arabella made it worse. What don’t you need, when you’ve just, completely out of the blue, lost your job? What’s literally the very last thing you need? A spouse convulsed with disbelieving grief. That’ll do it.

  Arabella was now rocking backwards and forwards.

  ‘What are we going to do, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where are the children?’

  ‘What are we going to do? I don’t know. How should I know? Out somewhere. With Matya. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Well, for a start, we’re going to have to cut back on expenditure everywhere. Everywhere,’ said Roger. ‘No child-support money to spend on frocks, not any more’ – because that was where that £1,500 a year went, a fact he knew she didn’t know he knew. Ha! Take that! Screw you very much! Arabella blinked. He’d got her! Yeah! Take that!

  ‘Gym membership . . . lunches out . . . all that stuff will have to go.’

  Arabella kept rocking.

  Sod this for a game of soldiers. Roger needed to get some air. He turned and went out the door thinking, I know what I’ll do: I’ll go for a walk. In the five years he’d been living in Pepys Road, this was something he had never done, not once, in the midweek. He had never not been at work and in the holidays they’d always been expensively elsewhere.

  Roger strode out the door and down the road. He dodged an Ocado van backing into a parking spot, and then had to pause to allow a dog-walker to sort out a crisis with tangled leads and a large poodle which, from the way it was sitting immobile on the pavement, seemed to be on strike. It didn’t help that the dog-walking man was trying to use one of his hands to send a text. Down the road, Roger could see Bogdan the builder, the Pole Arabella used sometimes, throwing a piece of plaster into a skip. He saw Roger and the two men nodded at each other. Maybe I could be a builder, thought Roger. Do something a bit more physical. It would suit me. Always liked to do DIY, back in the day when I had the time for it. Still got the energy, the physique, the va-va-voom. Life in the old dog yet . . .

  He turned the corner and headed out on the Common. This again was something he’d only ever done on the way to or from work, or wheeling the boys out at the weekend, a time quite a few other bankers could be seen, all in their various tribal uniforms, their pushchairs so big and unwieldy they were like infant SUVs. Weekends were all about the Euro bankers with their sweaters over their shoulders, the yummy mummies on their mobiles, the British military fitness crowd shouting at their idiotic punters, unable to believe that they were being paid for yelling at people to do sit-ups. On sunny days, huge numbers of young people would remove as much of their clothing as was legally possible and sprawl on the grass drinking alcohol. Simple pleasures are the best. There had been far less of that this summer than usual, a fact you could tell just by seeing how green the grass was. The sprawlers looked like yobs and proles, but Roger knew that appearances were deceptive; just because they had their kit off and were getting drunk didn’t mean that they weren’t web designers, secretaries, nurses, software engineers, chefs. It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody.

  The Common demographic was different in the middle of the day, middle of the week. It was more underclassy. Four homeless men were sitting on a park bench drinking Tennent’s Super, while a woman, looking just as rough as they did, harangued them about some injustice. They were nodding, agreeing, feeling her pain and at the same time feeling no pain whatsoever.

  Three truanting teenagers were practising skateboarding on the pavement and into the road. It was as if by the energy they put into not caring about the traffic they could make the traffic go away. Roger thought about saying, hope you’ve filled out your donor cards, lads – then thought better of it. There were three of them, after all. A few yards away, a scowling skinhead, in his late thirties so old enough to know better, was letting his pit bull shit on the path, and visibly daring anyone to
say something to him about it. A couple more truanting teenagers were playing basketball on the netless court, and beyond them, the skateboarders who could actually be bothered to use the skateboard park were practising their stunts and moves. Roger had done a little skateboarding in his youth, but in those days the emphasis had been on what you could do with the board when its wheels were in contact with the ground, whereas now the emphasis seemed much more on lifting the board in the air, or shooting the bottom of the board on the edge of the ramp, or grabbing it with your hand while airborne. A man in a red bandanna rode up to the top of the ramp, flipped up into the air, grabbed the bottom of his board, and came back down with the board on the top edge of the structure, which had the effect of making him fall over backwards onto the wooden floor. Some of the other skateboarders applauded – ironically, Roger assumed.

  Actually, Arabella’s question had been a good one. What are we going to do? What am I going to do?

  An ice-cream van had set up beside the duck pond, and Roger felt that a large ice cream, a seriously childish one like a double scoop of vanilla with two chocolate flakes, would be the ideal way to celebrate his new-found independence/unemployment/disgrace. But, he realised on consulting his pockets, he didn’t have any money: his cash was in his jacket. He was a man in pinstriped trousers, a City shirt and a tie, walking across the Common with no money.

  The sky began to spit. Time to get back home before he got drenched. Roger turned and picked up the pace to beat the squall he could see coming in from the west, the clouds dark and rainy. Other people were having the same idea, and the Common was staging an informal evacuation. By the time he came back past the skateboard ramp, everyone had melted away. The rain abruptly became heavy and vertical. Roger realised he wouldn’t make it home without getting drenched, so he detoured sideways across to the row of shops that ran towards the high street, and took cover under an awning. Other people had had the same idea, and every awning had a small huddle underneath it. Next to him a pair of goths had taken the opportunity to start snogging. Next to them, a cross-looking Indian lady in a shalwar kameez was fighting a losing battle against a folding umbrella which would not unfold. She kept pushing the top back down into the handle and trying to release it, but hadn’t mastered the wrist technique to make it snap open. Roger took pity on her.

  ‘May I?’ he asked. She handed the umbrella over and Roger click-flicked it into position. As he did so, the rain began to slow down.

  ‘They’re tricky,’ said Roger as he handed the umbrella back.

  ‘They’re badly designed,’ said Mrs Kamal. ‘But thank you anyway.’ She headed off into the rain. It was clear that it wouldn’t slow down much, so Roger decided to take the plunge. He hunched his shoulders and got ready to move off, and as he did so, he saw the billboard advertising the Evening Standard, and his heart momentarily stopped. It said

  ‘Bank Crisis’.

  And Roger thought, oh God no. But then he picked up a copy of the paper and his racing heart eased: it wasn’t about the scandal at Pinker Lloyd but about Lehman Brothers. The subhead said ‘US Giant On Brink Of Collapse’. The front-page details of the piece were fantastic. Basically, Lehmans were sitting on a pile of assets which weren’t worth anything, and no one wanted to buy them or bail them out, so they were going to go under. Roger put the paper back, smiled, and set out home through the rain at a slow jog. Nice to know he wasn’t the only one having a super-shit day.

  86

  Shahid had noticed that the police used a variety of different techniques to start their interrogations. Sometimes they would be waiting for him when he went into the interrogation suite; other times they would make him wait before they came into the room; sometimes they would come in and just sit there for a bit looking over notes; other times they would be barking questions at him as soon as he was through the door. They would be friendly or less friendly, they would try to make him want to please them or they would act as if they had long since given up on him. He assumed it was all a game for them, a set of manoeuvres, and did his best to ignore the inevitable emotional turmoil he felt. He often found himself wondering who was on the other side of the mirrored wall in the suite; what kind of running commentary was happening there.

  He went into the room on his fourteenth day in custody and saw that today there was a different policeman, one he hadn’t seen before. Or had he? He wasn’t one of the regulars and yet he didn’t look completely unfamiliar. He was a young man, younger than Shahid, fresh-faced and slim-shouldered, in a nice suit. He was on his own, which was not standard practice.

  ‘Hello,’ said DI Mill, ‘I’m Detective Inspector Mill.’

  It came back to Shahid.

  ‘You were at that public meeting, the one about the creepy website and cards and stuff,’ said Shahid. ‘I went to that.’

  ‘I know you did,’ said Mill. He dropped his eyes to the folder in front of him and looked as if he were reading it – a copper’s trick Shahid had got used to by now. The silence stretched.

  ‘You haven’t turned the machine on,’ said Shahid.

  Mill didn’t answer. He gave the impression he was thinking about something else. Eventually he said,

  ‘Hardly any of my friends understand why I want to be a policeman. They think all you do in the police is go round banging people on the head and arresting drunk drivers. Or something – they don’t really know what they think, they just know they’re against it. But the real problem with the job isn’t anything to do with it being violent or difficult or with what the other coppers are like. The real problem with it is the sheer amount of routine. The drudgery. Most of it’s routine and detective work is no different. It’s not TV. Most of the time you know what’s going to happen. Surprises are rare. Nice surprises are even rarer.’

  He fell silent again. Shahid felt no need to say anything.

  ‘And then something comes along which is a little bit different’, said Mill, ‘and it reminds you why you wanted to do the job in the first place. Like being here, for instance. I’d never been here before. Paddington Green. It’s where they bring terrorist suspects, as you know. Been doing it for years, since the IRA days. I’ve seen it on the news all my life. But this is the first time I’ve ever been inside. That counts as something new. It’s pretty cool. I like new things.’

  Mill went quiet again and seemed to be following a train of thought.

  ‘I’ll tell you what else is cool. Terrorism is cool. I mean, it’s very uncool as an activity, obviously. But the thing about terrorism is, the resources given to it. From a policing point of view. Antisocial behaviour, all of that, it’s not such a big deal for us. People mind about it and all that but it’s not what gets you up in the morning. Somebody’s nicked your bike? Good luck with that. Somebody’s planning to stick a bomb somewhere? Different story. So that’s what’s cool. The amount of resources you get on terrorist cases. The kinds of things you can do with those resources are amazing. Like, getting somebody’s internet service provider to hand over the records of what sites they’ve been visiting over the last couple of years. That’s part one. Part two is getting the manpower to go through that stuff and see where it leads you. And this is where we get to the surprising thing. Surprising to me anyway. You following me so far?’

  Mill was looking closely at Shahid. He was looking for signs that Shahid knew what was coming. He didn’t see any. Shahid looked the same way he had all the way along – like an irritable and, it had to be said, not very guilty thirtysomething. He nodded to Mill’s question.

  ‘What we found was this: that all the initial traffic setting up that blog We Want What You Have – the one which you came to the meeting about – came from your IP address.’

  Mill folded his arms and sat back to watch. It was unmistakable: Shahid Kamal’s first reaction was total shock.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yup – it came from your IP address. It didn’t come from your PC, or if it did, you’ve had it professionally cleaned up to target
just those files and no others, which my colleagues tell me is unlikely. But it definitely came from your IP address.’

  Shahid looked away and thought for a few moments.

  ‘This is a trick. The reason you aren’t taping this is because it’s all a lie and you’re trying to entrap me into something. You lot have come across no evidence of anything so you’re using this thing which was going on in the street and just chucking it at me.’

  In response, Mill reached out and turned on the tape recorder that was always present in the suite, attached to the side wall. He said:

  ‘DI Charles Mill, 16 September 2008, interrogation of Shahid Kamal, tape starts at’ – he glanced at his watch – ‘14.17, no others present. So Shahid, I’ve just told you that there is a proven link between your IP address at your flat and the blog We Want What You Have, whose proprietor is under investigation for charges of harassment, trespass, obscenity, vandalism.’

  ‘Vandalism?’

  ‘Yup, that was when the clever clogs went down the street and keyed every car in it, all the way down one side and back up the other. That’s a lot of damage in a street of fancy cars. Call it ten grand. Custodial sentence, right there.’

  Shahid shrugged. He did not look unduly troubled by the thought of people’s SUVs being messed up. Mill went on:

  ‘And there’s another one, animal cruelty. Dead birds, someone’s been sending them to houses in the street. Blackbirds. Not all of the houses, just some. In A5 envelopes. Bit sick, if you ask me. Know anything about that?’