Capital: A Novel

by John Lanchester

  ‘That’s disgusting, but it’s nothing to do with me.’

  What Mill did not say was that the dead birds had been sent in the last fortnight – in other words, while Shahid was already in Paddington Green. The link between We Want What You Have and Shahid’s internet access had been found two days before, after the latest wave of activity. By the time they knew about the link with Shahid, they already knew that he couldn’t have been responsible for what was now going on; at best he might be involved with somebody else. But there was a strange pattern to the way the site had worked. When it began, it had been photos of houses taken, Mill had long since concluded, by someone with a strong local interest. Then it went away for a while. Then it came back again, much darker, with abusive labels on the site, abusive postcards sent to the houses, graffiti in the street, cars being keyed. Now dead blackbirds had been sent through the post to seven different addresses. It seemed much angrier. The shift in tone and behaviour was baffling.

  Shahid’s eyes were moving from side to side. He was thinking hard.

  ‘I know nothing about this,’ he eventually said. ‘Try the Belgian, if you can find him.’

  ‘It began some time before he came and stayed with you. Have you changed the encryption on your wireless internet at any point in the last months?’

  ‘No,’ said Shahid, unthinkingly – before realising he had just been tricked into giving up a perfect defence. If his internet access had been open, the traffic might have been nothing to do with him. He sighed. ‘It is encrypted and I am the only person who had the password. As you know, I let the Belgian use my internet access but not my computer.’

  ‘You’ll understand why this looks strange to us. You’re under arrest as a terrorist suspect, now it looks as if you’ve been making all sorts of menaces on the internet, threatening your neighbours, scaring the living daylights out of them. Doesn’t look too great, does it?’

  ‘I’m starting to get used to being accused of things I didn’t do,’ said Shahid. ‘I have no reason to believe you.’ He crossed his arms and looked over at the one-way glass. Yet again he found himself wondering who might be on the other side and what they might be thinking.

  ‘So who did this?’

  ‘No idea,’ said Shahid, and for the first time in their meeting, it seemed to Mill that he wasn’t telling the whole truth.

  87

  The London centre for asylum and immigration tribunals, where cases concerning the immigration status of asylum-seekers to the UK are decided, was near Chancery Lane. Hearings took place in the complex of court rooms, where the judges shared offices and picked up their weekly paperwork, the whole building having the inconsistently decorated air and too-bright colours of underfunded public-sector work. There were times when the whole building seemed to smell of instant coffee. This was the place where the fate of Quentina Mkfesi was to be decided.

  The hearings had a standard format. On the Monday, the judges – a separate inquisitorial service inside the Ministry of Justice – would cold-read a brief and hear evidence from the witnesses, represented by their lawyers, with the government’s case for refusal of asylum being made by another lawyer. On Tuesday they would have more hearings. On Wednesday they would go home and begin to read up on the case. On Friday they would make a decision and write up their judgment, which would determine whether or not the applicant would be allowed to remain in the UK.

  It followed from this that the allocation of judge for an asylum applicant was crucial. So although Quentina Mkfesi didn’t know it, her entire future – the next few years of it anyway – hung on the identity of which of two members of HM Government’s immigration and asylum service would be assigned to deal with her case.

  On Monday 22 September, Alison Tite and Peter McAllister, both of them immigration judges, arrived at work within thirty seconds of each other. They shared an office on the second floor of the building, clumsily partitioned so that it shared a window with another office. Both of them were carrying coffee, hers a cappuccino in a styrofoam cup from the small Italian deli down the road, his a gigantic milky drink from the Starbucks by Chancery Lane Tube station.

  Alison Tite was a thirty-seven-year-old barrister with two small children, married to an actuary, who had initially practised family law, but who had then drifted into immigration work because she wearied of the set cast of characters in her former field, and of the intensely personal bitternesses involved. Immigration work felt more connected to the larger currents of history, which she found more satisfying. Her favourite part of the cases was always the two days she spent reading background information on the specific case files. A recent example: she read The Kite Runner as background to a lurid case about a would-be Afghan refugee whose brother had been stoned to death and whose family shop had been firebombed and then confiscated. Or so he said; there was something convincingly Taliban-like about that sequence, arson before confiscation, and Alison allowed his appeal. Alison liked the feeling that the man in front of her, or woman or child, came as the representative of a world, of a way of life, and she needed to understand that world to make a judgment about whether that man/woman/child should be allowed to stay or had to be deported. Her favourite book was We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families.

  The great flaw in the system was that deportation did not mean deportation. In almost all cases it was not legal to return the asylum-seeker home to Sudan, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, or wherever. In most instances, the asylum-seeker packed off on a plane would face torture or death or both. That was wrong and, more importantly to the system, illegal under European human rights law. So failed asylum-seekers couldn’t be allowed to stay legally: they could not work or claim a full range of citizens’ benefits from the state. And yet they couldn’t be sent back to the country they had come from. Even from the most realistic, least idealistic perspective, it could not be seen as an ideal solution. In practice, what happened to the failed asylum-seekers was that they were sent to detention centres.

  Alison knew that the main thing about the system was not her opinion of it, and within the constraints of her power, she did what she could to be as fair as possible. If she was the judge on an applicant’s case, that applicant stood a much better than average chance of winning the right to remain legally in the UK. She had one other thing going for her: she could write very well. That meant that although the percentage of her cases granted PRR (permanent right to remain) stood out as high, when her judgments were read, they were difficult to challenge. When her name was on the docket, the asylum-seeker’s barrister cheered up, and the Home Office’s groaned, and reached for the Red Bull.

  Today it was Alison who was groaning. She had period pains, her youngest child had earache and had woken her three times the night before, her sister had invited herself down to stay for the weekend and in consequence had inflicted a double load of everything – cooking, cleaning, washing up, commiserating, hand-holding, and complaining about schools and husbands. The result of all this was that for Alison, in a way she would have admitted to almost nobody, being at work was a relief, verging on an outright pleasure. Gang-raped Somalis, tortured Syrians, genitally mutilated Kikuyu activists, Chinese gangmasters claiming to be political dissidents: bring ’em all on. Not a single one needed to be given Calpol, or told that they still didn’t look a day over thirty. When she arrived in her office, a fat file, tied with the traditional ribbon – the ribbon that always made her think of other people’s fingers, and all the things those fingers must have done – was already on her desk.

  Peter McAllister sat on the other side of the same desk, with the same degree of non-view out of the semi-window. He was stretching his arms as far back and up as they would go, and his pinstripe suit was riding up. He was looking a bit porky, Alison felt; as if whatever horse-riding-type exercise he was taking at the weekend was not keeping at bay the effect of his eating and drinking during the week. Her first impression of him, two years earlier, was that he looked like a
privileged man passing into early middle age with his early assumptions and prejudices entirely intact. That impression was accurate: that was exactly who Peter McAllister was. He had been to Radley and St Andrews, had been a pupil under an old friend of his father’s, had gone into commercial law but had disliked using his brain quite so ferociously, so had ended up here, where his moral certainty was useful. He was a member of the Tory party and he and his wife, who was the one with the money, were back-and-forthing about whether he could put himself up for a constituency at the next election: realistically, he would probably do best to fight a Labour safe seat this time, then bag a winnable one next time round. He’d be in his early forties then; with a following wind, he’d be a minister within a few years, and after that, you never knew. In the mean time, he was fighting the good fight by injecting the traditional values of Englishness into an immigration system which was always in danger of ‘producer capture’. The people who worked with immigrants always ran the risk of coming to believe that they worked for the immigrants. That was a mistake Peter never made. He remembered who paid his salary. He did not rule for the government (he would have said, for the taxpayer) in every case, but he did often enough to mean that his and Alison’s judgments more or less cancelled each other out. They got on perfectly well, discussed work in neutral terms and mainly when it concerned technical points of law, and never socialised.

  ‘So what have you got?’ said Peter, unwrapping his own brief, after he’d finished the yawn induced by his stretch. ‘I’m not at all in the mood today, rode ten miles cross-country at Josie’s dad’s place last night and I’m so stiff I can hardly move. Getting too old for it. So what’s on?’

  Alison had scanned the first page of her brief.

  ‘Saudi dissident. You?’

  ‘Some Zimbabwean woman. Quentina something.’

  88

  Roger came downstairs in the late morning to find that the post consisted of three bills and a mysterious A5 envelope. It had something in it, something that wasn’t a book or a CD. He pulled the envelope open and his head jerked back when he saw what was inside: a dead blackbird, rigid with rigor mortis. The bird was starting to smell. With it was a card with the usual words written on it: ‘We Want What You Have’. He threw it in the kitchen bin. The perfect start to the day.

  The sheer unfairness of life. That was the thing that Roger couldn’t get out of his mind, couldn’t stop thinking about. The sheer unfairness of life.

  He had done his job. He hadn’t been flaky or negligent. If he were to be completely honest – if you were to strap him down and pull out his fingernails – he might admit that there had been a passage of time when he was a tiny bit absent minded, a tiny bit floaty, a tiny bit prone to spending the odd hour here or there thinking about how nice it would be to be bending Matya over his desk and taking her from behind. But that had only been for a while and was in any case no worse than anyone else. It was all as if he was being punished for a crime – and what had he ever done wrong, apart from having a deputy who was a crook and a sociopath? It just wasn’t fair.

  The worst of it was the maths. The Younts’ outgoings were still what they had been. Two houses to run and maintain, neither of them cheap, clothes and holidays, Arabella’s completely out-of-control discretionary spending – he’d given her a semi-lecture on the subject a few days after he was sacked, and the net effect of that was that she went out with Saskia, got drunk and came back in a taxi with four colossal bags of new clothes, to cheer herself up. Talking to Arabella about money was like trying to talk to a child about nuclear physics. There were the cars, the service costs which seemed to bleed out of them – by chance he’d just had the car insurance and travel insurance bills in the last few days, which had caused him to go and look at the house insurance contracts, which were apocalyptically expensive, even given the fact that they’d shelled out for the also-apocalyptically-expensive burglar alarm and home security – laundry and haircuts and taxis and piano lessons for Conrad and swimming lessons ditto, and food and wine and Arabella’s personal trainer and a constant haemorrhage of house bills for carpets and chairs and kitchen equipment and who knew what, and nursery fees for Conrad in the mornings combined with Matya who was lovely, who was the incarnation of loveliness, but who was not cheap, when you drilled down into what she cost the Younts and allowed for the fact that if they let her go they would be saving some serious cash.

  Money coming in, money pouring out had been a source of anxiety to Roger even back in the days when money actually was coming in. This, though, took that to another level. This was Apocalypse Now. The money was still going out – gushing out like a bust tap – but it wasn’t coming in. Zero. Zilch. Nada. The big egg. Zip. Sweet FA.

  The other possibility was going to get a job. Of course that was the first thing Roger had thought of. He wasn’t going to just sit there on his arse, not him. That wasn’t the stuff the Younts were made of. He called an old chum from school who now ran a headhunting company, and tried to put a few feelers out. But that experiment in testing the water had gone badly; very badly. The first warning had been just how hard it was to get Percy on the phone. He’d called five times in two days. Finally he’d rung and the phone had been answered by a different secretary – Percy’s PA must have been away from her desk – and he’d said ‘it’s a personal call’ with just enough negligent public-school authority for her to put him straight through. When he got through, Percy had been reserved. No, strike that: he’d been outright shifty. He had treated Roger like a down-and-out trying to touch him for money.

  ‘Old boy,’ said Percy. ‘Always so good to hear from you.’

  ‘I won’t beat about it, Perce – I’m looking for work. I’ve had a spot of bother with Pinker Lloyd. You might have heard some chat. Somebody stuck his fingers in the till and because he worked in my department, they’re trying to stick it on me. My plan is, get another job and then sue the bollocks off them. I mean, really take them to the cleaners. The advice I’m getting is, we’ll be talking seven figures.’ This was a flat lie. Roger had been so demoralised and taken aback that he hadn’t even spoken to his solicitor about what happened – and the fact was that the bank’s employment contracts were drafted in such a way that he would be unlikely to see any cash at all. Another of life’s lavish unfairnesses, but not one he was about to share with his old school semi-friend. ‘Anyway, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on my rear end counting out the settlement and living off the interest on the interest, so I thought perhaps we’d have a chat, see what’s knocking around out there?’

  ‘It’s good to have a plan,’ said Percy. ‘Absolutely. Very good.’ Then he paused. He was doing that thing of pretending to have answered Roger’s question, even though he knew perfectly well that he hadn’t.

  ‘So I was wondering if we might put something in the diary,’ said Roger, advancing over the parapet of his own desperation.

  ‘Quite so, quite so. Absolutely,’ said Percy. ‘Only – well, I hate to play this card. May I speak to you as an old pro?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come to you.’

  ‘Experience teaches that there are some times when it’s best to let the market come to you. I know you’re a trader at heart, Roger’ – he knew nothing of the sort, not least because it was entirely untrue – ‘and I know you’re a go-and-get-’em type. Like to make your own weather. Create your own reality. A strength, a great strength. Really. In normal times. But – well, there’s a bit of a but knocking around at the moment. Not just the Pinker Lloyd thing but the market in general. Lehmans was a horrible shock. It’s pandemonium out there. People are wondering who’s next. They’re wondering what’s going to jump out of the cupboard and shout Boo! And this doth not for a hiring climate make. Nobody’s taking anybody new on. Nobody feels too sure about being kept on themselves. You follow me? Bad time to go looking for work – don’t want to seem desperate. Very off-putting. I tell my clients, it’s like sex. More desperate you are, more likely y
ou are to have to pay for it! See my point? In your shoes, best course of action is not to act. Not just now. Let it shake down a bit. Dust settles. I tell my client, dust always settles – though it can take longer than you think. Best all round, eh?’

  ‘I thought that in this case—’ Roger managed.

  ‘That’s just it, though, Roger,’ said Percy. ‘This is the case. It’s all a question of timing. Long and short of it, speaking both as a pro in the field and as your old mucker, best to lie low for a bit. Trust me.’

  And that was that. Percy hadn’t so much given him the brush-off as picked him up bodily by his belt and collar and slammed him head first into a wall. This was made much, much worse by the fact that while Percy was an utterly obnoxious excuse for a human being, exceptionally vile and greed-crazed even by the standards of City headhunters, than which no form of life was generally agreed to be more low – he did know his field. If what he was saying, in effect, was that no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose, then no one would touch Roger with the nozzle of a septic tank suction hose. He wouldn’t be wrong about that.

  This meant that Roger would be ill-advised to send out his CV and start touting for work. There was nothing for it except to make massive cuts in expenditure and try and make the cash in their current and savings accounts last as long as possible. Those balances stood at around £30,000 and Roger knew – was horrified to know it, but knew it nonetheless – that at current rates of expenditure the money wouldn’t last two months. Then they would be into his savings, the various assets wrapped in various tax-free devices over the years, and then into his pension fund. In the City, there was a term for this. It was called ‘being completely fucked’.

  So there was nothing for it except massive cutbacks in expenditure, starting right now. Action this day! Right now meant today, meant this very hour. Preferably this minute. Showdown with Arabella and then full-scale lockdown on expenditure. The thing was, though, that Roger felt that he didn’t want to do that; couldn’t face it. What he wanted to do, it turned out, was to log on to something called the White Shirt Specialists, which had a new offer where you could order three gorgeous white shirts for £400, a considerable saving from the normal price of nearer £500. Roger had been thinking about this saving, holding it back for a rainy day, and now here was the rainy day and Roger felt himself browsing a range of subtly different collar and sleeve and button and cuff designs, and also the question of monograms, which often struck him as vulgar but which in this case could be made delightfully understated, white on white. He found himself wondering if it were really true that the shirts could be made to fit perfectly with only the requested measurements of height, age, weight and collar size. There was something depressing – or maybe it was liberating? – about the fact that your physique boiled down to just these four measurements. That was all it took to sum you up: 41, 96 kg, 1.90 m, size 17 collar = Roger Yount.