‘My last tenant was a perfectly nice young woman. Her name was Nicola. She had lived here for almost a year and I had no idea that there was a problem.’ Georgia rubs the moving band in the middle of Hazel’s ring. ‘She was ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with ambition but she was, shall we say, very confident. I should have realised there was something wrong but all my other tenants had managed before her and never complained. She earned a good wage and paid her rent as we agreed, the same twenty-five per cent that everyone pays. But she liked to spend. She always had nice clothes, and she would show me them, doing twirls in the hall in some new frock or a nice jacket. Told me she got them in charity shops, but of course that wasn’t the case. They were new. Everything was brand new. She bought them all on credit, and took the labels off.’

‘You told me you didn’t like credit.’

‘I don’t. But I can’t roll back time. I had the same rules for all my lodgers at the beginning; nothing on tick. They were Annie’s rules and I never changed them. Everything must be paid with cash.’ She pauses. ‘But once we all had plastic instead of pound notes I had to accept that a cash economy wasn’t reasonable any more. Everyone was on the electoral roll, because of the house rule about voting, and that meant they got letters offering them credit cards. And by the time Nicola was here, you could opt for e-statements, with nothing coming through the post. I’ve never had a credit card so I didn’t realise that, and I think she knew that I didn’t know. She moved out three months before her two years were up. She was the only one who has ever done that.’ Georgia picked up one of the outsized green paperclips and tapped it on the table, moving it from the long side to short, to long, to short. ‘And a little while afterwards, the letters started arriving. Letters from a credit card company. I saved them, thinking she would come back to collect her mail, but she never did. She just vanished. And by the time the letter arrived from the Sheriff Court, I hadn’t seen her for six months, so I opened it and that’s when I realised what she had done.’

‘You must have been furious.’