She glanced up. ‘Sorry,’ she said sourly, and continued tapping.

‘Not the phone,’ Gordon said. ‘The seat.’

With a theatrical sigh, she moved six inches and, when he sat, added an extra two. He performed a furtive armpit-sniff. Okay, probably advisable to clamp his arms to his sides.

Although he had never set foot in the Capri courthouse until the last six months, Gordon was becoming a regular. He had been here for a court-ordered mediation session with Kelly. He had been here to query his rates. He had been here on Leonie’s behalf to submit paperwork relating to the Hilton. And he was here every second week over some new scrap relating to cliff-side developments around The Lodge. He was here nearly as often as the spectators.

The courthouse was an example of the bygone pretensions which Capri council was progressively demolishing in favour of brand-new pretensions. The double-brick walls were topped with pediments and frills, the moulded ceiling a riot of flying putti, a trip back to when adults were allowed to take undisguised pleasure in the sight of naked cherubs. Gordon wondered how many accused paedophiles had sat here and gazed upwards, dreaming of better days. If only the ceiling could talk.

There could have been child molesters in the current bunch of uninterested parties, Gordon thought, but you couldn’t tell them by sight the way you used to. When he grew up they were dirty old men in raincoats, schoolteachers, priests and peeping Tom surf club presidents. Now, they could be anyone. They could be his adversary in the current proceedings, this annoying dick from next door, David Archer, stark naked under his sharp navy-blue suit, company T-shirt and gleaming caca-brown slip-ons, grinning familiarly at Gordon.

David Archer had made his pile from stealing copyrighted images off the internet, slapping captions on them, printing them on T-shirts—all of which somehow laundered the copyright theft—and selling them online. His internet T-shirt meme empire now grossed many millions and the right, he seemed to believe, to use the path from Cliff Street to The Lodge for his workmen to transport a mini-excavator and steel girders to the puke-modernist shipping container for which he had demolished one of Bluebird’s original P&O-style family homes. Gordon had refused access via the path, and David Archer had threatened him with a court order.

Gordon’s initial reason for refusing was revenge for that demolished white house, which had been one of his take-off markers when he grew up looking at it from the surf. It belonged to the family of Neil Tasker, a school friend of Owen’s, and Gordon had always loved it. Gordon lost his objection at the development approval stage—Frontal’s council had yet to see a demolition it didn’t like—so now Gordon was fighting a guerrilla action with the hope of a negotiated settlement. The most irritating part was that David Archer was terribly good-natured, unfailingly giving Gordon a cheery hello down the beach or up the shops or over the fence while ignoring his letters, their tone shading in time from grumpy to desperate, suggesting a cash payment ‘in perhaps the high four-figure, low five-figure region’. Even now, Gordon’s attempts to play the righteous nimby were falling on blind eyes. David Archer flashed his surgically whitened teeth. Entitled cunt. An echo of Noel Chidgey’s hatred of the young came into Gordon’s head: What this generation needs is a good war.