He entered the council chambers shortly before his 11 a.m. slot, which, worryingly, turned out to be less a slot than a bracket. He sought a seat among the drunk drivers, shoplifters, fine defaulters and haunted-looking AVO-seekers bundled together at ‘11 a.m.’. Distributed equidistantly along a bench, none had the courtesy to make room for him. He stood, mustering peak cranky-face, above a young woman tapping her phone.

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.