Too little too late. The mortgage was three months in arrears and there were two letters from the lender—some cowboy-sounding outfit called HomeTime—the second one a lot nastier than the first. In June the Spains had swapped their bill-pay mobiles for pay-as-you-go, and both of them had more or less stopped calling people—four months’ worth of phone-credit receipts were paper-clipped together, barely enough to keep a teenage girl going for a week. The SUV had gone back where it came from at the end of July; they were a month behind on the Volvo, four months behind on the credit card and fifty quid behind on the electricity. As of their last statement, there had been three hundred and fourteen euros and fifty-seven cents in the current account. If the Spains had been into anything dodgy, they were either very bad at it or very, very good.

Even when they got careful, though, they had kept their wireless broadband. I needed to get Computer Crime to flag that computer every shade of urgent. Patrick and Jenny might have had no one in the flesh, but they had had the whole internet to talk to, and some people tell cyberspace the things they wouldn’t tell their best friends.

In a way, you could probably say they had been broke even before Patrick lost his job. He had made good money, but their credit card had a six-grand limit and it had spent most of the time maxed out—there were a lot of three-figure charges to Brown Thomas, Debenhams, a few websites with vaguely familiar girly names—and then there were the two car loans and the mortgage. But only innocents think broke is made of how much you earn and how much you owe. Ask any economist: broke is made of how you feel. The credit crunch didn’t happen because people woke up any poorer than they’d been the day before; it happened because people woke up scared.

Back in January, when Jenny had spent 270 euros on some website called Shoe 2 You, the Spains had been doing just fine. By July, when she had been too scared to change the locks against an intruder, they had been broke as all hell.

Some people get hit by a tidal wave, dig in their nails and hold on; they stay focused on the positive, keep visualizing the way through till it opens up in front of them. Some lose hold. Broke can lead people to places they would never have imagined. It can nudge a law-abiding citizen onto that blurred crumbling edge where a dozen kinds of crime feel like they’re only an arm’s reach away. It can scour away at a lifetime of mild, peaceful decency until all that’s left is teeth and claws and terror. You could almost catch the stench of fear, dank as rotting seaweed, coming up from the dark space at the back of the closet where the Spains had kept their monsters locked down. I said, “It looks like we might not need to go chasing after sister-history, after all.”