I hate smoking, especially the smell of stale tobacco on the fingertips. My father smoked when we were kids and Mum would nag him constantly about how disgraceful it was and how it wasn’t really the kind of thing people like us did. My mother is a snob, but a provincial one. My great-grandparents had taken their familial sum in 1925 when it had purchasing power similar to over one point two million today. They had used it to buy a rather grand house on the outskirts of Worthing and to seed an export business sending dry-cleaning chemicals to the United States. During the war they had taken a ton of government contracts and then reneged on them all, eventually losing everything when my great-grandfather was imprisoned for fraud and embezzlement.

My grandparents’ sum was worth the equivalent of about half a million when they took it in 1955. They were sensible; they invested in a modest village house and the education of their son at a well-respected private school. That was where my father met my mother; she was at the local Catholic girls’ school, one of the many young ladies who hung around Edenbridge in the hope of marrying up.

His own familial worth was the equivalent of sixty grand in 1985 when my father hit forty. Luckily my grandparents passed away a year later and so he inherited the house.

I think my mother had greater dreams when she was younger, had thought she was marrying into old money that would give her a level of status and security. She still acted like the minor royalty of their village, mind, and headed up both the WI and the local church choir, ensuring that things were run just how she thought they should be. My mother was born to have staff at her whim, but she made do with the local villagers instead.

My full name is Christopher Aimo Jeremiah Hardcastle. Growing up my father called me Kit. My mother, who is half-Finnish, snuck Aimo into my name—it means “generous amount.” A dig, I presume, at the familial sum on which she was expected to raise me. I have used it for certain parts of my work in the past, telling horny old women that it’s not money that the generous amount refers to. Amidst the blushes and the giggles none of them ever seemed to think that, given it is a name my mother bestowed on me, it’s a bit creepy. Unless that is part of their Jocasta fantasy—most of them were at least thirty years my senior, after all. I miss those days sometimes. Carefree, lazy days with the occasional evening entertaining, for two hours at most. But it’s a young man’s game and I had to move on.

I earn my living now working for a very small, very exclusive and very private company. We specialize in understanding trends and picking out patterns in a sea of certain meaninglessness. If that sounds vague, it’s because the job is elusive and constantly changing. I’d been wondering what I was going to do with my life as I hit the big 3-0 and the old ladies began to call slightly less frequently. As I surfed the web one day a little pop-up had appeared, an advert for some IQ testing site. I was bored and so I took the sample test. Five minutes later I got an email asking me to complete some psychoanalytical profiles and offering me five hundred quid for a few hours of my time.