Leo’s mother and father came from Trinidad. He went on lining up trimmed law reports as if no one had spoken. True to form, Colin was now shouting. And equally predictably, the phone rang.

Penny went to answer it. ‘Gill and Thompson, Bookbinders. Good morning. Oh, yes. Hello, Quintin.’

Colin was thumping the counter and shouting that we weren’t bookbinders at all, didn’t deserve the name, not when we wouldn’t do a simple job of work for an ordinary person, who had been born here, not like some of them.

Quintin Farrelly was our most lucrative, knowledgeable and exacting customer. He was the owner of the Keats Letters. Penny blocked her free ear with one finger and struggled to hear what he was saying. ‘Yes, yes. Of course we can. Sorry, there’s just a bit of a noise in here.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Colin,’ I said. ‘There’s something we could do for you, if you’d like it.’

He stopped shouting, which was what I had hoped for. ‘What?’

‘Well. Let’s have a look at what Penny’s doing, shall we?’

I took him by the arm and showed him the photographer’s portfolio. It was A2 size, in dark navy-blue cloth with a lining of pale-green linen paper. The man’s name, Neil Maitland, was blind tooled on the lid. Colin examined the job with an aggrieved expression.

‘What do you think of it?’

Penny gave me a grateful thumbs-up. She wedged the handset under her ear and reached for the order book and work diary. ‘Yes, Quintin, I’m sure we can do that for you.’

‘It’s nice,’ Colin admitted, rubbing the green interior with a heavy thumb.

‘We could make you a beautiful case like this, and you can put your recipes and pictures in it, and then your mum can show it to all her friends.’

‘Can I choose the colour?’

‘Of course.’

‘And it would have to have my name on the lid, not this Neil’s.’

‘Of course.’

‘Any colour?’

‘Any colour you like, Colin.’ Including sky blue pink.

He expressed a preference for red. He left his bag of papers with us, stressing that it was to be kept in the safe whenever we were not actually working on it, and promised that he would call in again tomorrow to see how the job was progressing. Penny hung up, after asking after Quintin’s wife and the Farrelly children.

‘Christ on a bike,’ Leo muttered as the three of us raised our eyebrows at each other. ‘Anyone want a coffee?’