He remembers that they ate a lot of reindeer – stews, burgers and dried. Kim is mostly vegetarian now. He was happy then. He feels a certain melancholy for the time he’s wasted pretending to be a banker. Only after the whole place was crumbling did people in the City begin to question the true value of what they were doing and already they are forgetting. It was a conceit of the market that by operating at its diktat they were helping human progress. Nobody had read Keynes. He wishes he could claim he had been immune to the Zeitgeist, which was largely about creating money out of nothing. His old dad said – far too often – that banking is about dealing with the things you understand and the people you know. He had tried to persuade the old boy that there was money to be made in collateralised debt and hedge funds. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but what use are they? You can go on calling them derivatives until you’re blue in the face, my boy, but show me one.’

He hails a cab. All paper. The City fell in love with the notion of frictionless wealth.

He enters the gold-plated but functional reception of the safe-deposit company – he suspects it has an Arab clientele – in a small and badly converted mews house. There is plenty of that phoney brass that is supposed to evoke gold, but the effect is fly-by-night. He passes through a metal detector, shows his key, and the door to the strongroom, down a short flight of steps, is opened. What he does in there is his business. His key opens the heavy door of a locker, the size of a small cupboard, very smoothly. He sees a neatly bubble-wrapped parcel, picks it up and walks out with it. He wonders what else is hidden in this vault: drugs, krugerrands, piles of dollars, stolen goods. He has the feeling that all these items represent areas of future economic growth – crime, fraud, dishonesty, deception, narcotics, tax evasion, funny money. And he could be going to jail unless Cy comes through. But Cy is allowing him to twist in the wind for a few weeks. He hasn’t been able to tell Kim how bad things are and this presses heavily on him too. Back home all is warmth and order – trusting, adoring children, lovely open-faced Kim, with her predictable but welcome values – and out here all is hellish chaos.