‘Parking meters, parking meters,’ said the copier.

‘Well, John, that’s your privilege.’

So it was going to be the good cop, bad cop routine, but Pearly wasn’t fazed. His job was to get the selling price down without losing a client, and his skills were honed from long practice. He drew McMillan away from the copier towards the door where he could lower his voice to a comradely level and where there was less distraction. Even as he talked, he noted how scruffily his client was dressed, the window display so obviously long unchanged, the mousetrap half hidden beneath the lowest shelf of A4 paper stacks with a small, flat corpse in its grip: the creature’s tiny jaw bared in the agony of death. Almost certainly the business was failing and the brothers forced to realise capital by the sale of the building. Pearly had a dim memory of their father, who had worn a fedora and used to drive a Sunbeam-Talbot. The Pegasus Building would be sold and the money invested in a new business that would fail in its turn, until the sons had lost everything their father had accumulated. Pearly took no satisfaction in his foresight, but there was nothing he could do to forestall the end of another minor dynasty. His job was just to sell the property in a professional manner, not advise the McMillan brothers on how to be successful.

‘I’ll have to run it past Eli,’ said John at the end of their conversation, having finally come around to Pearly’s view, ‘but if you don’t hear anything by the end of tomorrow you might as well go ahead.’

‘I think we might get some real interest this way. I’ll give it a good push on the website.’ Neither of them had anything else to say, even the copier was silent, and so Pearly shook hands and went his way. The place had a lingering shroud of inevitable failure, and it occurred to Pearly as he left that on all his visits there he’d never seen a customer on the premises.

Pearly had experienced disappointments and setbacks, but overall his life had been one of success and achievement. Often he was puzzled, even bewildered, by the ease with which some people failed when success was possible. As someone with vigour, ability and self-belief, Pearly tended to impatience with those lacking such qualities. He expected others to have the advantages of his own nature and achieve similar outcomes from their confrontation with life.