Piotr was taking the day off. He’d been interviewing the Bhattacharyya women yesterday, and would have to do more of the same tomorrow, but today they were having their perfect baby (perhaps he should pity the spoiled little thing) and Piotr – well, he was walking aimlessly around London in a foul mood. Sometimes he missed the manual labour of his teenaged summers and today, in particular, he would have liked to vent his mood on something productive, something literal. His fingers were aching in the cold.

His flat was at the wrong end of Angel, small and increasingly dusty and he suspected there was a leak from upstairs rotting the inside of his bathroom wall. He could smell the damp, but not see it. A bad sign, surely. Even Sweet Potato roamed around with her nose in the air, letting him know that she wouldn’t put up with this substandard life for much longer. He was surprised – though grateful – that she hadn’t run off years ago. And then this morning he’d left the flat to find that his bike, which he kept chained up in the communal stairwell along with several others, had been stolen. Not just the bikes – they’d stolen the whole banister. Sawn right through it with a hacksaw, at both ends, and then lifted the whole lot. Must have been two of them at least. Shit’s sake, was it a gang? His wasn’t even a very good bike. Not that he would be able to afford a new one. He needed to get this article about the baby finished and filed as soon as possible – he needed the bloody money.

Perhaps it was the unashamed wealth of the Bhattacharyya family that had annoyed him. Perhaps it was the self-satisfied money of the whole of west London. No, it wasn’t that. He wasn’t like that. At least he never used to be. He was just unnerved by Holly, by the way she’d looked at him as if she knew everything about him and was profoundly unimpressed. And he would have bet everything he’d ever owned on the fact that Holly Bhattacharyya’s wide-eyed granddaughter had never had her bike nicked.

He criss-crossed through the greens and parks of Islington, mostly empty in this weather – there was frost on the grass, crunching beneath his feet. Avoiding Holloway Road, he found himself walking around the outskirts of Paradise Park. He pushed the gate and walked over to one of the benches.