‘The man you rented the house from has never paid the mortgage. It is the building society who’s evicting you, Mr Travers, not your landlord. If you’ll just come down we’ll try and get this sorted out.’

He looked through the letter box. He could see a woman holding a young baby standing at the end of the hall. She looked haggard. Her clothes were crumpled and she had no shoes on. He noticed that her feet were filthy. She shook her head at him in a gesture of bewilderment.

‘We paid him the other day. We paid him four hundred quid, a month’s rent. We’ve been here for six months. We ain’t got nowhere to go.’

Two little girls, twins, walked from one of the downstairs rooms and went to her. The constable sighed heavily. He shut the letter box and went back to the little crowd on the pavement.

‘Poor bastards. This is happening more and more. Someone buys a house, gets a mortgage and then rents it out to poor gits like them. They take the four hundred a month or whatever for as long as they can, then when the place gets repossessed they’ve had it on their toes. Nowhere to be seen. Some of these blokes have eight or nine houses on the go. They make a fortune.’

Patrick nodded. Mortgage scams were as old as the hills. He hated these jobs.

‘Let me have a go.’

The constable shrugged. ‘I’m getting on to Social Services. They might find them a bed and breakfast or something.’

Patrick nodded and went up to the front door.

He bellowed through the letter box: ‘My name’s Patrick Kelly and I have been asked to repossess this property. I am a court bailiff. Now, Mr Travers, you have your wife and children in there with you, and they are probably frightened out of their lives. Come down and we’ll try and get something sorted.’

Ben Travers stood in the bedroom. He knew who Patrick Kelly was, everyone knew who Patrick Kelly was. He was a legend in his own lifetime.

Travers looked around the squalid room. Their so-called furnished accommodation had consisted of two old beds that had come from a second-hand shop, a broken-down settee, and a gas cooker that had probably been used all through the war. He looked around the room and felt the frustration and anger building up inside him. He had come to this, with a wife and three kids to support.

Every penny he’d saved had gone to getting the key money for this house, over a thousand pounds, and then the four hundred a month rent. They’d had to get away from Louise’s mother! They had lived with her for three months before they got this place, and it had been three months too long as far as he was concerned. Two years earlier he’d had a privatised council house in East Ham, a nice little business and his family. Now it had come to this, the repomen at the door for the second time. He caressed the baseball bat, then holding it down by his side slowly walked down the uncarpeted stairs.