On the basement floor I shoved open the door and looked out at an underground car park that was full of cleaning staff. They had been invisible from the street. Men and women, young and old, talking in twenty different languages, the unseen people who came every day to clean the floors and the windows and the toilets in the shining glass tower.

And I saw that they were beyond number.

The armies of the poor.

Chapter 3

3

WHEN I ARRIVED home that night I knew something was wrong even before I got through the front door.

We lived in a big top-floor loft and the stench filled every corner of it. I knew immediately where the stink came from because the clues were everywhere. A single shoe in the hallway, studded with teeth marks. Wooden floorboards that had been scrubbed clean to conceal evidence. A rubbish bin stuffed with stained kitchen roll. And everywhere there was that smell, meaty and musty and peaty. The smell of animal.

The dog had been bad again.

On the far side of the loft an elderly woman with white hair was sitting at one end of a sofa with a little red dog on her lap. At the other end of the sofa was a fresh wet stain that would now be there for ever.

Mrs Murphy was watching TV with the sound turned off, which was always her custom when my daughter Scout was sleeping.

Without moving his tennis ball-sized head from his front paws, the red dog – Stan was his name – rolled his huge round eyes up to look at me. You could see the whites of his bulging eyes around the blackness, as though the sockets were too small to contain such a pair of headlamps.

He caught my eye and quickly looked away.

‘Mrs Murphy,’ I said, ‘you’ve had so much work again.’

‘Don’t worry none,’ she said, scratching the dog behind his ears, her soft accent sounding as if she had never left County Cork a lifetime ago. ‘Stan’s still little. And the good news is that Scout ate her dinner. Some of it, anyway. She doesn’t eat much, does she? There’s nothing of her.’

I nodded and went off to look in on my daughter.

Scout was five years old and still slept in the baby fashion with her hands held up in loose fists by the side of her head, like a tiny weightlifter. The light was on in her room, although she must have been sleeping for hours.

She had slept with the light on ever since we lost her mother.

I picked up a school sweater from the floor, folded it and placed it on the back of a chair where Mrs Murphy had tomorrow’s school uniform all neatly folded and waiting. I hesitated, wanting to turn off her light. She couldn’t keep it on for ever. But in the end, I didn’t have the nerve.