On arrival at the police station the custody sergeant informed me that Wayne had been arrested on suspicion of possessing class-A drugs for the purposes of distribution and supply. He would arrange for the investigating officer to fill me in on the details. I took a seat in the waiting room on the hard blue plastic bench that lined one wall of the room. The walls were light grey and empty. The only information being displayed was an ‘In Event of a Fire’ notice. Somebody had written ‘Drink Lager’ on the face of it. Moments later, a middle-aged man in a dark green anorak and blue trousers entered and walked up to the custody sergeant’s counter. He had huge feet and his dirty white training shoes were verging on clown attire. He wore thick-rimmed spectacles and enjoyed an elaborate hair puzzle combover which once again gave off the whiff of the circus. He spoke to the custody sergeant with a booming, relatively posh accent.

‘Are you in charge here?’

‘Yes, I am. How can I help you, sir?’

The sergeant was in his mid-forties. He sported a short back and sides and a large head. He was overweight and had fat luxury fingers that were manipulating a ballpoint pen as he stared indifferently at the computer screen in front of him. He held an insincere smile as his resting face and had an air of simmering indifference towards his work. A big meat-eater I reckoned, and not someone whose personal space you would invade, on the beach, for example, or in a doctor’s waiting room.

‘It’s my neighbour. I want him arrested and put in the cells.’

‘And why might that be, sir?’

‘I’ll tell you why if you’ll give me the chance. To put it simply, he has found a way of getting into my attic from his property. He gets in most nights and starts making knocking sounds and huffing and puffing like a small bear. It’s driving me mad and is a clear breach of my peace. To make matters worse, he’s foreign. It has to stop before I do something I will regret.’

‘What has him being foreign got to do with the situation, sir?’

‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? In his country it’s probably acceptable to scrut about in a neighbour’s roof space.’

‘What’s your neighbour’s name?’

‘Christ’s sake, you love to interrupt, don’t you? He’s called Mr Dushku.’

‘And have you spoken to him about this?’

‘I was getting to that. No, I haven’t, but I’ve written to him on several occasions and received no reply. He will probably say that he can’t read English but that’s a lie because I’ve seen him in his back garden reading the Sun newspaper. He can certainly speak English well enough when he’s shouting at his feral children.’