Dan looked at the telephone on the desk, and the cord, snaking through a hole, out of sight. There had been gangs on the streets and at school, where there had also been a chess club, run by an ancient Hungarian woman, called Mrs Róheim who looked exactly like a man. Of Dan’s four closest friends from primary school he lost one to drugs, and one to excessive schoolwork. The third went off the radar, first for the streets, then a girl, then moved to Berlin. The fourth was still Dan’s best friend, and worked in TV production, and Dan didn’t see enough of him. Ten-year-old Damilola Taylor was murdered fifteen minutes from Dan’s home. They were the same age. Dan didn’t know Damilola, or any of the African kids, but he knew the gang that killed him by sight. The violence that was in the air most days had been in everything that day. You’d swear you could see it, in the cracks in the pavements and the bricks in the walls; violence and grief. And yes, Dan’s mother smacked him, when she was frightened for him, or desperate, for reasons of her own. She also held him close to her heart and kissed his head, and read to him. He’d felt her tears drip from her cheek to his. She had been angry at his father, and described his treatment of her, a woman of Jamaican heritage, as a political act. One of her boyfriends hit Dan in the head once, and when he told her about it she never saw him again. Another had taken them both up in a helicopter for her birthday, high above London. It had been one of the best days of Dan’s life. She had quit the boyfriends when she took up the Bible, but her embracing of the notion of sin was a kind of violence in itself. Did Dan have a violent childhood? It had been both playground and minefield, and his home had been his nest as well as his prison. A rough childhood in a bad area? Whatever.

He looked from Dufour to Karen, who waited attentively, and back to Dufour.

‘Oh look, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What can I tell you? I told the other guy the same yesterday. I wasn’t in gangs, I didn’t deal drugs, I finished school. I went to college. That’s it.’

Karen translated, with an air of finality. She seemed pleased with his answer, at least. ‘How big is your house?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Your home, with your wife, is it big, or small?’

‘This again? He likes his property, doesn’t he? It’s small.’

‘Why is it so small?’

‘It’s what we can afford,’ said Dan, and felt suddenly humiliated. He could see why Dufour would be suspicious of him. He was related to a multimillionaire, and he was still a failure.