Capital

off the sides of yachts. His face was often reddish with a touch of sunburn or windburn and his eyes were lined from outdoorsy squinting. Lothar beside Mark was like a colour chart for men’s faces: this is what happens when you go orienteering in the Black Mountains v. this is what happens when you never voluntarily look up from a screen.
    Lothar would not normally be here. Dropping in on people was a new thing he did; he’d read some book about ‘deconstructed’ management techniques. Since no one in the world was less deconstructed than Lothar, he had formulated a strict policy of spending half an hour a week wandering around the building talking to people and going into meetings at pretend-random. So here he was pretend-randomly at Roger’s daily check-in with his deputy.
    Roger might have been nervous at going over the software problems with Lothar in the room. Everyone in business knows that everything to do with new software is a guaranteed nightmare. But Mark never approached Roger with a problem to which he did not have, if not a solution, then an idea about where a solution might possibly be sought. The department was working with the IT department and an external contractor to develop a new, custom-made software package to display information on traders’ screens: the holy grail was the maximum amount of information with the minimum clutter, and the greatest amount of individual customisation (since the traders all had their own views about how they wanted their screens to look) combined with the shortest learning curve. This didn’t interest Roger particularly, but then not much of his work did, and he was always ready to take a view in his amiable, even-tempered way. That didn’t seem to be necessary here. In this instance, Mark’s tone implied that he knew Roger was busy, that it was not all that urgent a query, and that it would be entirely legitimate for Roger to wait for a new, improved version of the software before he deigned to look at it. So he was making it clear that his enquiry was pro forma, except that if it was too obviously pro forma it might look as if he did not value Roger’s opinion, which he did, he deeply did. All this was part of the way Mark was a perfect deputy, almost uncannily so. Lothar made no move to take the file. For a moment Roger thought it would be more expressive of confidence in his deputy, and therefore a better example of Deconstructed Management, if he didn’t look at the papers, but then a bat-squeak of instinct told him to play it the other way.
    ‘Let’s have a shufti,’ said Roger. Mark slid some screenshots in front of his superior. Sure enough, the screenshots were a little cluttered and busy. One of them displayed eight different graphs. Roger and his deputy looked at each other. Neither of them looked at Lothar, who in Mark’s case was his boss’s boss.
    ‘No,’ said Roger. ‘Still too much.’
    Mark bowed his head slightly. Because he was at the same moment doing something to his pen, this made him seem as if he was wringing his hands in a gesture of self-abasement.
    ‘I’ll bounce it back to them and tell them you said so.’ He nodded and backed out of the room towards the trading floor.
    ‘Good,’ said Lothar – one of the only things he ever said which came across with a faint flavour of German: ‘gut’.
    Roger got up, stretching to his full height, and moved towards the door, which Mark had closed as he went out. He pressed the button that made the blinds go up and looked out into the space where his colleagues were all in their various work postures – leaning into their screens, slouched and tilted backwards, or occasionally standing and moving as they talked into their headsets. The sun had gone down and the lights in the other tower of Canary Wharf seemed brighter; but the only people looking out the window were simultaneously on the phone, buying and selling. One or two of his people nodded or grimaced at Mark as he walked past. Roger momentarily found himself thinking about his million pounds, before wrenching his attention back to Lothar.
    ‘They’re a good bunch,’ he said. ‘Work hard play hard, same way all kids are these days.’
    ‘Figures look pretty gut,’ said Lothar in a neutral tone.
    Roger thought: yes!

4
     
     
    Ahmed Kamal, who owned the shop at the end of Pepys Road, number 68, came awake at 3.59 in the morning, one minute before his alarm clock was set to go off. Through long habit he was able to