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could not bring himself to speak again. It was simply not necessary. His mouth was so thick and full now with the taste of Wesley.

Three
    ‘What you did back then was unforgivable. It was mean, it was selfish, it was thoughtless, it was just… it was just plain wrong. ’
    The man who spoke these stem words –his name was Ted, and he was a fresh-faced but avuncular small town estate agent –did so without the slightest hint, the slightest note, the slightest tremble of disapproval in his voice. His absolute lack of ire was not merely striking; it teetered, it lurched, it practically tumbled head first into the realm of remarkable.
    Wesley, to whom this speech had been principally directed (but who didn’t appear to have digested a word of it), acknowledged as much –internally –as he swung himself from left to right on an ancient and creaking swivel chair in Ted’s Canvey High Street office. He was inspecting property details. He was considering renting.
    ‘Which bad thing in particular?’ he asked idly. There were so many bad things.
    ‘ Which thing? The Canvey thing. In the book. The Katherine Turpin thing.’
    Wesley stopped swivelling and glanced up. ‘What? In the walks book? All the stuff about perimeters? That was years ago.’
    He liked this man. Ted. He liked his wide mouth, his charming effervescence, his loopy sincerity, his almost-silliness. Wesley appraised Ted’s thick lips as they vibrated, like two fat, pink molluscs performing a shifty rhumba.
    ‘Two years ago. Twenty-seven months, if you want to be precise about it,’ Ted calculated amicably.
    ‘Two years? Fuck. Is that all? ’
    Wesley frowned –as if this was a vexatious detail that had not previously occurred to him –while Ted waved to a passerby through the agency’s large, exquisitely high-polished picture window. It was the third time he’d done so in as many minutes.
    ‘You seem to know everybody around here,’ Wesley observed drily, turning his head to peer outside, ‘it must be very trying.’
    ‘Trying? Why?’ Ted didn’t understand. ‘I find people their homes. It’s an essential… it’s a quint -essential service.’
    ‘I get your point,’ Wesley puckered his lips slightly, to try and stop an inadvertent grin from sneaking out and plastering itself –with unapologetic candour –all over his mouth. Then, in a bid to distract Ted’s attention, he suddenly pointed, ‘There’s a woman. Do you see her? Over in the Wimpy. Sitting in the window, directly opposite the Old Man.’
    ‘The sun’s in my eyes,’ Ted squinted, then moved to the left a fraction. ‘Ah… Yes. The one in the sweatshirt? Short hair? Eating a doughnut? Looks like a boy?’
    ‘That’s her.’
    ‘Who is she?’
    Wesley shrugged, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I asked.’
    He glanced around him, momentarily nonplussed. It was a neat office. Ted was neat. In fact he was immaculately presented. He wore a dark grey suit from Next, a spotless white shirt and a silk tie with an image of Sylvester the Cat spewed repeatedly in full technicolor onto a noxious, salmon pink background. His two shoes shone like heavily glacé’ed morello cherries.
    ‘So… Ted, was it?’
    Ted nodded.
    ‘So Ted, are you the boss of this agency?’
    Ted did a humourful double-take, ‘Do I look like the boss?’
    ‘I don’t know. How does the boss look?’
    ‘Different. Older. Shorter. Brown hair. Glasses. Huge moustache.’ Ted was a strawberry blond.
    ‘I knew a man like you once,’ Wesley observed, rather ominously, casually flipping through the sheets of property details again. ‘He looked like you, had the same cheerful… no, altruistic notions. Always beautifully turned-out. Then one day he became fascinated by pigeons’ feet, and that was the end of him.’Ted tried to look unfazed by this strangely baroque influx of information. He almost succeeded.
    ‘He’d travel around,’ Wesley elucidated, ‘catching stray pigeons and giving them pedicures.