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saddle and springboard from that to gain the roof of the shed. But Reilly was unutterably stupid.
    Joe threw some clothes on and went to investigate. The snow had gone as suddenly as it had arrived, replaced by a steady, depressing and very English drizzle.
    By standing on the flowerpot he could see the house on the other side of the fence was a 1950s brick build, not Edwardian. A Luftwaffe bomb must have flattened the previous home, leaving a gap like a missing tooth until it was repaired with a filling of modern brick. He walked round the block and found the brick house, its tiny front garden dominated by an imitation wishing well, guarded by a garden gnome, all constructed to conceal a drain cover. After a long pause and a lot of shuffling, the door opened to reveal an elderly space alien, its hair enrobed in silver foil, wearing a coat-length dressing gown of neon pink. Only its tartan slippers were of this earth. The creature clocked Joe’s wonderment.
    ‘I’m dyeing me ’air.’ Vowels marbled in Cockney. ‘No law aginst it. What you want?’
    Joe was matter of fact: ‘Have you seen my dog? A small black dog?’
    Reilly answered the question by bounding out from behind the woman and, standing up on hind legs, giving Joe’s hands a good licking, tail wagging.
    ‘Oh, so ’e’s your dog, is ’e?’ she said. ‘’E’s very thin.’
    ‘He’s half whippet. They’re running dogs and always thin.’
    ‘You should feed a dog like that.’
    ‘I do feed him.’
    ‘I’ve cooked ’im four sausages and ’e’s wolfed the lot.’
    The mystery of Reilly’s disappearing trick was solved. ‘Well, thank you very much. But we ought to be getting on.’
    She looked at him hard. ‘You’re a tinker with that accent,’ she said. ‘They don’t look after their animals proper.’
    ‘I’m Irish.’
    ‘Half-starved, poor doggy.’
    ‘I cooked a leg of lamb yesterday. He ate more of it than me.’
    ‘And ’e’s all nerves, too. He shivers. Should be ashamed of yourself. Bloody tinkers.’
    Joe could feel a cold rage build within him.
    ‘We must be going,’ he said quietly. ‘Thanks for looking after him.’
    ‘Bloody tinkers!’ she shouted, and slammed the door shut.
    Joe’s hands were trembling. One more piece of bigotry from her and he would have ripped the head off her garden gnome with his teeth. ‘Biting frightens the enemy’ had been one of Mr Chong’s favourite sayings. But this old biddy with the tin hair, she wasn’t the enemy. He knew whatever was eating at him – Vanessa running off with the banker, his job going down the pan, the fact that he had no choice but to run, again – wasn’t her fault. For the thousandth time, he told himself that he had to control his anger.
    He took Reilly’s lead out of his coat, snapped the hook onto a ring on the collar, and led him to his Transit van and opened the door. Reilly leapt up onto the passenger seat, coiled himself into a fossil and fell asleep.
    Rubber on drizzle, the windscreen wipers flicking this way and that, drizzle on rubber. The radio proffered a song of unrelenting happiness; South London, all concrete and asphalt, seemed anything but. Easing off the main road, Joe went under a concrete arch on stilts into the vast car park of the Scandinavian furniture megastore and parked. Reilly’s black eyes studied him, his ears sticking out – a silent, sardonic, doggy plea for his master not to split the pack.
    ‘Sorry, pal.’ The dog let out a little sigh and buried his snout in his tail, an expression of grumpy fed-upness that seemed spookily human. Joe clicked the van door shut apologetically, locked it and headed into the store.
    Off work, pending the inquiry, Joe had decided to put up some shelves in the spare room of his flat. Vanessa had always nagged at him to do it; now that she had left him for good, the thought that he was finally submitting to her long-expressed wish half amused him. The shelving necessary for the job was in