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discover that these people and I have at least one opinion in common. This Woggle,any history of fraudulent claims? False addresses? Double-drops, financial skulduggery, that sort of thing? Anything that might make him vulnerable to discovery?’
    ‘No, sir, on that score he’s completely clean.’ There was a brief pause and then, almost uniquely, all three of them laughed. If there was one thing that Woggle wasn’t, it was clean.
    ‘Shit, man,’ Jazz observed, aghast.
    ‘Haven’t you ever heard of soap?’ Woggle had taken up what was to become his habitual position, crouching on the floor in the room’s only corner, his bearded chin resting on bony knees which he hugged close to his chest, his great horned dirty toenails poking out from his sandals. Woggle was dirty in a way that only a person who has just emerged from digging a tunnel can be dirty. He had come straight to join the House Arrest team from his previous home, a 200metre tunnel under the site of the proposed fifth terminal at Heathrow Airport. Woggle had suggested to Geraldine the Gaoler that perhaps he should take a shower before joining the team, but Geraldine, ever watchful for the elements that could be said to make up ‘good telly’, assured him that he was fine as he was.
    ‘Just be yourself,’she had said.
    ‘Who’s that?’ Woggle had replied.
    ‘For I am the sum of all my past lives and those I have yet to live.’ Woggle stank. Digging tunnels is hard physical work and every drop of sweat that he had sweated remained in the fabric of his filthy garments, a motley collection of old bits of combat gear and denim. If Woggle had worn a leather jacket (which, being an animal liberationist, of course he would never do) he would have looked like one of those disgusting old-style hell’s angels who never washed their Levi’s no matter how often they urinated on them.
    ‘Guy, you are rank!’ Jazz continued.
    ‘You are high! Here, man, have a blow on my deodorant before we all get killed of asphyxiation and suffocate to death here!’ Woggle demurred.
    ‘I consider all cosmetics to be humanoid affectations, yet one more example of our sad species’inability to accept its place as simply another animal on the planet.’
    ‘Are you on drugs or what?’
    ‘People think that they are superior to animals, and preening and scenting themselves is evidence of that,’ Woggle droned with the moral self-assurance of a Buddha, ‘but look at a cat’s silky coat or a robin’s joyful wings. Did any haughty supermodel ever look that good?’
    ‘Too fucking right she did, guy,’ said Jazz, who personally used two separate deodorants and anointed his skin daily with scented oils.
    ‘I ain’t never gone to sleep dreaming about shagging no cat, but Naomi and Kate are welcome any time.’ Layla spoke up from the kitchen area where she was preparing herbal tea.
    ‘I have some cruelty-free organic cleansing lotions, Woggle, if you’d like to borrow them.’ Layla. Real fob: fashion designer and retail supervisor. Star sign: Scorpio.
    ‘They won’t be cruelty-free after the plastic bottles end up in a landfill and a seagull gets its beak stuck in one,’Woggle replied.
    ‘Don’t be fooled by that fashion designer thing, sir,’ said Hooper.
    ‘She’s another shop girl. It comes out later in the second week. Layla cannot believe it when Garry points out that she and Kelly do basically the same job. Layla thinks she’s about a million miles above Kelly. There was quite a row.’
    ‘Garry likes annoying them all, doesn’t he?’
    ‘Oh yes, anything for a reaction, that’s Garry.’
    ‘And this young lady Layla takes herself very seriously?’
    ‘She does that, all right. Some of the biggest clashes in the first week are between her and David the actor, over who’s the most sensitive.’
    ‘They both reckon themselves poets,’Trisha chipped in.
    ‘Yes, I can see that there’s a lot of concealed anger there,’ Coleridge remarked