1

For me, the turning point was when they came to arrest Mr Ellis for crimes against the economy. I didn’t recognise the significance of it at the time, but I can be a bit of a dumb ox. Change comes slowly for me – an accumulation of things rather than any sudden revelation. Also, in my defence, it happened in the middle of an argument with Beth, about one of my numerous failures as a partner and human being.

I was on my knees, wiping away at the skirting board behind the sofa with a damp cloth. I often used to do this sort of thing after a frustrating day at work. It was something I knew I could complete to my own satisfaction, without anyone else interfering, criticising or distracting me. Well, not today. I sensed Beth’s presence, and looked up to see her standing in the doorway of the lounge, her balance shifted onto one leg, head tilted, arms folded. I had come to recognise this pose as a portent, as predictable and tiresome as a tax return.

‘What?’ I said with a touch of pre-emptive annoyance. There was an unidentifiable grey mark on the skirting board I’d been on the verge of erasing.

‘You still haven’t sorted out the streaming?’

Oh, of course: that.

‘You promised!’ she said.

Yes. Yes, I had.

‘It was a really busy day, Beth. I barely had time to take a slash, let alone –’

‘So how am I supposed to watch TV, or listen to a bit of music, or look something up on the web, or … or read a book, or do anything else that will help me relax from my really busy day at work?’

Beth, read a book? By what miracle might this happen? Although I could hardly claim to be much of a reader these days either. I hadn’t streamed a new novel to my tablet for … how long had it been? I remembered starting a book about a year ago, but I had never finished it, couldn’t even remember the title. There was a lone chapter stored somewhere on my tablet, waiting in vain for the next one to relieve it of duty.

I stood up. If we were going to have an argument, I would at least give myself the advantage of height.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I know it’s a pain, but you’ll just have to do something else.’

‘It’s all right for you. You can go to the gym, or your tennis club.’

‘Tennis is on Tuesdays.’

‘Whatever. The point is, I can’t do anything without the internet.’

I nearly said, ‘You could join the gym too,’ but recognised, just in time, that this would not be taken as the innocent and helpful suggestion I intended.

‘You could always fix it yourself,’ I said instead.

She dismissed this with something approaching a scowl. ‘This is your area.’

‘In what way?’

‘Computing-y stuff.’

‘Telecoms and programming are not even close to being the same thing.’

We argued a lot back then. More so than any other couple we knew? Probably not. It isn’t the sort of thing you discuss with other people, is it? (No, you wait until later, then write it all down and distribute it as widely as possible in book form.)

‘I’m assuming you’ve checked the use-by date on the streambox,’ she said.

‘Yeah, there’s four months left on it. And, anyway, they send us a new one when it’s out of date. The problem’s with our account. That’s why everything is down, including our phones.’ Surely she had tried to use her phone since yesterday.

‘Which is why we agreed you’d phone them at work,’ she said in a sing-song of triumph.

Ah, I saw it now – her faux ignorance was a trap for me to fall into. I closed my eyes and let out a long breath. ‘Look, I’ll call them tomorrow, Beth. That’s the best I can do.’

‘Like you did today?’ she said sweetly.

‘I will do it,’ I said with emphasis, ‘tomorrow.’

Her mouth dropped open in alarm. ‘Ohmygod. Mysterina’s on tonight! I’m going to miss it.’

‘Mysterina isn’t going anywhere,’ I said. ‘You can watch it once the service is back up.’

‘But I have to see it as soon as it’s available. How else am I supposed to discuss it with the girls at work tomorrow?’

In case you’ve never seen it, Mysterina: Love Psychic is a show in which a fifty-something in multicoloured attire cavorts her way round stately homes, rolling her eyes and picking up ghostly past-life traces, not of people who were brutally murdered, but who had great sex. ‘I’m getting … yes … yes … Lord Dankworth, in this very bed … with two serving maids. “Oh, my lord, no, we mustn’t. No, not the riding crop. Oh, my naughty sir!”’ Mysterina would swoon and sigh and moan, before finally being ejected by her hosts along with the camera crew. It was amusing for the first couple of episodes, but by season five the joke had worn a bit thin.

‘Why don’t you watch it round Antonia’s?’

‘She doesn’t like it.’

A woman of taste, clearly.

‘Any other bright ideas?’ Beth said.

I tried to avoid this sort of unpleasantness, really I did. But there was a tipping point where my pride decided ‘that’s enough’ and went nuclear. Once she pushed me beyond that, our arguments had a depressing predictability: the swearing stage, the yelling stage, the storming off stage. And she did push. Once Beth had made up her mind about something, she stuck to it like glue. She dignified this sort of behaviour with the word ‘determination’. I had other, less charitable, ways of describing it.

But today was different. Today I hadn’t reckoned on turning to look out of the lounge window and seeing four policemen in full body armour outside Mr Ellis’s house. Just down the road stood a police van in standard, don’t-screw-with-us black. My first thought, rather selfishly, was that I now had the perfect excuse to drop our conversation like a maggoty apple without looking like I’d backed down. My second was that I hoped our neighbour wasn’t in any trouble, because although I didn’t know him well, I was beginning to like the old guy.

The policemen were clustered near his porch, a tangle of black limbs against the dusty red brickwork. Only one of them was armed. His assault rifle was angled downwards, his index finger outside the trigger guard, pointing down the barrel.

‘Are you listening to me?’ Beth said.

‘Nooo,’ I drawled vaguely.

From the corner of my eye I saw her put her hands on her hips and fill her lungs – the prelude to a good bollocking. I pointed out the window and her mouth shifted from an o of outrage to the kind of o that anticipated gossip or scandal. She took a couple of steps into the room.

‘What are they doing at Mr Ellis’s?’ she said. She may have lost the thread of the argument, but the accusatory tone remained, as if the police were there at my instigation.

I wouldn’t have done that, you understand; even back then, I wasn’t the type.

End of excerpt

You can buy A Danger of Books here