She felt that if she allowed herself out, let loose in public, she would be sure to be accosted by someone doing a survey, and would confess, when asked, her new occupation. ‘I fellate strange men for money,’ she could hear herself announcing loudly to a bored student with a clipboard trying to sell insurance in a crowded shopping precinct. To keep herself under some sort of control she stayed home and fed the family on long-stored, unlabelled casseroles from the freezer, and when the cat food ran out she extravagantly opened a can of best dolphin-friendly tuna for the delighted Biggles. From the safety of her window she watched Paul Mathieson looking proudly up at the Neighbourhood Watch sign on the street lamp outside his house, and gleefully she thought, here’s one crime you haven’t spotted yet, right under your nose. How ecstatically horrified Carol would be, too. A few months ago she had walked down the Close with them as Jenny was taking Polly to one of her disco classes (‘Make-up already at your age dear?’ Carol had commented, eyeing Polly’s dazzlingly lurid lycra outfit set off by Barbie-pink lipstick) when a teenager from the estate had crossed the road in front of them wheeling frothily-frilled twins in an absolute Rolls-Royce of a pram.
