"I surely am."

"Then you can drop me at Hermsprong," said Butcher, opening the car door and stepping in, which you could do with the old Morris Oxford if you were only as big as the lawyer.

Architecturally, Hermsprong was a mirror image of Rasselas built on the other side of the canal. And, like a mirror image, it showed everything back to front.

Unlike reconstructed Rasselas, every cliche of depressed urban high-rise living could be found on Hermsprong. Crack-houses, corner dealers, lifts that were moving urinals when they moved at all, underpasses that were rats' alleys where you could lose more than your bones, the highest break-in rate, the lowest clear-up rate, more hoodies than a monastery, and so on, and so on. If ever a place should have been razed to the ground, Hermsprong was it. But paradoxically it survived because of Rasselas's success. How could you say an experiment had failed when you could produce evidence only a mile away that it could succeed? Or to put it another way, why should you demolish Hermsprong and relocate its inmates to the lovely new small well-planned developments the council was building to the east when the inhabitants of Rasselas were so much more deserving?

These were the arguments the sophists of the City Council produced in order to postpone a decision that was going to put an intolerable strain on their already overstretched budget.

Joe knew that to ask why Butcher was heading for Hermsprong would be like asking a bank robber why he robbed banks. 'Cos that's where my clients are, stupid.

Instead he said, "You're not going to light that thing in my car, are you?"

Referring to the cheroot that Butcher had inserted between her lips.

"Jesus, Sixsmith, you should watch more old movies. You can't be a proper PI unless you chain smoke!"

"Like you can't be a proper lawyer 'less you wear a wig and charge five hundred pounds a minute?"