the shop in seven minutes,’ she screeched. ‘We aren’t announcing it, you’re the only ones that know!’
They silenced themselves with a collective gasp, lifting their phones to their faces as their attention turned from me to whatever delights awaited in the Snazzlechuff shop.
‘What’s the drop?’ I asked, slipping inside, door slamming behind me.
‘Nothing.’ She tossed the half-smoked cigarette butt in a huge bin full of them. ‘But they’ll refresh the website all day before they risk missing out on something so you probably won’t make an appearance on Reddit for at least another couple of hours.’
I frowned at the thought and wiped my shoes on the doormat before following her through the house. From the outside, it looked like a very normal semi-detached house and I assumed once upon a time, it had been. But at some point, it had become some sort of Premiership-footballer-meets-Justin-Bieber Franken-house. The normal-looking front was just the tip of the house iceberg. Gazing around at the bizarre architecture, it appeared number 18 and its semi-detached twin had been knocked into one giant house and extended out at the back, creating an absolutely humungous downstairs area, filled with oversized sofas, armchairs and beanbags bigger than a king-sized bed. And the televisions. So. Many. Televisions. The largest of them all hung on the wall, twice the size of a school blackboard.
Did schools still have blackboards? I wondered. Didn’t seem as though Snazzlechuff was the right kid to ask.
All the soft furnishings were, against all kinds of common sense, stark, bright white, and all the technology was black, giving the room the air of a very fancy chessboard-slash-asylum as designed by Kris Jenner, a feeling only enhanced by the fact that literally everything was either padded or had rounded edges. The effect was at once calming and unnerving. I couldn’t hurt myself in here whether I wanted to or not, and the longer I was here, the more appealing the idea became.
‘Coffee?’ Veronica asked, pushing me through the millionaire’s soft-play centre and into the next room. A considerably smaller but no less swish kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ I nodded, taking a seat at an island in the middle of the room. ‘This is quite a house.’
She answered with a cackle. ‘Isn’t it though? They bought it when he first started making money and now they don’t want to leave, so they just keep adding on and adding on. I’ve told them it’s fucking ridiculous but they won’t listen to me. When they want to sell, who’s going to buy it? A million-quid mansion in the middle of a bloody cul-de-sac and only half a mile from the prison and the dog track. They’ll be queuing up …’
‘Maybe they could buy the neighbours out,’ I joked. ‘Take over the entire street.’
‘They’ve offered but no one wants to sell,’ she said plainly. ‘All the neighbours are trying to cash in on him one way or another. Sad, really.’
I gave a low whistle, for the first time feeling oddly sorry for the junior millionaire.
The end of the room was made of glass and I looked out on the back garden. An assortment of dirt bikes, scooters, Segways, football nets and bouncy castles all stood sentry, patiently waiting to be played with. It had to be every boy’s dream.
‘Don’t know why his mum keeps ordering all that shit,’ Veronica commented, following my gaze. ‘He never goes outside. I try to make him go out for his lunch but he won’t have it.’
‘Even prisoners get at least one hour a day,’ I replied. ‘What sort of state is his skin in under that helmet?’
‘He makes Darth Vader look healthy,’ she said with a shrug. ‘It’d be easier to flay him alive than it would be to peel him out that gaming chair. I’m surprised his mother hasn’t started giving him sponge baths.’
I pulled a very sour face that she caught before I could look away.
‘This job is not without its challenges,’ she added as she dropped a coffee pod into the Nespresso machine. ‘Which leads me to wonder, how come you want to spend your life putting more of his nonsense out into the world?’
‘His nonsense?’ I repeated with a smile. ‘That’s a funny way to talk about your own client.’
Veronica opened the enormous American-style refrigerator and fished around for some milk, holding it up for my approval.
‘I used to represent a different kind of talent,’ she clarified as I nodded at the semi-skimmed option. ‘Photographers, makeup artists, stylists, that kind of shit, but now there’s