urban living; fresh modern homes for those displaced from terraced back-to-backs.
Now it looked like shit.
‘My ideal home,’ Dan muttered to himself, ‘I’d blend in perfectly here.’
He looked again at the instruction. Valuations here were rare, most properties were still council or housing association so it had to be a right-to-buy. Really great policy, the creation of a property owning democracy. Dan wasn’t against it, actually quite the reverse, it got people on the property ladder who wouldn’t have had a hope of managing it otherwise. There could be those who were trapped by it though; if the area was really bad and you bought but none of your neighbours did then you were stuffed – to use a technical property term.
This looked like one of those. Virtually unsaleable. Virtually no comparables to value the thing.
Thanks, Hannah, he thought, thanks a million.
Dan locked the car and had another look around. He might only have a Skoda but it was a VRs, a little pocket rocket that he secretly loved and which could embarrass cars many times its price. He would rather keep it in one piece.
The coast looked clear even if he knew that he would be being watched.
He had picked up the keys from the building society that morning. He walked up to the door and tried the first one in the lock
Then the second.
And the third.
None fitted. He checked the house number again, and the street name. Now a couple of youths in hoodies had sidled up and were leaning against the broken down, faded, stained fence by the end of the street. They feigned disinterest but Dan caught the look, the hungry eye of the thief, the interest in his car. He knew they were waiting for him to disappear inside somewhere then the jackals could get closer to the kill.
Well it didn’t look like he was going anywhere. He looked at the door again. It was roughly painted. It looked new, as did the lock. The frame showed signs of being forced, there were splinters around the keep.
With a sigh, he pulled out his mobile and called the building society to break the news that the house they had repossessed had been re-repossessed back. It was a short conversation.
He got back in the car and drove to the Quays, noting that the jackals had slunk off as soon as he had moved back towards the car.
He had to admit he like the Quays. He knew that they were not everyone’s cup of tea, Manchester’s (OK Salford’s really but even the city was now branding itself as Salford, Manchester) docklands, started at the same time as London’s. At one point they were very popular with the scally’s from the streets that he had just left as a takeaway shop, a source of BMWs, Audis and nice TVs, but things had improved for the Quays. Lots of better quality buildings had gone up and the Lowry, the shopping centre, the Imperial War Museum North and lately Media City had made the place a lot more fashionable and safe. Dan, in his weaker moments had forgotten about his debts and lack of deposit for a moment and had toyed with the idea of buying a place here.
He quickly found the block where the apartment was. It looked like one of the newer ones and a nice one at that. It certainly looked fine from the outside. It was hard to believe he was only a mile from where he had just been, from the squalor and deprivation of the estates. Was Britain getting like America with its underclass forever stuck in poverty and crime? Dan wasn’t sure but the gap between the have and the have nots certainly seemed ever bigger from the evidence of this morning.
Again he had the keys, this time collected from a solicitors office in Manchester close to the firm’s own place. There was a proximity card on the key fob. Dan decided to take a gamble that it would get a parking spot and so drove up the service ramp to the roller shutter door to the parking garage and pressed the card against the panel. It worked; the shutters rose in front of him. At least the car was going to be safe at this one and getting in boded well; it looked like he was at least going to get into this place.
It was mid-morning but the car park was virtually full. Dan guessed that most people worked in the city and caught