'When you're bankrupt,' Derek Corby had told Jimmy as a boy, 'you've lost all control. Your life is taken out of your hands and it can take years to get it back. Sometimes you never do get it back.'

The funny thing was, Jimmy didn't really care any more. He'd lost control anyway.

The real problem wasn't bankruptcy. Bankruptcy he could face.

The real problem was eviction. That was the terror that continued to haunt him and Monica.

The bank could force them from the two floors of their house that they had made home and the council would then place them in a dreaded Bed and Breakfast. This was the appalling prospect which Jimmy's parents were trying so hard to help them avoid with their monthly standing order, a standing order which, as Derek said, 'showed willing', but which did not even scratch the surface of the interest on the interest on his debt.

The threat of eviction haunted them. And then one evening, Jimmy hit upon the solution.

'It's not going to happen, Mon,' he said. 'I won't let it. We are never going into emergency accommodation.'

'What will you do?' Monica asked, putting baby bottles into soapy water to soak.

'I'll tell you what I'll do,' Jimmy replied, as he mashed up boiled carrot and apple and spooned the resulting mush into the compartments of an ice-cube tray ready to be frozen and made to last all week. 'I'm going to do what I used to do. What I always did do, even before I was rich. I'm going to dodge, I'm going to weave, I'm going to improvise and take my chance.'

'Yes, but what are you actually going to do?' Monica said, smiling at this reminder of just what a Jack the lad Jimmy could be.

'I'm going to move us into a house in Webb Street. That's what I'm going to fucking do.'

'Don't swear, Daddy,' came a sleepy voice from the top of the unlit stairs.

'Daddy said fudging, darling,' Monica called out.

'No he fudging didn't,' came the reply.

'Yes he did, now go to sleep.' Monica turned back to Jimmy and spoke in a lower voice. 'Don't you remember, darling? We don't own Webb Street any more.'

'No,' said Jimmy, 'and nor do any of the other people who are living there rent-free. They're squatters. And that's what we'll be. We're going to squat the street we used to own. How's that for irony?'

Crusty Nimbys Despite the radical nature of their lifestyle choice, the squatters of Webb Street were beginning to develop some distinctly bourgeois attitudes.

None of them would ever have imagined themselves as Not In My Back Yarders, the kind of people who are all for development and change as long as it doesn't affect them. After all, as squatters they themselves were usually the targets of Nimbys, folk who could see the logic in the homeless occupying empty properties but didn't want squatters moving in next door or, worse still, taking up residence in their holiday homes. The problem was that when you came down to it everyone had a back yard, even squatters, and in this case it was the other end of Webb Street.

The undeveloped bit. The rotting, neglected, rat- and bug-infested, boarded-up and broken-windowed bit that Jimmy had not got to before the recession hit. But it wasn't the rotting properties that the efficient and highly organized 'top end' squatters objected to, it was Bob the tramp.

He just so brought down the tone of the street. Of course the various activists, eco warriors, cycle dispatch riders and trapeze artists who had squatted the top-end houses would not have put it that way themselves. They didn't hold with snobbery or elitism in any shape or form. The world and all the houses on it were, as far as they were concerned, common property.

It was just that Bob was so utterly revolting.

Stinking as he did, and caked in blood from whatever it was he was coughing up, he hung around, shambling up and down the street, begging at their doors. This was not what proper squatting was about. Proper squatting wasn't about screwed-up substance abusers. That was what small-minded fascists thought squatting was about.

Proper squatting was organized, politicized. It was a legitimate and responsible lifestyle choice taken by legitimate and responsible people. Bob was giving the wrong impression altogether. When journalists came down to write about their new and radical initiative in sustainable urban management taking place in Webb Street, those responsible for the initiative wanted their efforts to be reported in the righteous and glowing manner that they believed to be appropriate.

And they didn't want a pustulous petrol head screwing up the photo opportunity.

These squatters thought of themselves as custodians of a precious human resource. Better tenants in every way than any absentee landlord. Caring for the houses they occupied, improving them, bringing them to life. Property for People, not Profits was their mantra. They were not scroungers, they were not freeloaders, they were not ne'er-do-wells. They were in fact the future. And it worked.

Bob didn't fit into that mould at all. Bob was just a plain old-fashioned tramp and his presence was a constant reminder to the happy house occupiers of the fact that they themselves were only one eviction from the street. That much as they liked to see themselves as legitimate custodians of urban resources, to the rest of society they were just Bob with a college education and rings through their lips. Bob's presence connected them with everything that the public feared most about the radicalized homeless, all the cliches that they fought so hard to dispel with their careful property management and their commitment to supporting the council's recycling policies.

And besides, on a purely hygienic and aesthetic level, the squatters of Webb Street did not much like living next door to a festering, stinking, disease-ridden tramp who was beginning to attract more of his ilk.

They wished he would just fuck off.

Unfortunately he didn't seem to have any intention of doing so. Instead he continued to live in several of the houses at the bottom end of the street, the end to which Jimmy was forced to go in his search for an empty property.

It was not a little frustrating for Jimmy to walk down Webb Street from the top end, past all the nearly completed and beautifully renovated houses. Had he thought of it sooner he might have squatted one himself, but he hadn't and now every single decent property had long since been grabbed.

There were slogans and posters in most of the windows: Power to the People Government is crime Property is theft Property might be theft, Jimmy thought to himself, but that hadn't stopped the new tenants from fixing locks on all the doors and windows in order to secure their occupation. But he was not one to waste time in pointless regret. He would simply have to find the least worst property at the other end of the street and get on with it.

Once Jimmy had made a decision he was usually pretty energetic about following it through and the idea of making a family squat in Webb Street was no exception. The morning after he had had his idea and for many days afterwards he made the long trip to Webb Street by bicycle and worked hard at making one of the houses he used to own habitable.

'All the good houses have already gone,' he told Monica. 'The whole street's crammed with super-cool, beardy, dreadlocky anarchist types with bald, pierced, tattooed girlfriends who work in circuses or sell falafel at markets. But up at the other end, where we never even got round to starting the conversions, hardly anybody's bothered at all. That old tramp I told you about still hangs around. He's going to be our neighbour if he doesn't die first.'

'Lovely,' Monica replied without enthusiasm.

'Anything is better than a council Bed and Breakfast, Mon.'

'But how will we get Toby back to Notting Hill for school each morning? He's really settled in, we can't make him move again.'

'We've still got our bikes. We'll cycle like I've been doing. It takes about an hour.'

'An hour's cycle ride to school,' Monica protested, 'then an hour back? He'll be shattered.'

Jimmy could see from Monica's face that she was about to list the incredible danger that such a mammoth daily journey would involve. She was no doubt picturing her first-born wrapped round the bull bars of some speeding Humvee driven by a mad nanny who was late for her Pilates class.

'Mon,' Jim said firmly, 'kids used to walk miles to school, it was the norm. One of the reasons they're all getting so fat is that they don't do that any more. What's wrong with an hour's bike ride? It's a good thing, surely. We used to spend nearly that long in the Discovery some mornings and there's cycle lanes almost all the way. Anyway, don't you see? There's nothing else we can do. Your parents live on a boat. Mine are in a one-bedroom flat in Reading. It's up to us to find somewhere to live and Webb Street is perfect. We have a head start there. We know all the service providers. There's any amount of cement and tiles and paint and all sorts of stuff still locked up in the houses from when the building work stopped and, most important of all, there's a whole squatting community already set up. We can join it. We won't be alone. They know all the legal stuff. They even have lawyers. My dad said the most important thing in a crisis was to have a plan, right? Well, either we wait until we get thrown out and are at the mercy of the council or we take control like thousands of other Londoners have done and prepare a squat.'

Monica did not look completely convinced, but she didn't protest further. Slowly they were all learning to put their previous attitudes behind them.

Jimmy selected his house. First he discreetly replaced the broken locks on the front door with two of the four Chubbs that had been fitted so beautifully to his Notting Hill front door by the talented Romanian carpenter. Then he began work in earnest.

Astonishingly the water was still on and the gas only needed reconnecting. There was no electricity for the time being but Jimmy had a good set of cordless power tools that he was able to charge at home and take with him to work. One of the super-cool squatters had explained to Jimmy that once he moved his family in they could easily get the leccy reconnected as the various power companies did not care who owned the houses they supplied as long as the bills were paid.

Jim worked every single day. Preparing the surfaces was a massive task as the premises were so dilapidated. He found, however, that by asset-stripping the floors he didn't intend to occupy he could forage enough sound timber and plasterboard to service the ones that he did.

He balked at nothing: no cockroach, no bug infestation, no nightmare mystery stains worried him in the slightest. He worked with a light heart for he had once again found a sense of purpose to his day, a purpose which was far more satisfying than any work he had done in his past life. He was coming to see that being rich and working simply to get richer could be in many ways a soul-destroying business. Particularly if the work you were doing had long since become routine. But being poor and working to survive, working to keep your wife and children from sinking into an abyss of poverty, that was a thrill. Jimmy was painting and decorating for his family, for his kids. He was working to put a roof over their heads. No goal could have lent more vigour to every blow of his hammer and every stroke of his brush.

The process wasn't costing him anything either, in fact he was spoilt for choice when it came to fitting out the kitchen and bathroom. After all, he had five en suites gathering dust above his head in Notting Hill, all beautifully equipped with the most splendid baths, bidets, basins and shower units.

In the end, however, he took all his stuff from the en suite in the attic nanny flat, Jodie's being the only bathroom furniture that would fit into the stripped-out room he had prepared at Number 23 Webb Street. In fact Jimmy thought he could probably have fitted that room into the massive free-standing cast-iron tugboat of a bath that he and Monica had once shared. Jodie's bath and basin also had the advantage of being the only ones in the whole Notting Hill house featuring taps that were not so smoothly designed that you couldn't turn them off with a wet hand.

Next Jimmy stripped out Jodie's kitchenette. He removed the work surface, the fitted cooker, fridge and microwave and the lovely chrome power points, planning to reassemble it all carefully in Webb Street. He was able to shift the whole lot with the help of an anarchist with a van, who did the job for a pink bidet from Monica's old bathroom and a still-boxed-up juicer that Derek and Nora Corby had given them one Christmas.

Jimmy made tremendous progress and after six weeks of fourteen-hour days he had his chosen floors cleaned and sanded, all the walls prepared for decoration, half the wiring done and he'd made a start on the plumbing. In fact he reckoned that he was no more than a month away from being able to move the family in if the bank suddenly snapped the thread on the sword of Damocles they had hanging over him and chucked them out of Notting Hill.

'We'll be camping for a year and washing in a bucket. But we could do it.'

Then, one afternoon, just when Jimmy thought his year of bad luck was coming to an end, it got worse again.

A different sword of Damocles, one forged at Scotland Yard and of which Jimmy had been blissfully unaware, landed bang on top of his head.

He was working at Webb Street when he heard a knock at the door. Outside was a small, very neat-looking man of about Jimmy's age.

'James Corby?' the man said.

'Probably,' said Jimmy with a smile, 'it depends who you are.'

'Your wife told me I might find you here.'

'Oh . . .' Something stirred in Jimmy's memory, a strange familiarity. 'Do I know you?' he asked.

'Slightly,' Beaumont replied. 'We once briefly shared a house in Sussex. When we were students.'

'God! That's right. It's you! How are you, mate? Not come looking for your milk, have you? I think it will have gone off.'

Beaumont was pleased. Pleased that Jimmy had remembered him even if he clearly had no idea of the pain he had caused.

'I'm afraid not, Mr Corby,' Beaumont said. 'I'm a policeman now. Detective Inspector Graeme Beaumont. And I'd like to speak to you about your share speculations. In particular the trade you made in Caledonian Granite in the autumn of 2007. You may recall that you disposed of your stock hours before the price collapsed.'

A matter of pride Jimmy returned home quite late that evening, after Monica had finally got all the children down. The last half-hour or so had been spent dealing with Cressida's current nightly ritual of re-emerging from her bedroom fifteen times in order to say that she couldn't sleep and being told to go back to bed again.

'Well?' Monica whispered after shushing Jimmy to alert him to the fact that his elder daughter had only just gone down. 'What was it all about? Why did a policeman want to see you?'

'You were right,' Jimmy said, 'about those Caledonian Granite shares. It was against the law.'

Monica was silent for a moment as the scale of this new disaster sank in.

'Have they charged you?'

'Not yet. They showed me evidence of the trade I made the day before Caledonian collapsed. I said I'd made lots of trades in those days. That I couldn't remember them all. That I must have just got lucky.'

Through all of his previous travails Jimmy's sunny manner had never quite deserted him. Now, despite his efforts at bravado, the twinkle had finally dulled in his eye.

Monica crossed the room and hugged him. Then she went and put the kettle on.

Jimmy made an effort to pull himself together.

'Did Rupert call?' he asked.

'Yes,' Monica replied, rather surprised. 'How did you know that?'

'Did you tell him I was with the police?'

'Of course not, it's none of his business who you're with. But he sounded very anxious. Said he needed to see you.'

'I'm not surprised.'

'Oh my God!' said Monica. 'You mean they're on to him too? He must be worrying that he'll be next.'

'No, Mon, not next. First. He's first. That's the whole point. It's him this cop is after. He told me that they'd go easy on me if I was prepared to say where I'd got the information about the Granite shares. That they might not press charges at all.'

'What did you tell them?'

'I told them that I couldn't remember making the deal. That it must just have been a lucky guess.'

Monica made the tea. It was clear she was thinking hard about what to say next, wanting to phrase it right.

'Jimmy . . .' she said finally, 'perhaps you should just tell them the truth.'

He looked at her, genuinely surprised.

'Monica, I could never do that.'

The angry frustration that spread across her face showed that she had known what he'd say.

'Why not, Jim?'

'Well, for a start I'd be admitting to having made an insider trade . . .'

'Which you did. Which they know about anyway. That's the whole point!'

'I think maybe he's bluffing. If he really had me then he could have nicked me and offered to drop the charges, but he didn't.'

'What difference does it make? He'll certainly leave you alone if you tell him about Rupert, so just do it. Rupert got us into this mess.'

'I got us into this mess, Mon. Nobody forced me to try to make an extra fifty grand by picking up the phone.'

'Rupert must have known when he gave you the information that it was illegal.'

'I should have known it myself. You did. You pointed it out, remember?'

'Yes! And you didn't keep the money! You did the right thing, you shouldn't have to suffer for this.'

'That's not how the law sees it.'

'Jimmy, you've got kids. We're broke. You can't ruin us to protect Rupert. He's a shit. Look what he said about Henry in the papers, saying Jane's hairdryer was far worse than him milking the public for his pension fund. And he tried to cheat Amanda on her settlement. You should turn him in.'

'Mon,' Jimmy said firmly, 'you have to understand I would never do that. Rupert's been my friend for nearly twenty years.'

'But he isn't your friend any more, is he!' Monica shouted, all her pent-up emotion suddenly finding form in anger. 'And actually I don't know why he ever was! I really don't. All those dinners, all those holidays. He was always a complete shit. A reactionary, supercilious shit. Why did we put up with him? Sharif's worth a hundred fucking Ruperts and he didn't walk out on his kids.'

'Mon, we liked Rupert. Don't pretend we didn't. Maybe you don't like him any more but that's because everything's changed. We're poor and we've screwed up and he represents the problem. But when we were rich like him, we liked him.'

'Well, I don't like him any more! It was his bloody idea to invest in Webb Street, which is what ruined everything in the first place. You'd never gone into debt like that before. Everything was paid off, then that bastard persuades you to-'

Jimmy banged his hand down on the table. He'd never done that before. Monica's jaw dropped in surprise.