Opposite the Cock on the eastern side of the High Road is the black-painted facia of another loan shop, a bargaining house whose clerks wait with fingers that grasp more than they give for the needy to step inside. The shop’s storerooms and safe deposit boxes groan with watches, rings and precious things. A gambling husband, a booze addled wife, a business partner who cut and ran; a hollow-eyed cashier holding up a gleaming keepsake to the bare light of a tungsten bulb, tipping coins from a leather pouch onto a glass counter that entombs the keepsakes of the poor and the lost. Barely a quarter of a mile from the shop where Emmanuel Gbeho tried to hock his watch, Angel Flores hopes to cash in the war medals belonging to the father who beat her and her sister Rosa. Her brother’s eldest daughter, Carmela is getting married in Miami and she has no money for the flight. The medals prove worthless. The ones they gave you just for showing up. Two a penny. Forget that – ten a penny. Angel Flores, who vacuums corridors in the Hilton Metropole Hotel three miles south along the Edgware Road, has no idea that the plates – the blue and yellow ones with the terracotta bottoms that she uses day in day out – how could she know that just two of those stupid plates that were a wedding present to her parents José and Frieda could buy her a flight to Florida, and the whole set of six with the bowls and china cups she keeps on top of the wardrobe in the one bedroom flat on Willesden Lane could pay for every dress, tiara, roast pig, floral decoration and musician at Carmela and Domingo’s wedding? She picks up the cigar box filled with ribbons and medallions while the pawnbroker turns his attention back to the sudoku puzzle in last night’s Standard.