Imp strolled past the overgrown hedges and boarded up windows of Billionaire’s Row, ignoring the leaking roofs and snarling-dog security signs as he headed towards the high stone wall at the back of Kensington Palace. He was going home, for some debatable value of home.
Once upon a time this had been a street of well-to-do family houses, the town residences of straitlaced minor gentry nestling in the shade of a second-tier palace (now serving as a state-subsidized dorm for minor royalty). A century ago, Imp’s great-grandparents had bought one of these houses with the proceeds of an early silent movie fortune. His grandparents had lived here and his father had grown up hearing tales of it, but it had been sold off to cover death duties in the sixties along with the rest of the homes on this street, as the London property market inflated out of reach of mere mortals.
Today the average plot on Kensington Palace Gardens passed hands for roughly two hundred million pounds. Yet they all stood empty and derelict, roofs leaking, carpets mildewed, woodwork decaying, and wallpaper peeling. The sovereign wealth funds that bought the houses as investment vehicles were remote from mundane affairs like tenants and rent, never mind domestic maintenance. If the roof caved in, what did a million in reconstruction costs matter, when the title deed was appreciating by twenty million a year? Why bother with repairs when nobody lived there; and nobody could be permitted to live there lest they acquire some vestigial tenancy rights in law and encumber the liquidity of the asset.
Imp’s ancestral pile was fronted by a rusting chain-link fence secured with padlocks, monitored by cameras on poles. He unlocked the gate and slouched up the driveway. He’d started by hacksawing the original lock, replacing it with one of his own. The cameras had been a little harder, but there were blind spots. Then Game Boy had hacked them. He’d found their unsecured logins on Shodan and tweaked their settings. The security company so proudly boasting of 24-hour monitoring on their warning signs was in fact watching the hell out of a house just down the street that shared the same long-dead architect.
Imp marched up the front steps and rapped smartly on the door frame. “Hi, homeys, I’m honey!” he trilled, puffing out his chest as he opened the door. It squealed noisily across the floor tiles. The rain had warped it so that it tended to jam. Inside the seemingly derelict house, the porch was swept clean of debris and the inner door was sturdy despite a fresh coat of graffiti. Del was working on another of her murals, a street scene of heroic bike couriers racing to dodge shark-like cars and police with piranha heads. Muffled dance music was pounding away upstairs. Imp slung his rain-damped trench coat on a hook, wiped his feet on the doormat, removed his boots, and entered the hall.
The front hall was lined with oak wainscoting almost to the ceiling, and floored in black and white marble. It was as snobby a lobby as any snooty butler could hope for. Imp thought it a shame that he lacked an Alfred to take the piss out of Doc’s Bat-persona. He opened a door to the left of the hall and flipped on the drawing room lights.
To maintain the pretense of abandonment, he and Doc had installed slanted plywood cutouts just behind the bay windows, a stage backdrop painted in an Ames room illusion. From the outside, the flats provided a forced-perspective illusion of empty rooms, peeling wallpaper, and filthy floors. But the backdrops were barely a meter deep. Behind them the rest of the house was fully inhabited, albeit not in a manner of which the owners would approve.
“Anyone in?” he called, glancing round the squat. The big-ass TV was on, blocking out the disgusting mess in the Adam fireplace with a photorealistic display of dancing flames. Immediately behind the backdrop to the windows at the front of the room was a row of bland office desks, covered to a considerable depth in assorted semi-functional e-waste. Game Boy’s rig perched beside it, three giant monitors on arms angled inwards to focus on his joystick-and-keyboard-encrusted bucket seat. At the back of the room, a dress rack bowed under the weight of costumes, fronted by a snowdrift of discarded underwear. But the centerpiece of the room was a brown leather sofa of roughly the same dimensions as Jabba the Hutt. This was Imp’s pride and joy, and it was currently unoccupied. “Ahoy there, children! Any sign of—”
A lithe arm snaked around his shoulders and clamped a palm over his mouth. “Shut it,” Del hissed in his ear. “No pirates here, only me.”
“Ay, my little Tiger Lily!”
“Fuck you, pay me.” She let go and shoved him in the small of his back, sending him reeling until he collapsed theatrically atop the giant sofa. He flopped on his back with arms spreadeagled as she tossed the canvas bank bag at him.
“Hey, not nice!” He managed to keep the bag from whacking him in the face with its heavy padlock, which swung open. “This tagged?”
“Not any more: I disarmed the dye packs.”
Imp struggled towards a sitting position—the sofa was almost as big as a double bed—and looked inside.
“Money, money, money, it’s a rich—”
“Fuck you, pay me.” Deliverator grinned, easing the sting of her demand slightly. She was, Imp decided, extremely cute when she smiled: but despite being extremely cute she was the least likely of all his housemates to put out, as he’d established to his regret. She was totally immune to all attempts to charm her out of her skintight Lycra pants: a gold star lesbian, he figured. “Pay me now.”
“Can I pay you in kisses?” he asked hopefully, and gave her mind a little push. “Will you do it for exposure? I can make you a star—”
She pushed back, hard (pushing was always iffy if
