'There are already some… people wishing to enquire about loans, sir,' said Bent, behind him. 'I suggest you let me deal with them.'

'No, we will, Mr Bent,' said Moist, turning away from the window. 'Show them into the downstairs office, please.'

'I really think you should leave this to me, sir. Some of them are rather new to the idea of banking,' Bent persisted. 'In fact I don't think some of them have ever been in a bank before, except perhaps during the hours of darkness.'

'I would like you to be present, of course, but I will make the final decision,' said Moist, as loftily as he could manage. 'Aided by the chairman, naturally.'

"Mr Fusspot?

'Oh yes.'

'He is an expert judge, is he?'

'Oh, yes!'

Moist picked up the dog and headed for the office. He could feel the chief cashier glaring at his back.

Bent had been right. Some of the people waiting hopefully to see him about a loan were thinking in terms of a couple of dollars until Friday. They were easy enough to deal with. And then there were others…

'Mr Dibbler, isn't it?' said Moist. He knew it was, but you had to speak like that when you sat behind a desk.

'That's right, sir, man and boy,' said Mr Dibbler, who had a permanently eager, rodent-like cast to his countenance. 'I could be someone else if you like.'

'And you sell pork pies, sausages, rat-on-a-stick…'

'Er, I purvey them, sir,' Dibbler corrected him, 'on account of being a purveyor.'

Moist looked at him over the paperwork. Claude Maximillian Overton Transpire Dibbler, a name bigger than the man himself. Everyone knew C. M. O. T. Dibbler. He sold pies and sausages off a tray, usually to people who were the worse for drink who then became the worse for pies.

Moist had eaten the odd pork pie and occasional sausage in a bun, however, and that very fact interested him. There was something about the stuff that drove you back for more. There had to be some secret ingredient, or maybe the brain just didn't believe what the taste buds told it, and wanted to feel once again that flood of hot, greasy, not entirely organic, slightly crunchy substances surfing across the tongue. So you bought another one.

And, it had to be said, there were times when a Dibbler sausage in a bun was just what you wanted. Sad, yet true. Everyone had moments like that. Life brought you so low that for a vital few seconds that charivari of strange greases and worrying textures was your only friend in all the world.

'Do you have an account with us, Mr Dibbler?'

'Yessir, thankyousir,' said Dibbler, who had refused an invitation to put down his tray and sat with it held defensively in front of him. The bank seemed to make the streetwise trader nervous. Of course, it was meant to. That was the reason for all the pillars and marble. They were there to make you feel out of place.

'Mr Dibbler has opened an account with five dollars,' said Bent.

'And I have brought along a sausage for your little doggie,' said Dibbler.

'Why do you need a loan, Mr Dibbler?' said Moist, watching Mr Fusspot sniff the sausage carefully.

'I want to expand the business, sir,' said Dibbler.

'You've been trading for more than thirty years,' said Moist.

'Yessir, thankyousir.'

'And your products are, I think I can say, unique…'

'Yessir, thankyousir.'

'So I imagine that now you need our help to open a chain of franchised cafes trading on the Dibbler name, offering a variety of meals and drinks bearing your distinctive likeness?' said Moist.

Mr Fusspot jumped down from the desk with the sausage held gently in his mouth, dropped it in the corner of the office, and tried industriously to kick the carpet over it.

Dibbler stared at Moist, and then said: 'Yessir, if you insist, but actually I was thinking about a barrow.'

'A barrow?' said Bent.

'Yessir. I know where I can get a nice little second-hand one with an oven and everything. Painted up nice, too. Wally the Gimp is quitting the jacket potato business 'cos of stress and he'll let me have it for fifteen dollars, cash down. A not-to-be-missed opportunity, sir.' He looked nervously at Mr Bent and added: 'I could pay you back at a dollar a week.'

'For twenty weeks,' said Bent.

'Seventeen,' said Moist.

'But the dog just tried to—' Bent began.

Moist waved away the objection. 'So we have a deal, Mr Dibbler?'

'Yessir, thankyousir,' said Dibbler. 'That's a good idea you've got there, about the chain and everything, though, and I thank you. But I find that in this business it pays to be mobile.'

Mr Bent counted out fifteen dollars with bad grace and began to speak as soon as the door closed behind the trader. 'Even the dog wouldn't—'

'But humans will, Mr Bent,' said Moist. 'And therein lies genius. I think he makes most of his money on the mustard, but there's a man who can sell sizzle, Mr Bent. And that is a seller's market.'

The last prospective borrower was heralded first by a couple of muscular men who took up positions on either side of the door, and then by a smell that overruled even the persistent odour of a Dibbler sausage. It wasn't a particularly bad smell, putting you in mind of old potatoes or abandoned tunnels; it was what you got when you started out with a severely foul stink and then scrubbed hard but ineffectually, and it surrounded King like an emperor's cloak.

Moist was astonished. King of the Golden River, they called him, because the foundation of his fortune was the daily collection his men made of the urine from every inn and pub in the city. The customers paid him to take it away, and the alchemists, tanners and dyers paid him to bring it to them.

But that had been only the start. Harry King's men took away everything. You saw their carts everywhere, especially around dawn. Every rag-and-bone man and rubbish siever, every dunnikin diver, every gongfermor, every scrap-metal merchant… you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry was all about business. They said that if a dog in the street looked even a bit strained a King's man would be there in a flash to hold a shovel under its arse, because prime dog muck fetched 9p a bucket from the high-class tanners. They paid Harry. The city paid Harry. Everyone paid Harry. And what he couldn't sell back to them in more fragrant form went to feed his giant compost heaps downriver, which on frosty days sent up such great plumes of steam that kids called them the cloud factories.

Apart from his hired help, King was accompanied by a skinny young man clutching a briefcase.

'Nice place you got here,' said Harry, sitting down in the chair opposite Moist. 'Very sound. The wife's been on at me to get curtains like that. I'm Harry King, Mr Lipwig. I've just put fifty thousand dollars in your bank.'

'Thank you very much, Mr King. We shall do our best to look after it.'

'You do that. And now I'd like to borrow one hundred thousand, thank you,' said Harry, pulling out a fat cigar.

'Have you got any security, Mr King?' said Bent.

Harry King didn't even look at him. He lit the cigar, puffed it into life, and waved it in the general direction of Bent.

'Who's this, Mr Lipwig?'

'Mr Bent is our chief cashier,' said Moist, not daring to look at Bent's face.

'A clerk, then,' said Harry King dismissively, 'an' that was a clerk's question.'

He leaned forward. 'My name is Harry King. That's your security, right there, an' it should be good for a hundred grand in these parts. Harry King. Everyone knows me. I pay what's owing an' I take what's owed, my word, don't I just. My handshake is my fortune. Harry King.'

He slammed his huge hands down on the table. Except for the pinky of his left hand, which was missing, there was a heavy gold ring on each finger, and each ring was incised with a letter. If you saw them coming at you, as for instance in an alley because you'd been skimming something off the take, the last name you would see would be H*A*R*R*Y*K*I*N*G. It was a fact worth keeping in the forefront of your brain, in the interests of keeping the forefront of your brain.