PHUC COMES TO give me flowers and my husband a bottle of wine. He has to catch two buses and walk a fair way from the city to deliver his gifts. His reason for coming this evening, he says, is that Richard was one of the first people he met when he arrived in the country, last year. Since then – until this week, when his lease expired and he found a cheaper alternative – he had rented one of our investment units.

‘For the future,’ he had explained to me on the phone earlier. ‘I have to save for future.’