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absurdly rich or corporate flats for employees working in the city. Although some of the flats were occupied by troublesome permanent tenants, he was rarely bothered during the night. Though he noted one addition in flat thirty-nine in the east wing. Someone had moved in. The old girl, Lillian, had died. In a taxi or something a couple of months back. Stephen had told him the day after, but he’d never seen the woman during his shifts. She never came out at night. The new tenant was listed as Apryl Beckford. He wondered what she looked like.
    When he finished the last dregs of his tea, he walked into the ornamental garden built at the intersection of the two wings. He rolled and then smoked a thin cigarette while listening to the fountain. The memory of the dream dimmed and he began to feel something like relief to be back at work. There were few chores, only the occasional patrol to make and guest to sign in. It was less demoralizing than life at the Green Man, and more comfortable too. Once, before he started work at Barrington House, the building had even been featured in Hello! magazine, on account of some footballer who used to live there. An ideal old-school job for an artist, he’d once hoped, but he’d stopped sketching as soon as he took his place in the leather chair in reception. Now he suspected he had put himself there to forget and be forgotten; to ease himself out of mainstream life in the most comfortable way possible. And that notion no longer troubled him.
    After his spent cigarette landed in the fountain he returned to the chair and began to yawn. Another restless night. Arab teenagers in performance cars circled Lowndes Square. He checked his watch. Still another ten hours before he could leave in the morning and fall into a deep sleep. Preferably a dreamless coma.
    Leafing through the television listings in the Evening Standard, he was suddenly startled by the buzzing of the house phone. On the brass panel he could see a red light next to the label for apartment forty.
    ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he whispered to himself. It was Mr Glock, the middle-aged Swiss playboy, and the rudest man Seth had ever met. He picked up the handset to stop the deafening trill from the panel’s speaker. ‘Seth speaking.’
    ‘I need a taxi for Heathrow. Do it now.’ Mr Glock hung up.
    No other tenant so reinforced his long-held suspicion that the rich were an unpleasant crowd. When he first began working in the building, the tenants and their absurd wealth intimidated him, as if their very presence shone lights about his stained tie, the scuffs on his shoes and the gaping holes in his curriculum vitae. It had made him ridiculously diffident in their presence. But after half a year of taking their stinking rubbish out and witnessing countless demonstrations of self-importance before his desk, compounded with their affected accents and vulgar furnishings, his awe had gradually reduced to a simmer of resentment. He’d little respect left for any of them. Especially Glock. Working here assured Seth that money favoured the worst kind of people.
    He took the lift up to the fourth floor, where Glock’s bags would be waiting. On the way up he mopped his face with a paper towel. The texture of the paper hurt the hot, delicate skin of his forehead and cheeks. Remembering an Asian man who sneezed on him in the cinema, he wondered if he’d picked up a tropical illness from a foreigner. He rubbed at his neck, feeling the beginning of a tickle in his throat. Then recalled that nasty cold air he had sucked in while looking through the letter box of apartment sixteen, and winced. He thought he could still taste the dust.
    Once Glock and his bags were taken care of, Seth rolled a cigarette and watched the cab pull away from the kerb and drive out of the square. He told himself it was absolutely the last time he was getting out of the chair for the duration of the shift. He felt like shit. The tickle at the back of his throat