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me.
    Before we left the house, the younger, nicer, council official had come back and I’d found out his name was Euan. So now I began to wonder if they were all Welsh and if they were, what they were all doing in this part of London. Were they all plotting some sort of revenge for the death of Llewellyn?
    Inspector Morgan turned out to be a woman. I suppose they thought that was clever of them, all girls together stuff, and I’d confide in her. But I did get that cup of tea at long last.
    She was quite young which surprised me. I’d always imagined inspectors would be old fellows with grey hair and bad teeth. Or, if they were women, built like brick barns. Morgan was smartly dressed though her hair was a bit dowdy. If she looked like anything, she looked like a schoolteacher. She had something of the same manner, bossy but wary at the same time.
    ‘Miss Varady?’ she asked, although she knew I was. ‘I don’t think I’ve come across that surname before.’
    ‘It’s Hungarian,’ I told her. ‘But before you start checking on me, I’m British by birth.’
    My father came from Hungary with his parents in the fifties when they had the revolution. He was five years old at the time.
    ‘I see,’ she said. ‘Well now, Francesca—’
    I interrupted her to ask, ‘What’s your first name?’
    She looked surprised so I went on, ‘Because if you’re going to call me by my first name, I ought to be able to call you by yours. Otherwise, I call you Inspector, and you call me Miss Varady.’
    The copper by the door hid a grin.
    She took that quite well. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Just when we’re on our own, then, my name’s Janice. So, Francesca—’ She underlined it faintly. ‘Just carry on telling me about yourself, and the squat, and your friends – and Theresa Monkton.’
    ‘We called her Terry.’ There really wasn’t more I could say than that. We hadn’t known her very long. I had nothing but my own guesswork for the things I’d deduced about her, so I couldn’t mention any of them. She hadn’t talked about herself. Lucy might know something. I told Inspector Janice all this.
    ‘What about her other friends?’ she asked.
    ‘I don’t know. She didn’t say. No one ever came to the house.’
    ‘Had there been any disputes between you, any of you, at the house?’
    There’d been plenty, Terry being so lazy and grumbling all the time. But I thought quickly before I answered. I didn’t like the drift of the question. What did they think had happened?
    I said, ‘Nothing much, just the usual squabbles about whose turn it was for the washing-up. She kept herself to herself. We always tried to respect one another’s privacy. Even people like us have the right to a private life, you know! It’s not easy, when you’re all living together. You have to be careful not to ask questions and we didn’t.’
    ‘Which of the men was her boyfriend?’
    ‘Neither! People come and go in squats! It just happened that we were two women and two men!’ For good measure, I added, ‘I don’t have to stay here and be grilled by you, you know.’
    ‘You volunteered to come to the station, Francesca.’
    Not that I remembered. I said so.
    ‘We know it’s been a shock,’ she said soothingly. ‘But we need to know the circumstances. We’re grateful for your cooperation. Now, let’s get through it as quickly and painlessly as possible, shall we? Tell me the last time you saw her.’
    ‘Alive? Yesterday around lunchtime. Next time I saw her, she was dead.’
    ‘Hanging from the ceiling?’
    ‘Of course, hanging from the ceiling! Where else?’ Morgan was waiting. ‘Nev wanted to take her down because she looked so hideous, hanging there. But I told him, we mustn’t touch her. We had to tell your lot. But the council men turned up first.’
    ‘But you were going to notify the police?’
    ‘Yes!’ I said fiercely. ‘Believe it or not, we were!’
    ‘Oh, I believe you, Francesca. Why shouldn’t