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Porson. ‘Lick o’ paint and a carpet shampoo don’t cost much, but rent goes on and on. If he was strapped for cash . . .’
    Slider frowned. Williams had nice clothes, and he just didn’t
look
poor. But poverty can come on quickly, especially these days. ‘As to the suicide thing,’ he added in fairness, ‘if we hadn’t discovered he was left-handed, it would have looked quite good.’
    ‘Good enough for an amateur to think it would pass mustard, I suppose,’ Porson grunted. ‘So what are you going to do? Lean on Botev?’
    ‘Yes, sir. Interview the rest of the tenants. Ask the neighbours if they saw black-sack man and the car. And meanwhile, we’ve got deceased’s fingerprints. We’ll run them, and the name, through records and see if anything comes up.’
    ‘And if nothing does?’
    ‘There’s Mispers. And we’ll circulate a mugshot to the usual places. After that, I’m afraid we’ll have to go public to try and find his next of kin.’
    Porson met his eyes. Going public when all you had was a mugshot of a corpse was not nice. ‘Let’s hope it won’t come to that,’ he said shortly.
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘Well, get on with it. I don’t like the sound of this, and I hope it turns out to be a suicide after all, or some simple mistake, or something. Maybe he was ampidistrous? But I suppose you’ve got to go through the motions, do it by the numbers. Let me know if anything comes up. Otherwise, I’m not here.’
    Porson waved him away and bent his bloodshot eyes on the heap of ‘reading matter’ that every meeting these days seemed to generate, in the way that lily beetle grubs generated those slimy lumps of – well, if you were a gardener, you knew. And since his dear wife had died, Porson had had to take over her garden. Disrespectful to let it all die, he had thought, but he wasn’t sure he had the aptitude and he was preparing himself for disasters and guilt. Meanwhile . . . He opened the first file with a sigh like a gale through a pine forest.

THREE
Tattoo Parlous
    R onnie Brown was tracked down at work at Heathrow, where he did minor maintenance, mostly replacing lights and unblocking lavatories. He was a poor, meagre sort of person, faded and cowed by life. The only exciting thing that had ever happened to him was his wife throwing him out, which was why he longed to talk about it, to everyone he met, even to a policeman investigating a suspicious death. Kept to the point, he could offer no information about the man upstairs, having never spoken to him, though he had seen him once, getting out of a taxi outside the house as Ronnie Brown was walking towards it on his way home one evening from Hammersmith tube station. He hadn’t heard anything upstairs on Sunday night. He confessed to being a heavy sleeper. He’d been woken by the sound of Botev rowing with Lauren on the landing outside, and had then become aware of the music coming from the flat above. It hadn’t been going when he went to sleep, about half ten, quarter to eleven. He hadn’t heard loud music up there any other time. Upstairs was usually a very quiet tenant.
    Nicky and Graham were more voluble – or at least, Nicky was. Graham, lying on the sofa with a rug over his legs, despite the summer heat, was clearly undergoing some extreme treatment, for he was grey and skeletal and had a cotton scarf tied round his head, pirate-style, to conceal his hair loss. Both were determinedly cheerful, however, and expressed deep concern over the fate of the man upstairs.
    ‘Robin Williams? Isn’t it terrible, we never even knew his name,’ Nicky said. ‘Poor soul, horrible to think of him killing himself all alone up there.’
    But Graham looked at Swilley, who was doing the interview, and said, ‘I don’t think he did kill himself, otherwise this very glamorous lady detective wouldn’t be here, looking so stern. You think it was something else, don’t you?’
    ‘We don’t know,’ Swilley said shortly. ‘We’re trying to