a shed with its pink-painted fretwork eaves, its arched windows and its glass-panelled front door. As he watched, someone came out from the back of the house and was walking down the path towards the back fence. It was a young man this time and Duncan hadnât seen him before. The young wifeâs brother who was staying with them? He toowas wearing only jeans and a T-shirt and Duncan wondered what beautiful country of green mountains, dense forests and perpetually blue skies he had left behind to come to this cold cloud-covered suburb. He watched the boy open the door of the summer house and go inside.
B usiness being practically non-existent, Freddy sat in his office at Crabtree, Livorno, Thwaite and opened the London street guide he had bought while he was waiting for a key to be cut from the one he had taken from Claudiaâs handbag. The chances of a block of flats â surely what the name Lichfield House designated â being listed in this guide seemed to him practically nil but he would give it a go. The index was vast and lo and behold (a favourite phrase with Freddy) here was not Lichfield House but Lichfield Road, turning out of Kenilworth Avenue, with a north London postal address. There was not necessarily a connection but after he had seen his one client of the afternoon, he would go and look.
The clientâs reason for this interview was rather too close to home for Freddyâs liking. He wanted a divorce on the grounds of his wifeâs adultery. Having spent an uncomfortable half-hour in which he had resisted telling the client about useful little eavesdropping gizmos, Freddy drove up to what he thought of as beyond the bleak reaches of northern suburbs and found Lichfield Road. He parked the car in the one remaining empty space outside the Kenilworth Parade shops and went into Wicked Wine. A woman in a long coat with the hem coming down and a hat shaped like a coal scuttle was buying gin. The man behind the counter wrapped the bottles, put them into her carrier and took her cash.
âAnd how can I help you, sir?â
âI donât suppose,â said Freddy, âthereâs a place round here called Lichfield House.â
âYou donât suppose, do you? Well, youâre in luck,â said Rupert. âItâs just round the corner. Olwen lives there and you can go with her. He can go with you, canât he, Olwen?â
âNot really,â said Olwen.
This greatly amused Rupert who roared with laughter and said, âWill you listen to her!â
Freddy followed the woman in the coal-scuttle hat, now struggling along with the bag of bottles. âCan I carry that for you?â
âNot really,â said Olwen in a considerably colder voice than she had used to the wine-shop man. She hobbled along the path, nearly slipping over on a sheet of ice, and lumbered into the block as the automatic doors opened for her.
Avoiding the ice, Freddy stood on the step, thinking about having an immediate confrontation with Stuart Font. The difficulty was that he hadnât brought a weapon with him, the walking stick he had in mind. Instead, he too went through the entrance and had a look at the pigeonholes on the right-hand wall. Olwen had disappeared. As Freddy was reading the name S. Font on the lowest pigeonhole a man he supposed to be a porter came up from a staircase beside the lift.
âMight you be visiting one of our residents, sir?â
âMind your own business,â said Freddy.
âIf this isnât my bloody business, sir, I donât know what is.â
âPiss off,â said Freddy.
Any steps he took would have to wait till after Christmas, less than a week away. On his way out he met a tall, extremely thin man with longish, sparse grey hair who, making for the pigeonholes, stopped unwillingly to listen to the porterâs torrent of complaints. Freddy went to find his car. It had received a parking ticket in his absence.
*
C