A Meeting of Minds Read Free Page A

‘When Max arrives would you send him up?’ she asked Beattie, halting in the doorway
    â€˜Right, ducks,’ she was assured. ‘Get ‘im to bring down your stuff for the charity shop then, will yer? It’ll save us time later.’
    â€˜That’s my Rosemary,’ Beattie explained fondly as the door closed behind her. ‘She’s coming with me. Gonna ‘ave the upstairs front.’
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    In her bed-sitter Detective Sergeant Rosemary Zyczynski rested her elbows on the gritty windowsill and sniffed in the familiar scents of the outer neighbourhood. The ceaseless sound of traffic from the main road was a constant drone. Even in the early hours there was always movement out there, bringing sounds like the sea with waves approaching, receding, washing up again. Out at Ashbourne House she would find country silence. At most the cry of a fox or hunting owls.
    Someone nearby was frying onions, and above the dusty bitterness of town-bred evergreens there crept the pervasive
odour of cat. Today something new: not far off a road surface was being re-tarred. Appreciatively she drew in the hot metal scent of the burner. This was her feet-on-the-ground world.
    She was going to miss this place, cramped as it had become now that Max expected occasionally to spend the odd night here. It was the sleeping part of sleeping together that was the trouble: the rest was wonderful. But Max had the cat-nap habit, and would get up at odd hours to boil a kettle for drinks, then boot up the computer to knock out a few paragraphs of mint-fresh ideas; climb back into bed to read for twenty minutes; sigh, set a leather marker in his book; extinguish his bed-lamp; and be asleep within seconds.
    Z, by contrast, required her log-like eight hours, and he invariably disturbed her however mouse-like his intentions. She would lie awake, unmoving, pretending to be asleep until, long after his performance, wearily, she was.
    In her new flat, offered by Beattie at a suspiciously low price – ‘You might as well ‘ave it now as wait until I’m gorn, girl!’ – she and Max could do the sleeping part in separate rooms, as they did when she stayed over at his house in Pimlico.
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    Downstairs, Frank Perrin was grinning. So Miss Weyman had a daughter she hadn’t admitted to. A nice-looker, and no wedding ring; living at home with Mum although she’d be well into her twenties. And Beattie could still go on playing mother hen, with young Rosemary given a sweetener of the bigger upstairs apartment at the new place, which had ample room for a live-in lover. Cunning old Mum: keeping her kid close by giving her a generous rein.
    â€˜I’ve dropped in for the residents’ names,’ he announced. ‘So’s we can get on with the entry-phone list. Just the surnames’ ll do for now. They can make any fancy changes to the cards later.’
    â€˜Right. Wormsley you know, ‘im downstairs across from me. And I’m Weyman. The other folks upstairs, front, are
called Winter. All of us starting with a W. You‘da thought I’d chose them for it, only I didn’t. And the upstairs rear lot are’Ubbles. Nice little fam‘ly. A Mum, Dad and a kiddy about four.’
    â€˜Hubble, like the telescope, right? And then your Rosemary, upstairs front. We’ll need to put her initial R on the bell card, to keep your – er, callers apart.’ He’d been going to say ‘mail’, but remembered in time that there was to be a communal letterbox; all post to be sorted indoors and left on the hall table. A bit too matey for some folks, that. Beattie might be compelled to rethink that one.
    At first Beattie didn’t get the gist about the initial, thinking he somehow knew how jealously Rosemary guarded her privacy. That was her one condition on taking the flat. If anyone asked what her job was, no mention of police. Beattie was to say civil servant.
    Then it