Hard Going Read Free

one home, over three floors. Given the cost of housing in Hammersmith these days, its size ought to have made it quite valuable; on the other hand, not everyone wanted to live over a restaurant. It was hard to guess what it might fetch on the market, but it wouldn’t have been cheap.
    At the back of the first floor was an L-shaped kitchen-dining room; on the second floor the master bedroom was in front and a large bathroom, obviously made by sacrificing a second bedroom, at the back. On the third floor – the attic behind the parapet – were two maids’ bedrooms with a sliver of a modern shower room tucked between them. One was empty; the other seemed to be used as a storage room, containing suitcases and cardboard removers’ boxes full of personal possessions.
    The main bedroom was decorated and furnished, like the living room, with grand, heavy old furniture in the Victorian style, very much a man’s taste; yet the kitchen and bathroom had been done out fairly recently in modern style and at some expense, with a lot of tile, marble, chrome, and a profusion of gadgets.
    The kitchen in particular roused Atherton’s envy. ‘Every damn thing that ouvres and fermes ,’ he remarked. He loved to cook, but living in a tiny two-up-two-down he hadn’t the space for a kitchen like this, even if he could have afforded it.
    Slider had often noted that, as a rule, the posher the kitchen, the less it was used, but this kitchen, though it was spotlessly clean, was obviously cooked in.
    ‘I wonder if Mr Bygod was another of these epicurean bachelors who like to cook,’ Slider mused.
    ‘Don’t look at me when you say “another”,’ Atherton objected.
    ‘If the chef’s hat fits,’ Slider said. ‘There’s no sign of a woman’s touch in the bedroom or reception room.’
    A further anomaly was that flight of stairs at the bottom. The front door was heavy, and was controlled by an entryphone system, the upper end of which was beside the door inside the living room. It was recently painted and sported well-polished brass furniture – quite a grand door in its way – but behind it was a tiny lobby, lit only with a bare light bulb hanging from a long flex. And while the upper hall and stairs were carpeted, these lower stairs were covered with linoleum that looked old and worn, and the walls were painted with a dingy pale green emulsion that was much scuffed and marked with traffic.
    ‘You’d think, given the flat must have cost quite a bit,’ said Slider, ‘that he’d want to make a better impression.’
    ‘Perhaps he didn’t entertain,’ Atherton said. Then, ‘That was a nice suit he was wearing. Bespoke.’
    ‘How could you tell from that distance?’
    ‘I can tell. Might be interesting to talk to his tailor.’
    One of Bailey’s ghosts found them to tell them that Doc Cameron had moved the body and wanted them back, so they returned to the living room. The corpse was off the desk and on the floor, on its back, in a body bag, waiting to be zipped up. Slider took a look at the face – the first time he’d been able to see it. Thin, with high cheekbones, a prominent nose and full, carved lips: distinguished, he’d have said. A strong face, and while not exactly handsome, it was agreeable to look at – probably women would have found him attractive, he thought.
    He stared down for a long moment, aware that this was the last the world would see of Lionel Bygod, whoever and whatever he had been. From here he would go to the morgue, where he would be unemotionally cut up and analysed, no longer a person but a case, a piece of evidence in an investigation; and from there into a coffin, his final disintegration taking place unseen within the oak, pine or mahogany, depending on the next-of-kin’s propensities or finances. That zip would zip closed his time on the stage, like the final curtain on the last night of a play. All that he was and had been was over and done with. And Slider had yet to discover if anyone