one-hit wonder Read Free Page B

Bee’s address for the first time this morning and seen the word “mansion,” she’d thought, without surprise, that Bee must have been living in some great detached pile of a building, with security gates and a driveway. But these were just flats. She felt all her other expectations about Bee’s lifestyle—housekeepers, health spas and charity dos—drop down a notch or two, proportionately.
    She perched herself on the stairs in front of the house and nibbled her fingernails nervously, watching the world go by.
    Tourists, businesspeople, girls in trendy pantsuits, messengers on huge motorbikes. Not an old person in sight.
    Not like Bideford, where the elderly outnumbered the youthful by three to one.
    “Miss Wills.” She jumped as someone loomed into view and boomed at her. A large hand with fat knuckles and a big gold ring was thrust toward her. She shook it. It was a bit clammy and felt like a damp shammy.
    “Hello,” she said, getting to her feet and picking up her bag.
    “Mr. Arif?”
    “Well, which other people do you know who might know you by your name in the middle of the street, young lady?” He laughed, a pantomime laugh, amused by his own humor, and let them into the building. He was quite short and quite wide and had a very large behind. The fabric of his trousers was silky and thin, and Ana could clearly see the trousers was silky and thin, and Ana could clearly see the outline of a pair of unappetizingly small briefs digging into his fleshy buttocks.
    He was highly aromatic, and as the doors closed on the coffin-sized lift, Ana was enveloped in a rich and pungent cloud of perfume. The lift clunked loudly as it finally hit the third floor, and Mr. Arif pulled open the brass gate to let Ana out. He gestured expansively at the apartment doors as they walked down a broad, dimly lit corridor that smelled faintly of gravy and old mops.
    “These, all my flats—all short-term—but all fully rented—
    365 days a year. Here. Here and here. Famous London stage actress, here. Here—a lord. There—an MP.” Ana didn’t really have any idea what he was talking about, but she nodded politely anyway.
    Mr. Arif slipped a key from a very large bunch into the lock of flat number twenty-seven, swung open the door, and flicked on the light switch.
    “Here all day with the police and such and who knows what on the day that we found her. A bad day. A very bad day.
    Four days she’d been here. In this heat. You can still smell it.” He twitched his nostrils and his large moustache quivered.
    “Breathe in deep like so, and the stench—it is still there.” He jabbed at his throat with the side of his hand to demonstrate exactly where the stench was and began heaving open grimy windows at the other end of the room, holding a monogrammed handkerchief over his mouth.
    “How is this, that a woman as beautiful”—he pointed at a framed poster of Bee on the wall—“could be dead and nobody be knowing this thing? How is it that I, her landlord, come to be the one to be finding her? I am not her friend. I am not her lover. I am not her family. I am her landlord.
    This—this is not right.”
    He shook his head from side to side for a good twenty seconds, allowing time for the not-rightness of the situation to be fully absorbed, his body language implicitly informing her that in his culture this sort of thing would not be allowed to happen. Ana gently placed her bag on the floor and stared in wonder at the photo of Bee on the wall, realizing with a jolt that she’d almost forgotten what her sister looked like.
    “So.” He clapped his hands together and then rubbed them, his flesh squishing together like bread dough. “The cleaning crew are arriving at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. By that time all extraneous matter is to be removed. I have famous royal ballerina moving in on Saturday morning. All has to be perfect. Your beautiful sister has not left you a very great task. Your beautiful sister has not very