Tigerlily's Orchids Read Free

just closed on the five of them when Claudia Livorno came through the swing doors, carrying a bottle of Verdicchio and walking gingerly because the step outside was icy and her heels were high. She rang the bell of Flat 1.
    *
    O lwen had nothing in Flat 6 to eat except bread and jam, so she ate that and when she woke up from her long afternoon sleep, started on a newly opened bottle of gin. She never went near a doctor but Michael Constantine said it was his opinion she had the beginnings of scurvy. He had noticed her teeth were getting loose. They shifted about, catching on her lips when she spoke. In the flat below hers, Marius Potter was sitting in an armchair that had belonged to his grandmother reading
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
for the second time. He would finish the bit about the murder of Commodus and then go downstairs to have supper with Rose Preston-Jones. This would be his third visit, the fifth time they had met, and he was looking forward to seeing her. He had already once cast the
sortes
for her and would do so again if she asked him.
    The first day he moved in they had recognised each other as kindred spirits, though they had nothing much in common but their vegetarianism. Marius smiled to himself (but only to himself) at her New Age occupation and lifestyle. Rose was no intellectual, yet in his estimation she had a clear and beautiful mind, was innocent, sweet and kindly. But something about her teased and slightly troubled him. Taking
Paradise Lost
from his great-uncle’s bookcase, Marius once again thought how he was almost sure he recognised her from further back, a long way back, maybe three decades. It wasn’t her name, not even her face, but some indefinable quality of personality or movement or manner that brought back to him a past encounter. He called that quality her soul and an inner conviction told him she would call it that too. He could have asked her, of course he could, but something stopped him, some feeling of awkwardness or embarrassment he couldn’t identify. What he hoped was that total recall would come to him.
    Carrying the heavy volume of Milton, he went down the stairs to the ground floor. Rose, admitting him to Flat 2, seemed to be standing in his past, down misty aeons back to his youth, when all the world was young and all the leaves were green. But still he couldn’t place her.

CHAPTER TWO
    T hanks to the recession, the solicitors Crabtree, Livorno, Thwaite had less than usual to do, so Freddy Livorno had taken the afternoon off and gone home. Now he was in the living room of his pretty little house in Islington, dismantling a basket of dried flowers which stood in the centre of an occasional table. Carefully he removed the plumes of pampas grass, the prickly stems of teasels with their spiked crowns and the slender brittle stalks of honesty (honesty!) bearing their transparent oval seedheads. Into the now empty basket he put the high-tech bug he had bought from a shop in Regent Street and replaced the plants, carefully concealing the deceitful little gizmo.
    Now for Claudia’s computer, the machine she exclusively used for her journalism as the deputy fashion editor of a national newspaper. A small widget, minute, almost invisible, went in between the keyboard lead and the socket. That should do it, Freddy said to himself. Technology was a wonderful thing, what an improvement on private detectives! As a solicitor, he knew all about that variety of gumshoe, though now he thought their days were numbered. His gizmos were costly and for the two of them he hadn’t had much change out of eight hundred pounds, but that was nothing compared to a private eye’s charges.
    Freddy wasn’t the sort of man to speculate about thecharacter or even the identity of the man who was his wife’s lover. Those details would be revealed in time. As to how she had met him, he supposed she had interviewed him for some aspect of her work. She could well