Free Tigerlily's Orchids by Ruth Rendell

trouble?’
    â€˜You’ll do it yourself. You stand down there in the hallway shouting at the top of your voice that no one in this place goes out to work. Don’t deny it. I heard you.’
    â€˜I’m not going to deny it. It’s true. There’s three of them students – or so they say. And not one of the others has what you’d call a job. Now when I was young and even more when you was young, in a place like this, six flats, everyone’d have gone out to work, nine-to-five jobs the lot of them – well, maybe the wives, some of them, would have stopped at home. Done their own housework in them days.’
    â€˜Then you’d have been out of a job,’ said Wally triumphantly.
    Richenda cleaned all the flats in Lichfield House, three in Ludlow House, two in Hereford House and five in Ross House. Her mother had cleaned flats before her and her grandmother before that, but they had dressed for the job, the former in ‘slacks’ and cotton blouse, the latter in an overall. Richenda told the residents that she wore what she called her ordinary clothes because she was no more going to get herself into a uniform than Wally was. If the ordinary clothes – a short tight skirt, tight cardigan over a low-cut T-shirt and stiletto heels – caused some astonishment, Richenda said they could take it or leave it. See what they’d get if they took on one of those single mums who put cards through the door offering cleaning services – their homes stripped bare and an open invitation to every burglar in north London.
    She started at Stuart Font’s, her intention to use no cleansers, no polish and no appliance but the vacuum cleaner. When Stuart pointed out the hot-chocolate stain she said, almost before he had finished his sentence, that this was a job for a carpet-cleaning firm. The woman he was ‘carrying on with’ phoned soon after that and though it was apparent as he moved from room to room, looking over his shoulder, that he wanted to be on his own, Richenda followed him, pulling the Hoover after her and listening carefully to his side of the conversation.
    Wally Scurlock allowed ten minutes after her departurebefore going out and carrying with him his garden tools in a large canvas bag. He was almost totally uninterested in other people unless they came into the category of those who interested him very much. Therefore, he no more registered Duncan Yeardon taking out of number 3 Kenilworth Avenue a box of papers for recycling than he noticed the cypress tree by Duncan’s front gate. The young girl with a silk-smooth pale face and sleek black hair who emerged from Springmead was another matter altogether. Wally took in with hungry eyes her slender shape, long slim legs and the flower-petal hands that held a black plastic sack which looked far too heavy for them. He considered crossing the road and offering to carry that sack for her but dismissed the idea as soon as it came to him. Attracting attention to himself was pointless and possibly dangerous.
    Ten thirty was the date of his self-made appointment and it was now twenty past. He walked past the church, designed by Sir Robert Smirke a hundred years ago but now called the Bel Esprit Centre and converted into a mini-shopping mall with cafeteria and children’s play centre, and briskly up Kenilworth Avenue, a street of mixed dwellings, short terraces of three-storey town houses, detached and semi-detached villas, all interspersed with blocks of flats very much like Lichfield, Ross, Ludlow and Hereford but older. At the top was a roundabout where there was a hairdresser’s, a newsagent’s, a building society branch and a shop selling fitted bathrooms, now in the process of closing down. Wally passed two exits and took the continuation of Kenilworth Avenue. Here, past Kenilworth Green and St Ebba’s, the oldest building in the neighbourhood by about six hundred years, was Kenilworth Primary