Free The Office of the Dead by Andrew Taylor Page A

shown what I was feeling on my face.
    ‘It’s a bit seedy, I’m afraid,’ she said.
    ‘It doesn’t matter.’
    ‘You didn’t think he’d live somewhere like this, I suppose? He wanted to stay in Cambridge, you see, and it was all he could afford when Mummy died.’
    Janet took me along the landing to the room at the front, which was furnished as a sitting room. It smelled of tobacco, stale food and unwashed bodies.
    ‘She gives him his breakfast and an evening meal,’ Janet said, meaning the landlady, ‘and she’s meant to dean for him as well and send his washing to the laundry.’ She threw up one of the sash windows and cold, fresh air flooded into the room. ‘I don’t think she does very much. That’s one reason why I didn’t warn her we were coming.’
    ‘I’m sorry. I – I suppose there was nowhere better available.’
    ‘Beggars couldn’t be choosers.’ She turned round to face me. ‘There was enough money when I was growing up. My mother was always working and she was good at her job. They were queuing up for her. And Daddy had a little money of his own. Not much, about a hundred a year, I think. They didn’t have pensions or anything like that. I think they more or less lived up to their income.’
    ‘It’s all right,’ I said awkwardly, because I was English and in those days the English hated talking about money, especially with friends. ‘I quite understand.’
    Janet was braver than me, always was. ‘When Mummy was ill, the translation work dried up and they had to live on Daddy’s capital. So what with one thing and another there wasn’t much left when Mummy died.’ She waved her arm. ‘But he had this. He could be independent and he loves Cambridge.’
    I said, suddenly understanding, ‘You and David are helping to pay for this, aren’t you?’
    She nodded. ‘Only a little.’
    ‘That’s something,’ I said. ‘You won’t have to any more.’
    But I knew as well as she did that they would have to pay for other things now, and in other ways.
    John Treevor was still alive and less than twenty miles away in Rosington. Yet as we moved around his flat, sorting his possessions, it was as if he were already dead. His absence had an air of permanence about it.
    His possessions dwindled in significance because of this. People lend importance to their possessions and when they’re dead or even absent the importance evaporates. I remember there was a thin layer of grime on the windowsills, dust on the books, holes in most of the socks.
    ‘It would be much simpler if we could just throw it all away,’ Janet said as she closed the third of the three suitcases we’d brought with us. ‘And what are we going to do about his post? He’s not going to want to write letters.’
    While I took the suitcases down to the car, Janet went through the drawers of the desk. When I came back there was a pile of papers on top and she was looking at a photograph, tilting it this way and that in front of the window.
    ‘Look.’
    I took it from her. The photograph was of her when she was not much older than Rosie, a little snapshot taken on the beach. She was in a bathing costume, hugging her knees and staring up at the camera. I handed it back to her.
    ‘It was before the war. Somewhere like Bexhill or Hastings. We used to go down to Sussex to stay with my grandparents. I thought it was heaven. Daddy taught me to swim one summer, and he used to read me to sleep.’ Her voice was trembling. ‘There was a collection of fairy stories by Andrew Lang, The Yellow Fairy Book. I’d forgotten all about it.’
    She foraged for her handkerchief in her handbag and blew her nose.
    ‘Why did it have to happen to him?’ she said angrily, as though it were my fault. ‘Why couldn’t he just have grown old normally, or even died? This is nothing. It’s neither one thing nor the other.’
    I said nothing because there was nothing to say.
    Janet left a note for the landlady. I took her out to lunch and