Free The Keys to the Street by Ruth Rendell Page B

of Kent, standing on a plinth at the end of the gardens and looking down Portland Place. Someone had once told Bean he was the spitting image of the duke, and after that he had never passed the bronze figure without giving it a look.
    He lived a little way away in York Terrace East. Normally, he would have gone back by way of the tunnel but he didn’t want to encounter the key man again. Better brave the Marylebone Road, wait a good two minutes for those lights to change, then belt across before they changed back again. It was easier without dogs pulling him like in some chariot race.
    He let himself into his flat. Neat as a pin, spotlessly clean, it was furnished exactly as it had been in the days of Maurice Clitheroe, its former owner, with heavy, highly polished late-nineteenth-century pieces, red and blue Turkey rugs, and in the living room a newish three-piece suite covered in tan-colored hide. This and the huge television and VCR reflected Bean’s own taste. His kitchen was carefully geared for the freezer–microwave culture. There was no oven and there were no pans. The lot had gone on the day of Mr. Clitheroe’s memorial service, along with the piano, the whip and gun collection, and the pictures of two saints undergoing particularly revolting forms of martyrdom.
    Maurice Clitheroe had left Bean his duplex in recognition of services rendered. These had sometimes been onerous, particularly in the area of punishment, though here he had always been the executant, never the recipient. He had known where to draw the line, as for example in refusing to gratify Mr. Clitheroe’s demand that both of them should wear spiked dog collars while at home alone. And in spite of this setting of limits, the flat had still been left to him according to a promise frequently made but never entirely taken seriously.
    In relation to the flat he loved—he called it a maisonette—and in which he now settled down contentedly to microwave a Linda McCartney vegetarian platter, Bean had only one regret. He had no opportunity to impress his clients with his address, no chance of presenting them with invoices on paper headed York Terrace, NW1. For since the owners of his dogs were unable to claim income tax relief on what they paid him, every penny he received was black money, money in the back pocket, handed over in cash. His earnings from Mr. Clitheroe had never reached the tax floor, for all was found for him, his board, his lodging, even his clothes. The Inland Revenue probably thought he was dead or, more likely, had never been born.
    He had a look at the camera and checked that there were three frames left on the film.
    •   •   •
    In her third week at Charlotte Cottage, Mary was twice invited out to dinner. Her grandmother gave a rather grand dinner party for her. The nine guests and Frederica Jago sat down to deep-fried Crottin de Chavignol with cranberry sauce, roast guinea fowl, and French apple tart with clotted cream. A heavy meal suitable for old-fashioned old people. Everyone but Mary and one of the men she sat next to was very old, so it was plain that the young or youngish man had been invited for her sake.
    Much the same thing happened at the other dinner party. This was given by Dorothea in Charles Lane, where she lived with her husband, Gordon, in the house next door to the Irene Adler Museum. Everyone among the eight guests was young, so they ate arugula and corn salad in an orange and walnut dressing, red mullet with couscous and deep-fried sage leaves, followed by cherimoya sorbet with a Sharon fruit coulis. Couples were either married or living together in long-term relationships, so it was apparent to Marythat the single (divorced) man she sat next to had been invited for her sake.
    Of these two men, Frederica’s protégé and Gordon’s friend, the former rang Mary up the next day and asked if she would go to the cinema with him to see
The Madness of King George
. She said no. It was not only that she had