Dead Man's Time

card for her to read.
    She did not have her glasses on, but she liked his Irish accent. The face on the card was a little blurred, but it looked like the face of the shaven-headed man in front of her.
Richard
Carroll
, she thought his name read, but she couldn’t be sure.
    ‘How can I help you, gentlemen?’
    ‘We’re investigating a water leak. Have you noticed a drop in water pressure during the past twenty-four hours?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I can’t say that I have.’ But, she knew, there was a lot of stuff she did not notice these days. Much though it angered her, she was
increasingly becoming dependent on others. Although she still kept a tight grip on everything she could.
    ‘Do you mind if we come in and check your water pressure? We’d hate you to be charged for water you’re not using.’
    ‘Well, I wouldn’t be wanting that either,’ she said with a twinkle in her eye, in her soft Dublin accent. All these bastard utilities were trying to rob you blind all the time
and she wasn’t one to be having any of it. She scrutinized the phone bills, the electricity bills, the gas and the water. ‘I’ve been thinking the water charges are high of
late.’
    ‘All the more indication of a problem,’ Richard Carroll said, apologetically.
    ‘You’d better be coming in.’
    Holding the Zimmer with one hand, she stepped aside to let the men enter, then closed the door behind them.
    Almost immediately she did not like the way their eyes began roaming. At the fine oil paintings hanging on the walls, and then at the Louis XIV table in the hallway. The Georgian tallboy. The
Georgian chest. The two Chippendale chairs. Bargains, once, all of them, pointed out by her brother, who knew a thing or two about antiques of all descriptions.
    ‘Where would you like to start your investigations, gentlemen?’
    She saw the blur of the man’s fist only a fraction of a second before it struck her stomach, punching all the wind out of her. She doubled up, her frail hand clutching at the panic
button.
    But it was ripped off her neck long before she could press it.

8
    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife
, PC Susi Holiday thought. A sturdily built woman of
twenty-eight, with brown curly hair and a constantly cheerful face. That line had been running through her head repeatedly ever since she had woken up this morning. She’d had a day off
yesterday, and much to her husband James’s incredulity had spent much of it watching all six episodes of the BBC production of
Pride and Prejudice
, binge-eating junk food, and
smoking an entire packet of fags. She was like that. One week all healthy, working out at the gym, not smoking, then the next being a total slob.
    Now, irreverently, she decided that another truth universally acknowledged is that no one looks their best sitting on a toilet seat with their trousers round their ankles.
    Especially not if they are dead.
    Memo to self. Please, please, please don’t die on the loo.
    The need to go to the lavatory was a frequent precursor to a heart attack. All too many did die that way.
    Like the plump old man in front of them, in the dingy, narrow little toilet in the squalid Housing Association flat with its bare pale-blue walls and unwashed underwear, socks and shirts lying
all over the floor in every room. It smelled rank: a mixture of a rancid, cheesy reek and, the worst smell in the world, a decaying human. Its tenant was named Ralph Meeks, and this was whom she
presumed, with revulsion tinged with sadness, she was now staring at. Like all G5s who had been dead for more than a couple of days, he looked more like a waxwork than a real human being. She
always found the total stillness of a cadaver both eerie and fascinating.
    His bulky frame was wedged between the walls. There were liver spots on his hands, the crimson and green blotches of advanced decomposition on his face and visible parts of his body. An
insistent swarm of blowflies crawled over his face and neck and hands, and buzzed around him.
    Folds of flesh hung from the man’s midriff, forming a canopy over his private parts. His dome was bald with little tufts of hair on either side, he had a hearing aid in his right ear, and
his mouth was frozen open in an expression of surprise, one that was mirrored in his startled, lifeless eyes. As if dying had not, she thought, irreverently, been on his list of
things to