Upon her return from viewing Jemima’s body, she’d put up her ROOM TO LET sign in the dining room window, and she’d made her phone call to Loot to run the advertisement. Then she’d gone up to Jemima’s room and she’d begun a thorough clean. With the boxes and boxes and boxes of her belongings already removed from the house, this was a job that didn’t take long. Hoovering, dusting, changing sheets, an application of furniture polish, a beautifully washed window-Bella prided herself particularly on the state of her windows-scented drawer liners removed from the chest and new ones placed there, curtains taken down for cleaning, every piece of furniture moved away from the wall to give the hoover access…No one, Bella thought, cleaned a room the way she did.

She moved on to the bathroom. Generally, she left their bathrooms to her lodgers, but if she was going to have a new lodger soon, it stood to reason that Jemima’s drawers and shelves were going to have to be emptied of anything left behind by the police. They’d not removed every item from the bathroom since not everything within had belonged to Jemima, so Bella concentrated on straightening the room as she cleaned it, which was why she found-not in Jemima’s drawer but in the top drawer marked for the other lodger-a curious item that certainly did not belong there.

It was the result of a pregnancy test. Bella knew that the second she clapped her eyes on it. What she didn’t know was whether the result was positive or negative, being of an age at which she would, of course, never have used such a test herself. Her own children-long gone to Detroit and to Buenos Aires-had announced their conception in the old-fashioned manner of wracking her body with morning sickness almost from the instant of sperm-meets-egg, which itself had been achieved in the old-fashioned manner, thank you very much, Mr. McHaggis. So Bella, retrieving the incriminating plastic tab from the drawer, wasn’t sure about what the indicator meant. Blue line. Was that negative? Positive? She would have to find out. She would also have to find out what it was doing in the drawer of her other lodger because surely he hadn’t brought it home from a celebratory dinner-or, what was more likely, a confrontational cup of coffee-with the mother-to-be. If a woman he’d been bonking had fallen pregnant and had presented him with the evidence, why would he keep it? A souvenir? Certainly, the coming infant was going to be souvenir enough. No, it stood to reason that the pregnancy test was Jemima’s. And if it hadn’t been in Jemima’s belongings or with Jemima’s rubbish, there was a reason. There seemed several possibilities, but the one that Bella didn’t want to consider was the one telling her that once again, two of her lodgers had pulled the wool over her eyes about what was going on between them.

Bloody hell damn, Bella thought. She had rules. They were everywhere. They were signed and sealed and delivered in the contract she made each lodger read and affix his or her name to the bottom of. Were young people so randy that they couldn’t stop themselves from jumping in and out of each other’s knickers at the first opportunity despite her very clear rules about fraternizing with other members of the household? It appeared they were. It appeared they could not. Someone, she decided, was going to be talked to.

Bella was going through the mental preparation for such a conversation when the bell went on the front door down below. She gathered up her cleaning supplies, removed her Marigolds, and huffed down the stairs. The bell rang again, and she shouted, “Coming,” and she opened it to see a girl on her porch, rucksack at her feet, hopeful expression on her face. She didn’t look English to Bella, and when she spoke, her voice gave her away as someone from what had once probably been Czechoslovakia but was now any one of a number of countries with many syllables, even more consonants, and few vowels, because Bella could not keep track of them and no longer tried.

“You have room?” the girl said hopefully, gesturing in the direction of the dining room window where the room-to-let sign was displayed. “I see your notice there…?”

Bella was about to tell her yes, she had a room to let, and how are you at obeying rules, missy? But her attention shifted to movement on the pavement as someone dodged behind what shrubbery managed to grow in her front garden among the plethora of recycling bins. It was a woman moving out of sight, a woman in a tailored wool suit, despite the heat, with a brightly patterned scarf-her sodding trademark, that was, Bella thought-folded into a band and holding back masses of dyed orange hair.

“You!” Bella shouted at her. “I’m ringing the cops, I am! You’ve been bloody told to stay away from this house and this is the limit!”

WHETHER THE ACTIVITY was going to eat up time or not-and Barbara Havers knew which alternative was actually the case-there was no way she was going to face the sister of Simon St. James in her current getup and with her face attempting to divest itself of its smear of makeup through the means of excessive perspiration. So instead of heading from Chelsea directly to Bethnal Green, she drove home to Chalk Farm first. She scrubbed her face, breathed a sigh of relief, and decided to compromise with the weeest bit of blusher. She then went for a change of apparel-hallelujah to drawstring trousers and T-shirts-and having thus resumed her normal state of dishabille, she was ready to face Sidney St. James.

Her conversation with Sidney was not effected immediately, however. Upon leaving her tiny bungalow, Barbara heard her name called out by Hadiyyah, crying from above, “Hullo, oh hullo, Barbara!” as if she hadn’t seen her in an eon or so. The little girl went on enthusiastically with, “Mrs. Silver is teaching me how to polish silver today,” and Barbara followed the sound of the voice to see Hadiyyah hanging out of a window on the second floor of the Big House. “We’re using baking powder, Barbara,” she announced and then she turned as someone within the flat said something to which the little girl corrected herself with, “Oh! Baking soda, Barbara. ’Course Mrs. Silver doesn’t ackshully have any silver, so we’re using her cutlery, but it makes the cutlery shine so. Isn’t that brilliant? Barbara, why’ve you not got on your new skirt?”

“End of day, kiddo,” Barbara said. “It’s mufti time.”

“And are you-” Hadiyyah’s attention was caught by something beyond Barbara’s line of vision because she interrupted herself with, “Dad! Dad! Hullo! Hullo! Sh’ll I come home now?” She sounded even more enthusiastic about this prospect than she had about seeing Barbara, which gave Barbara an idea of how much the little girl was actually enjoying learning yet another of Mrs. Silver’s “housewifely skills,” as she called them. So far in the summer they’d done starching, ironing, dusting, hoovering, removing scale from toilet bowls, and learning the myriad uses of white vinegar, all of which Hadiyyah had obediently mastered and then dutifully reported to Barbara and demonstrated either for her or for her father. But the bloom had faded from the rose of acquiring domestic skills-how could it be otherwise, Barbara thought-and while Hadiyyah was far too polite to complain to the elderly woman, who could blame her for embracing the thought of escape with a joy that daily increased?

Barbara heard Taymullah Azhar’s response, muted, from the direction of the street. Hadiyyah’s hand fluttered in farewell to Barbara, she disappeared within the flat, and Barbara herself continued down the path that followed the side of the house, emerging from beneath an arbour fragrant with star jasmine to see Hadiyyah’s father coming through the front gate, several carrier bags dangling from one hand and his worn leather briefcase in the other.

“Polishing silver,” Barbara said to him by way of greeting. “I’d no idea baking soda worked a trick on tarnish. You?”