Eddie had turned round and slunk back into his room, a Polonius in retreat from behind the arras. That woman, he thought, that blowsy woman is after my dad. And if she gets him, then she gets the lot when he snuffs it - the flat, the wine business, the old Jaguar. The lot. She has to be stopped.
Then he thought: twenty-eight? Twenty-eight?
3. Dee is Rude about Others
As William locked his front door behind him that morning, he heard the sound of somebody fiddling with keys on the landing downstairs. This was nothing unusual: the girls, as he called them, had a difficult lock, and unless one inserted the key at precisely the right angle and then exerted a gentle upward pressure, it would not work. It was not unusual, he had noted, for the locking-up process to take five or ten minutes; on one occasion he had gone out to buy a newspaper and returned to discover one of the young women still struggling with the recalcitrant lock.
As he made his way downstairs, he saw that it was Dee on the landing below.
‘Having trouble with the key?’ he asked jauntily.
She looked up. ‘No more than usual. I thought I’d got the hang of it and then . . .’
‘Keys are like that,’ said William. ‘They never fit exactly. I remember an aunt of mine who used the wrong key for years. She was determined that it would work and she managed to force the lock of her front door every time. But it took a lot of force. She had lost the right key and was in fact using the back door key. The triumph of determination over . . . well, locks, I suppose.’
Dee stood back and allowed William to fiddle with the key. After a few twists the lock moved and he was able to withdraw the key. ‘There we are. Locked.’