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secretaries. Just in case this was one of them, I left my name and number, pointing out that it was the Stuart Street property and part of Nassim’s empire, which made us almost family, didn’t it?
    I just managed to get in the fact that it really was quite important before she hung up. You can’t win ‘em all. One or two now and then would be nice, though.
    I got Armstrong fired up and headed towards Hackney, using the back streets to avoid the worst of the rush hour. In effect, I’d lost a day, and I wondered if there had been something I’d planned to do that Monday, like work, for instance. I couldn’t think of anything I’d promised anybody and I hadn’t anything musical on for a few days, so that was all right. Being self-unemployed has its upside.
    In Stuart Street I had a choice of parking spaces outside No 9. It wasn’t so much fun nowadays, not since Frank and Salome Asmoyah, the black Yuppie couple who used to have the flat above me, moved to their much plusher Limehouse pad complete with mortgage repayments delivered in envelopes with black edges. My going-away present to them had been a pair of inflatable yellow wheel-clamps, which I’d attached front and aft to their VW Golf. Nothing could be more guaranteed to induce apoplexy in a London driver, though I never could get onside with that sort of paranoia. Have you ever seen a taxi wearing a Denver boot?
    As I got out, I caught the enigmatic Mr Goodson sneaking in through the front door, but if he’d seen me pull up, he didn’t wait to say hello. That wasn’t unusual, though. I knew he’d be inside his ground-floor flat with the door locked before I could get into the hall, no matter how fast I was. He rarely spoke to the rest of us peasants in the house, though when he did, he was nothing but polite. He didn’t play music loud, drink to excess, have phone calls, watch television or go out at all at weekends. I tell people he’s an alien. If I told them he was a quiet, shy, unassuming minor civil servant who read a lot of books, they’d have the weirdo squad from Social Services round straight away. After all, this was Hackney, and there were probably by-laws about such things.
    I sneaked up the stairs to Flat 3, tiptoeing by the door of No 2 so as not to disturb Lisabeth and Fenella, the two dragons who inhabited that particular dungeon. It wasn’t that we didn’t get on; we did – surprisingly well, in fact. But while I’d been house-sitting for Nassim, Fenella had been cat-sitting for me. Not that that required much; it’s just that not even Springsteen has mastered the tin-opener yet, though he’s working on it. Unfortunately, Fenella takes her duties terribly seriously, and would have a minute by minute report of what Springsteen had been up to while I’d been away. Lisabeth, on the other hand, regards anything male (about 48% of the population) and anything that moves faster than she does (the rest of the animal kingdom) with deep suspicion, and the combination of her moaning and Fenella enthusing was too much for me.
    Springsteen was out, but there were tell-tale signs that he’d been ruling the roost and no evidence that he was pining for my return. There was a dish of cat food down for him, plus a dish of tuna fish chunks (in soya oil as he likes to preserve his kittenish figure) and a saucer of rapidly separating cream. He had a cat flap in the flat door if he wanted to get into the rest of the house, and Fenella had thoughtfully left my kitchen window wide open so he could come and go that way via the flat roof of the kitchen extension next door. She’d also left the heating on for him, which was doing nothing except heating the window-sill for the pigeons and running up my bills. It looked as if I would have to have a go at the electricity meter with an electromagnet again. It also seemed, from the feathers on the kitchen floor, that one of the