In the Kitchen Read Online Free PDF Page A

facilities office stood open, the light still burned inside. The police had left the mattress and sleeping bags. Everything else had been taken – two black bin liners containing Yuri's worldly goods.
    Gabe ducked under the tape and went into the office. He picked a sweet wrapper off the floor and put it in his pocket. The room was the size of a double bedroom with two shelved alcoves on facing walls. They had found a gas burner, a couple of pans, empty jars and spirit bottles, shaving foam and a razor, a change of clothes, a pill box with a lock of hair inside, and an old photograph – of a woman with a cleft chin and two little girls in big coats.
    When she had sung her last set, Charlie's back always ached from standing so long in her heels. Her eyes ached from the smoke in the club. 'What about a cruise ship? I'll sing, you cook. Or the other way round if you like.'
    A few more months and they'd move in together. She wanted to dock, not sail.
    He looked around. He didn't know what to do. He had come to pay his respects to Yuri but had hardly given him a thought. He should have sent someone out for flowers. He would lay a bouquet on the spot. There was mould growing in the corner and one of the shelves looked charred, an accident with the gas burner perhaps. Thank God it was only himself that Yuri had managed to kill.
    Yesterday morning Gabe had walked up to the body, stopped a couple of paces off and stood with his hands in his pockets, waiting a few blank moments before walking away again. Yuri was lying on his back, with thick, black blood like a hood cast up round his head. He had white hair on his chest, in short, singed-looking tufts. His stocky legs were skewed in different directions as though attempting to perform the splits or some kind of Cossack dance. The towel which he had been clutching had wrapped itself round a foot. He had a wise face, had Yuri: easy to miss when he was a man in a green boiler suit, shifting grease. But somehow, as he lay there splayed and naked, it wasn't hard to notice and his blue and kindly lips had parted, as if ready to dispense good advice.
    'Don't know,' Ivan had said when the inspector asked what he knew about Yuri's family.
    'No, no, nothing,' Victor said when asked what he knew about Yuri himself.
    'I don't have any information concerning,' said Suleiman.
    'Please,' said Benny, 'I don't know.'
    Gabe didn't do much better. He handed over details of the agency through which Yuri had been employed.
    Yuri was lying somewhere, unattended, on a mortuary slab. It was loneliness, certainly, that killed Yuri. For an instant Gabriel was desolate. He kicked at the mattress and tapped the wall, as though checking for damp or loose plaster, searching for an immediate job to be done. He swept his hand across a shelf and dislodged a soft roll of fabric that had caught between shelf and wall. A pair of sheer black tights, in a shrunken ball.
    'So, he was naked, old Yuri. I think he was waiting for his girlfriend. You think so, Chef, eh, do you think?'
    Gabriel sensed someone behind him, another beating heart. He stuffed the tights in his trouser pocket and turned and saw her. That girl, Lena, standing in the doorway in the jumble of shadow and light, let him look at her and she looked back at him. Her face was thin and rigid and her hands, which she held twisted together at her chest, were fleshless claws. This morning he had told Oona to fire her. It astonished him that he had never looked at her before.
    Gabriel breathed deeper, to breathe the air she had breathed.
    He opened his mouth, without knowing what he would say.
    Lena smiled, or he imagined it, and then she ran away, into the maze.

CHAPTER TWO
    THE IMPERIAL HOTEL, AS MR MADDOX WAS FOND OF POINTING OUT, had a history.
    Built in 1878 by industrialist and champion muttonchop grower Sir Edward Beavis, on the site once occupied by Dr Culverwell's Bathing Establishment in Yew Street, Piccadilly, the hotel shouldered as many previous