Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [131]
Conversions meant flats, Barbara knew, which in turn meant occupants, which in turn meant winkling out the identity of the occupant in question. She fished for a cigarette and paced while she smoked it. The nicotine, she reckoned, would sharpen her wits. The sharpening didn’t take long.
She went to the door and saw the line of bells. Flats were marked but there were no names, as was typical in London. There was, however, one bell marked Porter, and this turned out to be a piece of good luck. Not every residential building in London had a porter. It upped the value of the flats within but it also cost the residents a bundle.
A disembodied voice asked her business. She said she’d come to make an enquiry about one of the flats that she’d learned would soon be coming on the market and could she possibly speak to him about the building?
The porter didn’t embrace this idea with wild enthusiasm, but he did decide to cooperate. He buzzed her in and told her to come along the corridor to the back, where she’d find his office.
It was perfectly quiet inside, aside from the well-muted sound of traffic on Kensington Road, just beyond Rutland Gate. She passed along a marble floor, treading silently on a faded Turkey carpet. The doors to two ground-floor flats faced each other here, and a table upon which sat cubbies for the day’s post was positioned beneath a heavy gilt mirror. She gave a quick glance to the cubbies, but like the bells outside next to the door, they offered flat numbers only and not names.
Just beyond the stairway and a lift, she found a door marked Porter. The porter in question opened it to her knock. He looked like a pensioner and he wore a uniform too tight in the collar and too loose in the stomach. He gave Barbara the once-over and his expression said that if she was intending to make a purchase of a flat in the building, she had better prepare herself for an accepting-offers-beginning-at situation that was going to knock her out of her high-top trainers.
He said, “Don’t know about any flat on offer, do I,” without any introduction.
She said, “This is a bit of a preemptive strike, if you know what I mean. C’n I…?” She indicated his office and smiled pleasantly. “I’ll just take a minute of your time,” she added.
He stepped back and tilted his head towards a desk situated in a corner of the room. He had a nice little setup here, Barbara thought, with part of the place made into a snug sitting room complete with television currently tuned in to an ancient film in which Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue were locked in a timeless, adolescent, agonizing embrace as music swelled with a familiar theme. She thought for a moment before she came up with the title. A Summer Place, that was it. All about young, tormented love. Nothing quite like it, she thought. Shoot me first.
The porter saw the direction of her gaze and, perhaps determining his choice of film was some sort of revelation about him, went to the television and hastily switched it off. That done, he moved to his desk and sat behind it. This left Barbara standing, but that apparently was his intention.
Barbara expressed what she felt was a suitable amount of gratitude for the porter’s willingness to talk to her. She asked some questions about the building, the sorts of queries she expected a potential buyer might have before plunking down hard-earned cash on a piece of outrageously priced Kensington property. Age, condition, problems with heating and plumbing and ventilation, difficulties encountered with other residents, presence of undesirables, the neighbourhood, noise, pubs, restaurants, markets, corner shops, and on and on. When she’d run the gamut of everything she could possibly think of— jotting his answers in her small spiral notebook— she said, laying out her bait and hoping he’d go for it, “Brilliant. Can’t thank you enough. Most of this matches up with what Bernard told me about the place.”
He bit. “Bernard? That your estate agent? ’Cause