Thursday, noon

Bea Abbot, sixtyish and widowed but coping pretty well with life, answered the phone by saying, 'Abbot Agency. How may I help you?'

The voice at the other end quacked away.

Bea recoiled. 'We are not that kind of agency. We do not supply girls for ... no, certainly not!' She put the phone down with some force.

Oliver, her teenaged assistant, turned a guffaw into a cough. Prompt on cue, the builders started hammering away downstairs.

Bea winced. How much longer were the workmen going to be? 'You can take that grin off your face, Oliver,' said Bea. 'We are a reputable domestic agency, supplying staff to reputable clients. We are not, repeat not, in the business of supplying girls for A-list parties.'

Oliver was feeling chirpy. 'But we have dealt with the odd murder.'

Bea took off her reading glasses to glare at him. 'That's different. That was an accident.'

'Two accidents, and we got well paid for each of them.'

'Never again.' Bea replaced her glasses and picked up the top letter of the morning's post. While the agency rooms in the basement of her Kensington house were being replumbed and rewired they were trying to work in her living room, surrounded by banks of office furniture, filing cabinets, printers and computers. Highly inconvenient.

The phone chirruped, and this time Bea listened to the excited babble without interrupting. 'Calm down, Florrie. Yes, of course it's distressing to find someone dead. Where are you?' Bea scribbled an address on the back of the topmost letter in the pile before her. 'I can get to you in five minutes. Just keep calm, right?'

She set the phone down, took off her reading glasses and put them in her handbag. What else did she need? Mobile phone, car keys, purse.

Oliver cocked his head. 'Florrie in trouble? The unflappable Florrie Green of the Green Girls Cleaning Company?'

'She's found her client dead to the world. No, what I mean is ... he's dead!'

'Another murder,' said Oliver, full of glee.

'Certainly not! Natural causes, I'm sure.' Was it raining? Did she need her umbrella?

'Can I come, too? I like murders.'

'You'll be the death of me.' Bea checked that it wasn't raining, picked up the letter on which she'd written the address, and left. There were days when young Oliver was morose and couldn't be prised away from his computer, and others when he was overly bright and cheerful. Bea didn't know which was worse.

It wasn't murder, exactly. It was suicide. Sort of. The note proved it was suicide, anyway. Things hadn't exactly gone to plan, no. But with some improvisation here and a little imagination there, the outcome was satisfactory. Or it would be in due course.

They were still short of cash. It hadn't been advisable to remove all the money from his wallet, or the police might have suspected a burglary. Fifty pounds each wasn't much to keep them going. They'd have to sell the car. The key was on his key ring which now resided in her purse.

It was annoying that they hadn't found his spare set of keys.

The address Florrie had given Bea was not far away in the tangle of small streets which echoed medieval Kensington. Her own house lay in a terrace of early Victorian property, all cream stucco and large sash windows. The one she'd been directed to was a higgledy-piggledy sort of house, with a front door tucked into a recess, and windows of all shapes and sizes. There was no front garden, but there was a light well to a basement and, possibly – here she craned her neck to see – a roof garden?

Early nineteenth century, with later additions? It was a one-off in a road of what had once been workmen's cottages but which were now so gentrified as to command prices that only a millionaire could afford.

Bea had half expected to find a doctor's car in front of the house, but there wasn't one. Only the usual residents' cars, neatly ticketed to show they had paid for the right to be there. And Florrie's Mini.

Bea drew her jacket close around her throat. She ought to have picked up a scarf since the day was decidedly chilly. She pressed the doorbell.

Florrie must have been waiting for Bea to arrive, since she opened the door without delay. A spacious hall, panelled and painted magnolia with curving stairs on the left going up to the first floor and down to a basement. A not-too-modern landscape in oils on the wall over an oak chest.

Florrie Green was sixty, aimed to look forty and succeeded reasonably well. She had short, dyed blonde hair, a strong, muscular frame and dressed for work in teenage and boys' clothing. Today she was wearing a bright green cropped T-shirt over a slightly longer red one. Her jeans were low slung, showing a hint of red thong.

'Sorry to trouble you,' she said, ushering Bea into the living room. 'I totally lost it when I saw him.' She was nervous, her hands fussing with two fine gold chains around her neck.

Bea looked around but there was no corpse to be seen in the slightly over-furnished room. The day was overcast and though there were small windows front and back, the place seemed dark. 'A terrible shock. Did you get yourself a nice hot cup of tea before you rang for the medics?'

'I didn't bother. They came and said he was dead, which of course I could see for myself, and then they said they didn't take bodies away, which I knew, really, only I'd forgotten for the moment. Then I looked by the phone and there's his telephone book open with a number for his daughter and I rang her because she'll have to make all the arrangements only there was no answer so I left a message on her answerphone. There's no mobile phone number for her. Then I remembered I was due to meet the girls at the Mansfields' up the road at twelve, and although I texted Yvonne to say I'll be late, it's a big house and it has to be the four of us or we'll never get it done in time.'

Florrie Green and her three friends had formed themselves into a cleaning company known as the Green Girls. They undertook contract cleaning for schools, office blocks and large premises of all kinds.

Florrie wasn't meeting Bea's eyes. 'So I thought, seeing as how you've got the builders in, you might be happy to get away for a while, just till the daughter turns up ...'

It was understandable that Florrie didn't want to hang around in the old man's house while paid work was waiting for her, but Bea was taken aback by the assumption that Bea had nothing better to do than hang around waiting for a dead man's family to surface.

The day-to-day business of running the agency could of course be left in Oliver's hands; a computer geek who knew more than most IT professionals, he was more than capable, even if he was only eighteen. Her other live-in assistant, Maggie ... Well, Maggie might not be gifted at office work, but she had turned out to be a good project manager with a gift for dealing with workmen. At the moment she was overseeing the redecoration of a client's flat, supervising the work downstairs in the agency rooms, and running the household with a twitch of her little finger.

But sit with a corpse? No way.

'Couldn't Yvonne or one of the others stand in for you here?'

Florrie gave Bea a look, indicating exactly what she thought of foolish people who didn't know what they were talking about. 'Like I said, we need four of us to get through the work in time. We have to start...