Oakmere Lodge

The Empty Flat

Part 4

The last time I saw Betty Cartwright, she was complaining about the toast.

Betty was eighty-five and one of those women who considered getting dressed an activity that required high standards. Even at breakfast she wore a proper skirt, blouse and cardigan, with a small string of pearls at her throat and court shoes that had been polished more recently than anything I owned. She wore enough floral perfume for you to know she'd passed along a corridor five minutes earlier. Her silver hair was set every Thursday and remained largely unchanged until the following Wednesday. She wore lipstick before coming downstairs, carried a folded handkerchief rather than tissues, and, as far as I knew, had never appeared in public wearing trousers.

She sat with her knees together, back straight, and used a knife and fork properly even when eating something that didn't require either.

That Monday morning, she picked up a triangle of toast between two fingers and examined it. "This is fucking ridiculous."

Margaret stopped pouring her tea.

Betty tapped the toast against the edge of her plate. It made a noise. "Listen to the bastard. You could tile a fucking roof with it."

Doreen suggested putting more butter on.

Betty turned towards her, pearls moving gently against her blouse. "I don't want to waterproof the cunt, Doreen. I want to eat it." She put the toast down and smiled sweetly at Shanice, who was passing with the coffee pot. "Morning, love."

"Morning, Betty."

"Any chance of some toast that hasn't been blasted through a fucking kiln?"

"I'll see what I can do."

"You're a darling."

Visitors sometimes took a while to adjust to Betty. They saw the pearls first.

I’d been at Oakmere for eighteen months and still found myself looking around to see who’d sworn before remembering it was probably the woman dressed for afternoon tea at the Ritz.

That morning she seemed particularly cheerful. There was colour in her face and something lively behind her eyes. When Arthur spent several minutes searching for his spectacles, Betty watched him with growing amusement until she finally reached across and tapped him on the side of the head.

He felt the spectacles resting above his forehead. "Aye, I knew they were there."

"Course you fucking did, darling," Betty laughed.

That was what I remembered afterwards. Not the toast or Arthur's spectacles, but the way her whole face became involved in the laughter. The lines around her eyes deepened, her mouth opened wide enough to destroy any remaining impression of refinement, and for a moment you could see the younger woman occupying the same face. At eighty-five, she hadn't become somebody else. She had simply accumulated years and wrinkles around the person she'd always been.

Nobody had thought anything of her good mood. Why would we?

She ate the replacement toast, declared it "a considerable fucking improvement", finished her tea and went upstairs.

The following morning, two men were emptying her flat.

I first noticed the boxes. There were six of them in the corridor outside Betty's door when I came back from breakfast, three sealed and three still open. One contained books. Another held ornaments wrapped in newspaper. A man I didn't recognise emerged from Betty's flat carrying a framed photograph and placed it carefully against the wall.

I stopped. "Is Betty moving out?"

He glanced at me. "Dunno. Just clearing it, mate."

There are phrases which mean very little until they're used in particular places. At Oakmere, clearing it was one of them.

I looked through the open doorway. Betty wasn't there. Her bed had been stripped, the little table beside the window was bare, and the wardrobe doors stood open. "Where's Betty?"

The man had already gone back inside.

I continued towards my own flat, telling myself there were several perfectly ordinary explanations, but by half past ten, nobody had found one. At quarter to eleven, Betty's name disappeared from her door, then at eleven, her clothes were carried out. At eleven fifteen, the little table outside her flat went, together with the African violet she'd been trying unsuccessfully to persuade into flowering for three years.

At eleven twenty, Val knocked on my door. She didn't come in. "Have you heard?"

There was something different about her face. Val enjoyed information, particularly information that other people didn't yet possess, but this time she took no pleasure in it. Her mouth had tightened, and she kept rubbing one thumb against the side of her forefinger.

"About Betty?"

She nodded.

"What’s happened?"

"They won't say."

"Who won't?"

"Anyone."

I followed her downstairs.

Mr Patel was standing behind reception with Bernard in front of him. Doreen and Margaret were nearby, both pretending to examine a notice about seasonal influenza vaccinations.

Bernard wasn't pretending anything. "I appreciate confidentiality, Mr Patel, but people are concerned."

"I understand that."

"Then you understand why we'd like to know."

Mr Patel's face had acquired the carefully neutral expression of a man who knew that every word he uttered was about to be taken somewhere he hadn't intended. "I'm afraid I can't discuss a resident's personal circumstances."

"Nobody's asking for medical details. We just want to know if something’s happened to Betty?"

"I can't discuss personal circumstances."

Bernard inhaled through his nose, and Val moved closer to me.

Then Doreen asked the question none of us had quite been prepared to ask. "Will there be a funeral?"

Mr Patel looked at her, and for perhaps half a second, something moved across his face. "There are no funeral arrangements."

Nobody spoke.

Doreen swallowed. "What does that mean?"

"What I said."

"Is her family arranging it?"

Mr Patel began to look annoyed. "I won’t discuss anyone’s personal circumstances." He returned to his office, and the door closed. The sound of a raised voice came from inside, too muffled to be understood.

Nobody moved for several seconds. Then the lift opened, and Eddie Moss shuffled out, adjusted his flat cap and stopped when he saw the small congregation around reception.

"What's happened?"

Val told him Betty was gone.

Eddie's face fell. The change was slight but immediate, his mouth turning down as he absorbed the news. Then he glanced towards the entrance as though something had occurred to him. "There was an ambulance here last night."

That brought everybody's attention back to him.

“It arrived about eleven,” he said, although whether it had come for Betty he didn't know. He hadn't seen her, hadn't seen anybody being taken out and, as far as we could establish, hadn't witnessed anything beyond the arrival of the ambulance itself.

"So what exactly did you see?"

Eddie looked puzzled by the question. "An ambulance."

He considered this sufficient, and by lunchtime, so did everyone else.

Betty Cartwright had been perfectly well on Monday morning. An ambulance had arrived at eleven that night, and on Tuesday her flat was being emptied, her name had disappeared from the door, and Mr Patel refused to discuss what had happened.

Nobody actually said Betty was dead, and nobody needed to. By three o'clock, she'd had a stroke. At half past three, it had become a massive stroke, and by four, she'd died before the ambulance arrived. Then Arthur remembered the ambulance crew trying to resuscitate her as they wheeled her out.

"You weren't there," I said.

He frowned. "Wasn't I?"

"No."

"Where was I?"

"Probably in bed."

Arthur thought about it. "Yes, probably." He nodded sadly. "Terrible business."

By Wednesday morning, Betty's flat was almost empty. I hadn't intended to look inside, but the door stood open as I passed, and I found myself stopping. The pictures had gone. The bed was bare. The wardrobe doors were still open, and even the hangers had disappeared. Pale rectangles on the walls showed where furniture had protected the paint from sunlight, and four small indentations in the carpet marked the place where Betty's armchair had stood.

It was astonishing how quickly a home could be converted back into empty accommodation.

Eighteen months earlier, Lorna and I had arrived at Oakmere with boxes, photographs, clothes and far too many things we'd been unable to throw away. We'd filled an empty flat until it became ours; now I was watching the process run backwards. There was something indecent about its efficiency.

"Shame about that lamp." George appeared beside me without my noticing. He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking past me into Betty's flat, where the standard lamp remained beside the window, one of the few pieces of furniture not yet removed. "Good lamp, that."

I looked at him. Less than forty-eight hours earlier Betty had been sitting downstairs in her pearls, swearing at a piece of toast. Now George was assessing the quality of her lighting. "Betty's gone, George," I said.

"I know." He continued studying the lamp, apparently unable to see why one fact should prevent consideration of the other. There was nothing greedy in his expression. If anything, he looked troubled by the prospect of a perfectly serviceable electrical appliance being wasted. "She won't need it, then."

The thought was so appalling, and so indisputably practical, that I couldn't immediately find an answer.

George noticed my expression. "I'm not being disrespectful. I'm just saying it's a good lamp."

An hour later, the lamp had gone. So had the African violet.

George denied taking either, although Doreen claimed she'd seen him entering the lift with something tall wrapped in a blanket. When pressed on whether this might have been Betty's standard lamp, George said it could have been anything. Nobody could think of many other six-foot objects with a lampshade, but George had recently become a strong believer in personal privacy and declined to assist further.

By two o'clock, the dispersal of Betty's possessions had acquired an uncomfortable momentum of its own. People who would have been horrified at the suggestion they were scavenging began making discreet enquiries about objects they felt might otherwise be thrown away. Dorothy Bell was particularly concerned about Betty's kettle, which was nearly new and, she pointed out, had hardly been used.

I reminded her that Betty had been gone for barely thirty-six hours.

Dorothy's face tightened with genuine indignation. She wasn't asking to have the kettle, she explained. She merely wanted to know whether anybody had spoken for it.

Apparently, there was a moral distinction. The kettle disappeared before teatime.

Dorothy said nothing.

On Wednesday afternoon, a man from the Council arrived with a laser measure and spent forty minutes inside Betty's empty flat.

By dinner, Bernard had established that the Council had acquired the property.

This upset people more than the ambulance.

"They've bought it already?" Margaret asked. We were in the lounge. Val sat rigidly beside her, arms folded.

Bernard nodded. "Apparently there's a considerable waiting list. They were keen to have it.”

"She's hardly cold."

Dorothy looked up from her knitting. "We don't know that."

Everyone looked at her.

"I mean, we don't know when she died."

This didn't improve things.

Even Bernard, who had spent enough years in local government to understand how slowly it could move, seemed disturbed. "They never move that quickly when somebody's alive."

That sentence settled the matter, and by Thursday, people had begun remembering Betty. Death improves people remarkably quickly.

Nobody mentioned the time she'd told Bernard to stop being a pompous old fucker in front of the visiting physiotherapist. Instead, Margaret remembered how beautifully Betty dressed. Doreen remembered that she'd once sat with a new resident who was frightened on her first evening. Arthur remembered that Betty had worked in Woolworths.

Nobody else remembered this.

"Pick and mix," Arthur insisted.

"Are you sure that was Betty?"

He thought about it. "No."

Then someone remembered the T-shirt. It had been during Oakmere's summer charity day, when residents were encouraged to wear something with an animal picture on it, as the main charity was the World Wildlife Fund.

Betty had appeared in her best navy skirt, low-heeled court shoes and pearls. Her hair had been freshly set, and she wore a small gold bracelet on one wrist.

Instead of her usual blouse, she wore a white T-shirt with a large picture of a cartoon beaver on the front. Above it were the words:

I LOVE MY BEAVER

And underneath:

THE WETTER THE BETTER

Margaret had stared at Betty's chest for some time. "I don't understand, Betty."

Betty looked down at the beaver. "What's not to understand?"

"Why does it need to be wetter?"

"Well, they like a good soaking."

"Yes, well, naturally. They live in rivers."

Betty's mouth had begun to twitch. "Exactly."

Margaret walked away, apparently satisfied.

Betty waited until she was out of earshot. Then she gripped the back of a chair and laughed so violently that tears appeared beneath her eyes. "Fucking hell," she managed eventually. "Sometimes I bloody love this place."

I hadn't understood the T-shirt either. I looked it up later. There are some things Google doesn't need to know about a seventy-one-year-old man, but by then it was too late.

When Dorothy decided we needed a photograph of Betty for the remembrance table, the beaver photograph was the best one anybody could find.

Dorothy rejected it. "It's disrespectful."

"Betty wore it deliberately," I said.

Dorothy insisted she wasn't organising a funeral, merely making enquiries, although she'd already telephoned Markeaton Crematorium about availability and divided her notebook into CREMATORIUM, FLOWERS, MUSIC, TRANSPORT and REFRESHMENTS. She looked at me. Dorothy had attended more funerals than anyone I knew and had acquired an expertise normally associated with wedding planners. She knew which ministers remembered names, which undertakers charged too much, which crematorium services felt rushed and which pubs provided sandwiches afterwards without insisting on a minimum number of guests. She also knew that twenty-four sausage rolls were insufficient for thirty mourners. "We’ll need forty-eight."

"Why?"

"Because people take two."

By Thursday afternoon, Bernard had prepared a few words in case he was asked to speak. Margaret had volunteered to help with refreshments. Val objected to Bernard speaking on behalf of residents because nobody had elected him, and Doreen said Betty hated lilies.

Margaret said she'd always liked chrysanthemums.

"She hated chrysanthemums," Doreen said.

"How do you know?"

"She told me."

"When?"

"Christmas."

"What were you talking about?"

"Funerals."

For a woman none of us seemed to know particularly well, Betty had apparently spent a remarkable amount of time discussing her own death.

Friday morning brought no funeral arrangements, but it brought something worse. Someone new was being shown around Betty's flat.

I passed them in the corridor, a woman perhaps in her late seventies accompanied by a younger man and one of the Oakmere staff. The woman looked nervous. She stood at Betty's doorway gripping her handbag against her stomach while the staff member explained the layout.

I kept walking.

The flat had been empty for three days, but already somebody else was considering putting their photographs on Betty's pale rectangles. I knew that was how Oakmere worked. There were people waiting. Somebody needed that flat, just as Lorna and I once had, but it still felt brutal.

At eleven o'clock Dorothy arrived in the lounge carrying forty-eight sausage rolls, arranged in four plastic supermarket trays, which gave the occasion rather more the appearance of a poorly attended office retirement than a remembrance for someone who had died. Dorothy was concerned about the use-by date. Apparently, bereavement had to accommodate food hygiene. "We can't keep them indefinitely."

I pointed out that she'd only bought them yesterday.

People began drifting into the lounge shortly afterwards. There was no announcement and, as far as I knew, nobody had actually invited them, but Oakmere was good at sensing when something was happening. By half past eleven there were twenty-three of us sitting in a loose semicircle around a small table Dorothy had covered with a white cloth. She was adamant that this wasn't a funeral, and apparently it wasn't technically a memorial either because nobody had given us permission to hold one. It was simply, she explained, "a few people remembering Betty", although the chrysanthemums, forty-eight sausage rolls and two pages of prepared remarks on Bernard's lap suggested that grief had acquired a committee.

Doreen objected to the chrysanthemums because Betty hated them. Margaret was equally certain she'd liked them, which led to a whispered disagreement about whether either woman had ever discussed flowers with Betty at all. Dorothy eventually settled the matter by pointing out that she'd already paid for them.

The greater difficulty was the photograph.

Every remembrance required a photograph, according to Dorothy, preferably one in which the deceased looked happy, recognisable and recently alive. Unfortunately, the best photograph we had of Betty satisfied all three requirements while also showing her in pearls, a navy skirt and a white T-shirt bearing the words I LOVE MY BEAVER, THE WETTER THE BETTER.

Dorothy had ruled it unsuitable, but I wasn't convinced. Betty had chosen the shirt herself and had spent most of the afternoon waiting for people to understand it. A photograph of her wearing something respectable would probably have pleased Dorothy, but it wouldn't have been Betty. Still, the decision had been made, so the little, white-covered table held chrysanthemums, a box of tissues and an empty space where a picture of the dead woman ought to have been.

Arthur had taken responsibility for the music, although nobody remembered giving it to him. He was certain Betty liked Frank Sinatra. When challenged on this, he said everybody liked Frank Sinatra, which wasn't evidence but was sufficiently difficult to disprove that we let him have his way.

Dorothy couldn't persuade her phone to connect to the speaker, so My Way began playing quietly from inside her handbag. Then she couldn’t find the phone. Dorothy emptied tissues, spectacles, two pens, a purse, several receipts, a packet of mints and what appeared to be somebody else's hearing-aid battery onto the table while Sinatra continued singing from somewhere beneath them. Arthur joined in on the piano. He knew the melody rather better than the words and compensated for the missing ones with sufficient confidence that, for a while, it sounded as though both men had chosen substantially different ways.

Eventually Dorothy found the phone but couldn’t switch it off, and it moved on to Sinatra’s next song, “That’s Life,” but by then, something had changed. I couldn't have said when. Perhaps it was the music, or the flowers Betty apparently hated, or simply twenty-three people sitting together because somebody who had been there on Monday wasn't there any more. The ridiculousness hadn't disappeared. The sausage rolls were still waiting beneath their plastic lids and Betty's beaver was still excluded on grounds of decency. But somewhere amongst all that, we'd started missing her.

Bernard unfolded his two sheets of paper. "I didn't know Betty particularly well."

It wasn't an encouraging start, and from the brief tightening around his mouth I think Bernard realised it too. He looked down at what he'd written, then folded the pages once and placed them on his lap. "Actually, perhaps that's the point." He didn't read the rest. He spoke instead about the peculiar intimacy of living somewhere like Oakmere. We passed one another in corridors and waited for the same lift. We knew who sat where at breakfast, who took sugar, who complained about the heating and who would press the lift button six times despite being repeatedly assured that once was sufficient. We knew these things without necessarily knowing the person.

Val shifted slightly in her chair.

Bernard looked around the room. "You always think there'll be another morning to say hello."

The room had become very quiet. Even Arthur had stopped singing.

"And then one day their chair is empty."

I looked towards the window.

There was a chair there that Betty sometimes used in the afternoons, particularly when the sun came through the glass. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her sitting in it. And that bothered me. I could remember exactly what she'd said about Monday's toast, but not the last ordinary afternoon when I'd passed her without stopping, because there would always be another one.

Dorothy lowered her eyes. Beside her, Doreen reached across and touched her hand.

For once, Bernard had said something worth listening to.

Then the automatic doors opened in reception. The sound carried easily in the sudden quiet, with the soft mechanical slide of the doors. Nobody paid much attention at first. Oakmere's doors opened all day for carers, relatives, deliveries and people who had forgotten something. Mr Patel came out of his office.

Then there was a silence from reception that felt different from ours. So different that the congregation began to turn one by one in their chairs.

The lounge doors flew open, and Betty Cartwright walked in.

For several seconds, nobody moved. Frank Sinatra continued singing from Dorothy's handbag.

Betty wore a grey pleated skirt, pale pink blouse, pearls and a navy cardigan. Her hair was immaculate. Her lipstick had been freshly applied. She carried a handbag over one arm and looked, if anything, healthier than she had on Monday.

Betty stopped just inside the lounge. For a few seconds, the scene seemed to make no more sense to her than her presence made to us. Twenty-three people were staring at her. Bernard had two pages of what amounted to a eulogy resting on his knees, Dorothy was clutching a tissue, chrysanthemums occupied the little table by the window and forty-eight sausage rolls stood ready to console the bereaved.

Betty's expression changed as she took it all in. The smile with which she'd entered disappeared first. Then her eyebrows drew together. Her gaze travelled from Bernard to Dorothy, from Dorothy to the flowers, and finally across to me.

"What the fuck have you lot done now?"

Arthur beamed. "Hello, Betty."

He was the only one of us who seemed entirely unsurprised, although I suspected this was because Arthur had never fully understood that Betty was dead.

Dorothy sat down.

Betty looked at her, then at the tissue trembling slightly between her fingers. Something in Dorothy's face must finally have told her this wasn't merely another Oakmere administrative failure. "What's happened?"

Nobody wanted to tell her, but in the end Dorothy did. "We thought you were dead."

Betty stared at her. There are occasions when profanity arrives because ordinary language is unequal to the task. "You thought I was fucking what?"

What followed was less an explanation than a collective confession. We told her about the ambulance, the men emptying her flat, the disappearance of her name, Mr Patel's refusal to discuss her personal circumstances and the Council acquiring her property with an efficiency none of us had previously associated with local government. Somewhere during this, Betty's bewilderment began giving way to comprehension.

Then she noticed the chrysanthemums. "Are those for me?"

Dorothy nodded.

Betty went over and inspected them with the grave attention of someone assessing her own funeral flowers. "Chrysanthemums?"

Nobody answered.

"I fucking hate chrysanthemums."

From behind me came Doreen's quiet, triumphant voice. "I said so."

That was when I realised something else. Betty wasn't carrying luggage. She hadn't come back to stay.

She'd returned for one reason only, and now reached into her handbag and produced the emergency pendant Oakmere issued to residents in case they fell. "Came back because I found this bloody thing in my washbag." She placed it on the table beside her funeral flowers.

It was difficult to imagine a more complete administrative resurrection. Betty hadn't been ill. She hadn't been taken to hospital and, despite several increasingly elaborate versions circulating around Oakmere, nobody had fought for her life in an ambulance on Monday night.

She had simply left of her own accord.

The ambulance mystery resolved itself when Eddie wandered into the lounge, saw Betty and displayed considerably less surprise than the rest of us had managed. While people were trying to explain what had happened, he mentioned that the ambulance had come for him.

Apparently, he'd become dizzy late on Monday evening, and somebody had called the paramedics. They'd checked him over, decided he didn't need hospital treatment and left him at Oakmere.

I asked why, when we'd questioned him about the ambulance on Tuesday, he hadn't thought to mention that he was the reason it was there.

Eddie frowned. "Didn't have my hearing aid in."

This explained nothing, so he thought for a moment, then added: "Nobody asked."

Betty looked at Eddie. Then at us. Then at the flowers. Her eyes moved to Bernard's abandoned speech and finally to the forty-eight sausage rolls.

A small sound escaped her. I thought she was crying, but she wasn't. Betty Cartwright, eighty-five years old, immaculately dressed and recently deceased, was trying not to laugh at her own memorial, and failed.

She bent forward, one hand pressed against her chest and the other gripping the back of Arthur's chair, while Dorothy watched with the wounded expression of a woman whose bereavement was being treated with insufficient respect by the deceased. "You stupid bastards."

Dorothy drew herself up. "I bought forty-eight sausage rolls."

That made Betty worse.

It took several minutes before we could establish where our dead resident had actually been.

His name was Keith, and that silenced the room more effectively than Bernard's speech.

Betty had met him six months earlier at a bereavement support group. He was seventy-nine, widowed and lived in a bungalow near Belper. He also, Betty informed us, possessed his own teeth, his own car and his own opinions, although she wasn't yet certain which of the three would prove most troublesome.

Nobody at Oakmere had known about him because Betty hadn't considered it any of our business. Her family hadn't known much more. She and Keith had apparently spent six months deciding whether two people of their age were entitled to do something spectacularly irresponsible, before Betty concluded that waiting until they were older would be fucking ridiculous, so she'd moved in with him, not for a trial weekend, nor for a fortnight to see how they got on. Permanently.

Once she'd decided, she'd dealt with the flat herself. The Council had people waiting for suitable accommodation and had agreed to acquire it. Betty had signed what needed signing, arranged for her possessions to be removed and left Oakmere with considerably less ceremony than we'd subsequently devoted to killing her.

Her daughter, she admitted, was furious.

Val wanted to know why.

"She thinks I've lost my mind." Betty considered this, then gave a small shrug. "She might be right."

The laughter had gone from her face now, although not the life. She looked around at us and for the first time seemed slightly uncertain, not about what she'd done but about whether we would understand it.

"I'm eighty-five. Keith's seventy-nine. Everybody keeps asking whether we've thought it through properly, as though we've got another twenty fucking years to make our minds up."

Nobody interrupted.

"Maybe it'll be a disaster. Maybe he'll get on my tits. Maybe I'll get on his. Maybe in six months I'll wish I'd stayed here." She glanced around the lounge, and I wondered whether she was already taking in the familiar things differently now that they no longer belonged to her. "But if it's a mistake, it's my mistake. I'm still allowed those, aren't I?"

That landed hard, for Oakmere was very good at keeping people safe. We had emergency pendants, handrails, risk assessments, medication records, pull cords and notices warning us about everything from wet floors to cannabis. Families asked whether we were eating properly. Staff wanted to know where we were going. People who loved us worried about what might happen if we made the wrong decision. And somewhere in all that concern, it was quite easy to forget that making the wrong decision was one of the privileges of being alive.

George was standing near the doorway. He raised his hand in a small salute.

Betty smiled at him.

"Good for you," he said.

I wondered whether he intended to mention her standard lamp.

He didn't.

Betty's attention moved to the refreshments.

"Are those sausage rolls?"

Dorothy confirmed that there were forty-eight because, in her experience, people took two.

Betty considered this useful information, lifted the lid and helped herself accordingly. "What?" she said when Dorothy stared at her. "I've been fucking dead all week. I'm starving."

After that, the remembrance deteriorated rapidly. The deceased ate four sausage rolls, complained about the chrysanthemums, rejected Arthur's claim that she'd always loved Frank Sinatra and demanded to know why there wasn't a photograph of her.

Nobody answered that immediately.

Eventually I explained.

Betty stared at me.

"The beaver?"

I nodded.

She looked genuinely offended. "That was a lovely fucking photograph."

By half past twelve, death had lost most of its formality. The chrysanthemums were redistributed among residents who didn't mind them, Sinatra had been switched off halfway through “Mack the Knife,” at Betty's request, and Dorothy had stopped looking bereaved, although she continued to appear slightly cheated. There was, after all, something unsatisfactory about putting this much work into a funeral and having the principal participant turn up alive.

Betty left shortly after one. Most of us found reasons to be near the lounge windows. A car was waiting outside. The man who got out was tall, slightly stooped and almost entirely bald. Keith, presumably. He walked around to open the passenger door for her, but Betty didn't get in. Instead, she put one hand against his cheek and kissed him. Properly.

Behind me, somebody made a small noise.

Margaret Ellis, who had been engaged to Trevor since 1963, moved closer to the glass.

Betty must have known we were watching because she kissed Keith again, this time with both arms around his neck, then looked directly towards the Oakmere windows, and her face broke into that same wide grin I'd seen over the toast on Monday morning.

She raised a middle finger, then she got into the car and left. I watched until it disappeared.

At eighty-five, Betty Cartwright had managed to die, hold her own memorial, eat the refreshments and run away with a younger man, all in the same week. It was difficult not to admire her. I hoped she'd be happy. I also hoped Keith knew what he'd taken on.

At three fifteen that afternoon, a courier delivered a large cardboard box to reception.

I knew nothing about it.

This was unfortunate, because my name was about to become associated with its contents.

The parcel was addressed to Number 30, OAKMERE LODGE, my flat, and marked as medical equipment, which meant the parcel was accepted and dealt with according to Oakmere's procedures.

I was upstairs at the time.

By the time I came down at four, the box had been opened.

Mr Patel and Shanice were standing behind reception looking into it.

Neither spoke when they saw me.

This was unusual. Mr Patel normally had something to say about almost everything, particularly if I was wearing my Social Media Ambassador lanyard, and Shanice's face had developed an expression I recognised immediately. It was the expression staff used when something was clearly not funny but had made the serious tactical error of being extremely funny.

White packing material covered part of the reception desk. From inside the box, something flesh-coloured protruded at an angle.

"Colin," Shanice said.

I considered getting back into the lift.

Mr Patel looked at me, then into the box. "Is everything all right?"

"As far as I know."

He looked into the box again. Whatever he could see did not appear to support my assessment. "Are you sure?"

I went around the desk. There was a leg in the box.