The other residents were equally unremarkable: a young married couple - he was a dramaturge, she had been a prompt until her marriage and retirement - a single man of middle age; and a lady of whom almost little was known, save that she occupied the flat for only short periods, irregularly spaced, and that she had a young child.

I might have left it there, but my new book was proving difficult to write, and I was eager for distraction. So I drank tea with Mrs Willis, and let her tell me all she knew about Miss Russell. Who was perhaps thirty, or possibly a little younger, soft spoken and apparently educated, dressed in expensive clothes that both Mrs Willis and Miss Crown dismissed as "dowdy", and kept to herself as much as possible. It was this last trait that most distressed her audience. With Mrs Willis the dominant social force, the block of flats had an atmosphere reminiscent of an Austen novel. Here was the gossiping matriarch, the flirt, the reserved young woman, and here was I, the newly arrived bachelor.