Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes Page A

that Audrey doesn’t like to eat too late. Something about the diet she’s on.’
    ‘I can be there for seven,’ I said firmly. ‘If that’s no good, I’m afraid I shall have to decline.’
    In the end he agreed to seven o’clock, and then he asked me if I had any special dietary requirements, at which I laughed.
    ‘It’s a serious question,’ he asked. ‘I’d hate to accidentally kill you with something you have an allergy to.’
    ‘I’m not too keen on aubergine,’ I said, in the end.
    ‘We’ll bear that in mind,’ he said. ‘Audrey’s cooking.’
    ‘Is she any good?’ I asked, thinking that actually he must surely have told me about Audrey’s culinary expertise at some point; after all, he’d told me about everything else.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Vaughn said with enthusiasm.
    But, given Vaughn’s taste in women, beer and music, this was not enlightening. I will have to wait until Saturday and see for myself.
    I dropped in to see my friend Maggie on the way home. She wasn’t looking too bright, poor thing. Still, I sat with her for a while and chatted to her. I’m intrigued by her house, which is beautiful, along with everything in it – there must be about six bedrooms upstairs; no idea why she needs that many since she’s been on her own for a good couple of years. I don’t think I disturbed her too much, although she was looking very tired. I told her I’d go back and see how she was doing at the weekend, and left her to it.
    I got home and cleaned the kitchen and bathroom, put on a load of laundry and ironed my work shirts whilst watching the news.
    I’ll have to plan my weekend carefully, with so much to fit in. Vaughn’s dinner party, diverting as it sounds, is the least of my priorities at the moment.
     

Briarstone Chronicle
     
    September
Briarstone Man Found Dead in Flat
     
    The badly decomposed body of a man in his 50s was found by council workers at a block of flats in Briarstone yesterday.
    The housing officers called at the flat in North Lane after several official letters and phone calls had gone unanswered, it was revealed. ‘The body was discovered sitting upright in the living area and the television was still on,’ a council spokesperson said.
    The man is believed to be Robin Downley, unemployed. Neighbours had not seen Mr Downley for some time. One woman who did not wish to be named told us: ‘I kept calling the council about the smell. I must have rung up 30 times and they never came round.’
     

Robin
     
    My wife left me, and that was the beginning of the end of my life.
    I remember I was at home with the kids on a Sunday afternoon, washing up, when the doorbell rang. It was Elaine, my wife’s best friend. She had tears in her eyes. I invited her in and faffed about making a cup of tea while she sat in the living room and sobbed unselfconsciously, making a hideous racket. Fortunately the kids were upstairs also making a hideous racket so they were none the wiser.
    ‘Where’s Beverley?’ Elaine said to me when at last she could speak. I assumed she just wanted her best friend’s shoulder to cry on, not mine.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘She went out.’ We weren’t the sort of couple who spent every minute together. We had our own lives, our own hobbies, our own friends. It made the time we did spend together more exciting, more precious. Or so I thought.
    The doorbell went again just then, and I remember feeling terrible, as if the world had suddenly shifted on its axis and I hadn’t realised, as if something was wrong in the most fundamental way possible and I was the last one to know. On the doorstep was Beverley, with Mike, Elaine’s husband.
    They were holding hands.
    I stood aside to let them in and they went through to the living room where Elaine was sitting, presumably already somehow aware of the bombshell they were about to drop into all of our lives. They were surprisingly calm, rational and emotionless as they delivered the news. They had been