"Somebody died in it," the estate agent said, in the tone of a man getting the worst over with. "I have to tell you. It's not a legal requirement in this country, whatever people think, but I tell everyone, because they find out afterwards and then they hate me."
James Byrne looked at the ceiling of flat five and did the arithmetic he had been doing for six weeks.
"How?"
"Fall. On the stairs, the flight between the second and third floor." The agent shifted. "Nine weeks ago. She was thirty-one."
"Accident?"
"That's — " He stopped. "It's still open, technically. But there's no suspect, there's nobody charged, and the police have not been in the building since July."
The flat was at the top of a converted school in Bristol, and it had the things converted schools have: a window eleven feet high, a radiator like a piece of agricultural machinery, and a ceiling far too far away to be practical.
It was forty thousand pounds under what the two below it had gone for.
James stood in the middle of it with his hands in his pockets and thought about the fact that forty thousand pounds was, at his rate, about four hundred and eleven lock changes, and that he had been doing lock changes since he was nineteen, and that this was the only way a man like him was ever going to own a room with a window like that.
"Does anybody want it?" he said.
"Three viewings in nine weeks."
"Right." James looked at the window. "I'll take it."
He moved in on the Friday with a van, a mattress, eleven boxes and a toolbag, and slept badly, which he put down to the mattress.
He slept badly on the Saturday too.
On the Sunday he found himself standing in the stairwell on the flight between the second and third floor, at eleven at night, with a bag of shopping in his hand, for no reason he could afterwards explain — just standing there, on the fourth step from the bottom, listening to a building that was not making any noise at all.
He went up. He put the shopping away.
And on the Monday night, at about ten past two, with the light off and his eyes shut and the radiator ticking, a woman's voice said, very clearly, about four feet from the end of his bed:
"You've put the sofa in the wrong place."