Broken Homes

woman with a round brown face with black eyes and short dark hair – Filipino if I had to guess. She wore a white plastic apron over a blue polyester tunic and a pair of yellow washing-up gloves. She didn’t seem thrilled to see me.
    ‘Can I help you?’ She had an accent I didn’t recognise.
    I identified myself and asked to speak to Mr Orante.
    ‘Is this about poor Richard?’ she asked.
    I said it was, and she told me Phillip’s heart was broken.
    ‘Such a shame,’ she said and invited me in and told me to wait in the living room while she went to fetch Orante.
    The interior of the cottage was disappointingly furnished in bog standard designer bland – cream-coloured sofas, steel tube occasional furniture and the walls painted in estate-agent-friendly shades of tinted white. Only the pictures on the walls, black and white photographic prints for the most part, had any character. I was examining a vérité portrait of a couple of New Orleans jazzmen when the woman in the apron returned with Phillip Orante.
    He was a short, slight man in his late thirties. Despite the thinner face, his features were similar enough to the older woman’s to mark her as a relative. His mother, I thought, or at the very least an older sister or aunt. She seemed a bit young to be his mother.
    The beauty of being the police, though, is you can satisfy your curiosity without worrying about being socially awkward.
    ‘Are you a relative?’ I asked.
    ‘Phillip is my son,’ she said. ‘My eldest.’
    ‘She came over to, ah, help out, you know,’ said Phillip. ‘After.’
    He motioned for me to sit down, I automatically waited until he’d chosen the sofa before perching on an occasional chair – the better to maintain my height advantage. We worked our way through the normal conversational openings – I was sorry for his loss and he was sorry I was sorry and would I like some coffee.
    You always take the coffee from bereaved relatives, just as you always start with the rote expression of condolences. The banality of the exchange is what helps calm the witness down. People who’ve had their lives disrupted are looking for order and predictability – even if it’s just in the little things. That’s when being PC Plod is at its most useful – look stolid, talk slowly and, ninety per cent of the time they’ll tell you everything you want to know.
    Phillip had an accent which I thought was Canadian but which turned out, when I asked, to be Californian. San Franciscan to be precise. His mum was Filipino but had moved to California in her twenties and had met Phillip’s dad, whose parents had been Filipino but had himself been born in Seattle, while both were visiting relatives in Caloocan. So we did a bit of bonding over a discussion of the joys of growing up with the extended diaspora family and mothers who unreasonably felt that a young man’s priorities should be schoolwork, household chores and family commitments. Time enough for a social life once you’ve finished university, got married and provided grandchildren. The obvious contradiction never seems to bother them.
    ‘We were working on the grandchildren,’ said Phillip.
    Adoption or surrogacy, I wondered? It didn’t seem the time to ask.
    His mum brought us coffee on an enamelled tray with kittens painted on it. I waited until she’d bustled back out before asking how he’d come to move to the UK and meet Richard Lewis.
    ‘I was a dot.com millionaire,’ he said simply. ‘Co-founder of a company that you’ve never heard of, which was bought out by a bigger company that I signed a non-disclosure agreement with. They gave me a huge share option which I cashed in just before the market went south.’
    He gave me a thin smile. Obviously this was his standard spiel with its appropriate pauses for rueful laughs and self-deprecating chuckles – only this was the first time he’d told it with his partner dead.
    ‘I always worry when there’s too much of a good thing,’ he said.
    Having made his millions he headed to London, for the culture, the nightlife and most of all because, as far as he knew, none of his immediate relatives lived there.
    ‘I love my family,’ he said, glancing after his mother. ‘But you know how it is.’
    He’d met Richard Lewis at the Royal Opera House during a performance of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera . He’d gone on impulse and had been in the standing-room-only section when a well-dressed stranger had turned to him and