Death of a Gentle Lady

God doesn’t exist and straight down to the pub.’
    Anxious not to leave his pets too long, Hamish drove to Inverness and took an early plane to London. Kylie and her husband lived in a flat in St George’s Mansions in Gloucester Road in Kensington.
    He took the tube to the Gloucester Road tube station and walked along until he reached St George’s Mansions. He rang the bell marked GENTLE, hoping his journey wouldn’t turn out to be a waste of time with them gone on holiday somewhere. But Kylie herself answered on the intercom. When Hamish announced himself, there was a little gasp of surprise, and then he was buzzed in.
    Kylie, looking like an elegant stick insect, stood in the doorway to greet him. ‘What’s happened now?’ she asked crossly. ‘The police have already been round asking if any of us have been near a place called Grianach. I told them we’d never even heard of it. Come in.’
    Hamish, feeling uncomfortable in all the glory of his best suit, collar, and tie, followed her into a pleasant living room.
    ‘It’s got nothing to do with that,’ he said. ‘I can’t help feeling that something happened at your family reunion that maybe gave Irena the idea she could blackmail someone apart from Mark.’
    ‘Sit down,’ said Kylie. ‘Didn’t we go through that all before?’
    ‘I thought maybe you might have had time to think of something.’
    Hamish studied her covertly. Could she be the murderer? Could she be trying to protect someone?
    Her face was Botoxed into expressionlessness. She stared at him for a long moment. Then she said, ‘It was the usual business, my mother-in-law demanding we all run around her, hinting that if she did not have the correct amount of grovel, she’d leave her money elsewhere. Mark was oiling about. Then he suddenly got furious. He’d got the news that she planned to change her will. He was talking a lot to Irena. Then he suddenly seemed to get cheerful again. Oh, he made one odd comment. He said, “There’s a bastard in every family and a skeleton in every cupboard, isn’t there, Auntie?” Mrs Gentle went quite white with rage.’
    ‘I think I might pay a call on him,’ said Hamish. ‘Where is he?’
    ‘I’ll write it down for you. It’s a garage in Peckham.’

    Hamish looked up the address in a battered old copy of the London A to Z he had brought with him. He found the nearest tube station on the map and set off.
    It was a cold, dusty, windy day. London seemed much dirtier than he remembered.
    When he found the garage, it was closed. He asked around and was told it had been closed for the last week. No one knew where the workers were.
    He pulled out his phone and asked Kylie where Mark Gentle lived, hoping it would be somewhere nearby, but Kylie gave him an address in East India Docks.
    It took him an hour and a half to get there. Mark’s flat was in the middle of what had been damned as Yuppie Town. Nothing but flats for the City workers. No shops or pubs or churches.
    Mark lived in a small converted Victorian warehouse fronting on to one of the old docks. Hamish rang the bell, but there was no reply. He rang all the bells until a woman answered, and he said, ‘Police. Let me in. I’m looking for Mark Gentle.’
    She buzzed him in. He mounted the stairs to Mark’s flat and hammered on the door. He could hear the sound of rap music coming from inside. He knocked again.
    He took out a bunch of skeleton keys and fiddled with the lock for half an hour until he got the door open. His heart sank as he recognized the smell.
    He walked in through a small hall into a large living-room- cum -kitchen. Mark Gentle lay sprawled on the floor. The back of his head was matted with dried blood, and there was a pool of dried blood on the floor. He still had a wineglass clutched in one hand; over by the window, a bottle lay on its side.
    Rap music was belting out from a stereo. Hamish switched it off.
    He pulled on a pair of latex gloves. He could do nothing for Mark now. The man looked as if he had been dead for at least a few days. He would need to call the police, but he wanted to search first.
    There were two bedrooms. One had been turned into an office. The drawers in a large desk had all been pulled out, and papers were spread over the floor. He examined a computer and found that the hard drive had been taken.
    Hamish knelt down and began to go through the papers but they seemed to be all to do with the garage: receipts, orders for spare parts, and wage