Not Dead Yet

surrounded by the richness of its art treasures. This royal palace, built by King George IV, and used by him for secret – and not too secret – seaside love trysts with his mistress. He doubted that George, nicknamed Prinny, vain and increasingly rich, had ever been bullied by anyone, nor been told he was no good or ugly. No one would have ever called him Ugly Boring Useless. Even though he actually was.
    One of the things he liked most to imagine was himself wearing the costumes of the time. He particularly fantasized about dressing up as the king, in those fine robes. He could picture himself sweeping into class, sword hanging to his side, king. No one would call him Ubu then.
    One summer, when he was eighteen, he applied for a holiday job as a guide and to his joy he was accepted. He would escortparties of tourists around, telling them of the love the king had for his mistress and how frustrated he was by the protocols of his age. But what he loved most of all about this job was the access it gave him. The freedom to wander around the Pavilion’s interior when there were no tours for him to guide, without the security guards taking any notice of him.
    He liked best of all its hidden parts. The secret corridors that ran behind the kitchens to the grand rooms, where servants could move around with drinks and food, slipping in and out of secret doorways. There was a hidden spiral staircase, that the public never saw, because the banisters were dangerously rickety, up which he could climb to an area, beneath one of the domes, to which the king invited his guests to see the spectacular views, and later where occasional senior household staff were rumoured to have lived.
    It was now derelict, the floorboards were in poor condition, and there was a very large trapdoor secured with just two bolts, and carrying a warning sign, below which was a forty-foot drop down into a store room above the kitchens. There was a rope-and-pulley system from the 1800s, which Eric imagined to have been a very primitive kind of dumb waiter. And from this rooftop eyrie he had the finest view of Brighton he had ever seen.
    He’d sneaked a sleeping bag up here and made it his private place. Sometimes, if he could avoid the security guards when they closed up the building in the evening, he would bring a picnic here and hole up for the night. Safe. No bullies up here. He would close his eyes and imagine himself living here, a king, worshipped and adored.
    Then one night he got caught by a bully security guard.
    They fired him as a guide. He was told he could never come back here again.

20
    Cleo loved her little town house in the trendy North Laine district of Brighton; she felt secure here and she liked the convenience and the buzz of living in the centre of the city. It was great to walk across the courtyard and out of the gates, and be able to stroll through the maze of cafés and small independent shops, and down to the beach on a fine day. But there were some drawbacks. One was that Humphrey needed a garden to be out in when she was at work – and she planned to return to the mortuary as soon as practicable after the baby was born. A bigger problem still was that she only had one tiny spare room and needed that for her studies – she was doing an Open University degree course in Philosophy – and for Roy to have a workplace at home. The baby would be born in a matter of weeks, perhaps even sooner, and they would be short of space. As soon as Roy sold his house they could start looking for a bigger place together. Another less serious, but constant, irritant was having to park on the street, and it was getting harder and harder to find spaces when she came back from work in the evenings.
    Throughout her life, Cleo’s favourite time of the week had always been Saturday mornings – even though in this job she frequently had to work part of her weekends. People who died suddenly were rarely obliging enough to do so only during office hours, which meant that when she was on call, which was most of the time as they were short-handed in the mortuary, she frequently had to go out on weekends and holidays to help recover a body.
    The one last night had been particularly unsavoury, and today she had to attend and assist at the post-mortem, which had now moved from the deposition site to the mortuary. But she wasn’t daunted. The torso lying in a tank of chicken droppings was grim work, but mangled and sometimes disembowelled bodies in car