CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Fleur sat despondently on her bed in a narrow unattractive room whose windows looked out over the roofs of Kensington in West London.
She had come to this old-fashioned second-rate hotel because she remembered it as being cheap. A secretary of her father’s had stayed there for many years and Fleur had often visited her, carrying manuscripts ready for typing or spending the afternoon during her holidays from school.
But she had not known until now how depressing such places could be when one actually had to live in one of them.
There was the smell of cooking that always pervaded the stairs, the stair-carpet that was threadbare and ugly and the banisters sadly in need of a good polish. The bathrooms opening off the landings, which with their frosted windows, stained en
