The kitchen told her pretty much everything. It was disgusting. It looked like a project for a reality-television programme involving boiler-suited professionals, swabs and mind-boggling quantities of bacteria. There were rows of empty baked-bean cans, their razor-edged lids piled up like a heap of discarded oyster-shells. Every mug, cup, plate, saucer and bowl filled the sink. The floor was piled with dirty saucepans. This was definitely more than a week’s worth of mess.

And it wasn’t only crockery he’d run out of. There was a pile of dirty clothes heaped up in front of the washing machine. She suspected there’d be more upstairs.

As she looked further she realised that the grime was fairly superficial. There wasn’t grease you could write your name in on the walls, it was just that he obviously hadn’t washed up for a long time. And judging by the spoons and forks sticking out of the nearer baked-bean tins, he hadn’t intended to do any. He was just eating the beans straight out of the can.

‘Yuk,’ she said aloud, and wondered if it was the first word heard in the house for ages.

As there were no more downstairs rooms Dermot could possibly be in, she bravely went upstairs.

She didn’t have to look far, even if she hadn’t been able to remember which his bedroom was. She could hear him snoring. Well, he wasn’t dead then, she thought, aware of her relief. Although the front part of her brain had dismissed this as a possibility, her subconscious hadn’t quite let it go. But now, unless the snoring was really thousands of flies swarming round a rotting corpse, she knew what she would find.

Once in the door of the bedroom she could also smell him. He was lying on his back with his mouth open, deeply asleep. He was wearing a pair of jeans and nothing else. His unshaven state would have meant he had a beard if it had had any shape, but it was just a vast amount of black hair. His teeth glinted white in among the fur although she was willing to bet he hadn’t brushed them for a long time. They made him look like some ferocious animal, a grizzly bear or some such.

She cleared her throat. She wanted him to wake up because she was fed up with feeling like a burglar. Once he knew she was there, she could explain herself. But he didn’t stir.

She’d been right about the dirty clothes. Socks, T-shirts, shirts, underpants and at least four pairs of trousers littered the floor. What had been going on? Did he usually have a cleaning lady who’d let him down, and he’d been incapable of shoving his own laundry into the machine?