Hard Going by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Page B

– of course you would want to … but I really don’t know. I could ask some of our other friends if they know. Perhaps he might have mentioned someone at some time.’
    Slider digested this. Men were, in any case, deeply incurious about each other’s private lives, and probably the older you got the more entrenched the habit became. It might not even be remarkable that Plumptre didn’t know whether Bygod had ever had children.
    He moved on. ‘So was he already retired when you first met him?’
    ‘Yes – we had both retired early, which was another bond between us, I suppose. I worked in the salaries department at Beecham’s on the Great West Road. I was there before the SmithKline takeover, but when Glaxo took over the lot, I was eased out, so I took an early pension.’
    ‘And what did Mr Bygod do before he retired?’
    ‘I believe he was a solicitor. I don’t know why he retired early – as I said, he didn’t really talk about himself. Perhaps he’d just had enough. He seemed very happy with his life the way it was.’
    ‘You knew about his habit of giving advice to people who came in off the street?’
    ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ Plumptre said. ‘They were people he’d met elsewhere, or who were introduced by other people he knew. Word got round, of course, but he didn’t let complete strangers in.’
    ‘What sort of advice?’
    ‘Legal and practical – how to deal with the local council, what your rights were in disputes, faulty goods, that sort of thing. Who to go to and where to find information – rather like the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. Not lonely hearts stuff,’ he added, permitting himself a small smile. ‘He wasn’t an agony aunt.’
    ‘Talking of lonely hearts,’ Slider said, ‘did he have any women friends?’
    ‘Oh, there are women in our group all right – of course there are. But if you mean in the romantic sense – I don’t think so. I never saw him with anyone.’
    ‘Your group?’ Slider queried.
    ‘Of friends,’ Plumptre said with a clear look. ‘We’re on committees together and meet for drinks and meals and go out sometimes. It’s a very nice circle. Of course, we’ve all known each other for years. Everyone was so kind and supportive when my wife died.’
    Slider was feeling his way towards an idea he couldn’t yet see. ‘Have you met any of Mr Bygod’s friends from outside that circle? Maybe people he knew before you met him?’
    Plumptre considered, and a little frown pulled down his brows. ‘Well – no. Now you come to mention it. He does like to entertain, and he gives wonderful parties, but whenever we go to his house, it’s all the same people – my friends, and friends of theirs. Someone from before?’ He pondered again, apparently fruitlessly, for he concluded, ‘I think he said that he lived in Islington.’
    Islington. Famous place, squire , Slider thought. London was not one place but a series of villages, and Islington was a long way, at least in spirit, from Hammersmith.
    ‘Of course,’ Plumptre said, with an air of being satisfied by the conclusion, ‘he might have seen his old friends separately. No reason we should know everything he did.’
    ‘Of course,’ Slider agreed. And it was true – he wouldn’t be the only person to have separate circles of friends which didn’t intersect. He might even have gone back to Islington to see his Islington friends. But it was, at the lowest reckoning, odd that there should have been no mingling of the groups, if groups there were, at social gatherings he initiated. When you asked people to your house for a party, would you segregate so rigidly?
    He wasn’t sure where the thought was leading, so he left it to mash at the back of the stove, and asked, ‘The people that he gave advice to: were there any – how should I put it – suspicious characters among them? People you felt he should be wary of? Criminals out on bail, or ex-convicts on parole?’
    ‘I couldn’t really say,’