Chapter One

1


It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant. She sniffed it on the air one warm June evening as she parked her car in her garage, but she assumed it came from her neighbors' trash can on the other side of the low wall that divided the properties, and did nothing about it. The next morning the smell of decay eddied out from inside when she pulled open the garage doors, and curiosity led her to poke amongst the stack of boxes at the back after she had reversed her car onto the driveway. Certainly, she didn't expect to find a corpse. If she expected anything it was that someone had abandoned their rubbish in there, and it shocked her badly to find a dead man huddled on sheets of flattened cardboard in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.

There was a flutter of media interest in the story, largely because of where the man was found-within the boundaries of an exclusive private estate bordering the Thames in London's old docklands-and because the pathologist gave cause of death as malnutrition. That a man should have died of starvation in one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest capitals of the world as the twentieth century drew to a close was irresistible to most journalists, even more so when they learned from the police that he had passed away beside a huge freezer filled with food. The rat pack arrived in force.

But they were to be disappointed. Mrs. Powell was a reluctant interviewee and had already vanished from her house. Nor was there anyone to flesh out the dead man's life and make it worth writing about. He was one of the army of homeless who haunted the streets of London, an alcoholic without f