Chapter 20 Chapter Nineteen

Richard Mott never woke up again.He lay peacefully in the living room of Martin Canning's house in Merchiston. It was a neo-Gothic Victorian mansion, sort of like a vicarage.The house had only just been built when the tree was first planted, dominating the lawn in front of the house.There are rows of shady trees and dense shrubs growing in the lawn, and it is impossible to see the real appearance of the houses behind it from the side of the road.Now the Monkey Mystery Tree has long been intertwined underground, and its entangled roots extend in all directions beyond the lawn, coiling around the natural gas and drainage pipes laid under the street, and even quietly protruding into other people's gardens. up.

The Rolex watch on Richard Mott's wrist was smashed, time stopped at 4:50 when he died (just a straight line), and there was nothing but the TV (the "fantastic " TV, which he once hoped to exchange his life for a moment), the little red dot on it watched all this like a ghost's eye, and the faint sounds of suburban life gradually faded away with the heavy footsteps in the morning uproar.The milk truck chugs and chugs down the street.This affluent suburb still has milk wagons like these, delivering milk in glass bottles to subscribers' doors.The mail had slipped silently into the mailbox.While in London, Richard Mott's day begins with the arrival of the mail.He always felt that those days without mail (although there were mail every day) hadn't really begun.Today the mail arrived as expected, and it was all addressed to him, re-addressed "From Martin Canning", including a check from his agent, from a friend in Greece One postcard, two letters from people who liked him, and two letters from people who hated him.Despite the mail, the day would never start again for Richard Mott.

It was the cleaning maid who found him.The maid was Czech, from Prague, and studied physics at school.Her name is Sophia, and she's using the summer to "work like hell" to make a little money.They're not "maids", they're cleaning staff, which is outdated and silly.They work for a company called Fears, usually with a mop in their hand, they are sent to the designated place by a pink truck under the supervision of the head of the cleaning team. A woman who lived on the Isle of Lewis, and she was mean to all the maids. In fact, it doesn’t cost much to hire cleaning staff to clean it two or three times a week, but with the addition of agency fees and hard-earned money that is not clearly listed, it will cost three times the price to hire someone who takes my time to clean.So generally, the people they work for are either too rich or too stupid (or both) to think of changing to a less expensive cleaner.Their company printed a pink business card, with a line of inscription printed under the company name on the business card: "We have worked hard for you!"

The word "inscription" (along with "doom" and others) Sophia learned from her Scottish boyfriend, a marketing graduate.After the maid finishes working, she needs to write on the little pink card, "Maids Maria and Sharon are serving you today", or someone else, and then leave the card at the family's house.Half of the company's maids are foreigners, mostly from Eastern Europe. People call them economic immigrants, but they are actually cheap labor.The butler will hand them a to-do list.This list was confirmed in advance through communication with the owner of the house, and it was always written indisputably, such as "cleaning the bathroom sink", "cleaning the corridor", "changing the bed" and other tasks that are clearly within the scope of the cleaning staff's duties, Checklists never tell you to "clean up the cat's vomit," "change the sheets after a storm," or "get the hair out of the bathroom drain," but that's more in line with the essence of their job.

Some people are like pigs who make their beautiful houses disgusting. Sofia, of course, also picked up the word "crazy" from her Scottish boyfriend.He is a good channel for her to understand the local dialect. Although he is superficial, he is very good in bed (his words). Isn't that what you can count on to make a foreign boyfriend? Otherwise, who would want to find a boyfriend?The housekeeper usually drove them to work in that pink van, and after dropping them off, God knows what she was doing, probably not doing anything too tiring.Sophia imagined herself sitting in a comfy chair somewhere, eating a chocolate chip cookie and watching the Good Morning news on TV.

They had three houses to clean in the Merchiston area, and all three were not far from each other, it seems to be the result of word of mouth--if nothing else, the housemaids of Ferris's maids were doing the housework. There is no choice.They went to the house with the monkey puzzle tree every week (it was so beautiful, Sophia wanted to live in it), but they never saw the owner, who slipped through the back door like a cat when they went in through the front door gone.He is a writer, so the housekeeper said, so as long as it is paper or anything with writing on it, don't touch it.It was the cleanest and tidy house they had ever cleaned, everything was in its place, the bed was made, the towels were folded, the food was stored in plastic containers from Lakeland, neatly placed in the refrigerator.You can literally do nothing, just sit in the kitchen, drink coffee and read the newspaper, and leave after the newspaper, and the housekeeper will never know that you are lazy.But Sophia won't do that, she's a hardworking person.In this house, she scrubbed and mopped, more diligently than usual, because the writer was so clean he deserved it.And now there was another reason, because the writer had a guest at his house, and this guest was a pig who not only smoked and drank, threw his clothes on the floor, and said nasty things if he saw her.

He made a deal with one of the maids, and the scowl-faced Romanian girl followed him upstairs (“go fuck”), but he ended up only giving her half the price, plus a signed photograph of him. "Bad embryo", the maids all think he is a bad embryo.The word was taught to them by Sophia, also thanks to her Scottish boyfriend. It's a useful word, they say. But that girl was a fool to go upstairs with him.She cried for days, dripping tears on the polished surfaces of the furniture and staining countless clean towels.She was a virgin before that, she said, but she needed money.Everyone needs money.Many girls came here by smuggling, some had forged passports, and some disappeared shortly after arriving.

sex trade.That could happen to that Romanian girl, you could see it in her eyes.There were rumors that accidents had happened to some of the girls who worked for Ferris, but rumors were everywhere, and accidents could always happen to girls.this is life. Sophia would like to believe that the writer's lack of a regular cleaner was not because he was too rich or too stupid, but perhaps because he liked the impersonal quality of Filwoth's cleaning service.Sophia thinks that writers should be the kind of people who can't get too close to other people. Constant contact with others may make them unable to write.

There are not enough people in the company today, and the flu is prevalent recently, but the housekeeper said to her, "Do it yourself first", so Sophia knocked on the writer's door.She has the key, but is required to knock first.She knocked harder a few more times.The door knocker of the writer's house is a bronze lion's head, which is well-made, and when people knock on the door, they feel a sense of satisfaction, as if they have become a majestic policeman.Still no one answered the door, she took out the key and opened the door, and in case the writer was having a fight with someone on the bed, she shouted loudly in a circumflex rhythm: "Fai Si is here." Actually, that shouldn't be Likely, there is no sign of the writer having a sexual life in the room, either with a woman or a man.Not even pornographic magazines, pornographic photos.There were a few framed pictures, and she recognized Notre-Dame de Paris, Danish houses by the canals—postcard-like sightseeing photos with no one in them.

He has a set of Russian dolls, very expensive ones.Souvenir shops in Prague are now selling matryoshka dolls.The writer's nesting dolls lined up on the windowsill, and she dusted them every week.Sometimes she nests them one on top of the other, which is how she played with her own nesting dolls when she was a child.She used to think that nesting dolls were eating each other.Her nesting dolls were cheap, poorly painted, and dull in color, but the writer's dolls were colorful, painted with scenes from Pushkin's poems, and must have been made by an artist—there are so many artists in Russia who are out of work now , They draw boxes, matryoshka dolls, and Easter eggs, and they draw what tourists like to buy.The writer's nesting doll set actually has fifteen sets!If she had been a little girl, she had no idea how much she would have loved these little things, and now, of course, she would not be so childish.She didn't know if the writer was gay.There are a lot of gay men in Edinburgh.

In his study he had a shelf of his own books, many in foreign languages, even Czech!She turned a few pages, and the books were about a girl named Nina Reilly, who was a private eye. Put the gun down, Lord Hunterston!I knew what happened on the grouse farm, and David's death was no accident.Fart, her Scottish boyfriend would surely say. People in Fearrs & Co. called the author Mr. Canning, but that was not the name on his books. His name was Alex Blake. The house was tidy as usual.There is a flower pot on the table in the hall, and the roses picked from the garden are exuding a delicate fragrance. He usually leaves a £10 tip, stuffed under the flowerpot, generous man.He must be rich.It wasn't like him that there wasn't a ten pound note today.The dining room is still as clean as it has never been used.She opened the living room door.The living room has curtains drawn, which has never been the case before.The room was very dark, like fog.But even in the low light, she could still sense that something bad was going on.She walked cautiously across the carpet, shards of glass creaking under her feet, like an explosion.She opened the curtains, and the sun poured into the room, illuminating the mess: the mirror on the fireplace, all the decorations in the room, even the delicate glass shades of the antique lamps, were smashed to pieces.The coffee table was overturned, and the table lamp fell to the ground, its yellow silk shade warped and broken.Everything hanging from the walls and from the ceiling fell to the floor, and it was as if the room had been trampled by an elephant.That must be a very reckless elephant.The writer's nesting dolls are scattered here and there like skittles in a skittle game.Without thinking, she picked one up and put it in her coat pocket, feeling its pleasantly round and smooth shape with her hands. Sophia felt a strange fluster, as if she knew something exciting was going to happen that had never happened before.Like the time she watched a huge apartment building get blown up.boom!A thick cloud of dust rose up, like a volcanic eruption, or the collapse of the Twin Towers, but the Twin Towers were still fine at that time. Then she exclaimed, "Oh my God, my God," in her own language.Although she was not religious, she crossed herself and said "My God" again and again.This sentence seemed to be the only language she could think of.After seeing the dead man on the ground, Sophia's vocabulary database seemed to be temporarily emptied, whether it was English or Czech. She was actually a scientist, not a cleaner, she reminded herself, she should have the ability to observe things calmly and objectively.She ordered herself to come closer.This must be the writer, lying on the ground as if he had fallen on his back while he was praying.It didn't look very comfortable in that position, but he probably didn't care if it was comfortable or not now.His head collapsed in its entirety, and one eye popped out.Scotch pea porridge-like brains splattered everywhere.And blood.So much blood had seeped into the red carpet that she didn't notice it at first.There was blood on the red-painted walls, and on the red velvet sofa.It was as if the room was waiting for a murder, waiting to use its walls like a sponge to soak up all traces of the murder. She gradually got used to the feeling of looking at him.Various vocabulary (English words) came back to her mind.She knew she could yell "Help" or "Kill me" now, but now that the initial shock had worn off, it seemed a little silly to yell like that.She then quietly exited the house, walked out the gate and returned to the street, and saw the housekeeper still standing behind the compartment of the pink van, moving the plastic buckets and mops out of the car.She told the housekeeper that the writer's house definitely didn't need cleaning today.

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