The phone rings. It's B. He tells me that he is in front of the door and I tell him to ring the bell so that I can let him in. The buzzer sounds just as I reach the interphone and I press down the switch. There is the sound of footsteps from the stairwell. Marie, emerging from the children's flat, meets B on the landing. He has brought L. with him, and they stand in the doorway for an instant. B. is small and brown, with a neat moustache and thinning hair. L is tall and very thin, hair sprouting thickly from the top of his scalp. He smiles warmly. B. looks business-like. They come in and head straight for the living room, where they can see the crates of kitchen furnishings stacked against the wall. Marie calls them back and leads the way to the kitchen. B's eyes dart around the confined space. He leans forward and peers behind the washing machine. ‘That's in the wrong place', he says, indicating the input pipe and tap. He's right. We establish that the people who put it in were a bunch of cowboys, drunks and incompetents - that's what you get when you ask someone to go to work on a Paris flat in mid-August. L. smiles even more broadly. He thrusts his hands up under his chin, joined at the wrists and open, and twists them round in a semi-circular motion. His words rush out in a rapid stream. I can make nothing of them, but B. waves them away with a frown. L. shrugs, good-naturedly.

‘We'll have to move that,' says B. ‘And the woodwork here is the wrong size. It'll need cutting.' Marie glances over and raises an eyebrow. We both mentally add another 500 francs to the price. ‘Where's the wall cabinet?' asks B. When we show him, he is contemptuous. ‘Who sold you that? It's too wide for the purifier. It'll look horrible.' L. thrusts his hands back under his chin and interjects another stream of what I take to be constructive suggestions. B. ignores him, and he pushes his hands back down to his thighs, still smiling happily.

B. and L. continue prodding about in the kitchen, occasionally drawing our attention to yet another piece of shoddy workmanship. B. is doubtful. ‘I don't like picking up where others have left off,' he says. He tells us a story about a plumber he once worked with who sabotaged the heating system of a flat they were fitting out. ‘You never know what you might find,' he says. We all stare glumly at the water pipes. Marie brightens up first. ‘I did phone you,' she says, ‘but you didn't reply. We had to take who we could get.' B. looks over to L. ‘Ah, yes,' he says. ‘That was a difficult time.' L. lifts his hands once more, and throws a couple of sentences at us. His eyes sparkle, his smile is benign. B. nods. ‘One of my associates - his brother (nodding at L.) - disappeared. We didn't know where he was' L. turns to me; ‘He was at the hospital, but we didn't know,' he says. Suddenly, he has become comprehensible.

B. looks tired. ‘We phoned everywhere, but no-one knew where he was. It was five days before we found him.' He tells us that the brother's car had broken down on the motorway. He had stepped out to walk to one of the phones and had been mown down by a passing lorry. Five days he spent in a coma. ‘He was in one of the hospitals that we contacted, but we called on the Tuesday, and he wasn't registered until the Friday.' Marie is thoughtful ; ‘Didn't he have his papers on him?' she asks. ‘Oh, yes,' says B. ‘He had his identity card, his work permit, his driver's licence. But the police didn't get in touch with us.'

L. leans forward, smiling happily. ‘We thought he had gone off with a woman,' he said. ‘Or maybe he was having an affair and the husband found out. Killed him.'

‘Good thing we didn't find him earlier,' said B. ‘He was in an awful state.' L. nodded. ‘A good thing,' he repeated, ‘He wasn't a pretty sight.' B. looks at the pipes again. Marie tells him that the work surface is too high, and he dives beneath it, plucks out one of the plastic feet. He takes it apart. ‘It's all right,' he says. ‘Look, there's a thread right the way down. We can cut a couple of centimetres off, and it'll be just right.' I peer at the thread and nod.'Yes,' I say, ‘you can do that.'

We go back to the living room. ‘We can do it on Saturday morning. Ten o'clock suit you?' Marie asks him how much it will cost, and he says he'll have to work it out. ‘Can you give us an idea?' she persists. B. is a little unhappy, but then says it'll be between 800 and a thousand francs. I try not to show that I'm surprised. B. talks about wanting to set up his own business, and tells Marie how much he enjoyed fitting her friend's kitchen. ‘Ah,' he says, ‘you should see that tiling.' We talk about kitchens. ‘It's an art,' says Marie, but B. won't have that. ‘It's a matter of logic,' he claims. ‘You measure it up, and then you do it logically.'

A little later, they leave. Marie is angry. ‘If it had been you or me,' she says, ‘the police would have reacted differently.' ‘You know what it's like,' I say. ‘Paperwork. Hospitals are overstretched.' Marie shakes her head. ‘They would have told us.' Perhaps they would. I don't know.

*(Added December 2002) B came back to do further work; this time he came with a rather older man, a pleasant, stocky chap with a grey moustache. After a while, it transpired that this was the missing brother. He remembered the accident with a laugh - 'Oh, that was a close call that was!'

(Comments to me at tmason@timothyjpmason.com)