The story of one of the first murders I was concerned with started with a cleaning lady, employed by a very upper-class agency, let us say Dusters Ltd of Kensington. She was sent off to clean the Belgravia apartment of a family she had never met and was given the keys to let herself in. Accordingly she went to this select address, walked into the kitchen, took off her coat and hat and hung them neatly in the cupboard. She put on her overall, found the Hoover and emerged in a long passage, at the end of which she saw a young man, who was to be my client, in the act of murdering his mother with a weapon which was referred to during the trial as a ‘salad knife’. Without a moment’s hesitation, the cleaning lady returned to the kitchen, closed the door firmly, put away the Hoover, took off her overall, put on her hat and coat and returned to the offices of Dusters Ltd. When asked why she had come back so soon, she shook her head and said, ‘No, that’s not really the type of family I’d care to work for.’ She told no one about the killing, which was not, in fact, discovered a considerable time later. When the son was arrested, however, the statement he made to the police came out as a kind of lurid poetry, for he said, ’I have either buggered a prostitute or killed a peacock in paradise.”

(John Mortimer, Murderers and Other Friends.)