Slowly it had started feeding on the houses on either side of it in the once stately Edwardian terrace. By the time the other inhabitants of the street were alerted to the danger, it was too late. Suddenly almost overnight the woodwork of the 'hotel' was painted a piccalilli yellow and the whole world could see that the monster was out of control. Now began the downward spiral of private householders rushing to sell their properties and by their own haste and numbers creating the falling market they feared.A pub on the corner of the street had previously spilled its hungry customers towards the distant main road and its chippies. Now, with heavy traffic towards the Highmore and the neighbourhood's ever-growing number of multiple occupancies, a Tandoori takeaway plus a chip-bar cum video-rental completed the street's decline from upward-aspiring Edwardian to dingy 'eighties commercial.Mr Balder was in fact a very hairy man who made it quite clear that it was no mere knee-jerk sense of civic duty that had made him ring the police but a passionately held belief in the right of landlords to get what was coming to them.'Fortnight's rent for his room he owes me,' he averred.
