How a friend bought a flat in Berlin and became custodian to a dead Russian

My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks and slight, alluring stammer, but seems content now in a steady relationship with a good woman in comfortable lodgings he’s able to afford, a long way from the centre of London. His intellect, though, still roves. He has an edge, a critical, sceptical outlook; and has avoided that benign, mellow fuzziness that can settle on people as they grow older. Though Stephen has maybe had to lower his sights a bit, he stays interested in things. He keeps his bite. That’s why I like him.

We had lunch the other day — we hadn’t seen each other in ages — and I caught up with his news. He’s bought a flat. In Berlin. ‘Why?’ I asked, surprised: ‘you don’t speak German; you don’t plan to live or work in Germany…’
No, he said, ‘but I read an article in the Mail’s Money pages, about buying flats abroad to let out as an investment. It had become obvious to me that on my civil servant’s salary I was never — I mean never, never in my life — going to be able to afford a place of my own in London. Never. So I took the Mail’s advice, found an agency that arranges these things, and did it all, at distance, through them.

‘They found me an unmodernised flat in what appeared to be a roughish Berlin neighbourhood — nothing special, but I could afford it — going very cheap because it had a sitting tenant in his late sixties, a Russian immigrant, with a life-tenancy, paying a controlled rent.