A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  Mo took my hand. I’d forgotten how touchy-feely she was, but it went with the plait and the outfits: it’s always reassuring when stereotypes hold. ‘Everyone has been so kind.’ She brushed her fringe out of her eyes, and in that gesture I could see again how tired she was.

  I wasn’t being kind. If I had been, I would have offered Steve and Mike the sofa bed in my spare room. But my spare room wasn’t a spare room, it was my office, even though I had a real office which – I looked at my watch – I needed to get to. I started to speak and then closed my mouth. If they didn’t find a place to stay in a couple of days, I’d offer them the sofa bed, I decided. But God, I hoped that I wouldn’t have to. When I first moved to London, I lived in my flat with three friends. Then it had been me and Peter for a long time. And after Peter and I had split up, it had been just me, and I discovered I loved the solitude. Since Jake and I had been together, I had got used to another person being in the flat again, but his strange hours, and the fact that he didn’t officially live with me – he still had his own flat across town – meant that for a lot of the time I still felt like I lived alone. I didn’t much want to return to flat-sharing, but if I had to, short term, I knew from experience that it was do-able. With luck, Steve and Mike would find somewhere else, and I could make the offer knowing it would be refused. The best of both worlds: I would look like a nice person without having to be a nice person.

  And with that rather uncomfortable thought I headed to the Tube. Intermittently through the day, as I worked – I sat in meetings, I emailed back and forth as I negotiated with agents, I had an editorial session with an author, I wrote cover copy for book jackets, did the mathematical juggling on a profit-and-loss sheet to see if I could afford to acquire an impressive, but expensive, book without bankrupting the company – as I worked, I thought about it. I wanted to look like a nice person without having to be one. Was that such a bad thing? Or even unusual? Maybe, I thought hopefully, maybe everyone wanted to appear to be nice without having to act nicely. But I felt itchy, as if a soft, warm layer of self-delusion had been ripped away, and a hard, cold layer of reality had been exposed to the air for the first time.

  I didn’t like it, and it wasn’t helped by a frustrating hour spent dealing with a particularly obtuse agent, who refused to understand you couldn’t sell some rights to a book and still keep one hundred per cent of them.

  In between my increasingly irritated emails pointing out this harsh fact, I emptied out my in-tray, searching for something to keep me occupied while I waited for the next attempt to make ninety per cent plus twenty per cent still equal one hundred. I needed something mindless. At home, ironing is my occupation of choice for mindless occupation, but ironing boards are rarely to be found in publishing offices. My gaze swept over the piles of paper that snow-drifted across my desk and caught on a half-buried envelope. Exactly what I needed. My passport was about to expire, and the renewal form had been so ridiculously complex I’d shoved it aside for some moment when time, energy and incentive would mesh together in mystic harmony. Or, as was more likely, that moment when I’d run out of time, and I just had to do the damn thing if I ever wanted to leave the country again. Today, I decided, the planets were in alignment. The zodiac had named this passport-renewal day.

  I emptied out the mass of paperwork, and put the main form on top. Name. Address. How many years at that address. Previous address. How many years at that address. Mother’s maiden name. Name of teachers from kindergarten to degree-level. Teachers’ mothers’ maiden names. I may not be reporting entirely accurately, but that was the gist. I scratched off question after question, progressing smoothly until I got to the payment section, where I was stumped. Although I’ve lived in London all my adult life, I’m Canadian both by upbringing and passport. Canadians are amenable, obliging people. Really, we’re famous for it. The Canadian passport renewal form, however, must have been outsourced, because it was not amenable, nor obliging. I read the instructions a third time. Pay by cheque. I could do that. Pay in local currency only. I could do that too. Make cheque payable to the Canadian government. I’d make it payable to Attila the Hun and his brother if that would get me a new passport. The problem was – I read the instructions for a fifth time – the problem was that nowhere did it tell me how much to pay. That was insane. A sixth time. The information just wasn’t there.

  I sighed, and turned to my computer. I’d downloaded the forms, so most likely I had missed one. Just what I needed today, a meander through a government website, looking for a single needle in a haystack of information. Maybe there would be a number to ring, and I could speak to a real live human being. Even government employees can sometimes, in moments of absent-mindedness, be helpful.

  Government employees. I stopped my search for the Canadians and googled my local council. There. I rang the main number. And, of course, reached an automated menu. Press 1 if you’ve lost the will to live. Press 2 if we’ve got you so worn down you want to cry. I opted for ‘none of the above’ by pressing 0 until I’d driven their phone system into a frenzy and it conceded defeat by transferring me to a person.

  ‘Good afternoon. Dennis Harefield, please.’ Please, I begged silently, not voicemail and another menu.

  And it wasn’t. A man’s voice. ‘Planning.’ Triumph.

  ‘May I speak to Dennis Harefield?’

  ‘He’s not in. How may I help?’

  ‘Are you expecting him anytime soon?’

  ‘I don’t have his schedule.’ The voice was getting testy. ‘What is this concerning?’

  There was no use pretending. I hadn’t thought up a reason for ringing, and I couldn’t see why I should pretend, anyway. ‘My name is Samantha Clair. I’m calling on behalf of a friend. She can’t reach Mr Harefield, and she’s worried.’

  There was a pause. ‘I don’t know anything except he isn’t here.’

  ‘Did he go on holiday? Was there a family emergency?’

  ‘If there was, he didn’t tell anyone. He just didn’t show up.’ The voice was bored.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you. I know you must be busy.’ You catch more flies with honey. ‘Do you know who I can speak to? Who his friends are in the office? If you can pass me along to one of them, that would get me out of your hair.’

  The voice softened slightly. ‘I would pass you on if I could, I promise. But Dennis wasn’t a friendly type. He didn’t socialise with anyone here. When he didn’t show up, his boss asked around. There isn’t anyone.’ He’d talked himself back into being fed up. ‘That’s all I know. I have to go. His unscheduled absence has piled a huge amount of work on everyone else.’

  Damn. ‘I understand. Thank you for your time, Mr …’ I let the sentence hang.

  He knew what I was doing. ‘Hunsden. Bill Hunsden. But don’t bother to ring back. I don’t know anything now, and there’s no reason I’ll know anything tomorrow, or next week.’

  ‘Got it. Thanks again. I appreciate it.’ I hung up and wrote ‘Bill Hunsden’ on a piece of paper. I looked at it for a moment and added, ‘Council, planning’, and the phone number. I underlined it. Then I looked at the council website and worked out the council’s email address style, and sent him an email with my name and contact information, and with Viv’s, ‘in case he heard anything’, I wrote. It made me feel as if I’d accomplished something, and it gave me something to tell Viv.

  I gathered up my passport application, with the various subsidiary forms that I needed to complete to prove that I was me. Some had to be countersigned by a qualified professional (a doctor, a veterinarian surgeon, lawyer, or university professor. What about vets who didn’t perform surgery? Wasn’t that discrimination? If a university professor was OK, why not a teacher? Weren’t violinists trusted members of society? And plumbers? What had plumbers done to make the Canadian government overlook them so scandalously?). Then there were the regulations for the photographs. Do not smile; head must be in three-quarters profile; left ear must be visible; right hand to be held in the
Vulcan salute. I threw everything into my bag. The day, I decided, was officially over.

  The agent and the Canadians between them ensured that I spent the journey home planning out the superpowers I needed to improve the world. My primary one, I decided, would be to kill with a glare everyone who aggravated me: passport officers and the un-mathematical agent obviously, but also the people on the Tube who were having a good time when I wasn’t; the tourists huddled around the map on the wall who were blocking the ticket barrier; and mostly myself, for being so cross for so little reason.

  If nothing else, it was cool in the tiled station hall. The last month had seen never-ending rain, which had, over the past week, transformed itself into summer. Summer is one of those seasons we are never prepared for in this country. We tell ourselves, and live, as though the British climate were always mild. If you come from Minnesota, or the Sahara, this is true. Otherwise it overlooks the reality that some days, or weeks, will qualify as ‘cold’, and some as ‘hot’. This entire past week had been hot. Maybe even very hot. To be on the un-air-conditioned, barely ventilated Tube in this weather was Method preparation for an audition in one of Dante’s circles of hell.

  Foreigners think that all social interactions in Britain must legally begin with a discussion of the weather. This is not true. We are only required to talk about the weather in certain, very specific, circumstances. When the temperature rises above 22°. When it drops below 10°. When it rains heavily, or there are showers for more than three days in a row. And when it snows. Or hails. Or it looks like any of these things might happen in the next month. At any of those moments, weather commentary is obligatory.

  Fortunately, the evening was well above 22°, and had therefore reached the point where the temperature had become material for discussion for days afterwards, ‘Isn’t it hot?’ and ‘How are you managing in this heat?’ morphing imperceptibly into ‘Wasn’t it awful?’ and ‘How did you manage?’, which would safely carry us through until the next weather emergency – say a drizzle that continued for more than an hour.

  So as I stopped at the newsstand to buy the chocolate I deserved after being so polite to the innumerate agent, ‘Hey, Azim, nice and cool in here’, was my reflexive opening. My credentials established as a respectable member of society, I moved on without waiting for a response. ‘What’s going on?’

  Azim had run the newsagent’s for years, possibly as long as I’d lived in the neighbourhood, which was getting on for twenty years. If there was anything worth knowing in the area, he was the man to tell you.

  He shrugged. ‘Apart from the fire? The school up near your house was graffitied again.’

  That was a pity – or a blessing, depending on the quality of the work – but it didn’t shake me to the core. ‘Hmm,’ I said as I scrabbled in my bag for the change which always collected at the bottom. I hoped that would be ambiguous enough to be taken as a general ‘tsk-tsk’ at the state of the world, or at least engagement with the conversation. Then that seemed rude, so I went on. ‘Do you have kids there?’

  Azim looked astonished. ‘My children have children.’

  And so we had a discussion about his grandchildren, their ages, likes, dislikes and general all-round wonderfulness, despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was ask about the empty house, but I couldn’t work out how to shift from what his youngest grandchild was expecting for her birthday to the fire. I also realised that using a superpower merely to murder tourists on the Tube, who, it was now abundantly plain, were entirely harmless, was a waste. I was going to develop a time-travel machine that would return me to an era when I hadn’t asked someone about his grandchildren.

  Finally, however, an influx of passengers off the next train saved me, as a handful appeared in the shop. I waved and slid out, moving quickly up the hill until I reached the corner of Talbot’s Road, where I slowed, just as everyone else was doing. The summer warmth had combined with the fire to drive home-loving Brits out onto the street, where they stood in groups, mingling as effortlessly as if they’d been born in Sardinia, and performed a sociable evening passeggiata every day of their lives.

  In general, apart from superficial chats with shop people, etiquette requires that you wait a decade or two before you do anything as emotionally striptease-ish as nodding to someone you recognise when you pass in the street. Catastrophe, however, was an extenuating circumstance to the otherwise ironclad three-monkey rule – see-speak-and-hear no neighbours. Everyone accepts the rules are in abeyance if there is something really horrible to be chewed over. Fire qualified.

  Or this fire did, at any rate. Because whatever we’d been told that morning about the safety of the squatters, once the fire had been contained, and once everything that could be salvaged had been removed, a fireman had found someone who had not been accounted for. And he was dead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  AS WITH THE line in the café that morning, there was little solid information, and lots of wild speculation. Even the one fact – that a dead man had been found – turned out to be half a fact. There was a body, but he might have been a she, no one was sure. And whoever it was might have had no connection to the house – the body, word on the grapevine said, had been located in the small lean-to.

  I stood at the edge of the group, listening for a while, and then pulled out my phone. Jake had said he might be working late, which would mean I didn’t expect to see him before I went to sleep. Most evenings he came to my flat, but sometimes he went back to his place instead. It depended on where work had taken him, and how he was feeling. If a case was particularly ugly, he might go back to Hammersmith. Sometimes because he’d gone to the pub with his colleagues, to decompress with people who felt the same, but mostly, I think, because he didn’t want to talk.

  He knew I didn’t expect to hear details of the cases he was working on, but even so, the not-talking was an issue for us, one that, naturally, we didn’t talk about. That every job had confidential aspects, I understood. I wouldn’t discuss an advance I was offering for a book, either. But more than the not-talking about particular cases, there was the reality that Jake spent his working life dealing with death. He investigated murder; I published books. The people he came into contact with were violent. Or criminal. Or sociopathic. Or, often, all three. However many jokes publishers make about the lunacy of their authors, mostly we like them. In Jake’s job, there wasn’t much to like. I was, I knew, better off not knowing what he was doing, to whom he was speaking, where he was spending his time and, especially, how dangerous it might be.

  This was different, though. It wasn’t something that would land on his desk, and so he might be willing to pass on some basic information. I texted: Can you find update on fire? Word is someone died.

  The first thing I did when I got home was open the windows, in the hope that the temperature inside would drop from ‘sauna’ to merely ‘tropical’ by bedtime. I looked in the fridge, but in the heat dinner seemed like too much effort. Then I reconsidered, and threw some tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in the blender. Voilà, gazpacho. I put it back in the fridge to chill and went upstairs.

  Mr Rudiger and I played a formal, if unspoken game whenever I visited, and now I knocked on his door and served my standard opening volley. ‘Would you like to come down for supper?’

  We both knew that this meant, If you want company, I’m here to provide it. That evening, he didn’t even bother to reply, just stood back and opened the door wider. ‘The terrace is cool at this hour,’ was all he said, before leaving me to find my way in while he went to the kitchen, asking, ‘White or red?’ as he went.

  ‘Have you got something non-alcoholic?’ The previous night hadn’t done any damage, but I didn’t need to go looking for trouble.

  He reappeared with two glasses of iced coffee. I’d introduced him to this heathenish North American practice, and he pretended to drink it only because I liked it, but – I put my hand on the glass – the coffee had been cold for a while. He’d had it alrea
dy made, and in the fridge.

  I didn’t comment, though, and we sat on the terrace and caught up. As always, Mr Rudiger had the news, even if he’d never seen any of the people we were discussing. He knew about the fire, and the body, but as with the group in the street, no more than that.

  He’d been an architect, though. He might be able to answer a question that had puzzled me. ‘What do you suppose the owner meant when he said that the building was going to be redeveloped?’

  ‘Turn it into a proper shop, a modern one?’ he suggested.

  That was the most likely solution, but even then, ‘I don’t know if you could. It’s on a corner, the turn between two rows of terraced houses. And it’s tiny – less than half the size of this.’ I gestured around us, indicating the house we were in. ‘Maybe not even a quarter the size. I’ll take a picture for you tomorrow as I go past.’

  He nodded, as if to acknowledge a subordinate who was doing some research for him. We never talked about why he didn’t go out. He just didn’t, like some people don’t eat meat. If you don’t ask vegetarians why they don’t want a steak, why would I ask Mr Rudiger why he didn’t want to go for a walk?

  But that subject got washed aside as I heard my phone. Jake. From the sounds, he was outside. He didn’t waste time. ‘I asked to be notified of news on the fire. They’re leaning towards arson, and the man who died was most likely the arsonist, who got trapped as he was setting the fire: there were traces of accelerant on his hands.’

  I thought of Mo and Dan and their kids, sleeping while someone crept about spilling accelerant.