A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  ‘In the meantime …’ Jake hesitated, as if searching for a way to phrase what he wanted to ask. Then, ‘Did you know there had been a series of fires in your neighbourhood?’

  ‘Really? Where? When? And how many is a series?’

  ‘All within walking distance. One up past the school, the others further east. And all very small until last night. Empty shops a couple of times, otherwise a shed, one was a garage. The one nearest you was a car.’

  ‘That was a while ago.’ I counted back in my head. ‘In the spring, or maybe even before that.’

  ‘So you did know about them?’

  ‘Not that there was a “them”. I knew about the car because I saw it.’

  His voice sharpened. ‘What do you mean, you saw it? You were there?’

  ‘I was on Mr Rudiger’s terrace – I’m there now, too, by the way, so you can ask him as well. We saw a huge pillar of black smoke. I rang 999 to report a fire, and they said it had already been called in.’

  ‘And then what?’

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. It had no explanation for that question, so I returned it to my ear and repeated ‘And then what what?’

  ‘And then what did you do?’

  I didn’t understand what he was asking me. I looked around as though I would find an explanation floating in space. ‘I don’t know, it was months ago.’ I looked at Mr Rudiger. ‘Do you know what we did after we saw that car on fire in the spring?’ He smiled gently and shook his head, so I returned to Jake. ‘Neither of us knows. We went on talking, most likely. Or I went downstairs. Or to a movie. I read a book. Played with Bim in the garden. Danced the tango. How the hell do I know what I did one afternoon months ago?’

  I could hear him smile. ‘I meant, did you go and watch the fire?’

  I laughed. ‘Of course not. Why would you even think that?’

  ‘Because you would have if you were a man – not an agoraphobic man.’ Courteously he excluded Mr Rudiger from his sweeping generalisation. I heard a voice near him, and Jake said, ‘In a minute.’ Then he was back. ‘Got to go. I’ll be lateish.’

  I hung up. If I were a man, I would have gone and watched a car burn? I decided not to share this psychological insight with Mr Rudiger, instead telling him that there had been a series of fires that the police were linking together. He’d heard about a garage burning, as well as seeing the smoke from the car with me, but, like me, he hadn’t known that there were more fires to be taken into account, much less that the police were thinking of them as a series.

  Mr Rudiger again refused supper, so eventually I went back down. ‘Lateish’ for Jake meant he wouldn’t be home in time for dinner, but was likely to be back before I was asleep, so I read a manuscript as I ate, and then sat in the garden for a while. After a time, lateish turned into late, and I decided not to wait up. I was just slipping into sleep when I heard Jake’s key in the door. By the time he’d walked the short distance down the hall, I was fully asleep.

  In turn, Jake was still asleep when I got up early to go running. I call it running, although people who really do run might question my choice of verb. But that’s their problem. The plus of the early morning was that it was cool. I nodded to the various regulars as I passed – the man who ran with two huge Dobermans (did two of them make them Dobermen, I wondered each time I saw them?); the three old men from, I had always assumed, the sheltered accommodation flats near the park, who stood waiting to collect their newspapers from Azim the very second he opened; the woman who looked like she was having a coronary every time she ran – oh wait, no, that was me.

  I knew I looked like I was having a coronary every time I ran, there just didn’t appear to be anything I could do to change it, so I ignored it, as always. Jake was making coffee by the time I hit the shower, and was reading files at the table when I emerged. He looked up as I filled my cup, but waited to speak until I sat down. Then he began without a preamble. ‘They ID’d the dead man from the fire last night,’ he said. ‘He ran an after-school club, a programme to keep adolescents out of trouble, kids who might be at risk.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And it looks like he didn’t keep them out of trouble. It looks like he was trouble. Your friends the squatters let him use their shed to store sports equipment for the boys, but the fire investigators found traces of drugs there. And when they searched his flat they found cash. A lot of cash. The kind of cash you have if you’re dealing.’

  ‘That sounds nasty.’

  ‘And nastier if he was the arsonist, which is the working theory.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why is it the working theory, or why is it nastier?’

  ‘Neither. You said he had accelerant on his hands; I presume that’s why they think he was the arsonist. But why would a youth-worker-slash-drug-dealer be an arsonist?’

  ‘Arson’s not my area, I don’t know much about it, but arsonists tend to fall into two groups – firebugs who set fires for the hell of it, to watch things burn, or people who want to destroy a specific building for a specific reason, usually insurance. Most of the buildings in this series weren’t insured, so the latter doesn’t hold. In this case, it might be that he wanted to create distractions, to draw attention away from a deal that was going down. And since most firebugs are adolescent boys, or young men, it wouldn’t be hard for him to co-opt one of the boys in his group so that he could do whatever deals he was doing while a fire was set elsewhere.’

  ‘So he burnt down the house where he was known and stored his club’s belongings because …’ I trailed away.

  ‘It was probably an accident. He might have stored the accelerant there, and it caught when he was moving it, or adding to his stockpile.’

  Mo and Co. had offered him space to be kind, and had been burnt out of their home. No good deed goes unpunished.

  The fire, and the death of a drug dealer/arsonist, would normally have been a distraction at work, but when I got to my desk, with an effort I pushed it to one side. Miranda, my assistant, had recently been quasi-promoted, and I needed to sort out the admin that went with that. ‘Quasi’, because while there was no money to promote her properly, I’d managed to get a holding position carved out for her so she wouldn’t leave and find a better job elsewhere. The plan was that she’d work as my assistant three days a week, and two days a week she would be allocated a few books as a junior editor. To start that part of her job, I had asked her to read half a dozen manuscripts that I had on submission. She’d already done some reading for me, writing reports on books she thought were worth pursuing. Now, though, if she liked something, instead of me taking over from there, she’d do what I normally did: run the costings to see what we could afford to pay, then bring the manuscript to the acquisitions meeting to pitch it to our colleagues; if she got the go-ahead, she would make an offer, negotiate with the agent and get a contract finalised, meet and deal with the author, edit the manuscript, brief the art department for the jacket – in short, she would be the editor of the book, not me.

  Even if she found a potential acquisition in the pile I’d handed over, however, publishing schedules make frozen treacle look like a speeding bullet, and it would be a year or more before one of those manuscripts turned into a book. In the interim I planned to turn over some of my own books to her. I didn’t want her to have to deal with the more difficult agents, or with authors who were known to need lots of hand-holding, or with a manuscript that needed major reconstructive surgery. I wanted to ease her in slowly, although there’s no such thing as an edit with training wheels: you have to let go and balance on your own every time. Miranda would ultimately have to cope with all of those things – if she was really lucky, she’d have to cope with them all in one book. For the moment, though, I looked through my list to find half a dozen titles at various stages that she could take responsibility for. So when she called good morning as she breezed by on her way to her desk in the open-plan area outside my door, I called, ‘When you’ve got your
coffee, will you come in?’

  Five minutes later, she was with me. Miranda’s coffee cup always made me smile. As far as I know, no one in publishing has ever bought a mug. There were a bunch of mugs in the kitchen of every publishing office, which just materialised over time, everything from mugs advertising books that had long been remaindered, to novelty mugs (World’s Best Mum, I Love London/Paris/Some-Other-Damn-Place-I-Don’t-Really-Even-Like-Much-Less-Love), to cheap ’n’ cheerful bog-standard supermarket ranges. The unspoken system was that you grabbed one, and then kept grabbing the same one until one day, magically, it became yours, no matter how ugly it was. Miranda’s mug was not only not ugly, it wasn’t a mug. Instead she had a cup and saucer, both demurely sprinkled with little pink rosebuds. That it was a cup and saucer was in itself different, the rosebuds even more so. But that it was Miranda’s was what made it noteworthy. Miranda might have been the very last Goth in the country, and every single item of clothing she owned was black. Apart from green-and-blue dyed strands of hair, and a series of dayglo feathers in her various piercings, I suspected a coloured item had not touched her skin since primary school. For variety, she layered her black jumpers and tights with more black jumpers, and sometimes a second pair of black tights. Her nail polish was black. As was her eyeliner. Her Doc Martens didn’t even have coloured stitching. And she had a pink rosebud cup. I loved Miranda.

  This was background affection and admiration. When she sat down I just said, ‘We need to look at some editorial work for you to take on,’ and watched her beam before she scudded back to her desk to collect some papers.

  When she returned, she said, ‘I was going to talk to you about that. I had a letter from personnel confirming my job change, but it’s not very clear.’

  She handed it to me and I skimmed through it. It looked clear enough to me, so I just waited for her to go on.

  She started and stopped a couple of times, and finally said, as though exasperated, ‘Are you still my boss? For the new part of the job?’

  I looked at the letter again. ‘I see what you mean. I assumed I was, but it doesn’t actually say that, does it?’ It didn’t. She was, according to the letter of agreement, my assistant for two-thirds of her time; for the rest, she was a junior editor, acquiring new books and authors ‘under supervision’. But who the supervisor was had been left unstated.

  ‘Do you want to do books for someone else?’ As long as she had the time, I couldn’t see that it mattered.

  ‘Wanting to is over,’ she said crossly. ‘I already am. Both David and Ben have told me that they’d like me to take on a couple of their books.’

  ‘Have they, by God?’ I was sour, and surprised at myself for being sour. Ten seconds before, I had thought that it didn’t matter. Now that it had happened, I found that I thought exactly the opposite. ‘Are they books you want to take on? And how many is a couple? Did they ask you if you have time?’ I thought about the two men and revised. ‘I assume they didn’t ask you, they told you.’

  David Snaith is my boss, and the company’s editor-in-chief. He was, therefore, entitled to tell Miranda, not to ask her, and without speaking to me first. It wasn’t polite, but he was entitled. Ben, however, was not. He was a colleague on the same rung as I was, and unless Miranda had been made a group junior editor – I looked at the letter from personnel again – she didn’t work for him, or at least she didn’t without the work being siphoned through me.

  She flushed. ‘Yes, they told me. And yes, they’re interesting books. Ben’s more so than David’s.’

  ‘What does Ben want you to do?’ I tried to keep the acid out of my voice, but Ben and I were not, shall we say, soulmates, and I think my tone when I mention his name could normally curdle milk. He was twenty-six, and he treated his job like it was the finals of an Olympic 100 metres – only one person could win.

  My opinion of him was not a secret, so Miranda looked contrite at the enthusiasm she was so obviously feeling. ‘It really does sound like fun. It’s a memoir, by a guy who was in a gang, then in prison. The manuscript has just been delivered, and Ben wants me to edit it.’ She looked at me wistfully.

  Who was I to say no to a book that interested her, a book its editor wanted to hand on? ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll talk to personnel, and to David, about lines of reporting. I’m happy for you to take on other editors’ books, but I’m going to remind everyone they have to come through me, so that you’re not inundated. Otherwise it will be too easy for everyone to hand over “just one thing”, and then you’ll have more work than you can get through in a year. Or’ – I scowled ferociously at her – ‘or it means you won’t have time to do my books, and even worse, my admin.’ I must be one of those bosses everyone is terrified to cross, because she giggled.

  After that, the day got away from me. In lots of jobs, you never see an end result, or you never see your contribution to an end result. In mine, you do. Once you’ve negotiated a contract, or edited a manuscript, or briefed a jacket, you can see you’ve done something. At least, you can when it goes well. Today was not going to be one of those days. Even lunch, a meeting with an author I had published in the past, and who I liked very much, made me feel like I was chasing my tail. She was having trouble finding a subject for her next book. I had no bright ideas either, so while I think by the time she left she probably felt better for talking it out, I didn’t.

  On my way back to my desk I paused in the open-plan area. One of the great things about working in a publishing office is that you can ask the strangest questions, and everyone assumes it’s to do with a book. I wandered over to the editorial assistants’ desks. If they’d been told a car was burning down the road, I asked, would they go and watch? Not only would they not, I discovered, but the very notion made them laugh the way I’d laughed when Jake suggested it. So I asked the people who were standing by the coffee-machine in the kitchen. Two laughed, three said of course they would go and watch. Jake was right, it was a gender split: the laugh-ers were women, the of-course-I’d-watch-ers were men.

  Even though I’d just had lunch, I checked out the table where people returning from holiday left a communal treats ‘ITUP’ – in the usual place. One of my colleagues must have been to the eastern Mediterranean. Baklava. The day was improving.

  And then it wasn’t. When I got back to my desk, brushing away filo crumbs, I found an email to the entire company from Olive, our publishing director. I’m told by friends who work in other fields that ‘publishing director’ sounds like one of those job titles you get when you’re middle management, with layers of bosses above you. But in the book world, it’s about as high as you can get, unless you work for a conglomerate, when CIA-sounding three-letter acronyms start to appear: CEO, CFO, COO. I’d want to be the last one, because I’d force everyone to pronounce it as a word – Coo! But I’m not the boss, and Timmins & Ross is not a conglomerate. We’re owned by a small number of investors, some of whom are the descendants of Mr Timmins and Mrs Ross, and mostly they leave Olive to run the company without a Fortune 500-sounding job title. Which she has done very efficiently since she was appointed nearly ten years ago. Despite this, office gossip had reached a pitch and velocity remarkable even in such a gossipy industry, once it became known that Olive had been having early-morning meetings that were so private she wasn’t even telling her secretary whom she was meeting. Whom she was meeting, and what they had been discussing, were the million-dollar questions. The answer, we feared, was that a takeover was in the offing.

  Now an email was asking the entire staff to be in the big meeting room on Thursday morning at ten. I had worked at T&R for half a dozen years, and I couldn’t remember a company-wide meeting being called. I would definitely have remembered, because the big meeting room wasn’t very big. Our office was three converted eighteenth-century houses rabbit-warrened together by passageways that had steps occurring at random intervals. The big meeting room on the ground floor had probably once been a grand reception room. There was a conf
erence table there, which seated twenty, twenty-five with a push. I assumed our warehouse staff, who were based outside London, wouldn’t be coming. Even so, there were eighty-five people in the London office, and eighty-five people in the big meeting room was going to make it worse than the centre of Edinburgh at New Year. Except that we’d be sober. Or was ten in the morning too early to start drinking? A company-wide meeting suggested otherwise.

  And on that happy thought, I decided to head home. On the tube I stood, squashed into a corner and without enough space to take out a book. It didn’t matter. My thoughts moved between lunch with my author, and how I could have done that better, and forebodings about tomorrow’s meeting.

  At the station before mine, a passenger kneecapped me with her shopping bag as she fought her way to the door, which made me focus on more mundane matters. Namely, we barely had anything to eat at home. Jake had said he’d be back at more or less a normal time, and because of my distracted trip to the market on Saturday, I wasn’t sure I had enough to put together a meal. There were half a dozen portions of chilli in the freezer, and probably another half-dozen of stew. (What can I say? I grew up in North America, and keeping the freezer stocked is as close as I come to religious observance.) I could stop at the station café and get a couple of salad-ey things to go with one of those. That would cover us.

  A station café is not normally a place I’d think of doing food shopping, but about a year ago I noticed a sign in the window: Daily Specials. And behind it was always some sort of salad. Once, pressed for time, I’d tried one. It was good, and since I walked past the café every day, I’d got into the habit of picking something up when fresh food ran low.

  Mo was behind the counter. She’d been there at seven-thirty when I went in to work; it was after six now.

  ‘Long day,’ I said.

  She looked as if it was just one more in a long line of long days, but she waved it off. ‘I took a few hours after the lunch rush.’ She was packing up a green bean and tomato salad neatly, which is easier said than done – green beans are slippy little buggers.