A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  Before she had time to reply to them, Mr Rudiger had reappeared with a tray. Glasses, lots of ice, a jug of Pimm’s and a pair of scissors, which he quickly used in his window boxes to cut some mint and – I sniffed – lovage, maybe? I wasn’t certain I knew what lovage smelt, or even looked, like, but it sounded right for Pimm’s. Like most things in life, I’d read about it rather than experienced it.

  I had my mind on higher things, like gin, so it took me a moment to notice that Helena was making a space for the tray on the small table, which was otherwise covered with files and documents.

  ‘Are you two going into business together?’ I asked, sitting down.

  Helena laughed. ‘Perhaps we should. There must be money in children’s playgrounds?’ she suggested speculatively to Mr Rudiger.

  He didn’t reply, merely looking amused again.

  My nose was out of joint. My mother, and my friend and neighbour, discussing things I knew nothing about. I pretended to myself I was rising above it, and took the glass Mr Rudiger handed me. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do more, take a healthy swallow, or hold the iced glass to my face and neck. So I alternated the two, and felt much better.

  Helena took a daintier sip, and deigned to fill me in. ‘Pavel is acting as an unofficial consultant to my women’s shelter,’ she said, gesturing to the files she had now neatly piled on one corner of the table.

  I hadn’t known Helena was involved with a women’s shelter, but it didn’t surprise me. In addition to her full-time career as partner in a law firm, and her busy social life, Helena sat on what I conservatively estimated to be 197 committees and charities. I often wondered if she was secretly two people, or possibly even three, because I had no idea how she had time to do half of what she accomplished daily. And if she hadn’t been so damn nice, that would have been aggravating.

  But she was nice. And she might be three people, so a new charity wasn’t a surprise. What Mr Rudiger had to do with a women’s shelter, however, I couldn’t imagine, so I put on my best do-go-on face, and waited.

  Mr Rudiger waved away the title of consultant. ‘Helena asked me to look at the plans for the building. It’s a terraced house, so it’s not ideal.’

  Helena was blunter. ‘It’s hopeless. We need to provide security for women and children who have left abusive homes, and the building just isn’t designed for that. Pavel has been suggesting low-cost ways of adapting the entrances so that visitors can be screened.’

  Helena would co-opt the devil himself if his skill set was a good fit for one of her charities – central heating in the devil’s case, or barbecuing. She also disapproved of people who didn’t work. Mr Rudiger was past retirement age, but that wouldn’t slow Helena down. This was a win–win for her: she’d get the help her charity needed, and he’d be working. Now I thought about it, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t been around before.

  I sat back, half-listening to the conversation about safety grilles and keys that couldn’t be duplicated, but mostly drifting, letting my gaze move gently from the plants – the tomatoes were nearly ripe, I noticed – to the houses and trees beyond. I was happy with my drink, and with company that only required my presence, not my participation.

  More than happy. I was nearly asleep when Helena stood up and gathered her papers. I pulled myself back to the present and hastily ran through the contents of my fridge. ‘Would you like to stay for supper?’ I asked. ‘And would you like to come down too?’ I added to Mr Rudiger. While his refusal to go outside was almost absolute, he occasionally made forays down to my flat.

  Helena had plans, as she always did, while Mr Rudiger simply shook his head: not tonight.

  Which meant that by seven I had no real excuse. Jake had texted that the case he was working would keep him out ‘lateish’. Even if he’d had time to find out what had happened at the inquest, I wouldn’t get any information for hours, if then, while someone, or everyone, at the meeting would most likely have the most up-to-the-minute information. And since Jake was a policeman, even if he’d had time to get the facts, he wouldn’t have heard half the rumours and speculation. Local gossip would be far more extensive, and probably more accurate. I googled the church hall, and found it was two streets away from me. So I went.

  I kept my head, though, aiming to arrive just after eight. With luck, I’d miss most of the main business, pick up the gossip and still get points for having attended. I thanked my cynical stars as I slid into a seat at the rear, because an hour after the start time, the meeting was still going strong, the participants showing no sign of flagging. A group of about thirty sat on folding chairs. I suspected that most had come for the same reason I had. Five people sat facing the rest of us, the committee, or organisers, or whatever they called themselves. Viv was one of the five, and so was Mo.

  Meetings are meetings, whatever the subject. This one, too, had a passive-aggressive minute-taker, and they were therefore fighting battles that had already been fought. Instead of being about cover copy, or illustrations, or marketing budgets, however, there was a skirmish about parking zones, a recapitulation of what sounded like a long-running saga of planning permits for change of use from residential to commercial zoning for some houses near the station, and an even longer-running tussle over the little neighbourhood park, which the committee wanted to have legally declared a common, so the council would be unable to sell it. I tranced out. Rather than attempting to follow the intricacies of zoning laws, I havered over whether I should offer a smaller advance for a book I had on submission, and leave the serial rights with the agent, or whether to wade in with a big-money offer and hope that we could sell serial for enough to cover my arse.

  By the time I mentally rejoined the meeting I was in, rather than the one I’d be in the following day, things were winding down. It wouldn’t be much longer before I could hear about the inquest, as well as tell Viv what I’d learnt about Harefield, although now I’d seen that she and Mo were on a committee together, I suspected she already knew.

  The committee members finally stood, but even then they continued talking, clustered in a little group at the front. I stayed in my seat. Sooner or later they’d have to pass me on their way out, and I’d nab Viv when they did. I looked down the row to see if anyone wanted to get past me. The man next to me was the only one left. He had paid little more attention to the meeting than I had, texting or emailing the entire time. He didn’t look up now, either – he may possibly not even have noticed that the meeting was over. He wasn’t the sort I expected to see there. He was probably in his thirties, and was wearing a suit, while I’d imagined the meeting would be attended entirely by retirees, and – I looked at the people heading to the door – I wasn’t wrong, either. Over half were sixty-plus. Of the rest – I tried to categorise them as I waited – there was a heavy sprinkling of Mo-types, concerned, middle-aged women. The retirees had a few men among them, but the younger group was almost entirely female. Most of these were women who would grow up to be Mo, and then later to be Viv. From the contributions I had listened to, they were parents, teachers or social workers. Of the few younger men who had spoken, one had identified himself as a social worker, another was the local councillor. The man on my right on his phone appeared to be none of these things, and had his age and gender not made him stand out, his lack of interest, and his suit, would have.

  As I was checking out the said suit, stylish and expensive, he looked up from his phone and caught me. So I smiled briefly and said, as if I longed to initiate a conversation with a stranger, ‘I’ve never been to one of these before.’

  He returned to his phone. ‘My father can’t get to them anymore, and he misses the local news, so I come.’

  That would have been sweet, if he hadn’t been texting as he said it. Unless he was texting his father. Then it was still sweet.

  I didn’t really care, though. I nodded and smiled, to indicate that I’d heard, but had no interest in following up. He looked relieved.

  I tuned in i
nstead to the conversation in the row in front of us, where the fire had now taken over as the main topic. A woman who looked as if she should be running empires, but I knew worked behind the counter at the chemist on the high street, had been to the inquest, which was interesting enough that even Mr Suit slowed his thumbs and listened, although he never once looked up from his screen. The identification of Dennis Harefield had been confirmed, she reported, and the cause of death, which was smoke inhalation. He had also had a skull fracture, probably from where a beam had fallen in. I shivered, and hoped that at least it had been quick, and the man hadn’t had to lie there, knowing he was trapped.

  As she was speaking, her group was enlarged by others who wanted to hear the news: the social worker from the front row, and also Azim, whom I hadn’t spotted earlier, but was not at all surprised to see.

  He and the chemist-shop woman, whose name appeared to be Sarah, had both been at the inquest, and they competed to dole out the details, which were, in reality, almost nil, since the inquest had been adjourned without the police reporting more than that they were making ongoing enquiries. There was nothing about Harefield’s drug dealing, nor his youth group, nor what the police had found in his flat that had made them certain he was a dealer. I hadn’t noticed anything, but then, I wasn’t looking for drug-dealer paraphernalia, and now I thought about it, I didn’t think I knew what drug-dealer paraphernalia looked like – scales and baggies, I was guessing from my extensive knowledge of drug dealing in films. And the money. I hadn’t noticed scales and baggies, and I probably would have, given the skeletal provision of his kitchen equipment. I hadn’t spotted large wodges of cash either, but I hadn’t checked the sitting room. I also hadn’t gone through the piles of his clothes, either, so it was more than possible that I’d been blind to anything worth seeing.

  Sarah reluctantly ceded her place as chief know-all to Azim, who took over as the information exchange when it came to the fires. They had started nearly a year ago, he reported, his eyes gleaming, and there had been one or two a month, more in the summer, fewer in the winter, which according to Azim, who was either quoting information he’d learnt at the inquest, or he was an aficionado of CSI, was the standard pattern. Except for this last fire, they’d been quickly extinguished, without spreading or even causing much damage. He said that the fire inspector had suggested it was the age of the wiring in the empty house that had blown that fire up into something larger, and more dangerous.

  Sarah muscled her way back in. ‘The police didn’t even know the building was occupied,’ she reminded us, to head shakes all round at the police’s ignorance. ‘Why would the wiring be old when Mike lived there?’ Head shakes turned into nods, and there followed a free-for-all on the many failings of the police. Sarah led the charge, but to my surprise, Azim wasn’t far behind on their general uselessness. I’d never had long chats with him, but I’d have expected him to be a law-and-order type. Another stereotype bit the dust.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Viv heading to the door, so I leant across the suit, who wasn’t paying Azim’s monologue any mind, and had long ago returned to his phone. I intercepted her and we swapped information. The news that her upstairs neighbour was the man in the empty house’s shed was, naturally, now no longer news, so I tacked on my abortive phone call to Harefield’s colleague at the council.

  ‘You may well be able to get more out of him than I could,’ I said, buttering Viv up shamelessly to cover up my lack of information. ‘His name is Bill Hunsden, and he works in planning. I’ll send you his number.’

  Azim abandoned the inadequacies of the police and joined our conversation. ‘You have been investigating Mr Harefield?’ he asked me.

  His intervention was not taken well by Viv. I’d never seen the two of them together before, but, from the way they faced each other, they frequently met, and vied for supremacy.

  ‘“Investigating” is hardly the word, Azim,’ she said loftily.

  He annoyed her further by not responding verbally, merely looking knowing.

  She ploughed on. ‘Dennis was a good man, and Sam has been helping me look for him this past week, not just since the fire.’ Her tone dismissed the johnny-come-latelies that were the police, finally whipping into action when they had a body stuck under their nose.

  I tried to smooth the friction between the two. ‘Dennis was a good friend of Viv’s, Azim,’ I said, my eyes silently adding, So will you shut the hell up?

  I’m not sure if Azim was trying to be helpful, or if he was deliberately being provocative, but his deep bass voice soothingly saying, ‘We can all be fooled by people’, was the match that set off the entire box of fireworks.

  Viv was all of five foot tall. And standing in the church hall aisle, she positively loomed over the six feet of Azim. Harefield was, she made clear, a man of unimpeachable integrity. There was no question that the police had made a grotesque error, and she shared this view, loudly, forthrightly, and at length, to anyone within, at my conservative estimate, a five-kilometre radius. Azim switched sides, and argued briefly that the police must know what they were talking about, that they wouldn’t say a man was a drug dealer without cause, but Viv, half his size and possibly a third of his weight, pinned him with a glare, and he quickly subsided.

  This wasn’t a discussion I felt I needed to be part of, but Viv wasn’t having any of it. ‘She can back me up,’ she said, holding onto my forearm with a death grip, and presenting me to the group as Exhibit A. ‘There was nothing in Dennis’s flat, was there? She can tell you.’

  Put on the spot I stammered and umm-ed and err-ed. Finally, ‘I didn’t see anything, but then, I wouldn’t have known—’

  Happily, I didn’t have to finish that thought, because Viv was in full flow, itemising exactly what we had seen in Harefield’s flat, and how all of it indicated the spotless incorruptibility of his character. The lack of food in his kitchen was highlighted to prove that he spent his entire time working, either at the council or with the boys, and so didn’t have time to cook, while the unmade bed and the towels on the floor and the piles of dirty clothes only added to this view: ‘He took so little time for himself that Sam had to positively crawl under the bed to look for his suitcases – bedclothes everywhere,’ she announced dramatically, as if the floodwaters had washed over a city, and the sole surviving resident – me – had heroically staggered through the mud plains to rescue its sole surviving kitten. I attempted to look modest, but suspected it looked more like I’d swallowed a frog.

  Finally, ‘And he didn’t even have his phone with him! What kind of drug dealer doesn’t use a phone?’ she demanded, proving to me, at any rate, that her expertise came from bulk consumption of Breaking Bad. She pinned me with a glare as I attempted to back away. ‘Sam can tell you. She saw it. Although her language when it rang. I know she was startled, and hit her head on the bed frame, but that’s no excuse, now is it?’ And she was off again, although this time it was young-people-today and when-I-was-a-girl. It was charming that she thought I was young, but I couldn’t see the coroner accepting my youth, or even my bad language, as evidence that Harefield was not a dealer.

  To get the spotlight off my linguistic turpitude, I returned to my single contribution, his colleague at the council. Flustered, I now couldn’t remember his name, and was reduced weakly to suggesting that ‘that nice man in planning’ would vouch for his character. Since he hadn’t been a nice man, and the lie showed on my face, no one paid me much attention. I was done. I switched to platitudes on the loss of a friend for lack of anything better, and stealthily began to move backwards until I had walked myself entirely out of the group, and made a break for it. I’d been to my first Neighbourhood Association meeting, and I’d survived. I might even go again, in another twenty years or so. Or longer. I was sure I could fit longer into my diary.

  I was reading in bed when Jake got home: it was well past lateish, and heading towards late by then. He sat down on the side of the bed and rubbed his face.
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  ‘Bad day?’

  ‘Bad case. There are children involved.’ I didn’t know whether that meant they were the victims, or the perpetrators, or just innocent bystanders, but that he didn’t tell me was matched by my not wanting to know. I moved my feet down to where he was sitting, circling them gently against his leg in what I hoped would be understood as a sign of wordless solidarity. Unless he thought I was just trying to warm them up. One or the other.

  ‘I left you some supper in the fridge. It just needs heating.’

  He leant over and kissed me hello. ‘I ate.’

  I licked my lips exaggeratedly. ‘Only if beer is one of the food groups.’

  He smiled. ‘You should be a detective.’

  ‘I could inaugurate a new field, forensic culinary mapping. I’d identify any pub in a ten-mile radius, and separate the craft-beer crazies from the Guinness gang.’

  ‘You know I was in a pub?’

  I didn’t need to be a forensic culinary mapper for that. ‘A PC walking the beat would know you were in a pub: you taste of beer and you smell of cigarettes. Unless Scotland Yard is organised on entirely different principles than I’d imagined, you’ve been in a pub, as well as standing outside with the smokers.’

  ‘With my DS and the team.’ He got up and started to undress. ‘It was post-work work.’

  My job also involved a lot of what looked like socialising, but was in reality work. I returned half my attention to my book.

  ‘I’m meeting up with a few of them on Sunday, and that will be social. Do you want to come?’ He had his back to me and his voice was casual.