A Cast of Vultures (10 page)

If the author wasn’t a professional writer, it wasn’t unheard of that he didn’t have an agent, and while lawyers generally represented big-name authors, the situation wasn’t unknown.

I tried to approach it from another angle. ‘What set your alarm bells ringing?’

‘It’s not one thing, it’s a lot of little things.’ She wiggled her fingers, those little things creeping about. ‘He says at the beginning that he’s changed names and places – he’s describing criminal acts among people who have not been arrested, so it makes sense that he’s protecting himself from blowback, as well as protecting others from police attention.’

‘And himself from libel actions, if the people he’s writing about haven’t been accused of the crimes he’s saying they committed.’

‘Exactly. And that’s fine, I expect that information to have been altered. It’s that there are details that aren’t right when there’s no reason for him to have changed them.’

‘Like what?’

‘He uses current slang, but says it was in use ten years ago, when the events happened.’

‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything except he isn’t very attuned to language. And if he’s not a writer by trade, he might well not be.’ If that was the worst of it, there wasn’t a problem.

She shook her head vehemently, curly hair flying. ‘He is very attuned to language. He may not have written before, I don’t know, but he’s good. Really good. That’s a minor example. There are more concrete concerns. For example, my grandmother lives a couple of streets away from the school he says he went to, so I know the area, and the school wasn’t there then. Once I spotted that, I began to check other details. He was prosecuted for possession of cannabis, which he says was a class C drug. It has been since 2005, but by then, according to his own chronology, he’d already been convicted. And then there’s his imprisonment: at one stage he says he was a Category C prisoner, at another that he was in a young offenders’ institution.’ She gave a wintry little smile. ‘My extensive research on Wikipedia tells me that only adult prisoners are categorised, and he was a minor. He should know this, and yet, somehow, he doesn’t.’

I put my hands up, palms outward, to stop the avalanche of detail. ‘Short version. You think the book is bogus.’

Miranda isn’t quiet, and she isn’t hesitant, but now she was both. ‘I think it must be,’ she finally said in a very small voice.

I wanted to tell her there wouldn’t be a problem, but that wasn’t the case. ‘Have you got a copy of the contract?’ I asked it as a question, even as I held out my hand for it. Miranda was insanely efficient. There was no question she had the contract. She pulled it out and doodled glumly on her manuscript while I went over it. Ben had spent what in technical publishing jargon was known as a shitload of money on this book. I flicked through to the warranty clause, praying it wasn’t standard. God did not have publishers
on his answered-prayers rota that week: the clause was entirely standard, with the author guaranteeing that the book contained nothing that was ‘materially inaccurate’. To outsiders, that was our get-out-of-jail-free card. If we could show the author had fabricated parts of his story, he would have to pay back his advance. But insiders knew it was more than likely that the advance had long been spent. Best case scenario? We would find ourselves legally in the right, but with no way of recouping the huge chunk of cash we’d spent, and with legal bills on top of that.

I flipped the pages back together. ‘You have to tell Ben.’ Miranda flinched. ‘I know you don’t want to. He isn’t going to be happy, but if the queries you raise don’t have an explanation, if the author can’t tell us what these inconsistencies mean, we can’t publish the book as it stands. If the author has a reason for the inconsistencies, you can go ahead. If he doesn’t, and the writing is as good as you say, maybe we can publish it as a novel.’

Miranda didn’t answer, just stared at the cup in her lap, turning it round and round in its saucer.

I summoned a positive tone and mapped out a plan of action for her. ‘Write it down, list out the details that don’t fit, then do a covering memo, outlining what you’ve just told me. But don’t just dump it on Ben’s desk and run. Talk him through it. If you’re right, Ben should be grateful it’s been caught early on. It would be much worse if we’d published it, and then found out. That would be a public humiliation for him, and a very expensive situation for the company.’ The operative word was ‘should’. I didn’t think Ben would be grateful at all, and it would still be a humiliation. Not a public one, but the whole company,
and most of the rest of the industry, would know that he’d fallen for a hoax. But it would still be better than the story coming out in the newspapers.

Miranda stood up. ‘If I were your full-time assistant still, you’d have to do this, not me,’ she said mutinously.

‘And that’s why you’re being paid the big bucks now.’ We snorted in tandem. The salary increase that went with her new job could be seen only through the most powerful of microscopes. ‘If you want me to look at the memo before you hand it to Ben, shoot a draft over to me.’ I’d make sure the tone was disengaged, as though it were nobody’s fault. ‘Use the passive voice a lot.’

She cocked her head to the side.
Hunh?

‘It’s a way of not allocating blame. When I said before “Ben should be grateful it’s been caught early on”,
it’s been caught
is better than
I caught it
. The latter says
I caught it, so why didn’t you?
while the former just says
the universe is conspiring against us
.’

She laughed, but shook her head at the same time. ‘If you think that’s going to make it OK with Ben, smoke inhalation has made you delusional.’

More than likely.

I
COULD HAVE USED
a little more delusion that evening. Dazed with lack of sleep, all I wanted was a quiet night in. I’d planned to potter around, make supper and then head to bed. But as I walked home from the Tube, the smell turned thoughts of food into a rancid lump in my gut. I decided I might never eat again, and briefly wondered whether we could get a book out of it. Lord knows, diet books that were realistic – eat less, exercise more, yadda-yadda – never sold.
Lose Weight the Arson Way
might have a future. By the time I reached the corner, the jokes dried up. There was crime-scene tape outside the pub, just as there had been outside the empty house. The smell and the signs of police investigation combined together to make me even queasier.

My thoughts grew more positive when I saw Steve in my front garden. Half of the area had already been cleared, and he was wrestling with a rosemary bush, his back to me. I coughed gently and he spun around.

‘Wow,’ I said, looking at what must have been hours of work.

‘You don’t mind?’

‘Mind what?’ I hopscotched over the tools and dug-up greenery that littered the path.

‘That I made a start.’ He was standing, rosemary bush in one hand, shovel in the other. ‘I didn’t want to rush you, but if I move now, I can get one late summer crop turned around before I begin to sow for winter.’

‘I told you,
mi
garden
es su
garden. Do what you like.’ I waved a hand at an untold world of doing-what-he-liked-ness, and continued up the stairs. At the front door, I hesitated. I didn’t want to set a pattern so that every time he was there I felt I needed to play hostess, but that good-girl training dies hard. Or, in reality, is alive and kicking, because I heard myself saying, ‘Do you want anything? A cup of tea? Water?’
Please say no, please say no
.

‘No, thanks. I’ve got everything I need.’ He dangled the rosemary bush in the direction of my recycling boxes, where I now saw he had a water bottle and a thermos set out.

What a great guy.

‘Before you go, though, have you thought any more about what you’d like me to plant, apart from the basics? Do you want me to transfer any of the herbs you have in pots in the back? Otherwise I’ll just put in some quick-return crops: lettuces, radishes, things like that.’

It seemed rude to say that I’d forgotten his question about what he should grow the moment after he’d asked it, so I promised to text him a list of what I liked and didn’t like first thing in the morning.

Inside, I dropped my things by the front door. Without bothering to put anything away, I headed to the kitchen first, and then settled into my reading position against the arm of the sitting-room sofa. I had coffee, I had manuscripts on submission that needed to be read, I had – I scrabbled through my bag – a manuscript I needed to edit before the author went away the following week. In a word, I was set: there was no reason for me to move from my little work cocoon in the cushions for the rest of the day. Maybe forever.

So naturally I immediately reached down for my phone, which was somewhere in the pile of papers I’d just spilt across the floor. As always, Helena answered on the first ring. Helena rarely troubled with ‘hello’. If she could have answered every ringing phone with ‘Tell me quickly what it is you want, I’m a busy woman’, and not be regarded as odd, she would have.

‘Just checking in after last night,’ I said.

‘Mmm,’ she replied. This meant: a) about time you rang; b) tell me everything; and c) while you’re doing that, I’m going to get through another three tasks simultaneously. Most importantly, it also meant, d) but don’t for a moment imagine that I’m not paying attention, because in ten years I’ll still be able to cite this conversation verbatim if I need to.

So I told her about the fire, and the adjourned inquest. Which moved me straight along to the Neighbourhood Association meeting, and Viv’s views on Harefield’s double life, and Sam’s information about the boys’ club, and that the police had questioned them.

Helena, of course, was way ahead of me. ‘I asked a
friend to see where the police investigation had got to, and why they were so sure he was a drug dealer.’

‘You did? When?’

Helena was tart. ‘After we spoke and you asked about drug dealers.’

I thought back to that conversation. ‘Did I even mention a name?’ I didn’t think I had.

‘No, but you said a house had burnt down in Talbot’s Road, and someone had died. It wasn’t very hard to find out who you were talking about.’

Mostly when I talk to Helena I feel like one of those small dogs with short legs, a cocker spaniel maybe, which needs to race along frantically behind its owner just to keep pace. She was used to my puffing along in her wake, and so she continued without pause. ‘Did you know they found £25,000 in cash in his flat?’

Jake had said it was a lot. The amount couldn’t have been mentioned at the inquest, or it would have been the main topic for discussion at the Neighbourhood Association meeting. But if Helena said that the police had found £25,000 in Harefield’s flat, then they had found £25,000. ‘No wonder they thought he was a drug dealer.’ Then I thought about it. ‘Wait a minute. Where did they find it?’ That was a lot of cash. It wasn’t something you could stuff away in an envelope.

‘Why?’

I was confused. ‘Why what?’

Helena was at her most patient, which meant that she thought I was being slow. ‘Why do you want to know where the cash was found?’

That wasn’t something I particularly wanted to discuss
with my mother. There was no help for it, however. ‘Viv took me with her when she went to check out Harefield’s flat after he disappeared. She was worried that he might have been taken ill, and was lying there. And if not, she thought he might have been called away and forgotten to tell her. So she went to see if he’d taken his suitcases, or a bunch of clothes had obviously been packed up or his toothbrush was gone.’

‘I see.’

I suspected she did see, right down to my climbing over the balcony. But I wasn’t going to confess to that unless I was forced to. Instead I returned to the cash. ‘Wouldn’t that much money take up a lot of space?’ I’d never seen £25,000 in cash, but even a few hundred pounds was bulky. I couldn’t believe that both Viv and I would have missed it.

‘Does that question mean you didn’t see it when you were there?’ I heard Helena shuffling some papers. ‘It was in a satchel, under his bed.’

‘Viv did the sitting room, I took the bedroom. And I don’t think I saw anything like that.’ I closed my eyes and tried to visualise Harefield’s bedroom. ‘I looked under his bed. I know I did. I used the light from my phone, because the bedclothes were thrown back, and I could barely see without it. But I didn’t see a bag.’

Helena’s voice was sharp now. ‘Are you saying you didn’t see a bag, or there wasn’t a bag?’

I understood the difference, and I sagged, defeated. ‘I think I have to say that I didn’t see one. It was dark under there, so I was about to move to check the other side when Harefield’s phone rang. I jumped, and dropped my own phone. I went over to search for his, and I think I picked
mine up and Viv came in to ask about the call. I forgot what I’d been doing, and left the room. So no, I can’t swear there was nothing under the bed.’

She was silent. So I repeated, ‘I can’t.’

Her voice was neutral, no judgement. ‘That’s that, then. It was there when the police searched. And you’re not sure.’

I wasn’t sure. But all the same, I didn’t think it was there.

‘You might want to mention it to Jake,’ she said.

‘Want’ was probably not the verb I would have chosen, but I knew what she meant. After we hung up, I focused on practicalities, texting Jake:
Will you be home for supper?
Then I dropped the manuscript I’d been holding in my lap and picked up my laptop. Google was my friend. ‘Kevin’, ‘skateboard’, ‘T-shirts’, and ‘Camden market’ together led me straight to a map of the market, with a stall marked as run by one Kevin Munroe, who sold skateboard-motif clothing.

Then I sat staring for a while, thinking not about skateboards, nor T-shirts, nor even Dennis Harefield. Instead I wondered how Steve had known I had herb pots in my back garden. And about Azim, a man who in twenty years I’d never once seen outside of his newsagent’s, who was, suddenly, everywhere.

I was in the kitchen making supper when the front door opened. As it did, I heard a ping, and checked my phone.
Yes
, said a text from Jake. And then he was in the kitchen. I waved my phone at him. ‘Cute,’ I said.

He washed his hands and face at the sink, then turned to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge. ‘I was in meetings all afternoon with my phone switched off; then I was
driving. I saw your message as I walked up the street.’

‘Lucky for you I made enough dinner to feed two.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘You always make enough for ten.’

I resented the implication that I was a complete idiot. I was only part idiot. ‘Six.’

‘Six hungry people.’

This was true. I changed the subject. ‘Still the same bad case?’

He took a swig of his wine, as if washing out his mouth, too, before handing me a glass and making a non-committal noise. Then, ‘We made some arrests. That’s why I wasn’t checking my texts. Interviews.’

‘That sounds like a step forward.’ Since I had no idea what the case was about, nor was I prepared to ask if the interviews had given the results he wanted, encouraging banalities was all I was good for. Even if Encouraging Banalities sounded like it was a Seattle indie rock band. I decided that that thought probably didn’t need to be shared.

Jake did better on no sleep than I did – he was called out often enough at night – but he still had to be tired. I’d been up since 2.30, and he’d been out of the house before that. ‘It’s early, but do you want to eat soon, and try and catch up on some sleep?’

‘Unless you’re hungry, shall we sit and have a drink first?’ That was British for ‘no’: always state your preference by phrasing it as a question was the rule.

I wasn’t hungry, just tired, so we moved into the sitting room. I looked out the window and saw Steve was gone. Jake saw me looking. ‘He was packing up as I left. He’d said he planned to get the soil turned and
fertilised tomorrow, and planted by the end of the week.’

‘Quick work.’

Jake no longer seemed disturbed that he was working out front. Progress. I moved to sit down, putting my feet up on the coffee table where I’d piled my manuscripts, none of which I’d given so much as a look at, with my laptop open on top. I wasn’t going to mention my googling to Jake, but, ‘I spoke to Sam the other day. Boy Sam,’ I clarified, in case Jake thought I’d taken to referring to myself in the third person. ‘He says he and his friends have been questioned by the police about the fires.’ Sam had said not to mention it to Jake, but if I told Jake this was unofficial, not something to be passed on to his colleagues, I was sure he wouldn’t. It wasn’t his case, or even his division.

Jake didn’t look surprised, just giving a what-were-you-expecting shrug.

‘Why would they know anything? Or, rather, why would the police assume they knew something?’

He sighed at the question. Truth be told, he was probably sighing at my hostile tone, but I chose to ignore that. ‘It’s the profile. Boys. Teens.’

I was snippy. ‘Could you elaborate, for us slow folk who don’t make snap assumptions about people we don’t know?’ I turned to face him on the sofa, hackles up.

Jake held up a hand: stop. ‘The police aren’t concentrating on the boys because boys generally are a problem,’ he said. ‘They’re concentrating on them because they knew Harefield, they spent time with him, and in addition they fit the age and gender profile of the majority of arsonists. Arson for insurance doesn’t have the same profile, but this series isn’t about insurance: several of the buildings were
uninsured. When it’s not an insurance matter, arson is most often a form of vandalism, and the perpetrators are almost always teenagers – teenaged boys, more specifically. These boys also live in the area where the fires were set, another factor.’ He poured himself another drink and held the bottle up to me in an unspoken question. I shook my head and rolled my hand in a keep-going gesture. ‘There’s nothing more to say. That’s why the police questioned them. Imagine your entire street had been graffitied one night. Would you expect the police to interview you and Mr Rudiger, or would they interview teenaged boys? Who is more likely to have been involved?’ He raised his hands, a poster boy for outraged patience. ‘If eighty per cent of one type of crime is committed by one type of person – age, gender, location, known acquaintance – we tend to focus on that type. Profiling is rough, but it’s not baseless.’

I decided not to discuss what happened when you only questioned one group of people – hey presto, you caught the perpetrators in that group, but the perpetrators who didn’t fit the profile meantime merrily went on perpetrating. Mr Rudiger and I might be the King and Queen of Graffiti, and they’d never find out, because they’d never think to interview us. But I wasn’t going to change the way the police operated. I wasn’t even going to change the way Jake operated.

I shrugged ungraciously by way of reply, so he continued: ‘My guess is that there were CCTV cameras near several of the incidents. The tapes would have been checked and it may be that some of Harefield’s boys could be identified at more than one fire. Firebugs – people who set fires for the hell of it – like to watch. It’s
likely some of Sam’s friends were seen on the tapes.’

Maybe I
was
going to attempt to change the way the police operated. ‘Why would that mean anything other than that they’d gone to watch a fire in the neighbourhood? According to you,
I
might have gone to watch the car burn.’ I stabbed at my chest to emphasise who ‘I’ was. ‘If I had, I’d be on that CCTV footage. Would you expect your colleagues to question me?’

‘If you’d been there, and were then seen on the tapes at another couple of the fires in the same series, then yes, probably.’