A Cast of Vultures (25 page)

T
HE SUMMER WEATHER
was holding, but the heat was no longer stifling, merely pleasant. It was the type of late-summer warmth that in my Canadian childhood had been called an Indian summer, but in Britain, Indians are from south-east Asia, and their climate is different. And in Canada these days it’s probably called a First Nations summer. So we can strike the metaphor. Delete. All I’m really saying is, it was still warm.

Which was welcome, because it was Bim’s birthday. He and ten six-year-olds would shortly be screaming through my garden, the traditional venue for his parties. Kay had suggested that perhaps, as Bim was getting older, they ought to think of moving it somewhere the children could play organised games. But in reality she was just being tactful. She suggested moving it because she was worried about me.

The fire damage to our building had been minimal, and
the Lewises and Mr Rudiger had moved home within days. I stayed at Jake’s for a couple of weeks. I told everyone it was because the damage to my flat was worse, and to a point that was true. The sitting room and hall had had to be repainted, and the carpet was so water-damaged it had to be replaced. The sofa was reupholstered, and industrial cleaners hired to get the stink of smoke out. But really, I stayed at Jake’s because I was afraid. I’d been afraid even before the fire, but afterwards it ratcheted up several levels, moving me from fear to terror every time I found myself home alone.

No one was taken in by my housekeeping excuses. I arrived at the flat one day to check on the repainting and found Jake watching a man install an alarm, so he had known.

It was even harder to pretend after Sam and I went through thousands of photos of ‘big bald geezers’, and I went through thousands more of twentyish dark-haired men who didn’t have sprained ankles. We both saw a bunch of ‘maybes’, but nothing we could be sure of until I asked, ‘Do property developers have their own construction crews? Or at least use the same ones regularly?’ Quite quickly after that Sam identified a foreman who worked for a construction company affiliated with R&B Property as the bald geezer, and I agreed that he could be the man at Kew, although I couldn’t say for sure, since I’d only glimpsed him. However the foreman’s phone records revealed who he’d rung after Jake had been knocked out, and two more men from the construction crew were brought in for questioning, one of whom was a slight, dark-haired man. I easily identified him as my Kew
attacker, and the fingerprints taken from my handbag confirmed it.

But I became more, not less, frightened after they were arrested. Jake came home from work two days after they were charged with assaulting me at Kew, and Jake on Talbot’s Road. He didn’t even take his jacket off, just stood in the middle of his sitting room, hands at his side, as though giving evidence in court.

‘You were right,’ he bit out.

‘About?’ I was right a lot, or at least I thought I was, but it didn’t seem like a time to make jokes.

‘They’ve pulled the CCTV footage for the street outside the flats where Harefield lived, and the fires.’ He was tight-jawed with rage. Then he exploded. ‘
Bloody
Reilly. And
bloody, bloody
Paula. Between the two of them, we were fucked. We should have had it all before the fire in your flat.’

He was so angry he barely knew I was there. He paced up and down the small room, three steps to the window, three back to the door, three to the window again. ‘Reilly had the footage from the CCTV cameras on the street outside Harefield’s flat, and footage from the fires. He was supposed to get it checked. If he had, he would have seen your two attackers coming and going from Harefield’s flat, plain as day, in and out. And if he’d had that compared to the fire cameras, he’d have seen both those faces at the empty house fire
and
at the pub fire.’

He stopped pacing but wasn’t any less angry. ‘Checking CCTV footage is time-consuming. He should have found a couple of juniors and had them go through it, and he didn’t because he’s a lazy bastard – a nasty, lazy bastard. Paula –
who isn’t lazy, and isn’t nasty – decided to be both, because she took a scunner to you. After Kew, after Chris took the case, and it became her job, she never chased Reilly up, which meant he sat on his fat arse and did fuck all.’

That was bad. Not Reilly, he didn’t matter. Paula did. Jake wasn’t angry, he was betrayed. Paula was his ex and his team’s DS. But anything I said would make him feel worse. I moved towards the kitchen to start dinner, briefly touching him on the shoulder as I passed.

I was sorting through his cupboards looking for condiments when he finally moved. ‘Reilly’s been given a formal warning,’ he said from the doorway behind me.

I changed the subject, making it less personal. ‘Are they any closer to charging Winslow?’ He’d been charged with corrupting a public official – bribing Harefield’s colleague in the planning office to fiddle applications for him – but he’d been bailed immediately. I hated that I might see him on the street: another reason I was still at Jake’s.

Jake knew I wasn’t talking about bribery. ‘They’re still putting a case together.’

Winslow had hired thugs to try and kill me, and Jake; they had either killed Harefield, or left him to die in a fire; and had arranged for at least three fires, possibly more. But the thugs weren’t talking, and so far the police were having trouble proving any link between them and Winslow. They’d worked for him, but no one could be found who had seen them together, and no payments outside their salaries had been found.

‘He’ll go down for the bribery, at least.’

That didn’t sound like enough.

Jake moved behind me and reached up to the top shelf
and pulled down the jar of mustard I was looking for. What an excellent place to keep it. He kissed the top of my head. ‘I know you only keep me around to reach the high shelves.’

I looked lofty. ‘Don’t flatter yourself. I know everything there is to know about stepladders.’

I also knew I needed to move back home. There was no place for me to work at Jake’s, the condiments were stored on the top shelves, and I hated the commute: it was a long walk to the Tube station, and after dark that creeped me out. If I was going to be creeped out, I figured, I might as well be creeped out in familiar surroundings.

So I moved back into my flat the evening before Bim’s birthday. Kay and I had been emailing, and I knew she’d have everything set up and ready – we’d been doing this for years. I was therefore unsurprised, as I sat in the kitchen drinking my first cup of coffee of the day, the sun making the kitchen gleam, to see boxes in the garden. It was a larger pile than usual, but Bim was getting bigger, so maybe the party games were too.

The doorbell rang, making me jump. Who came round before nine on a Sunday morning? Jake answered it, and then I heard the familiar tap-tap. Helena did. I had a cup out for her and was brewing a second pot of coffee by the time she’d reached the kitchen door.

‘Happy birthday, darling.’

Bim and I share a birthday. It took him a while to get his head around the reality that two people could be born on the same day and not be the same age, but he’s dealt with that trauma now. He’s not sure why I don’t ask my friends over for cake and jelly in the garden too, but he accepts that different people like different things, even if it goes
without saying that everyone likes cake and jelly.

Helena put an envelope on the counter. Not cake and jelly, but still, a birthday card was always good. As I moved to pick it up, she pulled it back again. ‘Not yet,’ she said.

Not yet?

‘It’s your present, but not only from me, and not only for you. You have to wait.’

I didn’t mind waiting, and I liked presents as much as cake and jelly and cards, but even before people had taken to breaking into my flat at regular intervals, I hadn’t been keen on uninvited guests.

I was less keen now. ‘Other people are coming? Before nine, on a weekend?’ I looked past Helena to Jake, who had followed behind her. If you can shrug without moving your shoulders, he shrugged.
Don’t look at me, lady
. So I didn’t. I just poured more coffee and waited.

Not for long. A tap at the flat door came even before I had sat down again. I stiffened. How had someone got past the front door to the house? Jake saw my response and headed down the hall. What if he hadn’t been home? Seventeen impossible scenarios, and a few possible ones, had scudded through my mind before I heard the two voices coming back towards the kitchen and I relaxed. No one could mistake Mr Rudiger’s voice, deep and resonant and with a lilt surviving from his Central European youth.

I moved back to the stove. More coffee. Before I had even poured in the water, there was another bang on the door. This one didn’t frighten me. It was a fusillade of knocks, accompanied by a shrill little voice shouting, ‘Use your key!’ The Lewises, probably with more supplies.

By the time Jake had let them in too, and Bim had careened ahead and barrelled into the garden to investigate the party preparations, Mr Rudiger had set out a plate of croissants, with the envelope Helena had smacked my hands away from sitting on top. Even without a present, croissants made the early morning visitor-flood bearable. I stood on tiptoe to kiss him. ‘Thank you.’

He pushed the envelope towards me. ‘You don’t know what it is yet.’

‘The present is from you and Helena?’

He nodded, as though my neighbour being in cahoots with my mother was normal. Maybe it was. I’d lost track of who was doing what to whom.

Helena called Bim inside, and I realised why when I looked at the envelope. ‘Bim and Sam’, it said.

I showed it to the little boy. ‘I think we’re sharing a present.’

He looked dubious, and if it hadn’t been from Helena and Mr Rudiger, I would have agreed. Apart from cake and James Bond films, we don’t have many tastes in common.

‘You open it,’ I said, and he did, carefully reading out the lettering inside the card. ‘In the garden,’ it said.

Bim and I looked at each other. We looked at Helena and Mr Rudiger. And then we looked into the garden. There was nothing there that resembled a present.

‘Come on,’ I said, taking his hand. They might tease me, but they wouldn’t tease him. We went out, and I moved over to the boxes and glasses and plates Kay had put out the night before. It was then that I noticed they were piled on a long box. ‘Maybe this?’ I said to Bim.

I moved the plates and he set to work, ripping off the
cardboard. Inside the box was a garden bench made of delicate silvered wood, long and low, with a box seat. It was very beautiful, but while I was thrilled to have it, I couldn’t see Bim’s share in it. Neither could he, and his lip trembled.

Mr Rudiger stepped nearer. ‘Lift the lid,’ he said gently.

Bim’s face cleared and his small fingers quickly found the catches in the seat. He pulled, and with some help from Anthony, up rose the lid. And under it was magic. In any other garden bench, the underseat area might have served as storage space. Nothing so dull here. A miniature ladder unfolded, attached to the bench. Bim went headfirst back into the box, and next came a plastic ‘O’ which, when extended, created a tunnel. The bench was like the clown car at the circus, with more and more spilling out than could possibly fit into such a small interior: the tunnel, the ladder, which clicked out into a climbing frame, complete with miniature tyre to swing from. It was an entire playground in a box.

‘And,’ Helena stressed, looking firmly at Bim, ‘it folds up just as easily, and can be put away in minutes.’ She turned to me. ‘Pavel designed it, and I had the prototype made.’

‘Prototype?’ I asked absently, unable to take my eyes off the transformation Anthony and Bim were producing out of a one and a half metre bench.

‘Of course, darling. We thought you and Bim would enjoy it, but we planned it for the shelters, for the children.’

I remembered their discussion on the terrace. ‘Of course,’ I repeated meekly. Then I thought about it. ‘How did you get it here? When did you do this?’

Mr Rudiger joined in. ‘I thought of it earlier this summer, when I saw Kay carrying Bim’s toys back and forth. I wondered if I could design something that made it easier for parents who didn’t have enough space to dedicate entirely to children.’ He waved his hand as if brushing away a wasp – it was the kind of idea anyone might have, the wave said. ‘When Helena asked me to look at the shelter plans, I thought it would be perfect for their garden. So I designed it, Helena had it built, and a few weeks ago, when we knew you would be at Helena’s party, we tried it out, to see if it would fit.’

Throughout his explanation my eyes had been glued to Bim’s ecstatic response as each new piece unfolded. But now I swung around, my mouth open in an ‘O’ as wide as the tunnel on the grass. Jake did too, and we spoke in unison: ‘When we were at Helena’s party?’

Mr Rudiger and Helena looked at each other, and then us. Helena took the lead: ‘Yes, why? What’s the matter with that?’

Jake pre-empted me, which was sensible, since he was more diplomatic than I would have been. ‘Whoever brought the bench left mud on the floor, and the bench must have hit the door jamb. We thought there had been an intruder.’ He was reproachful. ‘You frightened Sam.’

Helena wasn’t accepting responsibility for my fear. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

I leapt in. ‘Like what?
Mother, did someone carry a bench I don’t know exists in and out?
Anyway, if I didn’t say anything, the police did. The police who came
because I thought there had been a break-in
.’ I wasn’t shouting, but I was awfully close. I turned to Mr Rudiger. ‘Didn’t
someone come up and see you the next day? He was supposed to.’

For the first time, I saw my neighbour look anything other than pleasantly entertained. He was abashed. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘He did come up, but he just asked if anyone had borrowed my key, and I said no, because no one had: the men who brought the bench had Helena’s keys. He didn’t say that the question related to the day before, or a possible break-in.’ He repeated, ‘I’m so sorry.’