A Cast of Vultures (8 page)

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 instead 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.

‘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.

‘Sure, if you want.’

He looked over his shoulder. Not casual at all, said his body language.

I put my book down. ‘You thought I’d say no?’

He gave that little head shuffle that means it was fifty-fifty. ‘I thought you might not want to. You don’t like pubs, you don’t like socialising, and you don’t like strangers.’

‘What better way to spend a Sunday, then, than socialising with strangers in a pub?’ My voice was light, but I was shocked that he thought I wouldn’t be willing to spend time with his friends. I thought about our life. He’d met some of my friends, although his work schedule meant that I saw them more often on my own. It was only recently that Jake had told his superiors that I – someone he’d met in an official CID capacity – was in his life. Before that,
he couldn’t have introduced me to any of his work friends even if he’d wanted to, and afterwards we’d kept to the same pattern, probably mostly driven by inertia, but also, I now recognised, driven by my dislike, as Jake had so neatly put it, of pubs, socialising and strangers. That wasn’t good. I didn’t want my introversion to keep him from his friends.

‘Sunday, then,’ I said. ‘It’s a date.’

I
WAS IN THE
pub, socialising with strangers, when the fire alarm went off. We continued to talk, assuming it was a false alarm, but the volume increased, the endless woop-woop making conversation impossible. I said to the group around me, ‘I guess I shouldn’t have had that sneaky cigarette while I was standing under the smoke detector,’ and they laughed. I did too, because I don’t smoke. But the fire alarm didn’t give up – woop-woop, it went, getting louder and louder.

It wasn’t my cigarette that had set it off, I decided. It was a stronger smell than that. I was trying to work out why someone would be burning toast in a pub when the dream broke. No pub, no sneaky cigarettes, not even any toast. The woop-woop was my alarm clock, and it was morning. I reached out and grappled on the bedside table. Still in a deep sleep haze, I had hit several buttons on the clock before I was awake enough to remember that not only did
I not smoke, my radio just switched on in the morning – I didn’t have an alarm that went woop-woop. I opened my eyes. It was too dark to be morning. The woop-woop was coming from the street.

I sat up and turned on the light. Half past two, and Jake’s side of the bed was empty, the sheets tossed back.

The sitting room was lit up like a stage set when I walked in. It wasn’t half past two there, it was high noon. Still no Jake. I peered out the front window. What looked like every resident on the street was outside, standing around in dressing gowns or a mix ’n’ match of clothes dragged on in the dark. As I watched, a policeman headed up the road, his arms spread wide, gesturing the bystanders back as though they were a Jumbo coming in to land.

I found some shoes and went out to join the dressing-gown contingent. As soon as I opened the front door, I could see, and smell, everything. The pub on the corner was on fire, and the woop-woop was more engines arriving.

I’d laughed when Jake had suggested I might have gone to watch a car burn, but standing there, I realised why people did. In Canada, when I was a child, I’d once gone whale-watching on the St Lawrence. There’s one area in the river where a specific type of algae, or seaweed, or plankton, or whatever it is, is plentiful, and the whales migrate there for a seasonal all-you-can-eat buffet. Or those were the jokes we made onshore. Once we were in the boat, it was a different story. The organisers apologised: we would only see minke whales that day, the ‘only’ because minke whales are the smallest of the whales found there, and we wouldn’t get the full experience. Then a pod surfaced. Each of those small whales was the size of a city block, the height of an
apartment building. It wasn’t that they were beautiful, although they were, or that viewing them was interesting, although it was. It was that there, suddenly, on a perfectly ordinary day, were creatures on a scale so far outside our experience that we barely knew how to respond.

The fire was like that. If you’d asked me beforehand, I would have guessed that it would have been a visual experience. Instead, the heat pushed at us like a living thing, while the noise, the hissing and crackling, was even more aggressively alive. And it was an emotional experience, fiercer, and more beautiful, than I could have imagined. Like the whales, here, suddenly, on a perfectly ordinary day, in a perfectly ordinary street, was a sight so far outside my experience I barely knew how to respond. The term ‘force of nature’ is a cliché, and a particularly colourless one. Until I was faced by an animal the size of a row of houses, or a fire that was devouring a building alive, and then I understood it. This was why people stood and stared, or ran to watch. Not because they were ghouls, hoping for something nasty, but because what they were seeing was almost incomprehensible in scale.

So I stood and stared, like everyone else. I don’t know for how long, but when an arm went around my shoulders, I was so absorbed in that crazed, destructive beauty that I jumped and gave a yelp. Jake was amused. ‘Promise me you’ll tell everyone here that that’s not how you usually react when I touch you.’

I shook my head sorrowfully. ‘Too late. They’ve seen it now. They’ll never believe all those lies I tell to cover this tragic reality.’

He laughed and let go. ‘I came to tell you to get dressed.
They want to move everyone further down the street. I’ll go for Mr Rudiger. And have you seen the Lewises? Are they out here?’ He looked around. He was dressed already, which didn’t surprise me. I knew from experience with late-night work calls that he could move from deep sleep to being out the door in less time than it took him to say ‘I’m on my way’.

‘I saw Kay and Anthony, but not Bim. I’ll tell them they need to wake him.’ Then I processed what he’d said. ‘Moving us? Why? Is the fire spreading?’

His voice was professionally soothing. ‘No, no. But it’s a dead-end street, and the route out is past the pub: they want a controlled exit until the fire has been contained. It’s nothing more than that.’ Some uniformed police appeared behind him, and they were saying the same thing, in the same professionally soothing tone. There must have been a class in it at cop school: Soothing 101.

It worked, though. I turned to go, professionally soothed and merely asking, ‘How long do you think we’ll be out? Should I get my bag and office clothes?’

‘Whatever’s quickest.’ He looked at his watch. ‘They want everyone out in the next ten minutes, so hop it.’

I hopped it. I was dressed and heading back out as Jake came down the stairs with Mr Rudiger in front of him. He looked as if he were off to sit in a café and watch the world go by.

‘Good morning,’ he said. Mr Rudiger might not go out, but nothing ruffled his calm.

I snorted a small laugh. ‘Good morning to you, too. Have you got’ – I wasn’t sure what it was he should have, because I didn’t know how long we’d be out of the house.
So I handed Jake his wallet and phone, which I’d collected along with my things, and ended with a vague – ‘whatever you need? Where’s Bim?’ I looked around the hallway, as though he might be lurking under the doormat.

‘Outside already, and having a wonderful time.’ Jake had designated himself hall monitor for our building.

As we walked down the front path we were met by a clipboard-carrying woman in a high-vis jacket. We confirmed that everyone was out of our house, and I added that the neighbours to the left were on holiday, and had no pets. She checked us and them off, and handed us over to another high-vis-er, to be escorted in groups past the pub. It was like being back in kindergarten, although with more dramatic lighting. I was surprised we weren’t made to hold hands with a responsible adult.

We were permitted to stop a few hundred metres down the road. Jake had already disappeared again. Mr Rudiger took up a perch on a neighbour’s garden wall and nodded back towards the fire. ‘Over there, on the right.’

I looked. Jake was standing with a woman who was pointing to the rear of the pub. Then part of the fire crew moved between us, and I couldn’t see him anymore.

‘He’ll let us know what he’s found out when he’s back.’ I rethought that. ‘Or some of it.’ The flames that had been visible through the upstairs window of the pub were gone now. The noise, which had been almost overpowering, had altered. The whoosh of the flames, their hiss and splatter, had lessened, and instead the sound of water being pumped out predominated, a steady, even stream of sound that soothed, rather than the erratic crackle and roar of the fire that had exhilarated, but also threatened. Another sense
took over. The smell, of smoke and soot, had worked its way into my dream, but after a few minutes outside I’d become accustomed to it, and had stopped noticing it. Now a heavy blanket of smell predominated, no longer the smell of burning, but the smell of wet wood, wet charcoal, wet plaster. As with the empty house, but stronger, just the smell of burnt wet.

We sat watching, mesmerised, barely speaking. There must have been over a hundred people on the street – the fifty or so from our road, who had been forced to leave their houses, and then more from the houses and flats nearby, people who had come out to see what was happening, and had stayed, captured by the fire. As it got later, more kept arriving from nearby streets, having woken up and heard the news. Further down the road was a group of teenagers. I waved to Sam, who was on the edge of the group. He waved back, but furtively. I understood. Being on waving terms with a middle-aged woman wasn’t going to do his street-cred any good.

It was more than an hour later, when the fire was no longer visible, and the fire crew were no longer moving at a frantic pace, when I looked at my watch: nearly five. I turned to Mr Rudiger. ‘What are you going to do? Do you want to use my phone to ring your daughter?’

He thought for a moment. ‘Not yet. If they don’t let us go back inside in the next hour or two, I’ll call then.’

I considered my options. I could go to the café and get coffee, and then go to work. If I went to Jake’s, I could have the coffee and also a shower. I sniffed at myself, not that that told me anything, since the fire smell was everywhere. Even with a shower, my clothes were going to reek, and I didn’t
have any office clothes at his place. I could go to Helena’s, which was closer, and have the coffee and shower there too, but I’d be no better off in the clothes department. We were the same height, but there the physical resemblance ended. She looked like Tinkerbell’s smarter sister; I was closer to a baroque putto, but with more chest. And without the trumpet.

Decision made. ‘I’m going down to the café. It must be open by now. Are you ready for coffee?’ I asked Mr Rudiger. A redundant question. He was always as ready for coffee as I was.

Kay, on his other side, reached into her bag. ‘I’m in. And maybe some juice for Bim? Let me give you some money. I’d come to help, but …’ She had one finger firmly hooked into the collar of Bim’s T-shirt as he strained against it, his body yearning towards the fire engines like a mini Leaning Tower of Pisa, his eyes as bright as the flames had been. This was, by far, the best day of his entire life.

I was pleased she wasn’t going to come with me, although I didn’t say so. Kay is one of the most elegant-looking people I know, and if there’s anything she can drop, or knock over, or bump into, in a five-kilometre radius, she’ll drop, or knock over or bump into it. Then she’ll knock into the person helping her up. And then drop whatever it is again. It’s better to keep her away from hot liquids whenever possible. So I waved away her cash and headed down the road. At the corner, a figure peeled off from the group there. Sam. Either he thought his friends wouldn’t notice, or food and drink overrode the need for cool. I gave him a ‘Hey’, and he shambled along behind me without speaking.

Mo and another server had the café open, and were loading up trays with cups of tea and coffee. She gave me a smile as we came in, but didn’t pause in her pouring. When one tray was ready, she filled a bag with rolls, put it on top and handed it to Sam. ‘For the fire crew and the police.
Not
for you and your friends. If you send a couple of them down here, and if they do some carrying for the oldies, I’ll make up another tray for you.’

Sam grinned. ‘Free food? They’ll help.’

Mo handed me a matching tray and spoke to me as sternly as she had to Sam: ‘Are you going to be able to keep this to the people who are on the street because they have to be, not the ones who are sightseeing?’

‘I’ll do my best.’ I lied every time I spoke to Mo. I had no idea how I could accomplish what she was asking – check IDs? Demand to see utility bills, to prove where they lived before handing over an Americano? I’d aim for the older people and children. The ones in the middle could either take themselves down to the café or do without.

As we headed back up the hill, Sam shouted out to a few of his friends, sending them down the way we’d come, and we continued on towards the crowd. But before we’d gone far, Sam’s tray clattered, the hot liquid slopping around.

I balanced mine carefully and turned, to see him staring back at his friends.

‘What’s wrong?’

He shook his head without replying. He wasn’t looking at the boys, I realised, but at a man standing slightly apart from them. The man felt his eyes on him, and looked up. He looked at Sam, no expression on his face, before turning and walking away.

‘Who was that?’

‘No one,’ said Sam shortly, turning and starting to walk again.

‘Didn’t look like no one. Looked like someone,’ I prodded.

He scowled at me. Then, reluctantly, ‘A friend of Dennis,’ he said.

I raised my eyebrows and waited.

‘One of those people I told you about. The ones that Dennis stayed friends with, even though …’

‘Who is he?’

Sam stopped dead and looked at me sternly. ‘Don’t you go near him. Just don’t.’ If he hadn’t been carrying a tray, he would have crossed his arms, and possibly called me ‘young lady’.

‘I’m just asking about him.’

He didn’t change his tone. ‘His name’s Kevin. I don’t know what his last name is, so that’s good. Because you don’t need to know.’

He strode away, jaw fixed, and I followed. I reached Mr Rudiger without dropping anything, and rested the tray on the wall beside him.

‘I’ll help,’ said a confident bass voice.

I turned. Azim. I looked around quickly. Seeing him, it now occurred to me that there’d been no sign of Viv. Given the last interaction she’d had with Azim, I was grateful, or we’d have the battle of the coffee cups, but it was unlike her to miss out on a big event. And it was just as unlikely to see Azim. He ran the newsagent, but that didn’t mean he lived nearby. He was standing in front of me, however, so it appeared that he did.

I just nodded to him, and said, ‘Oldies first?’ as I began to pass out the cups. When the tray was empty, he picked it up and asked, ‘The station café?’ and was off for refills before I’d replied. Then he did the trip twice more, stopping and chatting to everyone, effortlessly separating the forcibly-out-of-their-houses-and-therefore-eligible-for-coffee sheep from the having-a-wonderful-time-sightseeing goats as he handed out cups.