A Cast of Vultures (9 page)

We continued to pass out and collect, and the crowd continued to grow as the news spread. Azim was now surrounded by a little pack of Neighbourhood Watch people – Sarah, I saw, was in her element, as was the social worker from the audience. Dan was there with his children, and even the suit from the church hall stood on the edge of the group, drawn, no doubt, by the crowd on his way to work.

Jake wandered by at some point, with a ‘Don’t quote me, but you’ll probably be able to go home in the next hour or so’, so I decided it was worth waiting it out. I emailed Miranda to say I’d be in late, and then sat on the wall with Mr Rudiger. He was enjoying himself, I think, exchanging banalities with anyone who approached, in between looking on as if the events of the night had been laid on for his entertainment.

Just before eight we were officially told we’d shortly be allowed back home. Kay had vanished briefly, and I had a sleeping Bim on my lap. Azim and his helpers came and thunked down the last of the trays on the wall beside me, which had become, by unspoken agreement, the collection point for empty cups.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m Azim, from the newsagent’s at
the station.’ He reached around me to shake hands with Mr Rudiger. The past few hours had produced a formula for meeting neighbours with acute bed-hair for the first time. The name-rank-serial-number introduction was: which street you lived in, how you had heard about the fire, a brief segue into opinions about the pub itself, and what you thought was likely to happen to it.

Sarah overshared: she lived with her sister in a flat not far from our street; they’d been woken by the fire engines and were both there in the thick of it, although her sister didn’t attend the Neighbourhood Association meetings with any regularity. (Head shaking all round.) Dan we knew about. Mr Rudiger and Kay were both succinct, sticking to names and addresses. The suit didn’t give his name, just said his father lived nearby and he’d come over to make sure he was safe, staying afterwards, as he put it, ‘to gawp’.

What a good son. Which reminded me. I fished out my phone and texted Helena.
Just in case you hear, fire in my street during the night. We’re fine, damage to pub only
. What a good daughter.

By the time I looked up, one of the high-vis-ers was walking along the street, calling out that we could go back home.

Kay moved to lift Bim off my lap, but the suit was faster. ‘Let me. He’s heavy.’ And he was walking with him towards our street before any of us had time to protest. His ‘This way?’ made up our minds, and we trailed along behind him, with Azim bringing up the rear.

Jake met us just as we reached the pub, leaving behind a little cluster of police and fire investigators. Azim peeled off there too, his motivation in joining the residents becoming
clear as he dawdled, waiting to get the scoop from the authorities.

I tilted my head to the pub. ‘Are you done here?’ I asked Jake, before leaning against him and confiding, ‘I’m shattered. Almost as tired as if I’d had to abandon my warm bed in the middle of the night because of a fire.’

‘How strange. And yes, I’m done. It’s not my business, anyway.’ He was telling himself that as much as me.

‘What’s the consensus?’ Azim might head for the professionals, but I had better contacts.

‘The pub burnt down.’

‘No!’ I widened my eyes. ‘Thank God we pay taxes so we can have a police force that knows what it’s doing.’ I clutched my invisible pearls for good measure.

Jake looked a little abashed. ‘They don’t know much more than that. The investigators are just beginning their walk-through, and it’ll be a few days before there’s more than a preliminary report. All they have at the moment is that no one was inside, and that the ignition point was probably in the backyard. If that’s the case, and there’s no traces of accelerant, or electrical failure, it might have been nothing more than a cigarette.’

‘But there have been other fires.’

‘That’s the concern. The earlier ones were, they thought, kids, or distractions set up by Harefield. The empty house then looked like the finish, Harefield caught in a fire of his own making. This changes things. It couldn’t have been Harefield. So either it’s a coincidence, which is possible – places do burn down – or someone is using the earlier series, although why they would want to isn’t at all clear.’

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so for once I didn’t say anything. Maybe I should try that more often. I stopped and looked back at the pub. Water and charcoal, doors and windows destroyed, it had gone from being a viable business to being a pile of bricks in just hours. I shivered, and watched the fire crew preparing to leave. As the first engine pulled away, two men were revealed standing at the end of the pool of light cast by the street lamp: Azim and Dennis’s friend Kevin, heads bent, eyes on the pavement, they were talking intently.

Jake’s arm went around me and pulled, and I turned and walked away. As we reached the front door to my house, our new friend was coming down the stairs, having presumably dropped Bim off. ‘Lovely to meet you,’ he said without stopping as I got out my keys. I mechanically said goodbye, but my attention was on the flat door. It took me several futile turns of the key to realise that I hadn’t locked up when we’d been told to leave, just left it on the latch. That I wasn’t the sparkliest pixie in the forest at three in the morning was not really news.

‘Who was that?’ Jake asked once the door was closed behind him.

‘A neighbour. His father lives nearby, and he came over to check on him. He goes to Neighbourhood Association meetings. Now you know everything I know.’

‘That’s unlikely. I don’t know what the Neighbourhood Association is, for starters.’ And with that the bastard had stripped off and beaten me to the shower before I’d even walked down the hall.

An hour later I was ready to leave. I’d finally managed to get my turn in the shower by the simple expedient of
standing on the bath mat and snapping, ‘You! Out!’ Once I took his place, I understood why I had to force him out. Under the running water, the smell of burning lifted. The moment I put my head out, it returned. I smelt of it, even after washing myself over and over. My clothes smelt of it, even the clean ones in the cupboard. The whole house stank of it. There was no point opening the windows, because outside was even worse. It was everywhere, a thick, sour, heavy smell.

Now that it was over, the exhilaration that watching the fire had produced had worn off, and the stench, the brute reality that someone may have burnt down a building with no concern for the lives of those nearby, combined with lack of sleep to produce a queasy feeling, a mixture of fear and anxiety that sat low in my stomach. I tried to ignore it, and went upstairs. I wanted to check on both sets of neighbours, to let us reassure each other that we were all right, and then head to the office, so that I could pretend that nothing bad was happening. Denial was a wonderful place to be: lovely scenery, great beaches.

I stood listening for a moment outside Mr Rudiger’s door. I didn’t want to wake him if he’d gone back to bed. I should have known better. My neighbour has hearing that makes bats feel so inadequate they’re on waiting lists for bat-sized cochlear implants, and he had the door open before I lifted my hand to knock.

Mr Rudiger’s age, and lack of mobility, should have meant the night had taken a toll. Instead he looked exactly as he always did, nattily dressed in a white shirt and dark trousers, his shoes shined, his face freshly shaved. I was three decades younger, and looked exhausted, my hair already
escaping from its clip, my clothes clean but unpressed, my shoes not having seen polish since the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth I.

So much for my planned offer of help. ‘Just checking in,’ I said instead. ‘I stopped by Kay and Anthony’s too.’ I shrugged, not sure how to explain why I felt the need to do so. ‘We seem to have become family since last night.’

Mr Rudiger looked at me the way he does when I’m being particularly dense, fond but under no misapprehensions: ‘We always were,’ he said.

By the time I reached the office, it was lunchtime, and the building was deserted. I sat at my desk and gazed around vaguely, as if the room belonged to someone else, someone I was only mildly interested in knowing. I was dizzy from lack of sleep, being a hard-core eight-hour-a-night woman by preference. My brain refused to let go of the smell of burning, which clung to me like an aura, even though objectively I knew I had washed it off hours before. I stared at the wall, seeing the flames still burning.

‘Sam. Sam!’ A voice was calling, and I turned. Miranda was at the door. ‘Are you all right?’

I returned to the present. A bad-tempered present. ‘Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

She put her finger to her chin in pantomime puzzlement. ‘Maybe because I’ve been calling your name for the last five minutes? Or because you’re not answering your phone?’

I wasn’t? ‘I didn’t hear you. Or it.’

‘Exactly.’

Oh. ‘I was thinking.’ I tried a smile. ‘Always a major undertaking.’

‘I could smell the burning rubber from my desk.’

Burning. I flinched, and scrubbed at my face, trying to wipe away the tiredness. ‘It’s just that I’m operating on very little sleep. There was a fire down the road from me last night, and they made us leave. We didn’t get back home until this morning.’

‘Why are you here? Go home, get some sleep.’ She didn’t add ‘Duh’ to the end of the sentence, but with the tone of voice she was using, it wasn’t necessary.

It would have been the sensible thing to do, but I didn’t want to smell that wet burning smell again. I brushed off her concern. ‘Soon.’ I gathered myself. ‘Has Kath been in touch?’ I was bidding on a book, and the agent, Kath Strong, was a demon for squeezing out final-final offers long after you thought you’d made a final offer.

Miranda looked stern. ‘That’s why I came in. She’s emailed and she’s rung. She couldn’t get hold of you, so she phoned me.’

Oops. I checked my email, and there it was. Or, rather, there they were: three emails from Kath. ‘Thanks. I’ll take care of it.’ Luckily this would take neither time nor brainpower. The auction had reached the upper limit of what I could offer. I tapped out a quick reply, dropping out. It was a damn good novel, but I could barely make the figures work at the level we’d agreed. We’d be shooting ourselves in the foot financially if I went any higher. If I hadn’t been so tired, I would have been disappointed. I’d loved the book. I reminded myself of the saying my first publishing boss always recited in these circumstances: ‘Never be afraid to walk away.’ He was right, but it still felt like failure most times.

I had no energy for that emotion today, however. That was the only benefit I could see coming out of the fire. I told myself that with a good night’s sleep I’d be fine. Not perky, but fine. I don’t really perk. It’s hard to perk when your natural state is that an unknown something dreadful will shortly happen to an unknown someone in an unexpected somewhere. With eight hours’ sleep I manage not to expect that the something dreadful will occur in the next twenty minutes. That’s as positive as I get. Without the sleep, there was no hope of positivity. And my un-perky worldview was once more proved the correct one when Miranda returned just as I hit ‘send’ on my email to Kath. She had her cup and saucer in one hand, but put it down on the filing cabinet to pour me a cup from my pot. This was not good.

‘I’m guessing you need to talk to me, and I’m also guessing I’m not going to like it.’

She shut the door, which, even if I hadn’t picked up on her butter-her-up-with-coffee clue, would have told me that whatever it was was going to be serious. ‘Since you’re not going home …’

‘What’s up?’ seemed a suitably innocuous lead-in, so I went for it.

‘It’s Ben’s book.’

I resisted the temptation to put my head down on my desk and whimper. Ben runs our literary fiction list, and he despises the kind of commercial women’s fiction I publish. He also despises anyone over the age of thirty-two. And, I’ve always suspected, he despises women more generally, although that might be my rationalisation for why he doesn’t like me. But, cut to the chase, I’m three for three: a woman over thirty-two who publishes commercial women’s
fiction, so yes, he doesn’t like me, although, to be fair, I don’t like him either. This was not one of those carefully guarded secrets. Everyone in the office knew. Possibly everyone within Greater London. He may have taken out ads in
The Times
.

Given our mutual hostility, therefore, if Miranda had run-of-the-mill editorial queries on the book she was working on for him, she wouldn’t bring them to me.

I pretended to smile. ‘What’s the problem?’

She turned her big, pretty eyes towards me and blinked slowly. ‘The book’s good, you know? Really good.’

That couldn’t be the problem, so I nodded and sipped my coffee. When nothing more was forthcoming, I prodded. ‘Remind me what it’s about. It’s a memoir, isn’t it?’

That unstuck her logjam. ‘Yes, a memoir, by someone who was in a gang. He tells the story of how he got into the gang, and what life was like, the drug dealing, violence …’ She trailed off, allowing me to assume the etceteras. ‘Then there’s his arrest and time in prison.’

‘And?’

‘And it’s wonderfully written, it’s exciting, and –’ she spoke in a rush now ‘– and I don’t believe a word of it. I think he made most of it up.’

‘Oh.’

She laughed, the Miranda I knew returning. ‘I was hoping for a little more guidance than “Oh”.’

‘How about “Oh, flaming Nora”?’ I looked at my empty mug. ‘If you were going to dump this on my lap, you could have spiked my coffee with brandy.’ I got up and poured us both more. ‘Let’s break this down. Tell me about the author first. Have you been in touch with him? What did Ben tell you about him?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s one of those he’s-writing-under-a-pseudonym-so-no-one-kills-him deals. No one gets to meet him, or be in touch with him at all.’

‘Who’s the agent?’

‘No agent. I checked the file. A lawyer negotiated the contract, and everything goes through him.’