A Cast of Vultures (6 page)

‘He’s a squatter!’ Jake was incandescent.

I stuck to my calm voice, although I suspected my calmness was making Jake angrier. ‘I understand what you’re saying. I understand that from your point of view they are committing criminal trespass, even if what they are doing has only been upgraded from a civil offence in the last few years by a government that I know you think too is doing its very best to criminalise poverty—’ I waved off his protest. ‘I agree. I’m off the point. What the point is that I don’t agree with you that squatting is, in and of itself, necessarily wrong. That building had been empty for years before they moved in. Even you—’ All expression vanished from Jake’s face, and I closed my eyes in regret. I began again. ‘I know what the law says, but in human terms it is hard to see what harm is being done by six people living in a building no one had used for a decade. Living outside normal property arrangements doesn’t make you a criminal, or a vagrant, or a deviant.’

He didn’t reply, just pulled his plate back and started to eat again, stabbing with his fork as though the meal had made a particularly vicious personal remark.

There was no point trying to get him to see it my way. I went for damage limitation. ‘Look, how does this sound: he won’t have access to the house, because there’s no reason for him to; I’ll get his last name, and ask for some ID; and I’ll arrange for him to come and see the garden while you’re here, and make sure he knows you’re a cop, and that you live here. And if there’s any sign at any point that they knew about the activities of the man in the shed, we’ll end the agreement.’

‘Fine,’ he said, but without looking up. And went on stabbing at the poor, innocent chilli.

We had silently cleaned up the kitchen, and Jake was pretending to watch television while I pretended to read a manuscript, when Steve texted. I showed it to Jake and said, ‘In the morning before work?’

‘Fine,’ he said again. Just like ‘Yeah, right’ really means
Not even if you set fire to my hair
, ‘Fine’ always means
How many ways are there to say no in English?

But I had his nominal agreement. I texted Steve a time, and we went to bed, where we pretended to sleep. I hated quarrelling with Jake.

In the morning, I stopped behind him as he was brushing his teeth. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, even if it was more regret that we were at odds than an apology for my actions.

He spat and gave me a small smile in the mirror. ‘But not sorry enough not to do it.’ He wasn’t asking. He knew I wasn’t.

I smiled back into the mirror and shrugged, and he shook his head. And he ruffled my hair as he walked past me into the bedroom. It was a bit the way you pat a small dog, or
an overexcited child. But it also signalled his acceptance of my plans, even if he didn’t like them. For that I could put up with the odd hair ruffle.

We were drinking our coffee when Steve arrived. I led him into the kitchen and waved him to a seat. ‘I’m not sure we’ve ever got as far as last names,’ I said. ‘I’m Sam Clair.’

‘Steve Marshall,’ he said, sitting.

When he looked towards Jake, I added, ‘And this is my partner, Jake Field.’

‘Boyfriend,’ said Jake, glowering as he put out his hand.

I contemplated banging my head repeatedly against the cupboard I was opening to get Steve a cup, but I managed to refrain. Instead I smiled with saccharine sweetness at Jake. ‘How about “the sun around which my world revolves”?’ I amended, batting my eyelashes for good measure.

He finally cracked a smile, and poured Steve some coffee, which I took to be a positive sign. ‘Sit,’ he said, at least sounding like the good cop, not the bad one, in a good-cop-bad-cop routine.

Steve watched us warily, and I couldn’t blame him. Someone wasn’t happy, even if Steve wasn’t a criminal vagrant deviant. Which he didn’t resemble, not any of the elements. He was short, probably only five foot eight or so, and wiry rather than thin. Although I guessed he was in his thirties, with his slightly too-long, mousey-coloured hair, which curled over his forehead and into his eyes, and dressed in his standard uniform of worn jeans and clean white T-shirt, he looked like a college student.

‘Have you and Mike found somewhere to stay?’ I asked.
Please God, let them have found somewhere to stay
. Whatever I’d originally thought about offering them space,
given Jake’s response to Steve even working in the garden, anything more was impossible.

‘Yeah, we’re fine. A bit further away than before, but someone Mike works for has a room in St John’s Wood. She’s happy for us to stay until we can get sorted out.’

That was a relief. ‘OK. The garden.’ I looked up. ‘What do you think?’

His smile could have lit Piccadilly Circus. ‘I think it’s great. It’s south-facing, it’s bigger than a window box, and it’s near most of my jobs. What else could I think?’

‘So you’re undecided,’ I teased.

Jake snorted. I thought about accidentally spilling my coffee over him, but decided to hold it in reserve.

Steve looked serious. ‘Look, it’s a wonderful offer, but if you want to change your mind, I entirely understand. Not just now.’ He grimaced. ‘Vegetables aren’t the most ornamental things. If you decide you can’t stand the way it looks, that’s fine. Or for any other reason. We can do it, and if you don’t like it, I can finish out the season and go. No hard feelings.’

I couldn’t really ask for more. ‘Sounds good to me.’

He must have spent a while looking at the garden before he rang the bell. ‘With the space you’ve got, I can grow what I need for the six of us, if we find somewhere to live together again, and plenty for Mo’s salads. I was doing that before, so that’ll easily come out of my half of the garden.’

‘Your half?’

Uncertainty crossed his face. ‘I thought that was the deal. I do the work for half the produce; you get the other half because it’s your garden.’

I squeaked. I sounded as if a puppy had had its bum
bitten, but the thought of coming home every evening to find a tonne of leeks and a bushel of lettuce on my doorstep was panic-inducing. ‘Not so fast.’ I didn’t add ‘Buster’, but it was implicit. ‘There’s just the two of us here. If you can feed six, plus make the café’s salads on half, the other half is more than I want, or can handle. Way more.’

‘But that isn’t fair,’ he argued. ‘You’re giving me the space. You should probably get more than half.’

‘But I don’t
want
half, much less more than half.’ I thought for a moment. ‘How does this sound? For the first while, until we settle into it, you can let me know once a week or so what’s available, and I’ll choose what I want, and how much. And I’ll let you know in advance which vegetables I detest, so you can allow for that when you plan out what you’re going to plant.’ Visions of baskets of turnips were added to the leeks and onions on my doorstep, and my gorge rose.

‘It still doesn’t seem right,’ he said, ‘but if that’s what you want, fine. And if there are weeks when you need extra, you’ll let me know.’

‘That sounds perfect,’ I said. And it did.

‘I can definitely use whatever you don’t want. Mo’s boss has been after her to supply more – they always run out before the rush hour ends. And I have a friend who has a stall at a farmer’s market. She’ll take anything I can produce.’

It sounded workable to me. ‘I’d like to keep the big bush at the back. It gives some cover so the window is less overlooked. Otherwise there’s nothing I mind losing. You can keep or rip out whatever you like.’ He nodded. ‘So. Formalities.’ I felt my cheeks flush. I wasn’t quite
sure how to ask him for the information Jake wanted.

Happily, I didn’t have to. Steve reached into his pocket. ‘I thought you’d like references. This is from the council, a contract for planting a couple of the squares as a freelance contractor, plus a letter of completion, approving the work. This is a reference from people in Hampstead I’ve worked for regularly for a few years now. And I’ve also put down my personal information – name, phone number and so on. I don’t have a permanent address, obviously, at the moment, so I’ve given you a copy of my driver’s licence, and listed my National Insurance number. That way if you come home one day and find some lunatic has bulldozed your front garden and scarpered, you can still track me down.’

I peeked over at Jake, who held out the pot to Steve. ‘More coffee?’ he said, and I breathed comfortably for the first time since dinner the night before.

Steve shook his head and pushed himself back from the table. ‘I need to get over to my first job.’

I walked him to the door, running through the usual well-meaning phrases – I hoped he and Mike were settling in their new place, how were Mo and Dan’s kids coping? As we stood on the doorstep, Steve turned back to face me. ‘I – we – really appreciate the help we’ve had from the neighbours.’ He stopped my words of protest. ‘No, I mean it. I’ve done the odd job for you, but you don’t really know us. And now that we’ve found out that Dennis wasn’t just running his boys’ club—’ He broke off, shaking his head. ‘I appreciate the sign of good faith.’

‘Dennis?’ It couldn’t be, surely.

He frowned. ‘You know, Dennis, who used our shed for
his boys’ club. I really can’t believe it. He seemed like a terrific bloke.’

‘Dennis.’ I said again. ‘Did he work full-time with the boys’ club?’ I knew the answer, even as I told myself that I was being ridiculous.

Steve was quizzical – when you discover you’ve been harbouring a drug-dealing arsonist in your shed, his employment history is probably not most people’s first question – but he answered readily enough. ‘No, the boys’ club was just volunteer work in his spare time. He worked for the council.’

But he didn’t have to tell me that. I already knew. I didn’t bother to ask whether he made his bed, or what brand of toothpaste he used, because I knew those things as well.

I don’t know what I said to Steve, or the arrangements we made, because I was gearing up to make Jake unhappy again. A regular occurrence.

Jake was putting his files away when I went back inside. I leant against the kitchen door, watching him and trying to work out what to say. Finally, ‘Viv’s missing neighbour.’

Jake straightened up and waited.

I closed my eyes and tried again. ‘I think – no, I know. Viv’s missing neighbour is the arsonist.’

Nothing. I peeked. Jake was standing staring at me, arms crossed. ‘Why?’

‘The arsonist’s name was Dennis, says Steve. He worked for the council. Viv’s neighbour Dennis, who works for the council, vanished unexpectedly. What’re the odds of two council workers named Dennis, one disappearing and one showing up dead? In the same week, in the same neighbourhood?’

Jake’s mouth quirked. ‘The Office for National Statistics have yet to collect that data.’ He sighed. ‘Tell me what you know, I’ll pass it on.’

I did, but apart from the link, I didn’t know anything else, and I couldn’t see it would interest the police: they’d known his last name, and probably now knew he had been reported missing. The only thing that was odd, and I doubted the police would care, was that Viv liked him. She didn’t give out her trust lightly, and she approved of him. Still, I hadn’t looked around his flat and thought,
Wow, this looks like a drug dealer lives here
. Drug dealers might well be pleasant socially, and have flats that looked no different from anyone else’s. It wasn’t my area of expertise.

I finished, ‘The police probably met Viv when they went to search his flat. She has his keys.’ I didn’t add that she’d acquired them after he’d vanished, not before. Or that we’d been in the flat. There are some things that a girl doesn’t have to share.

Jake didn’t make much of it. He went back to putting his files together, and I took the cups over to the sink before I began to pack the manuscripts I was working on into my bag. As I did, Jake was reminded. ‘My “partner”?’ he asked. ‘Do we run a dental practice?’

I didn’t bother to look up. ‘The way publishing is going, it might be sensible to retrain. I’d be a demon with the floss.’ I went back to my bag. ‘I just hate “boyfriend”. You’re not a boy. And that’s not what you objected to. You were marking your territory.’

He was silent, which meant both that I was right, and that he hadn’t known that’s what he had been doing. It didn’t matter. Things had gone better than I’d hoped. I had
a kitchen garden in embryo that I didn’t have to work in, a part share in a nascent dental practice, and Jake and I were no longer quarrelling.

It was only when I got home that evening that I remembered I hadn’t told Steve what Jake did for a living. Nor could I find the paperwork he had left for me.

N
OW THAT I
had nothing to occupy me, the questions I’d been blocking out with work during the day came roaring back. I wanted to find out about the house, and about Harefield, if it was in fact him. I texted Jake:
Will you be home for supper?

Twenty minutes later, there was still no reply, no matter how many times I picked up my phone. I even shook it once, but that didn’t dislodge any messages that had got stuck in cyberspace either. I stared at my bag full of manuscripts. It wasn’t that I had nothing to keep me busy, but I was antsy, and wanted to be up and doing. I just didn’t know what I should be doing. So I searched systematically for Steve’s papers. I hadn’t absent-mindedly filed them – there wasn’t an extra folder on my desk, and I carefully checked the drawers. I hadn’t binned them. I went through the recycling box outside to make sure of that. They weren’t in the kitchen drawer where I keep my shopping list.

After an hour, I admitted defeat. I looked out the window. It would be daylight for ages. I could go for a walk. I could water the back garden. I needed to do laundry, or I could visit Mr Rudiger. Instead I did what I knew I was going to do from the moment I left the office. I got my cycle out and went to find Viv and hear what she’d managed to dig up on Harefield, and give her my news. I could have rung her, but that seemed less purposeful. Going somewhere made me feel as if I were acting, not just reacting. To what, or about what, was less clear.

The drawback to this brilliant plan, I discovered ten minutes later, was that Viv wasn’t home. So instead of hanging about in my sitting room, I was hanging about on her doorstep. I looked at my watch. I’d give it ten minutes. If she wasn’t back by then, I’d go home and start supper, and do some work. It was still hot, but the building across the road blocked out the worst glare of the late-afternoon sun. I sat down by her front door and pulled out my phone. There’s an app that lets you download free out-of-copyright books, and when I first bought a smartphone I got carried away and loaded up, figuring you never knew when you might need an emergency copy of
Great Expectations
, or
Treasure Island
. So far,
Great Expectations
emergencies had been thin on the ground, but today was apparently the day those advance preparations were going to pay off. I stretched my legs out and began to read.

Miss Havisham had just appeared when the sun was blocked by a cloud. Without my noticing, the day had moved from warm to mild, and I’d definitely been there for longer than ten minutes. I looked up. It wasn’t a cloud, it was a person. Sam, my namesake. He was standing less
than a metre away from me, and I hadn’t heard a thing.

Apart from our name, Sam and I have little in common. I’m female, and over forty, and no one ever notices me much. He’s eighteen or so, and his south-east Asian dark hair is set off with peroxided blonde tips, his ears are multiply pierced, and his jeans permanently hang down around his arse, which, since he’s young and pretty, draws attention. Despite our differences, we like each other.

‘You’re not texting, and you’re not on Facebook,’ he said. ‘YouTube without the sound?’

I smiled up at him. ‘Much worse. I’m reading a book.’

He shook his head. He’d already told me what he thought of my bizarre hobby. He looked towards Viv’s door. ‘You waiting for her?’

‘Um-hmm. I wanted to hear if she had news of her missing neighbour.’

Sam shrugged. He didn’t know about missing neighbours. So I moved on. ‘What’s the news on the fire?’

He’d been leaning casually against the wall, but now he pushed himself upright, and his face became blank. ‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, why? A building burnt down two minutes’ walk from my house. Of course I’m interested in updates.’

He crossed his arms defensively. ‘Who you asking for?’

‘What do you mean? I’m asking for myself, for exactly the reason I said I am – I’m nosy.’

No smile. ‘Not for your boyfriend?’ It was an accusation.

‘My boyfriend? What’s he got to do with it?’

‘He’s a cop.’

‘He is. But he’s CID. He doesn’t do fire investigation. And’ – I snorted – ‘and he definitely wouldn’t use me to ask
questions. Mostly he tells me to stop asking questions.’ I waited, but so did Sam, so I tried again. ‘What’s going on?’

Sam leant back against the wall again, but he still didn’t look at me. ‘The cops have been around, “making enquiries”.’

‘Talking to you?’

He shrugged. ‘Me and my mates.’

‘About the fire? Why?’

He still wouldn’t look up. ‘Because when there’s trouble, it’s us that’s to blame.’

I knew this was true. When I first met Sam, I’d been told that he’d been ‘in trouble’ with the police. I didn’t know what that meant. It could have been anything from drunk and disorderly to something more serious. I’d never asked, and didn’t plan to now, either. Whatever he’d done before, in the time I’d known him he was so clearly a good person.

‘They think you know about the fires? One of you?’

He nodded.

‘That’s nuts.’

He smiled, but it was bitter. ‘Glad you think so, but they don’t. They wanted to know where we were Saturday night, and then on Wednesday last week, and a lot of other days, which we think must have been when the other fires were.’

‘You weren’t there.’ I made sure it wasn’t a question.

He was tense, staring at the ground. ‘I could tell them where I was on Saturday, and last week. Before that, how would I know?’ He put on a parody upper-class accent: ‘“I’m sorry, officah, but you’ll have to ahsk my secretary. She keeps my engagement diary.” I work part-time, when I can get it. I don’t know what I was doing three months ago.’

‘What do you do?’ I’d never known. I’d guessed he was seventeen or eighteen, but maybe he was older.

He shrugged. Not a question he liked. ‘What I can. Building sites, mostly. Sometimes a friend of mine’s dad, who’s an electrician, gives me a few days’ work. I’ve done the NVQs, but I’m not qualified.’

‘That’s what you want to do? Be an electrician?’

He still wouldn’t look at me, his arms crossed defensively.

‘How much longer would it take to get qualified?’

‘I’ve got the prelim certificate, but I’ve got to do an apprenticeship, put in the hours, and getting a place is hard.’ He glanced over at me, and then away just as quickly. ‘Why?’

‘Just wondering what it took. Look.’ I went back to the main point. ‘Would it help if I talked to Jake – my boyfriend? If the police are bothering you? Or would it make it worse?’

He shook his head once, sharply. ‘It would make it worse.’

I’d probably think the same if I were him. ‘OK. I’m not going to wait any longer for Viv. If you see her, will you say I dropped by to talk to her about Dennis? Tell her—’

‘How do you know Dennis?’

‘You know him too?’ We were both silent, startled. Then I connected the dots. ‘He ran a youth club. Did you know him from there?’

Sam was back to being mistrustful. ‘Did your bloke tell you about him?’

‘No, Viv did.’

‘How does she come into this?’ He wasn’t mistrustful now, he was downright belligerent.

‘He lived upstairs here. He went missing last week, and she was worried.’

‘Last week? Before the fire?’

‘Yes.’ I ploughed on. ‘What day did you say the police asked you about last week?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘That’s it, then. Viv said the neighbours saw him on Wednesday; he was supposed to have dinner with her on Thursday, but he never showed.’ I added, ‘She liked him a lot.’

Sam swallowed. ‘We –’ he gestured behind him, as though to his absent friends ‘– we went to the youth group he ran.’ He paused. ‘He was a good bloke,’ he said, as if I had argued the point.

‘Was he?’ I said neutrally. ‘I never met him.’

‘He was, really. The things they’re saying about him …’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t Dennis. Just not.’

I bent to unchain my cycle. ‘I’m sure you’re right. You knew him, and they didn’t.’

He eyed me warily, unsure whether my assertion was what I truly believed, or a trap. I decided that repeating myself would make me sound less trustworthy. Finally he said, ‘I’m not saying he didn’t have dodgy friends.’

I tried a joke. ‘Everyone has dodgy friends. Look at me, I live with a cop.’

He smiled absent-mindedly, to register he knew it was a joke, but he didn’t give it his full attention. It helped him make up his mind, though. ‘He was a good bloke,’ he repeated.

I just nodded. He was heading somewhere.

‘There were a lot of people like me, who used the club as a place to hang out with our friends.’

‘Tell me about the club.’

‘It started off just as a casual group. They were skateboarders.’

‘And Dennis skateboarded with you?’ That sounded implausible.

He laughed, loud and clear. Harefield was seemingly not the type. ‘No, that wasn’t his thing. He was helping us make some dosh, to pay for our kit.’

That hadn’t been what I imagined when I heard youth-group worker. ‘How did he do that?’

‘A few of the others had been making T-shirts with skateboarding tags, and selling them. Dennis showed us how to do it more professionally. Before, they’d been buying T-shirts from Asda, and with the price of paint, and a market stall, there was barely any profit in it. Dennis explained about buying the materials in bulk, wholesale. That was why we needed the shed, to store everything.’

‘Sounds like a great idea.’

‘It was. That was what we mostly did.’ Sam sobered.

More nodding from me. I could get a job as one of those dogs that go on the rear shelf in the back of cars.

‘But there were others.’ He hesitated, not sure how much to say. Then he went for it. ‘Some groups are recruiting grounds for gangs. There’s a lot of low-level stuff going on—’ He left what the ‘stuff’ was unsaid. ‘Dennis let it happen, not because he was part of it, but because didn’t want to drive off the kids involved.’ He looked at me directly now for the first time. ‘He really did want to help. He wanted to keep them out of trouble. Sometimes it worked.’ He looked away again, and again I remembered how when I first met him he’d been described as having
been ‘in trouble’ himself. ‘Sometimes it didn’t. But those kids didn’t get thrown out. Dennis kept after them, and then he stayed in touch.’

That could be altruism, or it could be an excellent way to set up a network of runners if you were a dealer. Sam wasn’t stupid, though, and he didn’t think that’s what the man had been doing. ‘If you trusted him, you’re probably right,’ I said, therefore.

We stared at each other. Sam looked as though no one had ever told him that his judgement was probably sound, and didn’t know what to do with that. I touched him on the arm and got on my bike.

While we’d been talking, I’d heard my phone ding with a text, so at the next light I checked it. Jake.
Won’t be back tonight. Working late, will go to H’smith
. Then a second text.
Inquest on Harefield tomorrow. More then.

So that was that. I went home and did those very things I’d decided against earlier. Laundry, watering the garden, manuscripts. Who said my life wasn’t a roller-coaster ride of thrills?

With Jake sleeping at his flat, I was at the office even earlier than usual in the morning. I always make coffee in the coffee-maker I keep on a filing cabinet as soon as I get in, even before I boot up my computer. Today, however, I picked up my cup to head off to the kitchen, where cheap, nasty coffee sits stewing on a burner. It’s a gourmet delight I normally found easy to miss out on, but the kitchen was the gossip nerve-centre, and the place to hear whatever rumours were flying about the morning’s group meeting. But before I’d even finished standing up, though, I sat back
down, all in one movement. It was too early. Publishing people are, for the most part, vampires, coming to life as daylight ebbs. No one would be in for another hour.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate enough to work on anything that mattered. I pulled over my in-tray to see if there was anything there that I could deal with using half my mind, or perhaps a quarter. The tray was overflowing, which was not a surprise, because these days I barely looked at it. Everything important came by email. Anything that needed to be done on paper was dropped in front of me if I was at my desk, or if I was out of the office, left on my chair so I’d see it when I sat down. Maybe, I thought, staring at the Everest of paper that had piled up without my noticing, maybe I should get rid of the basket altogether. Didn’t it just encourage people whose views I wasn’t interested in to send me crap I didn’t want to know about? Or maybe that sentence was a description of office life.

I started at the top. Meeting minutes, which I tossed unread into my filing basket for Miranda to stick somewhere we would never look at them again. A couple of manuscripts I’d asked her to print out, which I dropped on the floor near my bookbag, to take home to work on. Printouts of jacket roughs, which I’d already looked at and commented on as email attachments: more filing. Printouts of contracts to check and sign. Back in the basket, to be dealt with when I had a functioning brain. I reached the bottom and looked at my watch. It was now 8.35.

I poured some coffee and sipped, staring out the window. 8.37. I sighed and rubbed my face. 8.37 and a quarter. This was going well. I picked up the phone and hit speed dial 1.

‘Good morning, darling.’

My mother made me, and everyone else, look like a slouch. She was always at her desk by seven. Most days that was annoying, but today it would kill a – I peeked at my watch. 8.38 – a bit of time. But that didn’t mean I was going to match her relentless good cheer. I liked being in the office early, but mostly because no one else was, and so I had a space when I didn’t have to talk. ‘Morning,’ was the most I could manage.

Helena was good, I’ll give her that. She didn’t speak, just waited. Since she’s a corporate lawyer, her area of expertise can best be summarised as ‘money’, and so when the first rumours of Olive’s mysterious meetings surfaced, I’d asked her to keep an ear out for any whispers that might indicate a takeover was on the cards. If she’d ever heard anything, she hadn’t said, and I’d forgotten to ask. Now was a good time to repeat the question, but to my surprise, when I opened my mouth, what came out was, ‘Mother, do you know how – or if – you can find out about drug dealers, and distribution? Local networks, I mean?’