A Cast of Vultures Page 11

  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.’

  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 ho
ax. 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.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  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.