A Cast of Vultures Page 12

  ‘Wow,’ I said, looking at what must have been hours of work.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Mind what?’ I hopscotched over the tools and dug-up greenery that littered the path.

  ‘That I made a start.’ He was standing, rosemary bush in one hand, shovel in the other. ‘I didn’t want to rush you, but if I move now, I can get one late summer crop turned around before I begin to sow for winter.’

  ‘I told you, mi garden es su garden. Do what you like.’ I waved a hand at an untold world of doing-what-he-liked-ness, and continued up the stairs. At the front door, I hesitated. I didn’t want to set a pattern so that every time he was there I felt I needed to play hostess, but that good-girl training dies hard. Or, in reality, is alive and kicking, because I heard myself saying, ‘Do you want anything? A cup of tea? Water?’ Please say no, please say no.

  ‘No, thanks. I’ve got everything I need.’ He dangled the rosemary bush in the direction of my recycling boxes, where I now saw he had a water bottle and a thermos set out.

  What a great guy.

  ‘Before you go, though, have you thought any more about what you’d like me to plant, apart from the basics? Do you want me to transfer any of the herbs you have in pots in the back? Otherwise I’ll just put in some quick-return crops: lettuces, radishes, things like that.’

  It seemed rude to say that I’d forgotten his question about what he should grow the moment after he’d asked it, so I promised to text him a list of what I liked and didn’t like first thing in the morning.

  Inside, I dropped my things by the front door. Without bothering to put anything away, I headed to the kitchen first, and then settled into my reading position against the arm of the sitting-room sofa. I had coffee, I had manuscripts on submission that needed to be read, I had – I scrabbled through my bag – a manuscript I needed to edit before the author went away the following week. In a word, I was set: there was no reason for me to move from my little work cocoon in the cushions for the rest of the day. Maybe forever.

  So naturally I immediately reached down for my phone, which was somewhere in the pile of papers I’d just spilt across the floor. As always, Helena answered on the first ring. Helena rarely troubled with ‘hello’. If she could have answered every ringing phone with ‘Tell me quickly what it is you want, I’m a busy woman’, and not be regarded as odd, she would have.

  ‘Just checking in after last night,’ I said.

  ‘Mmm,’ she replied. This meant: a) about time you rang; b) tell me everything; and c) while you’re doing that, I’m going to get through another three tasks simultaneously. Most importantly, it also meant, d) but don’t for a moment imagine that I’m not paying attention, because in ten years I’ll still be able to cite this conversation verbatim if I need to.

  So I told her about the fire, and the adjourned inquest. Which moved me straight along to the Neighbourhood Association meeting, and Viv’s views on Harefield’s double life, and Sam’s information about the boys’ club, and that the police had questioned them.

  Helena, of course, was way ahead of me. ‘I asked a friend to see where the police investigation had got to, and why they were so sure he was a drug dealer.’

  ‘You did? When?’

  Helena was tart. ‘After we spoke and you asked about drug dealers.’

  I thought back to that conversation. ‘Did I even mention a name?’ I didn’t think I had.

  ‘No, but you said a house had burnt down in Talbot’s Road, and someone had died. It wasn’t very hard to find out who you were talking about.’

  Mostly when I talk to Helena I feel like one of those small dogs with short legs, a cocker spaniel maybe, which needs to race along frantically behind its owner just to keep pace. She was used to my puffing along in her wake, and so she continued without pause. ‘Did you know they found £25,000 in cash in his flat?’

  Jake had said it was a lot. The amount couldn’t have been mentioned at the inquest, or it would have been the main topic for discussion at the Neighbourhood Association meeting. But if Helena said that the police had found £25,000 in Harefield’s flat, then they had found £25,000. ‘No wonder they thought he was a drug dealer.’ Then I thought about it. ‘Wait a minute. Where did they find it?’ That was a lot of cash. It wasn’t something you could stuff away in an envelope.

  ‘Why?’

  I was confused. ‘Why what?’

  Helena was at her most patient, which meant that she thought I was being slow. ‘Why do you want to know where the cash was found?’

  That wasn’t something I particularly wanted to discuss with my mother. There was no help for it, however. ‘Viv took me with her when she went to check out Harefield’s flat after he disappeared. She was worried that he might have been taken ill, and was lying there. And if not, she thought he might have been called away and forgotten to tell her. So she went to see if he’d taken his suitcases, or a bunch of clothes had obviously been packed up or his toothbrush was gone.’

  ‘I see.’

  I suspected she did see, right down to my climbing over the balcony. But I wasn’t going to confess to that unless I was forced to. Instead I returned to the cash. ‘Wouldn’t that much money take up a lot of space?’ I’d never seen £25,000 in cash, but even a few hundred pounds was bulky. I couldn’t believe that both Viv and I would have missed it.

  ‘Does that question mean you didn’t see it when you were there?’ I heard Helena shuffling some papers. ‘It was in a satchel, under his bed.’

  ‘Viv did the sitting room, I took the bedroom. And I don’t think I saw anything like that.’ I closed my eyes and tried to visualise Harefield’s bedroom. ‘I looked under his bed. I know I did. I used the light from my phone, because the bedclothes were thrown back, and I could barely see without it. But I didn’t see a bag.’

  Helena’s voice was sharp now. ‘Are you saying you didn’t see a bag, or there wasn’t a bag?’

  I understood the difference, and I sagged, defeated. ‘I think I have to say that I didn’t see one. It was dark under there, so I was about to move to check the other side when Harefield’s phone rang. I jumped, and dropped my own phone. I went over to search for his, and I think I picked mine up and Viv came in to ask about the call. I forgot what I’d been doing, and left the room. So no, I can’t swear there was nothing under the bed.’

  She was silent. So I repeated, ‘I can’t.’

  Her voice was neutral, no judgement. ‘That’s that, then. It was there when the police searched. And you’re not sure.’

  I wasn’t sure. But all the same, I didn’t think it was there.

  ‘You might want to mention it to Jake,’ she said.

  ‘Want’ was probably not the verb I would have chosen, but I knew what she meant. After we hung up, I focused on practicalities, texting Jake: Will you be home for supper? Then I dropped the manuscript I’d been holding in my lap and picked up my laptop. Google was my friend. ‘Kevin’, ‘skateboard’, ‘T-shirts’, and ‘Camden market’ together led me straight to a map of the market, with a stall marked as run by one Kevin Munroe, who sold skateboard-motif clothing.

  Then I sat staring for a while, thinking not about skateboards, nor T-shirts, nor even Dennis Harefield. Instead I wondered how Steve had known I had herb pots in my back garden. And about Azim, a man who in twenty years I’d never once seen outside of his newsagent’s, who was, suddenly, everywhere.

  I was in the kitchen making supper when the front door opened. As it did, I heard a ping, and checked my phone. Yes, said a text from Jake. And then he was in the kitchen. I waved my phone at him. ‘Cute,’ I said.

  He washed his hands and face at the sink, then turned to get a bottle of wine out of the fridge. ‘I was in meetings all afternoon with my phone switched off; then I was driving. I saw your message as I walked up the street.’

  ‘Lucky for you I made enough dinner to feed two.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘You always make enough for ten.’

  I resented
the implication that I was a complete idiot. I was only part idiot. ‘Six.’

  ‘Six hungry people.’

  This was true. I changed the subject. ‘Still the same bad case?’

  He took a swig of his wine, as if washing out his mouth, too, before handing me a glass and making a non-committal noise. Then, ‘We made some arrests. That’s why I wasn’t checking my texts. Interviews.’

  ‘That sounds like a step forward.’ Since I had no idea what the case was about, nor was I prepared to ask if the interviews had given the results he wanted, encouraging banalities was all I was good for. Even if Encouraging Banalities sounded like it was a Seattle indie rock band. I decided that that thought probably didn’t need to be shared.

  Jake did better on no sleep than I did – he was called out often enough at night – but he still had to be tired. I’d been up since 2.30, and he’d been out of the house before that. ‘It’s early, but do you want to eat soon, and try and catch up on some sleep?’

  ‘Unless you’re hungry, shall we sit and have a drink first?’ That was British for ‘no’: always state your preference by phrasing it as a question was the rule.

  I wasn’t hungry, just tired, so we moved into the sitting room. I looked out the window and saw Steve was gone. Jake saw me looking. ‘He was packing up as I left. He’d said he planned to get the soil turned and fertilised tomorrow, and planted by the end of the week.’

  ‘Quick work.’

  Jake no longer seemed disturbed that he was working out front. Progress. I moved to sit down, putting my feet up on the coffee table where I’d piled my manuscripts, none of which I’d given so much as a look at, with my laptop open on top. I wasn’t going to mention my googling to Jake, but, ‘I spoke to Sam the other day. Boy Sam,’ I clarified, in case Jake thought I’d taken to referring to myself in the third person. ‘He says he and his friends have been questioned by the police about the fires.’ Sam had said not to mention it to Jake, but if I told Jake this was unofficial, not something to be passed on to his colleagues, I was sure he wouldn’t. It wasn’t his case, or even his division.

  Jake didn’t look surprised, just giving a what-were-you-expecting shrug.

  ‘Why would they know anything? Or, rather, why would the police assume they knew something?’

  He sighed at the question. Truth be told, he was probably sighing at my hostile tone, but I chose to ignore that. ‘It’s the profile. Boys. Teens.’

  I was snippy. ‘Could you elaborate, for us slow folk who don’t make snap assumptions about people we don’t know?’ I turned to face him on the sofa, hackles up.

  Jake held up a hand: stop. ‘The police aren’t concentrating on the boys because boys generally are a problem,’ he said. ‘They’re concentrating on them because they knew Harefield, they spent time with him, and in addition they fit the age and gender profile of the majority of arsonists. Arson for insurance doesn’t have the same profile, but this series isn’t about insurance: several of the buildings were uninsured. When it’s not an insurance matter, arson is most often a form of vandalism, and the perpetrators are almost always teenagers – teenaged boys, more specifically. These boys also live in the area where the fires were set, another factor.’ He poured himself another drink and held the bottle up to me in an unspoken question. I shook my head and rolled my hand in a keep-going gesture. ‘There’s nothing more to say. That’s why the police questioned them. Imagine your entire street had been graffitied one night. Would you expect the police to interview you and Mr Rudiger, or would they interview teenaged boys? Who is more likely to have been involved?’ He raised his hands, a poster boy for outraged patience. ‘If eighty per cent of one type of crime is committed by one type of person – age, gender, location, known acquaintance – we tend to focus on that type. Profiling is rough, but it’s not baseless.’

  I decided not to discuss what happened when you only questioned one group of people – hey presto, you caught the perpetrators in that group, but the perpetrators who didn’t fit the profile meantime merrily went on perpetrating. Mr Rudiger and I might be the King and Queen of Graffiti, and they’d never find out, because they’d never think to interview us. But I wasn’t going to change the way the police operated. I wasn’t even going to change the way Jake operated.

  I shrugged ungraciously by way of reply, so he continued: ‘My guess is that there were CCTV cameras near several of the incidents. The tapes would have been checked and it may be that some of Harefield’s boys could be identified at more than one fire. Firebugs – people who set fires for the hell of it – like to watch. It’s likely some of Sam’s friends were seen on the tapes.’

  Maybe I was going to attempt to change the way the police operated. ‘Why would that mean anything other than that they’d gone to watch a fire in the neighbourhood? According to you, I might have gone to watch the car burn.’ I stabbed at my chest to emphasise who ‘I’ was. ‘If I had, I’d be on that CCTV footage. Would you expect your colleagues to question me?’

  ‘If you’d been there, and were then seen on the tapes at another couple of the fires in the same series, then yes, probably.’

  I hated when Jake was rational, and he expected me to be rational too. But I wasn’t ready to concede entirely. ‘Maybe. But you said last night that the pub and the empty house were different. Neither fits into your “essentially vandalism” category, so why should the boys be hauled in in connection with the empty house?’

  ‘It’s not my category,’ he said absently. ‘And it’s true, the two incidents do appear to be different. They thought that the fire in Talbot’s Road might have been an accident, one where the arsonist himself was killed. But if the pub fire is another in the series, that’s no longer a consideration: Harefield couldn’t have set the pub on fire, so the question is, was Harefield the arsonist, or was he simply the ideas man, and someone else set the fires for him, and then caught him in his own trap?’

  ‘Why can’t it be two lots of people?’

  He stared at me as if he were trying to work out how to say something. Finally he found a diplomatic form of words. ‘Because two arsonists in one small geographic area, in one short period of time, is a coincidence too far, wouldn’t you say?’ He was good. I barely heard the unspoken ‘dummy’ at the end of the sentence.

  I would normally agree with him, but not when I’d just presented it as a reason for the police not to harass Sam. And Sam didn’t believe that Harefield was either the arsonist or the ‘ideas man’. I decided not to mention that again, at least, not right away. ‘Dinner?’ seemed like a more tactful response.

  By unspoken agreement, we stayed away from the subject while we ate, but I couldn’t postpone it forever. I waited until we were cleaning up, and I had my hands in the sink, carefully scrubbing a pot so that I didn’t have to look at Jake. ‘Helena says I have to talk to you about something.’

  Jake picked up the clean glasses from the dish drainer. ‘Two of your favourite things,’ he said. ‘Doing what Helena tells you, and talking.’ He nudged me gently. ‘Get it over with.’

  ‘You know I said Viv had the keys to Harefield’s flat?’ I began. Jake nodded, drying the glasses and putting them away, making I’m-listening noises. ‘When she was worried about him, when Missing Persons were telling her there was nothing they could do, I sort of – well, we went to check out his flat together. We had a look round, to see if he’d packed up and gone off somewhere. I looked in his bedroom.’

  Jake pulled the clean pan I’d been scrubbing over and over out of my hands and turned off the tap. I stayed facing the sink. ‘Helena said the police found a satchel full of cash under his bed. I looked there, to see if there was a suitcase or something. I didn’t see a satchel.’ I turned to him. ‘I can’t swear it wasn’t there, but I can, and do, say that I don’t think it was.’

  He handed me a tea towel. ‘You do find trouble, don’t you?’ But he wasn’t annoyed. ‘I’ll pass it on, but officially this will carry no weight: if you’re not sure, you�
��re not sure.’ He leant back against the counter and stared at me for a moment. ‘But between us, how sure are you?’

  I stared back hopelessly. ‘I don’t know. The room was messy, sheets and towels all over the place, so I keep thinking I might have overlooked it. It was dark under the bed, too. But I’ve got a good memory, and an even better visual memory. And my mind sort of works in categories …’ Jake raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. I’m tidy.’ I waved my arm around the kitchen. ‘I’m tidy because things that go together in my head get put together.’

  I could see he still didn’t understand, so I used the examples in front of us. ‘There are different kinds of belonging. My spice rack is alphabetised because cumin doesn’t belong next to turmeric, it belongs after cinnamon and before dill seeds. The scissors are kept beside the knife rack, even though there’s no place for them there, and it would be tidier if I kept them in a drawer. But scissors and knives both cut things, so they belong together. It makes me –’ I knew how weird it was, and it wasn’t something I’d normally admit to, but there was no help for it now ‘– It makes me actively unhappy if the scissors are in the drawer with writing things, not on the counter with the cutting things.’

  Jake stared at me for a moment, then silently walked over to the shelf where I kept the spice jars. He bent and looked at them, moving his head left to right, working his way along the alphabet. Still silent, he sat back down, started to speak, then closed his mouth. Then he shook his head.

  I kept going. ‘Don’t forget baking supplies: flour, buckwheat; flour, rye; flour, spelt. Self-raising flour is a problem. It’s wheat, so does it go after the spelt, or does it go before, because it’s self-raising? Sometimes it’s labelled all-purpose flour – maybe it goes at the front of the shelf, with the “a”s? I don’t know what to do with it, which is why it’s on a different shelf altogether.’ I tried to get back on track. ‘What I’m trying to say is, I was looking under the bed for a suitcase, so it’s likely I would have noticed a satchel, because a satchel is the same family as a suitcase, just as knives are in the same family as scissors.’ Jake was still speechless. ‘I realise that this isn’t anything the police can use …’