A Cast of Vultures Read online

  I began to fill in an application, and then I realised I didn’t know the address of the empty house. I could wait and ask Steve when I next saw him, although I couldn’t think how I could explain why I was nosing around searching for the owner. I googled ‘Talbot’s Road’, and ‘fire’, to see if there were any reports that might have mentioned the address. The local newspaper had a small article, and a couple of blogs had mentioned it, but all they said was ‘a fire on Talbot’s Road’, which got me no further forward. I tried the Post Office website to see if there was a way of searching for addresses, but if there was, I didn’t have the skills to find it.

  This reminder of my limited computer skills moved me naturally to Viv, and her friend whose grandson was good at computers. That might mean anything from him helping his gran post pictures on her Facebook page to him being a hacker wanted by Interpol for denial of service attacks that had brought the Pentagon to its knees. There was one way to find out. I shot Viv a quick text: Could I speak to your friend’s grandson? Need help with a computer search. Then I went back to the Land Registry and in default of getting any of my questions answered, clicked on ‘Check average property prices and sales in my area’. That was fun, if a little terrifying. The half-dozen sales in my street over the past decade showed the almost hallucinatory price-rise in property that I knew about from the newspapers. Here, when it was about my own street, it stopped being a political story and became real. A flat that had been (sort of, and thank you Mr Mortgage Lender) affordable when I’d bought it as a sitting tenant nearly twenty years before might now be just about affordable to a two-salaried couple both working in law, or investment banking, or something like that, but if I were starting out today, I’d be living an hour’s journey out of the centre, and grateful every day that it was only an hour.

  I was dragged out of this nasty little reality check by the phone. I jumped and scrabbled for it – no one rang me at ten at night. The number was blocked, but I was worried about Sam, even though objectively I knew he was being guarded by Helena and her watchdogs.

  ‘What?’ demanded a voice I didn’t recognise.

  What what? At least no one was asking me if I wanted to win some luggage by completing a marketing survey. So, ‘Is this the Miss Congeniality hotline?’ I snapped. I didn’t, really. Instead I went for, ‘What do you mean, “What?” You rang me.’

  ‘Huh.’

  Twenty seconds, I mentally warned the voice. That’s all you’re getting, because it’s only Tuesday, and already this has not been a good week. ‘Who is this?’ I didn’t bother trying not to snarl.

  ‘Viv told me to call.’

  It was Viv’s friend’s grandson, responding to my text, and he wasn’t being unpleasant, he was most likely a teenager, and he just lacked social skills. Since I did too, I empathised. ‘Thanks for ringing so quickly. This may be a very quick question. I’ve been trying to find an address for a building. That is, um – what is your name?’

  ‘Why?’

  Yes, he was a teenager. ‘Because I don’t want to call you “um”. And because, if you don’t tell me, I’ll tell Viv, who will tell your grandmother, who will give you a hard time. It doesn’t even have to be your real name. Just something better than “um”.’

  He snorted. ‘Stinger.’

  Naturally. ‘OK, Stinger, thank you for that. Now, my question. I was trying to find out the address for a building, but that was so that I could get some information on it from a government website.’ I got the snorting sound again. It was excellently done, and I hoped his computer skills matched up. ‘Yes, exactly. That’s why I called on you.’ Flattery will get me everywhere, or at least I hoped it would. ‘Can you find out who owns a building for me? And if it’s a company, who the directors are?’ I explained where the building was, and what had happened to it.

  I got an aggrieved silence, and I didn’t blame him, so I doubled down on the flattery. ‘I’m sure you can find it in twenty seconds, while I couldn’t manage it in twenty years.’ I left unspoken that I’d tattle on him to his grandma if he didn’t shape up, and instead finished with, ‘Let me give you my email address.’

  That was snort-worthy too. ‘You think I couldn’t find it?’

  ‘Not for a minute, Stinger. I think you have it already.’

  He recited it to me, smug.

  ‘You’re scary.’ He wasn’t, but if you call yourself Stinger, you probably want to be.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I NEED A COUPLE of cups of coffee in the morning before I’m human. When Jake is there, we have coffee together, but if he isn’t staying over, I don’t bother and wait until I get to the office. He’d texted after Stinger and I had our meeting of souls the previous evening, to say he was working out west past the airport, and so would go back to his own flat when he was done. All of which is to explain why, when Ben put his head around my door at eight the following morning, I was at least three cups shy of being ready for him.

  ‘Come in,’ I said warmly, pretending to him, and to me, that I was fully caffeinated and happy to see him. ‘Or shall we go across the road? I could use a croissant.’ I could think of nothing I wanted less, but it would move our discussion onto neutral ground, and give me an extra five minutes to rally. Ben probably thought the same, so we walked silently to the café the office staff used as our regular pit stop. I’m sure it had a name, but I’d never heard it called anything except ‘across the road’.

  When we arrived, the takeaway queue was long, but there weren’t many sitting at the tables, so we headed to a booth in the back, ordering coffee and croissants as we passed the counter. Which was a pity, as it gave us no reason to delay our discussion. Apart from the single sentence he’d used to order, Ben hadn’t said anything since we’d left my office. I couldn’t predict how the conversation would go, but the needle was swinging somewhere between ‘badly’ and ‘downright awful’.

  I began with a bit of smarm. ‘First, I wanted to say how grateful I was that you took the lead with the management consultants. I couldn’t have done that.’ He nodded, but didn’t look any friendlier. Not a surprise. We’d never been friendly. But while it was smarm, it was honest smarm: I truly couldn’t have done it. I ploughed on. ‘So.’ I stopped. Then began again. ‘So, Miranda was telling me about the gang memoir she’s editing for you.’ The temperature dropped from cool to frosty. ‘And I was thinking, while she’s produced some queries that are difficult, it might be excellent ammunition for this reorganisation chaos.’

  ‘Queries.’ Ben’s voice was, shall we say, not welcoming. About as not-welcoming as a haemophiliac would be when introduced to a vampire in a dark alley.

  ‘She thinks the author might have –’ I had given a lot of thought to the next word ‘– might have embellished his text. There are some points where the details don’t quite ring true, she says.’ There were points where an entire bell tower was ringing a carillon of false notes, but that could come later. I waved my hand in grand dismissal. ‘Nothing that she wouldn’t normally sort out with you. But it seemed an awfully opportune weapon …’ I trailed off, I hoped tantalisingly.

  The Ice Age that had descended at the first part of my speech thawed slightly. A Little Ice Age, at least. ‘A weapon?’

  I nodded vigorously. ‘Absolutely. They made it plain the other day that they want to get rid of the in-house editing and farm everything out to freelancers because they don’t know what editing is, and so if it vanishes they think it won’t matter. We can use this manuscript as a perfect example of why editors are not only essential, they’re cost-efficient. If Miranda is right, and there are problems she’s isolated, she’s saved the company a lot of money, and also a public-relations situation. If the manuscript had gone to a freelance who was paid by the hour, they would have put the commas in the right places, but they would have felt it was their job not to dig deeper because asking questions would rack up costs. But you didn’t farm it out, you gave it to Miranda, who is bright enough to spot the problems that
were worrying you.’ I was going to go to hell for the number of lies I was telling. ‘It’s ammunition, isn’t it – proving why in-house resources are essential.’ I sat back and stirred my coffee to give Ben time to think.

  ‘Will you give me a quick rundown of what she spotted? I imagine it will confirm my concerns, but it’s sensible to compare notes.’ He was good. If it weren’t that he’d torn his croissant into ever-tinier pieces, until there wasn’t one larger than a dust mite, I might almost have believed him.

  I pushed across Miranda’s line-by-line breakdown and he read as I sipped my coffee and watched him out of the corner of my eye. If Ben and I ever got onto boys’-night card-playing terms, I’d insist that croissants be served as part of the deal. Each time he hit something nasty on Miranda’s list, his hand went back to the pastry.

  It took him forever to read the two pages through. Then he went back to the top of the first page and began again. Finally he laid the memo face down on the table, carefully squaring it up, then folding his hands on top, as if that would physically suppress the information it contained. ‘I’d spotted a few red flags, of course.’ Liar. ‘But I must admit, nothing like this.’ All right, that was more generous than I’d expected. ‘If she’s right – and based on this memo, I don’t see how she can be wrong – the book is unpublishable. I should have seen it, and I didn’t.’ Much more generous. ‘And I like your idea of using it as management-consultant fodder. Let’s do it.’ Damn. He’d acknowledged he’d made a mistake, acknowledged that someone had caught what he’d missed, and further acknowledged that someone else had found a solution. Did that mean I was going to have to learn to like him?

  ‘How do you want to proceed? On the manuscript front, I met a social worker this weekend who works with boys in gangs. He might be able to put us on to someone who will look at it for you.’

  ‘That sounds good: we’re definitely going to need an expert report if we’re going to cancel the contract. Do you want to get in touch with him, or does Miranda have time?’ He was doing everything right, now not even automatically assuming Miranda’s hours were his to apportion, as he had when he’d first handed her the book.

  ‘It’ll be good experience for her to do it.’

  He considered. ‘As for the management consultants, I could map out a plan before I go, and perhaps get Rog and some of the others to read it and see what they think. Shall we email some times, see if we can fit in a quick meeting later today?’

  I ticked it off in my head. Miranda no longer had to confront Ben; we might have a way of winning the Great Reorganisation Battle; and if any redundancies were going to be made, Miranda had put herself in a position where it was impossible she would be among them. A worthwhile twenty minutes. I smiled.

  For the rest of the day, the editorial department looked like one of those French farces, where there are six characters and seven doors, and everyone rushes in and out, madly slamming them open and shut. We talked and talked – one of publishing’s best skills – and finally got a memo written just before it was time for us to head off for yet another talk-fest, a dinner where one of the big fiction prizes was due to be announced.

  I arrived a few minutes after the start time on the invitation. While publishing meetings always begin late, it is impossible to be too early for a publishing party. If editorial meetings had a bar, we’d be on time for them, too. This prize was sponsored by a City property firm, and so it was held in the recently renovated private rooms at the Royal Academy where – I looked around as I walked in – five hundred publishers, authors, journalists and corporate sponsors and their guests were being served champagne. The crowd was starkly divided, like a wedding with his and her sides of the church. The sponsors and their guests were encased in dark suits, accessorised by expensive haircuts and watches, or in short, tight cocktail dresses, accessorised by blonde highlights and serious holy-moley jewellery, depending on gender. The publishing contingent had grey suits, haircuts that were several weeks past their cut-by dates and checked the time on their phones, or floaty dresses that the kindly would call ‘arty’, less-good blonde highlights, and chunky silver or amber jewellery.

  I jumped right in, determined to put aside for a while all things connected with thugs, botanical gardens and management consultants, chatting, with the help of a couple of glasses of champagne, with strangers. Because it was, as Jake had called it, post-work work, and part of my job. We moved next door for dinner and I found my table. One of my authors had reached the prize’s longlist, although she’d fallen at that hurdle. She and her husband, her agent and his wife, the publicist who had looked after her book, a couple of her friends and I were seated together. As Magda said when she arrived, the bonus of not being shortlisted was that she didn’t have to stay sober for four hours, only to find out at the end she might as well have been plastered, because she hadn’t won and so wouldn’t have to give a speech.

  We sat and I took stock. Magda was directly across from me, between her publicist and her agent, who had represented her for longer than I’d been her editor. That was good, she’d be well looked after. Charlie, her husband, was on my left. I knew he wasn’t a writer, so my task for the evening would be to make sure he didn’t feel left out. We introduced ourselves and made chit-chat about Magda’s book not making the shortlist, after which I gave him a rundown on the other people at the table. Charlie looked at the place card in front of the still-empty seat on my right. ‘George Hammond,’ he read. ‘Who is he? Do you know him?’

  I waggled my head: maybe yes, maybe no. ‘It depends on whether you ask him or me. If you ask me, then yes, I’ve known him for years. He was an editor, then he moved into journalism, and then PR – branding, that sort of thing.’

  Charlie was puzzled. ‘And if I asked him?’

  ‘We probably haven’t met more than twenty or thirty times – twenty or thirty if you don’t count the year we worked for the same company – but I’ll give you excellent odds that George will sit down, hold out his hand to me and say, “I’m George Hammond”. He never recognises me.’

  As I was finishing the sentence, the chair beside me was pulled out, but before I could turn, Charlie leant in and whispered, ‘Course officials have declared the race will be abandoned and bets are void. He just squinted at your place card. Although, if it’s any consolation, he looked at you first, and then the card, so you were right, he doesn’t recognise you. Technically, you should have won.’

  Dinner was going to be fine: I didn’t have a vested interest in the award; my author was surrounded by her friends and supported by her agent, so didn’t need me; George was an OK person, he just lived in his head, which I entirely understood; and Charlie was going to be fun to talk to. Only a tiny proportion of my job involves editing or manuscript acquisition. On a bad day, I estimated it at ten per cent, while the other ninety per cent could best be described as hand-holding, making sure people were happy, or at least comfortable. Maybe we should recategorise the industry as one of the caring professions, and put in for government grants. We could suggest the management consultants add that to their revenue-optimisation plans. Thinking of them and their jargon was a bad idea, so I turned back to Charlie and did my tell-me-all-about-yourself routine. He was a solicitor, and, I found to my relief, knew more people than I did at the party. He was sitting with the book people because of Magda, but he did commercial property and corporate law, so he knew most of the sponsors and their guests. ‘Although,’ he carefully added, ‘I do pro-bono work too, so that Magda will still speak to me.’

  ‘My mother is a solicitor; she’s explained that you don’t always eat live babies for breakfast.’

  He looked over the top of his spectacles. ‘If you believe that, I own a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in buying.’

  ‘Tempting. But before I take you up on it, tell me about your pro-bono work. What does that mean for someone who works in commercial property? Do you wander the streets offering free conveyancing?’

  He
laughed. ‘What a splendid idea. I could set up a stand outside Waitrose, to catch the impoverished middle classes: “Granny flats a speciality”. No, I work with people who have been unfairly evicted, or whose leases have been raised extortionately, or wrongfully terminated. Since squatting became a criminal offence, I’ve started taking cases there too. The law is recent, which means that until a few dozen cases go through the courts, we won’t really understand it. For now, no one knows what the parameters are, especially on time limitations, which are new, and—’ He stopped short. ‘I’m sorry, I can bore for Britain on precedent and case law.’

  He was Victor, just with more money and a better suit: another geek who loved his subject. I was one too, but publishing attracts geeks who love every subject. Editors know a little bit about lots of arcane areas. ‘I did a book on that once,’ was the standard phrase for being able to name the seven hills of Rome, or knowing that bees have a positive electric charge and flowers a negative one when they’re full of nectar. So I was happy to learn more about wrongful terminations of leases. Maybe I’d send him pictures of Viv’s flat – a happy lease story to match his nasty ones. Victor, at any rate, had thought a fifty-year tenancy was worth celebrating. I smiled sunnily. ‘Is this where I’m supposed to say, “No, it’s fascinating, please go on”, in a high-pitched little-girl voice?’

  Charlie picked up the menu and examined it. ‘Yes, you’re right on cue: that’s after the potatoes, and before dessert.’

  Before I could come up with more witty dinner-table repartee, the CEO of the sponsoring property firm stood up, and the speeches began. I listened for at least a nanosecond while he told us how very important culture was to society, in case a bunch of people at a literary prize hadn’t already been aware of that. As he spoke, Charlie gave me a whispered parallel commentary, telling me how the man had been expelled from his golf club for cheating on his wife. ‘Although adultery,’ he was careful to explain, ‘isn’t technically a matter for the committee, in this case they made an exception, as the adultery took place on the ninth green.’