A Cast of Vultures Page 23

  I could understand that. ‘I’ve heard that that’s terrible for the grass.’

  Magda glared at us as we laughed a little too loudly, and we ducked our heads and pretended to be ashamed. I opened my handbag and rootled around in it, not looking for anything in particular, just so that I didn’t catch Charlie’s eye and start snickering again.

  He whispered, ‘It was worse than that. Everybody’s tee-off times were delayed.’

  I laughed out loud, and dropped my bag on the floor so that I could hide under the table for a minute, picking everything up while I put my at-work face back on, piling everything back in topsy-turvy. My phone had come to rest by George’s foot. I gestured to him to kick it towards me. George being George, it took several whispered instructions before light dawned and he reached down to get it. I was just relieved he hadn’t stepped on it too. Losing two in a week would be embarrassing.

  By the time I had pulled myself together, the CEO had turned the microphone over to the publicist for the prize. Across the room, publishers began to whisper and chat, or read email and tweet. It looked like we’d choreographed it, and Charlie looked at me questioningly. I risked Magda’s wrath and leant in. The woman was notorious. She had given the identical speech at the longlist announcement. And then again at the shortlist announcement. And although I hadn’t been there, apparently at last year’s shortlist, longlist and prize announcements too. I condensed it for Charlie: ‘Her childhood influence was an aunt who was a librarian for MI5. Then it’s a fifteen-minute rundown on her childhood reading, the lowlight being an extract from a book report she wrote for her aunt when she was ten.’

  Charlie had an incisive legal mind. ‘Why didn’t they invite the aunt?’

  Since they hadn’t, I filled in the time by swapping Charlie’s adultery-on-the-ninth-green story for the entirely unverified, but believed gleefully by everyone, rumour concerning the chairman of the judging panel, an architectural historian who had received his knighthood, so the story went, because his name was identical to that of the chairman of the national water board, who had gone to school with the Attorney General, which therefore made him a natural candidate for the honours system.

  By the time I’d wound down, so had MI5’s niece, and we were on to the prize announcement. The winner was a book not published by T&R, written by an author I didn’t know, whose book I hadn’t read. The author immediately won my admiration, however, by making the shortest speech in the history of literary-prize-givings, and its end signalled that we could leave.

  The noise levels peaked as we all made a move, so it was a moment before I realised my handbag was playing Ella Fitzgerald. I examined my new phone. The timer was flashing: George must have hit the app by accident when he handed it back to me. Thank God it hadn’t happened five minutes earlier. By this stage it was barely audible over the noise of publishers mingling: after pre-dinner drinks, dinner drinks and after-dinner drinks, publishers were a noisy lot, so no one noticed.

  I circled the table saying my goodbyes, stopping longer for a chat with Magda and her agent. By the time we’d agreed that Magda’s new book was far enough along that she wanted to discuss it, and that we’d email to set up a date for lunch, most of the others at our table had wandered off, either to go home, or to talk to their friends seated elsewhere. I bent to give Charlie the publishing double-kiss that is a legal requirement for anyone who has spent more than ninety seconds together. As I turned my cheek to him, I saw a man across the room nod and raise a hand at me in a token wave.

  I had nodded and smiled in return before I saw that Charlie, too, was waving. ‘That serves me right for being snotty about George,’ I admitted. ‘I’m no better than he is. I don’t recognise half the people I’m supposed to, and then I think I know people I’ve never met.’ I tilted my head towards the man who had been waving to Charlie. ‘I thought he was waving to me, and that I therefore must know him. If he’d come over, I would have acted as if we were old pals and I was thrilled to see him.’

  ‘Be grateful he didn’t. He’s a developer. Not my client, but my firm acts for him. Not a pleasant chap.’ Charlie looked at me very seriously. ‘As your dinner-party solicitor, I am obliged to recommend that if he invites you to the ninth green, you insist on a formal letter of non-engagement.’

  I stared back just as gravely. ‘Only a fool disregards counsel’s opinion.’

  I had promised Jake I wouldn’t take public transport, but the theatres were letting out as I started home, and I knew I’d never find a taxi. I decided, with the cheeriness that four glasses of champagne can bring, that it didn’t matter, because I was with a large group of my colleagues, and so we set off for the Tube together.

  Which was fine and dandy until we got to the station. None of the others lived in my direction, and they peeled off for different lines. Still, the West End was heaving with people and I’d just stay well back from the platform edge until the train had pulled in. Not a problem I assured myself, no longer cheerful. I looked back over my shoulder a lot, but no one was paying any attention to me. I pushed into the middle of a group as they waited for the tube door to open. That left my station and the walk home.

  But someone, or something, was looking out for me, because two stops before mine, who should get on but Kay. I greeted her from the other end of the carriage like she was Livingstone, and I was a slightly drunken Stanley: ‘Kay!’ I called, semaphoring with my arms above my head.

  She headed towards me, but I wasn’t done shouting. ‘Of all the tube carriages, in all the world, you had to walk into mine,’ I carolled.

  She laughed. ‘I’ve spent a week doing a walk-on part in a pub-theatre production of a Japanese play translated by someone who doesn’t speak Japanese. It’s really bad, so I’m thrilled to hear someone thinks I’m Ingrid Bergman.’

  ‘I thought Bogie said that to Ingmar Bergman.’

  She hesitated. ‘Are you drunk, or is that a joke?’

  ‘It was a joke, but if you had to ask, let’s just pretend I’m drunk.’ I smiled at her affectionately. We looked like the finalists in a Least Likely to be Friends competition. I was wearing my best dress, because of the dinner: a navy shift, with a beige scarf over it. Kay had on one of her twinkly-elf outfits, this time a little yellow sundress with ducks embroidered around the hem, accessorised with pink-glitter jelly shoes. I don’t know how anyone over the age of six can wear pink-glitter shoes and still look authoritative, but Kay did. Maybe it went with being tall and blonde and beautiful. Never having been any of those things, I wouldn’t know. On the plus side, I don’t own a ducky dress. So it’s swings and roundabouts.

  We walked out of the station, and I shot a quick look around, and then breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t want to walk alone, but it wasn’t fair to walk with Kay without warning her that I was – it sounded so melodramatic I was embarrassed even to think the words – I was in danger. I didn’t have to, though, I was relieved to see. The road between the station and Talbot’s Road was blocked by roadworks, with half a dozen workers hard at it, probably racing to get the job finished before the morning rush hour. With so many people around, everything would be fine, although I might have been the only person to consider men with pneumatic drills a welcome addition to the neighbourhood. Under normal circumstances I’d be enraged that the council had issued permits for heavy-duty road-breaking at nearly midnight. In the daytime the noise would have been bad; at night, it was a big up-yours to the residents. Amazing what a little bit of palm-greasing will buy you, I thought cynically.

  We were almost at the turn-off for our street when I saw, down the road, the door to Arthur’s flat open. I looked at my watch. I felt like Arthur’s mother: was this any hour for him to be going out?

  It wasn’t Arthur, though, because the man who came out wasn’t bent over. It was Kay who recognised him. ‘Hey!’ she called from a hundred metres away. I shushed her – it was nearly midnight on a weeknight. Even with pneumatic drills around the corner, we’d get no brownie
points for shouting in the street. She was undeterred. ‘That’s the man who brought Bim home on the night of the fire.’

  I looked again. If it was the same man, he didn’t recognise Kay, because he made no acknowledgement. Maybe he didn’t see her, maybe he didn’t recognise her, or maybe he was used to strange women waving to him in the street at midnight. Maybe all three.

  Kay had walked on before she realised I hadn’t moved. ‘Sam?’ she asked.

  I stopped staring at the man, who was getting into a parked car. ‘It’s just …’ I shook myself. ‘Nothing.’

  But it wasn’t nothing. It was a whole bunch of nothings, which somehow were adding up to something. A big, rather nasty something.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JAKE HAD TEXTED to say he’d be ‘very late’, which was even later than ‘late’, which was in turn later than ‘lateish’. I went out into the garden. It was still warm, and I unfolded one of the chairs we use on the two days a year it’s neither too hot nor too cold to sit outside. Sitting in the dark has advantages. There are no expectations. I didn’t have to be clever, or productive, or useful in the dark.

  In the dark, I could brood. And what I was brooding on was the man outside Arthur Winslow’s flat. Arthur had said he had a son who did his shopping for him and looked after him more generally. This man we’d seen had been leaving Arthur’s flat at midnight. It seemed safe to conclude that he was Arthur’s son. And, as Kay said, he was also the man we had met at the fire. The same man I had sat next to at the Neighbourhood Association meeting, when he’d told me he was there to pick up news for his father. Which took us back to Arthur, and made a nice, neat circular package of reasons why it wasn’t strange to see this particular man outside that flat at this hour.

  But I was putting other things into the package, and it was no longer so neat. Arthur had told us he had been a rent collector. If I’d thought about that comment at all, which I hadn’t, I’d have assumed it meant that he owned the house he lived in, renting out the upstairs to give him an income, which enabled him to live in the basement flat. But maybe he meant more, that he owned several, or even lots, of houses. He had also said his son was a rent collector. No one under the age of eighty used that word: it reeked of World War Two and pea-soup fogs. People who owned rental properties were landlords, or, if they owned lots, they were ‘in property’. I matched up the suit the man at the Neighbourhood Association meeting had been wearing with the suits of the property firm sponsors at the prize dinner. I thought of Charlie telling me that some of them were not nice men. That some were men who were so not-nice that he would warn a woman he had just met to stay away from them, and I didn’t think Charlie said that sort of thing lightly.

  I thought about that for a while. Viv and Mo both thought Dennis Harefield was a good man, and both of them were pragmatic, sensible women. The only people who didn’t think Harefield was on the up and up were people who didn’t know him. Wouldn’t it make more sense to believe the people who had at least met him?

  I thought of something else Charlie had said, and then I went inside and booted up my computer. I was just beginning to find the information I needed when an email pinged in. It was from Stinger, and it was brief: ‘Here you go,’ it said.

  The attachment proved the brief message was right: here I went indeed. Stinger had attached a Land Registry certificate showing that the empty house was owned by a company called AJW & Son. And even before I turned to the next document, a scanned page from a register of company directors, I knew what I would find. And I did. The director of AJW & Son was one Arthur James Winslow, and its chief financial officer was Frederick Winslow, presumably the son of ‘& Son’.

  I emailed Stinger back. Thanks. Can you find out what other properties AJW & Son own? And maybe if Frederick Winslow has other directorships?

  Five mins.

  I stared at my email, willing it to disgorge the answer. When it didn’t, I distracted myself by returning to a website that was explaining the ramifications of Sections 29 and 30 of the Limitation Act of 1980 – which if I were in government, I would have made sure had a snappier title. I was still struggling with the legalese when my email pinged again.

  He might be short on social graces, or even phone skills, but Stinger knew his stuff. The first attachment was a compilation of Land Registry reports. Aside from the empty house, AJW & Son owned three houses by the station, two more on the high street, another four near the school, and a handful at addresses I didn’t recognise, but the postcodes indicated were spread across north London.

  The second attachment, which Stinger had labelled ‘Your Frederick Winslow bloke’, listed his directorships: the AJW & Son financial directorship, and one which said he was managing director and chairman of a company called R&B Property. And there was a third attachment. Stinger either loved the chase, or he just wanted to stop me emailing him. More Land Registry certificates, this time for R&B’s properties. I clicked through them, one by one. Seventeen, no eighteen houses on Talbot’s Road, another six on the street adjacent. The rest were commercial properties, all in outer London suburbs.

  I was an editor. I worked better on paper. I pulled a pad towards me and began to write, jotting down events in chronological order, adding in the information I’d found online, which was easy to locate once I knew what I was looking for.

  I looked up to text Jake. Will you be home soon? If yes, I’ll wait up.

  The phone rang before I’d even returned to the screen. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I hadn’t meant to worry him, but I’d been attacked three days ago, and now I was texting him at – I looked at my watch – at past one in the morning.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong. It’s just …’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m on my way home. About twenty minutes away. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I could hear him smile. ‘You’re such a liar. You texted me at one in the morning, which you’ve never done. You’re up at one in the morning, even though the last time you saw one in the morning was when you were at university.’ Probably not even then. I’m not really a party girl.

  ‘All right, all right, we know you’re a detective, you don’t have to show off.’

  He didn’t reply, just let me stew. As he knew I would, I went on, ‘It would be easier to tell you face to face.’

  I could also hear him stop smiling. ‘Sam, you’re worrying me. What is it?’

  I hated this. ‘I know why the empty house burnt down. I know why Dennis Harefield was there. I know why I was attacked, and who wants me dead.’

  Jake didn’t say anything. He wanted to come home at night to someone who didn’t know about dead men, or assaults on his girlfriend, or arson. Finally he gave in. ‘Go for it.’

  So I did. ‘This isn’t about drugs, and it’s only tangentially about arson. They were there to lead you astray.’ I didn’t add, and they did. ‘It starts with the empty house. It was a junk shop when I first moved here, nearly twenty years ago. Then the shop closed, and after a while squatters moved in.’ Jake knew this, but he let me tell it in order, so I could get the story, and my head, straight. I checked my notes before I began again. ‘I got this off a government website. For a long time, if you took someone else’s land, and lived on it continuously, it just became yours. That’s how the Grosvenor family ended up owning most of Belgravia.’

  ‘You rang me at one in the morning to tell my why the Grosvenors own the West End?’

  I stopped rambling. ‘The law has changed, but what’s important is that after squatters have lived in a property for ten years, they can apply to have ownership of where they’re living legally transferred over to them. There’s a process: they file an application, after which the owners have sixty-five days to object; if they don’t respond within that time, the squatters become the registered proprietors. The owners then have another two years to evict them. If they don’t do that either, ownership of the property is formally handed to the squa
tters.’ I gestured all that aside, as though Jake could see me. ‘That’s background. Now, I don’t know when Mo and Dan and Steve and Mike moved in, but last week Mo said something along the lines of “we’d been in the house for ten years; there was every chance we’d have been able to stay”. She said Dennis was helping them with “that”, meaning helping them with the possibility of staying.’ That might mean they’d filed the notification, and were in the sixty-five-day waiting period, or it might mean there had been no objection, and unless they were evicted, they were waiting out the two-year period.

  ‘Waiting it out until the fire. I was talking tonight to the husband of one of my authors. He’s a solicitor, and he mentioned unfair evictions, and used the phrase “time limitations”, which made me think of what Mo had said. I’ve just emailed him to ask if being burnt out of your house would count as eviction. When he answers, I’ll let you know, but I bet anything that gets them physically out of the property fits the legal definition of eviction.’

  Jake didn’t speak, and I could hear his car indicator as he mentally evaluated what I’d told him. It was a few seconds before he said slowly, ‘You think the owner might have missed the date for objecting, and arranged to have the building burnt down? Why wouldn’t he just have them evicted in that two-year period?’ He was trying to tell me politely he thought my idea was absurd.

  Which was fine, because that idea was absurd, and it wasn’t what I thought at all. ‘No. I think the owner missed the date for objecting because he didn’t plan to object. I don’t think it was the owner who burnt the place down, because I know who the owner is.’