A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  Goes back? His post? Commandment Twelve: Thou shalt nick and paw through other people’s private correspondence.

  I made one of those noises again, ones I’d perfected with my mother, and now found I was using on Viv quite a lot too. I don’t know what it was about me and bossy older women, but I attracted them like ants to a jam-spill. I was the jam.

  I abandoned that analogy, and instead headed home, this time remembering to collect Viv’s seedlings for Mr Rudiger before I went.

  That was handy, as I could tell Jake that that was why I was late. He hadn’t been home when I’d come and gone, but he was waiting when I got back, and had seen the groceries already in the kitchen. ‘I forgot the sodding cuttings,’ I mumbled. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I had forgotten them. ‘Viv’s neighbour’s gone missing, and she was worried. That distracted her, and she didn’t hand them over.’

  Jake just nodded, not interested.

  For some insane reason, I felt the need to fill him in. ‘She called Missing Persons, but they said it was too early for them to do anything. She tried the hospitals, too, but with no results.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Forty-odd.’ I put my hand out, traffic-cop style. ‘I know, I know. He’s probably away, or visiting friends. She’s just worried because he arranged to go over and have a meal with her, and didn’t show up and didn’t get in touch to cancel.’ Jake just looked at me. ‘I agree,’ I went on, as if he’d said something, ‘but she’s worried all the same.’

  I left it there, and took the cuttings up to Mr Rudiger. As I walked upstairs, I tried to work out why I hadn’t told Jake everything. It wasn’t even the breaking and entering, although theoretically Jake would disapprove of that. Cops on the whole don’t like it when people break into places. But if I’d told him Mr Rudiger wasn’t answering his door, I wouldn’t even have to go over his terrace from next door, because Jake would be there before me. He wouldn’t think of it as breaking and entering. It was – I stood on the landing and stared at the wall while I thought – it was because we knew Mr Rudiger, and we didn’t know Dennis Harefield. That Viv knew Harefield the way we knew Mr Rudiger wouldn’t weigh in the balance with Jake. Jake didn’t know his neighbours in Hammersmith. He’d lived in his flat there for nearly a decade, but his erratic work hours, and general London life, meant that he rarely saw the people who lived nearby, or, if he did, not enough to recognise them. In the time we’d been together, he’d been surprised by the closeness of people in my street, and he wouldn’t move from the more general feeling of distance Londoners have for their neighbours, to the connection we felt to Mr Rudiger, and Viv felt to Harefield.

  I left it there for the rest of the day, and through most of Sunday. By evening, however, when Jake settled in front of the television, I found myself telling him that I needed to do what I call desking: sitting at my desk to pay bills, get estimates to renew my household insurance for slightly less than the national debt of a third-world country, check credit card receipts to make sure someone hadn’t cloned my card and was living it up at a motocross track in Wisconsin, things like that.

  And it wasn’t a complete lie. I did desk for myself for a while. And then I pootled about on the computer, doing mainstream online searches – my skills don’t go much further than Facebook and Twitter (no accounts for Harefield under any variants of his name I could think of). I googled him too, and to my astonishment got back only a couple of hundred hits. Being named Dennis Harefield was similar to being named Rhododendron Kaufman, or Phylloxera Tradescant: there just weren’t that many of them. Not that the scarcity helped. Most of the references were to an Australian officer in World War I, whose house had been used as a field hospital. That was mildly interesting, if you stretched the definition of interesting. There was a Dennis Harefield who was an opera singer. I watched a clip of him singing an aria from Boris Godunov on YouTube. No clues there.

  And then, finally, well into page three of the Google hits, I found Viv’s neighbour. There was a link to the council’s website, where he was listed in the environment department, which, as far as I could see, meant he had something to do with street lighting, or maybe parking. It was hard to say, since the website had been designed to ensure that no taxpayers were able to tie any employee to any service they might need. But whatever he did, there he was. I sent an email, merely saying I was a friend of Viv, that she was worried, and would he please get in touch, in case he was on holiday, or had run away with a mail-order bride from Uzbekistan. Or in case, more plausibly, he had simply forgotten to tell Viv he was going away. A man who had no house plants might do anything, after all.

  By Monday, however, Harefield was pushed down the agenda. During the night, I had been woken, first by sirens, then by the noise of a helicopter hovering overhead. Both times I’d thought little of it, and had fallen back asleep immediately. While the streets near me are residential, and very quiet, we’re not far from Camden market, and from time to time there is a police crackdown and some mass raids that net them (I presume) a few drug dealers. The problem is no worse around here than anywhere else, but because the market attracts tens of thousands of teenagers, all in urgent need of leather trousers and T-shirts with obscene slogans commenting on their boyfriends’ prowess, there is, if not more drug-dealing, then more overt drug dealing, than elsewhere. The pub at the bottom of my street had been a well-known spot to buy weed for years. Recently it had been taken over, poshed up into a gastropub, and it probably now sold the same amount of weed, just behind a more respectable façade.

  It was only when Jake and I left for work the next morning that we discovered that the night’s activity had been more destructive: at the intersection of the main road we were stopped, blocked by yellow crime-scene tape as far as the eye could see. Jake took this in and headed directly over to a lone PC who was standing, bored, in the road, waiting for some random miscreant with evil in their heart to attempt to cross to the Tube station, so that he could tell them they couldn’t.

  I knew that the first rule in the PC’s Handbook was ‘Don’t tell anyone anything they want to know’, so I didn’t follow. Instead I found a group of neighbours.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  As I expected, they knew everything. ‘A fire,’ said a woman I recognised but didn’t know, adeptly fielding her toddler, who was heading for the crime-scene tape that bounded a now gloriously empty road. ‘At the corner of Talbot’s Road. In the empty house. It started around midnight, and was burning for hours.’

  I turned behind me, as though I would magically be able to see around the corner to Talbot’s Road, so it took me a moment to hear what she said. The empty house, not an empty house. She wouldn’t have said that if she meant a house where the owners were away, or one that was for sale. Everyone in the neighbourhood called the old boarded-up junk shop ‘the empty house’.

  This was no longer simply something that was going to delay my trip to work. ‘Did they all get out OK?’ I asked. Because everyone in the neighbourhood also knew that the empty house wasn’t empty.

  A chorus of ‘fine’ from the group, who were already up to speed. One, a grey-bearded man, volunteered: ‘I saw Mo half an hour ago. She said they’re doing fine.’

  That was a relief. It meant I could stop being a concerned neighbour and go back to being a commuter whose trip to work was being disrupted. But before I could spend too much mental energy on how I was going to get to the office, Jake was back. ‘A fire,’ he said. ‘In an empty house down—’ He gestured down the hill.

  ‘The junk shop,’ I agreed.

  He looked from me to the group surrounding me. ‘A junk shop?’ he asked. ‘They said it was empty.’

  ‘It was a junk shop. Before. Years ago. It hasn’t been for a long time.’ I moved from being a source of information to trying to get some. ‘What did the PC say? Does he know how it started? And we know everyone got out OK, but did they get all their things out? Do they have somewhere to stay?’

  Jake had
turned, was about to move away, but now he stopped. Slowly he turned back to our little group. ‘“Everyone”?’ he echoed. ‘“Somewhere to stay”? The house was empty.’

  ‘Yes, technically it was empty.’

  Jake gave me his police look, flat and guarded, while everyone else remained silent. ‘How is a house technically empty?’ he demanded, as though it were my fault.

  I did most of the local shopping, so Jake had little occasion to chat with people who knew what was happening in the area. And he drove to and from work. Maybe the lights behind the boarded-up windows in the empty house weren’t as noticeable from a car as they were when you walked past in the dark. ‘It’s technically empty because squatters live – lived – there,’ I corrected. ‘I don’t know how many, or if they’re always the same ones, but there have been people living there for years.’

  ‘The same ones for a long time,’ said the woman with the toddler. ‘Mo and Dan have a ten-year-old who’s been at school with my older boy since kindergarten, so they’ve been there for at least five years.’

  ‘And Mike did my wiring when we moved in,’ added a woman I’d never seen before. She was dressed like me, office clothes, and had probably been blocked en route as we had been. ‘That was six years ago. And he’d been recommended to me locally, so he and Steve had probably been there a while by then.’

  Jake looked at me, toddler-lady and office-lady as though we were suspects in a particularly repellent type of crime. Was knowing your neighbours an arrestable offence? In London it probably was. ‘How many people were aware that this “empty” house wasn’t empty?’

  The others turned to me. He’s yours, was their unspoken consensus. You deal with the dummy who doesn’t know what goes on on his own doorstep.

  So I did. ‘Everybody,’ I said simply.

  He was annoyed now. ‘Everybody, apparently, except the owner.’ And he grabbed my hand and pulled me in the direction of the crime-scene tape. I looked back over my shoulder, signalling both goodbye and that I’d catch up later with what was going on from the people who knew.

  Jake walked us back to the main road, ducking under the crime-scene tape and pulling me with him. ‘We have some info for your sergeant,’ he said in passing to the PC, who stood back for us.

  The after-effects of the fire became overpowering long before we reached the junction where the house was. There was a smell, not of burning, exactly. I sniffed. It wasn’t anything I’d ever smelt before. It smelt, I decided, like wet soot. Not that, previously, I’d have been able to say what dry, much less wet, soot smelt like, but smelling it now, I was sure. It was a leftover kind of smell, not of fire, not of burning, but of once-was-burning, and, overlaid on top, the smell of damp.

  There was more crime-scene tape as we got closer, blocking access to the corner plot the house was on. There was also an incident tent covering the small forecourt in the front of the house, the space that, in most residential London streets, was sometimes a small garden patch, but was more often paved over, functioning either as a place to park, or simply as a pressure valve that separated street from home.

  When I first moved to the area, before the empty house had been empty, when it had still been a junk shop, there had been an ugly wooden extension in that front space, one step up from being a garden shed, an extension that put the shop’s front door right on the street, although I don’t know why the owner bothered: the shop was one of those shops you can’t figure out how it survived, because it was never open. The chipped vases in the window were never sold, or even moved, but just got dustier and dustier, until you couldn’t tell what colour they’d been originally. The window got dirtier too, and gradually it became harder to see that there were any vases there at all. The sole indication that anybody ever came or went was that the post never piled up on the other side of the glass door. Someone collected it, even though the door was always shut, the sign always turned to ‘Back in 5 minutes’.

  I don’t know when I noticed the post wasn’t being collected, or if I did notice it before the day that the windows were boarded up. The general neighbourhood opinion was that the owner had died, but it was clear no one really knew, and that was a story made up to match the circumstances. I probably also didn’t notice when the squatters first moved in – the goal of squatters, after all, is to be unnoticeable. At some point I became aware that at night the rooms were lit up behind the boards. Then the boards over the upper-floor windows came down. The makeshift shed and its door vanished, and the area returned to being a paved yard, before, one day, the paving too vanished and the soil underneath was planted, with a small lean-to at the rear. The house was still known as the empty house, and generically its residents were called the squatters, but the phrase wasn’t condemnation, just description, the way the locals you recognise but don’t know get tags attached to them: the couple with the yappy dogs, the old man who shouts at children, the people who play the Carpenters’ Greatest Hits at full volume in their garden on summer weekends. Compared to those last ones, the squatters were model neighbours.

  From a distance, the house didn’t look too terrible. The white-stuccoed front had black streaks across it, like mascara the morning after the night before. The wooden boards that had covered the ground-floor windows for so many years were gone, presumably ripped away by the fire department, and the windows behind had no glass in them. Then we turned the corner and I sucked in my breath. I realised then that, just as I had never smelt wet soot, so I had never actually seen the after-effects of a fire. Like most people, any fires I’d seen had been on television or film, and in a twisted way my brain had never grasped that it had not experienced the reality. The reality was a wall that was almost entirely a single huge scorch mark. The reality was that you could see the sky through the first-floor windows, since the roof had caved in, and only a few beams were left, broken and jagged and charcoal. The reality was that this was no longer a house, just some walls, and a front door.

  Jake kept me moving past it, however, without a chance to take in more, and I was grateful. At the bottom of the hill, a small, shifting group of uniformed and plain-clothes police stood. There was some freemasonry of police that Jake could read, because he walked up to one of the plain-clothes men without needing any of them to be identified. I lagged behind as he took out his warrant card and introduced himself, but he pulled me over and told me to give my information about the residents of the house. I did, including what I knew about the adults who lived there, which wasn’t much. Mo worked in the station café. I didn’t know what Dan did, or even what he looked like; if I’d seen him around, I didn’t know that I had. They had children, but I didn’t know how many. I’d used Mike as an electrician too, and Steve did odd jobs around the neighbourhood: he came to me once a year to hack back the ivy growing up the side of our house. At the sergeant’s request, I passed over the phone numbers I had for Steve and Mike.

  Then I decided to do a little fishing of my own. Being with a CID officer moved me from being a neighbour with information to being someone that they might give driblets of information to in return. ‘How did it start?’

  A uniformed man I’d mentally, but with no certainty, decided was the sergeant shrugged. ‘Don’t know, and we won’t until the fire inspectors go through later today.’ He looked at Jake and continued, ‘We assumed arson, since the house was empty. If there were squatters living there, it’s more likely it was set off by them tapping into the utilities illegally, or leaving a hotplate on. That kind of jerry-rigging is always a danger.’

  I knew nothing about what squatters did or didn’t do, but I noticed that the possible cause had slid from arson to being the fault of the occupants because they were, conveniently, living outside the conventional legal system. But if I pointed that out, whatever information was forthcoming would dry up.

  ‘Who is the owner?’ I asked. ‘I’ve often wondered why the building’s been empty for so long.’

  The sergeant didn’t know, didn’t care. ‘We were ju
st told the house was empty, awaiting redevelopment.’

  The building was tiny, probably two-up two-down. I wondered how it could be redeveloped into anything. I didn’t ask. I’d get better info from the neighbours.

  And I did. Jake headed off to his car and I stopped for coffee at the Tube station café on my way to work. Or, rather, I got in line behind everyone who had decided to do the same thing. It was going to be record takings for the café owners that day. Catching up with the news was not just easy: it would have been impossible to have done anything else. Those who lived nearest the empty house told the rest of us that the fire had been put out before dawn, but the police had been there ever since, and more had arrived first thing in the morning. The gossip continued: the café owners had put up Mo and Dan and their kids – they had two – in the flat above the café, which was, happily, between tenants. It was only two rooms, but it was better than nothing, and meant the kids could still walk to school. Mike and Steve were temporarily split up, on the couches of two neighbours, but the word was that they had the promise of a spare room not too far away that they could move into soon.

  By the time I reached the head of the queue and ordered, I was caught up: fact, fiction, and everything in between. Mo was running the coffee-machine, and she looked exhausted, but otherwise exactly as she always did, like she was ready to head off to Woodstock in 1969: grey hair in a long plait, dyed Peruvian pullover and – I peered over the counter – yes, buffalo sandals.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Even as I asked it, I knew that that was the world’s most infuriating, and pointless, question, one that gets asked at births, at weddings, at divorces and deaths, as well as at every intervening crisis point. Mostly there is nothing anyone can do, but asking makes the asker, if not the askee, feel better. I tried to be more practical, concentrating on detail. ‘Did you get your stuff out? Can I help with that? I don’t have much space – I couldn’t take furniture – but if you’ve got boxes or bags I could find a corner to keep them in. Or if—’ I didn’t want to say, if all your worldly possessions went up in flames, so I revised. ‘If you need to borrow anything, kitchen pots and pans, or bathroom things, or whatever, let me know.’ I scribbled my name and number on a napkin and passed it across the counter.