A Cast of Vultures

by Judith Flanders

  Then I looked at myself again. Specifically, at my arms where Munroe had grabbed me and two reddish handprints had emerged. I turned and looked behind. You could even see the individual fingermarks where he’d gripped tight. By evening, they’d be purple. I didn’t want to have to explain it – I couldn’t see how I could explain it – so I dug around and found a cardigan. I double-checked. If you weren’t too picky, my shoes matched the dress. My bruises were covered. By my standards, the outfit was a success.

  ‘Ready,’ I said, reporting for duty.

  Jake was diplomatic. ‘A cardigan?’ he said. ‘It’s sweltering.’

  ‘The neckline is more low-cut than I realised when I tried it on,’ I improvised, but it was also the truth. It was just that normally I didn’t care. Maybe I should go back to the market and get that tattoo. ‘If you look at the dress from my eye level, it’s fine.’

  ‘But no one over the age of fourteen is your eye level.’ Jake was stating the obvious. Everyone is taller than I am. ‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to take the dress back and buy another one?’

  ‘Easy’ isn’t a word I associate with shopping. Nor is ‘pleasant’, nor ‘enjoyable’, nor ‘fun’. ‘Waste of time and energy’ are words I associate with shopping. The only thing more boring than shopping for clothes was discussing clothes. ‘Let’s go,’ was therefore my response.

  On the way out, we met Kay and Anthony and Bim on their way in, and we did neighbourly chit-chat on the front steps. Bim had no interest in we-must-have-a-drink-soon, so he wandered back to the newly turned front garden and crouched, nose to the ground, bottom swaying as he investigated. That led us, naturally, to the work Steve was doing, and reminded me of the question I’d had the day before. ‘Did you let Steve into my flat?’

  Kay looked startled at the abrupt question. ‘You mean recently? No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  She checked my expression. ‘How sure do I have to be?’

  I shifted uncomfortably, avoiding her stare by watching Bim, who had found buried treasure, and was excavating for more. ‘Steve said something about the back garden, but I can’t remember him ever being out there. I thought if he’d told you I’d asked him to do some work, you might have let him in because – well, because I probably would have if he’d said that about your flat. I’d just assume you’d forgotten to tell me.’

  Kay was disappointed in me. ‘I wouldn’t let anyone in if you hadn’t told me they were coming. And Steve wouldn’t try to get in without your knowledge.’

  I flushed. ‘Put like that, no, I don’t think you would, or he would. I just can’t figure out how he knew what was growing out there.’ And it frightened me. Which in turn made me feel stupid, because nothing very frightening had happened. So Steve knew I grew chives by the back door: not really Silence of the Lambs territory.

  Kay pressed her lips tightly together and called to Bim. He bounded up, eager to show off his booty. When none of us displayed enthusiasm, he stepped back, his eyes moving from face to face. Kay continued to stare at me reproachfully, I was both apologetic and defiant, Jake had his there-will-be-questions-about-this-later face on, and Anthony was pretending he was a visitor from another country who didn’t speak the language. I must have looked the unhappiest, because Bim reached a decision. ‘Here,’ he said kindly. ‘For you.’ And he handed me half a worm, still wiggling madly.

  As we walked into Helena’s, I thought that half a worm might prove to be the highlight of my day. Jake and I had had a terse conversation on the way over that ran: Him: If you thought Steve had blagged his way in, why didn’t you say something to me? Me: I forgot. Him: You FORGOT? Me: Silence that continued right up to Helena’s front door.

  Once inside, I took a deep breath. Helena’s parties were always lovely – between her social life, her professional life, and the charities she was involved with, she knew more people, from more varied backgrounds, than anyone I’d ever come across. And all of them were interesting, bright, funny, clever – everything that makes for good company. I looked around at these terrific people scattered across her kitchen and out into the garden, and wondered if anyone would notice if I locked myself in the loo and read a book.

  Jake had left me at the kitchen door, and now returned with two glasses. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ he warned.

  Damn. I took a sip of my drink. Lemon and something. I looked over at his glass. Beer. ‘Are you supervising my alcohol intake?’

  ‘Until you’ve had something to eat.’

  He was right, but I don’t like being told what to do, and I dislike it even more when the teller is right and I’m wrong. So I walked away. Let him fend for himself, even if that meant I’d have to interact with other people, which was low down on my list of Fun Things to Do. I wandered over to the table where the food was laid out. Helena has no interest in cooking, so for parties she puts out salads and cold meat and cheese. Today there were also a couple of lasagnes, which I recognised had come from the Italian deli halfway between her house and mine. Normally I would have leapt right in. Today, Jake telling me to eat had put my back up. I broke off a chunk of bread.

  ‘That’s not going to get you very far,’ a voice behind me said.

  I turned. A tall, stooped man, probably in his sixties, blonde hair turning to straw, and little round specs like John Lennon used to wear. Lennon’s were a style statement. This man wore his because his mum had bought him a pair like it when he was twelve, and it had never occurred to him that he might choose differently now.

  It was likely that we had met before, but I never remembered anyone’s face, much less their names. As he looked like the type of person who wouldn’t remember either, I took a punt, smiled, and held out my hand. ‘I’m Sam Clair. And I’m not hungry yet.’

  ‘If you keep eating bread, you never will be.’ He stared, waiting for me to move on to wiser food choices.

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind. And you are …’

  ‘… having lasagne. It’s mushroom. Good for you.’

  It probably was, but, ‘No. I say, I’m Sam Clair, and then you tell me who you are.’

  He smiled widely. ‘I’m not very good at small talk. I’m Victor Walker.’

  He was even worse at small talk than I was, which cheered me up. ‘After that, Victor-not-very-good-at-small-talk, since my last name tells you I’m probably related to Helena, you tell me how you know her, and what it is you do. Then it will be my turn again, and I’ll tell you that yes, I’m Helena’s daughter, and that I work in publishing. From that exchange, we’ll have gathered enough information that we can decide if we’re interested enough to continue to talk to each other. If we’re not, you say, I see a friend I must speak to before they leave, or, I’m just going to refill my glass, and then you move on to the next person, where you do it over again – although you can leave out the sidelight on the need to eat one’s vegetables if you want. Then you keep doing it until you finally find someone you want to talk to, or it’s time to leave, whichever comes first.’

  He looked interested. ‘If only someone had handed me that on an index card years ago. Let me see. Point 1: I know Helena because we’re neighbours.’ He lifted his chin towards the garden, to indicate the direction of his house. ‘Point 2: I’m a historian. Subsection 2a, which you should add to your outline of Small-talk for Dummies when you have time to revise it: I teach local history and research method.’

  He stared at me, thinking he’d delivered the killer line that made sane people flee. I’m such a nerd, I found it fascinating, so I took another piece of bread, and under his disapproving stare added some cheese, and prodded him out into the garden to talk. Jake found us there half an hour later, and I introduced the two men. ‘Victor has been telling me about the research he’s doing into this area – all about post-war rebuilding.’

  Jake handed over another glass, and leant against the wall behind me, saying absently, ‘You need to drink, it’s hot out.’ If I didn’t reach the National Institute for Healt
h’s optimum nutritional intake that weekend, it wasn’t going to be for lack of supervision from my friends. He left a hand on my shoulder and turned to the older man. ‘Was there a lot of rebuilding around here?’ One of the nicest things about Jake is that he’s interested in everything.

  Victor was happy to return to what was evidently the passion of his life. ‘An enormous amount. Because the railway lines into central London run through the district, it was a prime target for the Luftwaffe, and was heavily bombed, which meant, in turn, that there was a lot of rebuilding, especially social housing, in the following decade.’

  ‘I have a friend who has lived in a tower block near the Heath since her parents moved in when it was first built,’ I offered it like car keys dangled in front of a fractious baby. ‘I’d guess that was the 1950s. Her lino has definitely been there since then.’

  Victor dove straight for the shiny objects. ‘How extraordinary. Would you introduce me? I’ve been recording interviews with anyone who has been living in the area over the last half-century, but a continuous tenancy from the 1950s is extremely rare.’ Now he was a botanist who had stumbled across a jungle orchid the world had mourned as extinct.

  ‘Then she’s a prime candidate. She’s not only been living there the whole time, she knows everyone. She can put you on to other long-termers. Give me your phone number.’ Victor, bless him, pulled out a tiny pocket diary and turned to the flyleaf, where he had his number written out. I texted Viv with it, knowing she’d adore the chance to tell an academic everything she knew, and that she was certain he didn’t.

  After that, the lunch party ran on, as lunch parties often do, into supper. I was enjoying myself, which was what I usually found happened once I forced myself out. I remembered to mention Sam’s problem to Helena, and she introduced me to a colleague who worked with youth groups. Even with Helena’s standard Superwoman Service, that was impressive. I outlined the situation, and Connie agreed that Sam and his friends needed legal assistance. She told me to get Sam to ring her on Monday to discuss it, and she would either take it on herself, or find the right person to do it. I could see why she and Helena were friends. They had the same modus operandi: see a problem, solve the problem, move on to the next problem. Beside us, Jake was involved in a heated discussion about parole with a bunch of Helena’s lawyer friends, so he was happy too.

  I was sitting in a deckchair, listening to him and his new friends, who had now moved on to limited licence, whatever that was, when Victor bounded up again.

  I smiled up at him. ‘I thought you’d gone home.’ We’d said goodbye several hours before.

  He waved that off as unimportant. ‘I had. But I got a text from your friend. She says she’s meeting a friend at his flat this evening, and that he’s also been living in the same house since the end of the war. She says I can come round and have a preliminary chat with both of them if I like, and I thought since you’d introduced me you’d like to come too.’ He extended this invitation as if it were a matter of unimaginable good fortune that I’d be able to join him, the way a millionaire would say ‘I thought you might like to see my yacht’. Which made it hard to say no.

  Victor was oblivious. ‘From what your friend tells me, this man is a find. He’s eighty, and he was a rag-and-bone man right up until the 1960s, when he got rid of his horse and cart and began to sell the same sort of goods from a shop.’

  ‘I have a very faint memory of a man with a horse and cart coming round when I was very small,’ I said, ‘but even though I know it’s a real memory, it’s still hard to make myself believe that it happened in my lifetime.’ If it had appeared in Miranda’s gang memoir, I would have thought the chronology was impossible, and it was another indication it was all made up.

  Victor nodded. ‘I tell my students that people their grandparents’ age saw cattle being driven down the high street, but they don’t believe me. That’s what these interviews are for, to show how even someone not very old’ – how tactful – ‘can remember a rag-and-bone man’s cart. And then I want to show the continuity: how the son of the rag-and-bone man goes into retail, how the dairy the cattle were driven to becomes a pizza place, but still keeps the dairy tiles on the walls.’ I knew exactly the restaurant he meant. ‘It’s all change, but it’s a progression, not a break. Everything overlaps, from a horse and cart or a dairy to a restaurant or a shopping centre.’

  Behind Victor’s back, I made bug-eyes at Jake. Help! they shrieked. Without obvious haste he disentangled himself from his group and wandered over. ‘Ready to go?’ he asked blandly.

  Victor, previously the most polite of men, in his excitement at the thought of two new interviewees spoke right over my Yes-I’m-exhausted-and-ready-for-bed: ‘We’re going to see Sam’s friend Viv, and’ – he consulted his phone – ‘and her friend Arthur.’

  Jake was every bit as enthusiastic. ‘Good plan.’ I wondered if murder was one of those things that, if other people witnessed it they had to report it, or if there was some leeway. Had Helena perhaps left the big bread knife out on the table? Then he continued, ‘We’ve got a car. Why don’t we meet you there? I’ll park and do email while Sam introduces you, and then once you’re set, I’ll take her home.’

  I decided to leave the bread knife where it was.

  Viv’s friend Arthur lived in Talbot’s Road, not far from the empty house. As we drove over, I traced out the long route we had to take by road, because the street layout wound around the railway line, just as Victor had said. The railway, and its network, took precedence in laying out the district, which I supposed historically had been the reality: the railways had been the prime commercial network, the houses were built afterwards, supply following demand.

  Then I sat up. The rail network distributed goods across the country. I thought back to my trip to the market that morning, and the thousands of customers getting their retail fixes for the week.

  I stared out the window. ‘If Harefield—’ I hated saying this. ‘If Harefield was a drug dealer— That is, apart from finding the drug residue, and the cash, do the police know where Harefield was dealing, or how?’

  Jake was succinct. ‘No.’

  ‘No? Just “no”?’

  ‘I know you. I know you can’t leave things alone, so I asked a favour and had a look at the file.’

  It made me sound like the local nosy parker, but on the other hand, he wasn’t wrong, and I hadn’t been able to leave it alone, so I ignored that part. ‘Go on.’

  He drove for a dozen metres in silence. Then, ‘Harefield had a juvenile record, but that was nearly twenty years ago. He’d straightened up, finished university, got a job at the council, worked with local boys, had a good track record. Everything we knew about him said he was on the level. There was nothing to link him to any dealing. He didn’t have any connections Specialist Crime could find to any known distribution networks. He had some dodgy friends, but they had been boys he’d worked with.’ He shrugged. ‘If you work with at-risk boys and young offenders, they’re not all going to stay clean. Some didn’t, and Harefield didn’t necessarily lose touch with them. But until we found the drug residue, and the cash, it looked like he’d kept in touch as a mentor, hoping to change their situations. Afterwards, of course …’ He let the sentence drift.

  I felt like I’d fallen through the rabbit hole. Viv had been saying from the start that Harefield was one of the good guys, and the police had been telling her right back that she was straightforwardly wrong. Now, according to Jake, the police had thought he’d been clean, just at the moment I— ‘I’ve worked out how he might have been distributing.’

  This time the silence was longer, and tenser. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘How?’

  ‘Harefield had been helping the boys in his group make T-shirts, helping them buy what they needed wholesale.’

  Jake nodded. ‘We know that. The materials were in the shed – or at least, the paints they used were what had accelerated the fire.’

  ‘He had a friend. His name
is Kevin Munroe. I saw him on the street at the pub fire. He was watching with everyone else.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘And he sells T-shirts with skateboarding designs in Camden market. And he was talking to Azim at the fire.’

  Jake was not in the CID for no reason. ‘And you think they were using the market as a distribution point. And Azim – he’s the local newsagent? What are you suggesting, that the boys who deliver papers are being used too?’

  I shrugged uncomfortably. ‘It would work, wouldn’t it?’

  Jake tipped his head. ‘It would. It might. I’ll pass it on.’ He looked over at me. ‘And then you don’t have to concern yourself with it anymore.’

  I’d like that. I’d gone from Harefield being Viv’s friend, and a good guy, to pointing out how he might have used as drug couriers the boys I’d also been defending and had just found legal counsel for. I felt nauseous, and it wasn’t the mushroom lasagne.

  Even if it meant having to go through yet another social interaction – I was so far past my daily quota I didn’t blink – I was glad when we reached Talbot’s Road, so I could stop thinking about Harefield. We didn’t need to look for the street number. Victor was standing outside in the dusk, and as I opened the car door, an elderly voice croaked out accusingly, ‘You’re the polite runner.’

  A man was standing beside Victor, and he was talking to me. I recognised him at once. If you run or walk your dog regularly first thing in the morning, you tend to see the same people over and over. I have always given them names. One of the runners is Marge, because the first time I saw her she had tied her hair up in a purple scarf, and in the dawn light she looked like Marge Simpson’s twin. Another is The Greek, because I think she looks Greek, even if I couldn’t tell you what looking Greek looks like. And Victor’s rag-and-bone man, it now appeared, was one of the Old Paper Guys, the three elderly men I saw most mornings as they waited outside the station for Azim to open his newsagent’s. Where they were made them the Paper Guys, and Arthur was the oldest, which did the rest. As I always said ‘Good morning’ to them as I ran past, that apparently in turn made me polite, as well as a runner, to them.