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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Sam Clair
- Sprache: Englisch
There was every possibility that I was dead, and my brain hadn't got the memo. Or maybe it was that I wished I were dead. On reflection, that was more likely. Usually sharp-witted editor Sam Clair stumbles through her post-launch-party morning with the hangover to end all hangovers. Before the Nurofen has even kicked in, she finds herself entangled in an elaborate saga of missing neighbours, suspected arson and the odd unidentified body. When the grisly news breaks that the fire has claimed a victim, Sam is already in pursuit. Never has comedy been so deadly as Sam faces down a pair from Thugs 'R' Us, aided by nothing more than a CID boyfriend, a stalwart Goth assistant and a seemingly endless supply of purple-sprouting broccoli.
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Seitenzahl: 451
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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A Cast of Vultures
JUDITH FLANDERS
For Patrick Hurd
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
THERE WAS EVERY possibility that I was dead, and my brain hadn’t got the memo. Or maybe it was that I wished I were dead. On reflection, that was more likely.
I opened one eye and took stock. Head, pounding. Brain, fried. Eyes swollen shut, mouth like the bottom of a parrot’s cage. Stomach – I decided it was better not to go there. I’m a publisher, and I’m smart, I didn’t need to inventory further. I was hungover, and, even worse, for zero enjoyment the night before.
I’d been at the launch party for a new novel. It doesn’t matter which novel, because while the books are different, the parties are always the same. We scarcely need to go. Instead, we could just have a drawer full of cut-outs, like those cardboard dolls children used to play with, the ones with the paper dresses with the little tabs at the shoulders to latch them onto the figures. There would be editor dolls in two styles, hipster and librarian. (In both cases, wine glasses would be firmly clutched in their tiny cardboard hands.) There would be a scattering of publicist dolls, all much better dressed. Then a couple of author dolls, one introverted and hating the whole thing, the other thrilled to be out of his or her own head, lapping up the sociability, because being a writer means being alone most of the time, with working lives that make Trappist monks seem chatty. When the sociable ones are let loose on real, live, breathing people, out spill great gushes of uncontrollable talk. The rest of the drawer would hold the rolling cast that moves from launch party to launch party: journalist dolls, book-reviewer dolls, blogger dolls, bookshop-manager dolls, literary-festival-organiser dolls.
These people are, after all, the reason publishing parties are held. We permit authors to think that launch parties are a celebration of their achievement, but that in itself is fiction. The parties are business, a way of persuading the necessary people that the new product is worth their attention. And, like everything else in the world, resources are not fairly distributed. Best-selling authors get glamorous (read, expensive) venues. New authors that publishers have high hopes for get lunch for a dozen in a medium-priced restaurant. Then there are what are known as the mid-list authors, a phrase that strikes fear into the hearts of the accounts department, or it would if the accountants had hearts. These are the authors of books you admire, but never manage to sell in any number, no matter how hard you try. (It is, tragically, still illegal to force people to buy books at gunpoint. I don’t know why this kind of restriction is allowed to remain on the statute books.) These authors get anything from a small dinner party at their editor’s house, because the editor is too embarrassed to admit that there is no budget for anything else, to, at best, warm white wine and crisps in the private room of a down-at-heels club.
The requirements for a successful publishing party in London are few, and easy to remember. Lots of alcohol and then, really, well, lots more alcohol. That’s it. If there’s a bowl of peanuts beside the crisps, that’s good, but a party doesn’t stand or fall by peanuts. Sometimes I imagine a publicist’s checklist for these evenings:
Ascertain venue capacity;
Invite three times the number of people, in the expectation that half will not attend;
Of the half that does, remember that at least half of them will bring a friend;
The other half will bring more than one;
Order two bottles of wine per expected attendee;
Don’t forget those non-drinkers! Add two bottles of water and one carton of no-brand juice;
Food is essential. One bag of crisps per hundred guests and, if budget permits, half a dozen cocktail sausages;
Relax, proud of a job well done.
The party the previous evening was textbook. It was in one of those Soho backstreets where strip-joints with names like Gentleman’s Relish were slowly being replaced by art galleries and noodle bars and ‘artisanal’ pizza places. (Artisanal means that the pizzas are lopsided, and the bottle of olive oil the server, hired for his skinny jeans and attitude, knocks over has a sprig of thyme in it.) The club itself was in a stately, beautifully proportioned eighteenth-century building that had fallen on hard times since its heyday, which was probably when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth. The annual membership fees of their few surviving members barely covered the building’s electricity bill. So they made ends meet by renting out space to companies like mine. All you had to do was ignore the peeling strips of paint dangling from the stuccoed ceilings, and the gaps in the intricate parquet floors where cubes of wood had popped out. And that it hadn’t been cleaned since before the French Revolution.
Everyone did ignore those details, and the dolls had come out to play. The editor doll was hipster, not frump – he was my colleague Ben, and not only was Ben not a frump, he would never have a frump author, because he would never believe that a frump could write well. And, who knew, frumpitude might be contagious, and he wouldn’t risk that. The author doll was therefore a thrilled-to-be-out, rather than a hating-every-minute, type, and she was happily flitting about. Or, she would have flitted, except that there were so many people packed into two rooms that flitting was out of the question. Nothing except determined barging was going to get anyone from point A to point B, so we mostly stayed in the groups we’d arrived with, and drank steadily.
My morning head would suggest it had been too steadily. Jake was already home when I got in the evening before. Being a police detective gave him superskills, and he only looked at me for a moment before he opened the fridge.
‘Pasta,’ he said. ‘It’ll soak up some of the alcohol.’
I stared at him severely. ‘Have you been drinking?’
‘No, sweetheart, I haven’t. You have.’
True. ‘But I don’t need to soak it up. I ate at the party.’
‘Crisps are not food.’
They weren’t? I’d have to revise my whole food pyramid. As would the rest of my profession.
Jake clearly felt the conversation was going nowhere. With the water set to boil, he moved to the fridge and began to pull salad-ey things out in silence.
‘Where did that come from?’ It was Friday, and I did a weekly shop on Saturday mornings. There was rarely much left by Friday night, and never any salad vegetables.
‘From Mr Rudiger. He left a postcard on the door to say he had a bag for us.’ I lived on the ground floor of a Victorian house that had been converted into flats long ago. Above me were Kay and Anthony, and their son Bim. They were actors, with erratic schedules. Not Bim. He’s neither an actor, nor does he have an erratic schedule, since kindergarten timetables tend to be fairly fixed. How Kay and Anthony managed their jobs, whether it was nighttime stage work, or daytime filming or advertisements or auditions (mostly the latter), and still saw that Bim’s life went on as normal, was a mystery to me. But they did.
Mr Rudiger lived above them, on the top floor, and his schedule was even more settled than Bim’s, because he never went out. By ‘never’, I don’t mean rarely. I mean never. In the nearly twenty years we’d lived in the same house, he’d been past our street door only once that I knew of. He was an architect, a famous one, who had moved to London from Prague sometime after the war. I wasn’t sure when, but his career had been entirely in Britain until he retired in his forties, and then, apparently, spent the next three decades living in the flat upstairs. Sometimes he came down for supper, but not very often. Instead, I mostly went up to visit. Mr Rudiger didn’t hold with making phone calls to people who live in the same house. In the rare instances he ventured downstairs, he left a postcard on the door if I wasn’t in. I never texted him, either, because I doubted he had a mobile phone. He wasn’t mobile, so why would he?
But while he wasn’t mobile, he was active, and one of his activities was gardening on his roof terrace. He grew more fruit and veg than seemed possible in that tiny space, and we were often the happy recipients of his harvests.
‘He also said he had some cuttings for you to take to Viv tomorrow, so will you go up before you set off in the morning?’
That was often the case too. Viv lived five minutes’ walk from us. I’d met her when I’d been knocked off my cycle, and she had helped scrape me off the pavement. When I’d gone back to thank her, I’d found her flat was crammed with pots and growbags, filled with every kind of flower imaginable. I hadn’t managed to get Viv over to meet Mr Rudiger yet – Viv not only gardened, but nothing happened for a mile or more that she didn’t know about, so that took up most of her time. I was, therefore, their go-between, and on my way to and from doing my weekly shop, I ferried cuttings and seeds back and forth as if they were black-market goods: Oi, mate, I’ve got some tomato plants in the back o’ me van. Throw in a handful of dill seeds, and I’ll do them for you for a fiver. Or perhaps it was more like a Soviet-era spy-drop: The courgette flowers have blossomed, The fennel flies at midnight.
I made a non-committal noise, which I hoped covered my response to Mr Rudiger keeping us supplied with food (good), my lack of desire for salad (bad), my wish that Mr Rudiger and Viv could meet so that I could stop being their courier (lazy Sam) and an acknowledgement that Jake was cooking and I was just sitting there watching him (bad Sam).
But before I could act on any of those thoughts, Jake had the sauce heated and the pasta boiled and dished up. He put a normal-sized helping at his place, and a much larger one in front of me. ‘Eat,’ he said.
Cranky Sam took over. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re cranky when you’ve been drinking.’
This was true. I ate.
Jake wasn’t scheduled to work that weekend, but even so, I wasn’t surprised to find he was gone by the time I woke up. I ran, in a half-hearted fashion, a few times a week before work, but Jake liked to hit things, so he went to the gym on Saturday mornings when I was at the farmer’s market, and we met up afterwards. He’d come with me to the market a few times, but he drove me crazy, buying all sorts of weird food: blood sausage, or cheese that smelt like it had been dug out of the drains. Then it sat in my fridge for a week, because he was working a particularly difficult case and wasn’t home to eat it. Once I’d made him take his purchases back to his own flat, but that was even worse, because when I’d opened his fridge a month later, they were still there, and their mould had got married and had babies. So we had silently agreed a Saturday division of labour: he hit things; I went hunter-gathering.
There was no help for it. I staggered up, and through my morning routine, caffeinating myself liberally as I went. By the time I went upstairs for Mr Rudiger’s ferry-load I was as alive as I was going to get. He had a few pots of cuttings and a bag of figs from the tree on his terrace for Viv, and extra figs for me, my fee as courier. I have trouble with deferred gratification, so I ate a fig as I headed downstairs, wiping my sticky hand surreptitiously on the back of my jeans. I doubted that there would be any left by the time Jake got back, but then, I was the courier, not him.
Viv lived halfway between me and the market, so the duty wasn’t exactly onerous. We’d got the transfer down to a routine, and I just rested my cycle against the railing when I got to her flat, knocking and calling out, ‘It’s me!’ when I heard her footsteps. Viv was barely five feet tall, and so for her the peephole in her front door was a decorative rather than a functional device. We good-morning-ed each other, lovely-day-ed a bit, and I’d handed over Mr Rudiger’s consignment before I noticed that she had nothing to give me in exchange. That was unusual, especially as we were in the middle of peak growing season. So was the fact that she was hesitating. Viv went everywhere, knew everything, and you’d have to be a fool to cross her. If I had to guess, I’d say she was seventy, but if someone told me she was a spry and active eighty-eight, I’d believe that too. Or ninety-eight, come to that. What she never was, was hesitant.
So now I waited while she paused for a moment. Finally she said, ‘Do you have time for a cup of tea?’
I dislike tea, but she wasn’t asking me because she thought I was thirsty. I chained up my cycle and went in. Viv’s flat was in one of the many council blocks in my neighbourhood that had been built after the war. She’d told me that her parent had been in the first intake of tenants, and she had never left. Nor did it look like she had ever redecorated, apart from a bit of fresh paint now and again. The rooms were a time capsule of 1950s style: black-and-white checked lino, Formica cabinets and all. The rest was plants, plants everywhere, on every surface, on the floor, on top of the small, squat, bulging refrigerator, on the windowsills, hanging from hooks in the ceiling.
There wasn’t a moment to look closely, however. Viv moved briskly, thought briskly, and had little patience with people who didn’t keep up, physically or mentally. I skipped along to catch up with her as she marched down the hall to the kitchen. That was the only room I’d ever seen for more than a moment, and it was probably the only room she used for anything other than sleeping or a location for more plants.
By the time I reached the doorway, just two steps behind her, she was already carrying the teapot over to the table. Cups and saucers had been laid out, and the biscuit tin was open. Whatever her hesitation earlier, she had planned to ask me in.
I sat and waited while she poured, but I didn’t bother to make conversation. She’d get to what she wanted when she was ready. It took longer than I expected. She fussed with the cups, passing me the milk and sugar even after I’d refused both, then the biscuits. Those I didn’t refuse: she was a terrific baker. Fresh figs and newly baked biscuits might be the death of me on the morning after a launch party, but it was a hell of a way to go.
Finally she gave a sniff, sat up straight and looked me in the eye for the first time since I’d arrived. This was the Viv I knew and secretly feared. ‘I don’t know what to do. I need some help,’ she said. No wonder she’d been fidgeting. I doubted those two sentences had ever passed her lips before. Viv always knew what to do, and she gave help, she didn’t ask for it, much less ‘need’ it.
‘What can I do?’ I kept my voice neutral. If she thought I felt sorry for her, she’d probably bite me.
‘A friend of mine has gone missing.’ Once she’d begun, the rest came more easily. ‘His name is Dennis Harefield. He lives upstairs, has lived there for years. I saw him last week, and he said he’d have supper here on Thursday. Everything was normal. But he didn’t come, and there was no one at home when I went up to knock. He hasn’t been home since. I’ve asked, and no one in the block has seen him.’
‘Since Thursday?’
‘Wednesday. It was earlier in the week when I asked him, but one of our neighbours saw him on Wednesday morning. No one has seen him since then.’
Only three days, but if he was in his seventies or eighties like Viv, even that short a period was worrying. ‘His memory is OK?’
Her glare would have shrivelled steel. ‘He’s in his forties.’ So not dementia, and three days wasn’t exactly a big deal. He’d forgotten Viv’s supper invitation, and was away for work, or spending a few days with friends or family. Or he’d met someone and supper with Viv had got pushed to the back of his mind.
She saw what I was thinking. ‘I rang his office – he works for the council – and spoke to a colleague. He hasn’t been in since Wednesday, but they were expecting him. He had meetings booked, and hadn’t put in for holiday leave. There’s something wrong. He didn’t stop his newspaper.’ She looked at me, eyes wide. ‘He didn’t ask me to water his plants.’
I could see this was the clincher for her, but, ‘There could have been a family emergency.’
‘He doesn’t have any family.’
‘An emergency with a friend, then.’ I wasn’t going to suggest that he’d met someone and was shacked up.
Viv shook her head stubbornly. She looked like a bulldog, small but scrappy, and not ready to give an inch. ‘I’ve known him for years. In all that time, he’s never forgotten to do something he’d said he’d do. If he said he was coming to supper and he couldn’t, he would have phoned or texted. He never forgets anything.’
Not sex-brain amnesia.
‘I thought he might have collapsed, so I asked his next-door neighbours to look in through his windows – you can see his sitting room from the balcony they share.’ She was speaking more quickly, and I suspected it had been a bit more creative than that.
‘What did they see?’
‘Nothing. If he’s in the flat, he’s not in the sitting room. And if he’s in the flat, I would have heard him. His flat is directly above this one. I can hear him when he’s home, or coming and going. I haven’t heard anything since Wednesday night.’
‘Did you try the hospitals?’
She was scornful. ‘Of course I did. First thing. No one with his name in any of the hospitals in the phone book.’ Only Viv would still have a phone book. I tried to remember when I’d last owned one, and so I missed the next part. ‘… the shelters, too, in case he collapsed with no identification, but they don’t take people’s names.’
‘You’ve spoken to the police.’ This time I was careful not to make it a question, but when Viv looked as though she were sucking lemons, I continued for her. ‘You did, and they told you there’s nothing they can do, a grown man can take off without—’ I waved my hand dismissively.
Her lips thinned. ‘I’m an old woman fussing over nothing.’
‘The local nick said that? To you?’ It wasn’t tactful, but I couldn’t imagine either that they thought that, or, more especially, that they’d been stupid enough to say it to her face.
She gave a small, tight smile, satisfied that her worth was realised, even as she was annoyed. ‘No, the locals don’t think that, but Missing Persons is centralised. I spoke to someone in a call centre. They’ve logged it, since it was more than seventy-two hours since he was last seen, but they aren’t going to do anything apart from checking the hospitals, which I’ve done anyway. Which is why –’ she gathered herself ‘– which is why I wanted to speak to you.’
‘Me?’ What could I do? Surreptitiously I looked down at my shirt. Nope. Not my day to wear the Superman ‘S’.
‘We need to go and look around his flat. See if he packed a bag, or if there are any messages on his landline.’
I wasn’t too sure I wanted to be part of snooping on someone I’d never even met. ‘I don’t know about listening to his messages, but when you go up to water his plants while he’s away, you can at least see if anything looks odd.’
‘Oh, I don’t have his keys. I’ve never been into his flat. He may not—’ She broke off, unsure if she should say something as unpleasant as the thought she’d just had. I leant forward. ‘He may not even have any plants.’
I hoped my wide eyes would be understood as shock at such an enormity, not an attempt to stifle a hysterical giggle. I concentrated on the main point. ‘If you don’t have his keys, then who does?’
‘No one. That’s why I need your help. You can easily climb onto his balcony from the neighbours’. His bedroom window is slightly open. If we push a stepladder across from one balcony to the next, you’ll be able to climb in with no problem.’
She said it in the tone she used to tell me on other weekends that the seedlings she was sending to Mr Rudiger needed to be watered every day.
It is not often, my friends will agree, that I’m rendered completely speechless, but I was then. I tried again, but no, I still had no idea how to respond. Finally, I said, ‘A stepladder.’ Don’t ask me. I don’t know why that was the detail I latched onto. It just was.
Viv looked embarrassed. ‘I don’t think I’m tall enough, even with the ladder.’ Not, I’m too old to be climbing over a balcony railing, you note. Or even, Maybe, just maybe, I shouldn’t be contemplating breaking into someone’s flat. Nope. Her concern was her height.
I nodded as though that made perfect sense. I thought that shrieking, ‘Holy shit, woman, you want me to break into someone’s flat?’ might tip her off that I disapproved.
She got over her embarrassment at her lack of inches, and continued: ‘It’s the only way to find out where he might have gone, and if he’s all right.’
I didn’t respond, because I still couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Someone needs to,’ she added, as if it were a given. As though it had been handed down to Moses on a tablet of stone. Right after the Ten Commandments, Commandment Eleven said: Thou shalt illegally enter thy neighbour’s flat whenever he’s been gone longer than you think appropriate.
I began to shake my head, no, and found I couldn’t stop. No, no, no. I pushed myself away from the table. ‘I can’t. It’s wrong. I’m sorry. Really sorry. But I can’t.’
I knew that if I stayed she’d persuade me. So I ran.
I went to the market on automatic pilot. I know I went, and I know I bought things, because when I got home, I had food in my cycle panniers, and it is rare in north London that the food fairy descends, waves a stalk of purple-sprouting broccoli and poof, your cupboards are full. But I don’t remember any of it, which became evident when I unpacked the bags back at the flat. No milk, no eggs, no bread, but a fine collection of disparate items that looked as if they’d been chosen to illustrate a children’s alphabet chart rather than provide a week’s supply of suppers: one apple, two bags of beans, three carrots.
I was standing staring accusingly at the food, as though it were its fault, when my phone rang. I looked at the display: Helena.
‘Morning, Mother.’
‘Good morning, darling. I forgot to mention when we last spoke that I’m having a party next Saturday. Drinks and lunch, in the garden if the weather holds.’
I made an indeterminate noise. Helena’s friends are lovely people – Helena is a lovely person. It’s just that she’s exhausting to be with, or even sometimes to think about. She’s a partner in a commercial law firm and works long hours – she’s at her desk every morning by seven, and she rarely puts in less than a twelve-hour day. Yet she still finds time to socialise. She sees friends, she goes to theatre and museums, goes to dinner parties, has dinner parties and, as this call showed, also lunch parties.
By contrast, I’m not much for parties of any sort. Had I not seen photographs of what was indubitably a small, cross, unsocialised baby-me in hospital after Helena had given birth, I would assume I was adopted. While making bright chat to the movers and shakers of the professional world – because those are the people Helena knows, doctors, and lawyers, and Indian chiefs – is pleasant in theory, it’s hard work for me in practice. I don’t really do groups. Or even two or three people. Sometimes one is a burden. But there was no point in refusing this invitation. Unless I could come up with a good reason – a lunch I’d already agreed to, or theatre tickets I’d already bought, or the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse scheduled in for an enjoyable afternoon of war, famine, pestilence and death – I wasn’t going to get out of it. ‘I’ll check my diary. It’s in the other room,’ I offered feebly, knowing full well that Helena knew full well that I was on my mobile, and could walk the fourteen steps to that faraway ‘other room’ while we were speaking.
She didn’t lower herself to point out the obvious. ‘Splendid. I’ll expect you and Jake unless you have a conflict.’
Fabulous.
Given my morning, I decided I might as well round it off by letting Mr Rudiger know I didn’t have whatever it was Viv had been going to send over, because I’d freaked out when she suggested the odd spot of breaking and entering. As I walked up the stairs, I thought what I’d do if one of my neighbours vanished without warning. Kay and Anthony were in their thirties, and if they disappeared there was no doubt the police would respond the same way they had with Dennis Whoever. Because they lived directly above me, the way Viv’s friend did above her, I could tell when they were home too, and which room they were in by their footsteps. If the three of them suddenly weren’t there, if they hadn’t mentioned they were going away and we’d made plans for dinner? I had never met their families, didn’t know what part of the country they came from. Searching for people named Lewis, no location, no first names, wasn’t feasible. But I had their keys. Going up to check would be no different from Kay bringing Bim through my flat so he could play in my garden when I was out, or me going up to borrow eggs or milk if I ran out when she wasn’t in, both routine occurrences.
If Mr Rudiger went missing, on the other hand, I’d be deeply concerned after three minutes, never mind three days. If he didn’t answer his door, I’d worry he’d fallen, or had a stroke, and I’d try and get in touch with his daughter. Petra Rudiger wasn’t a common name in London, so I had a fair chance of finding her if the police refused to take it seriously, although I suspected they’d be more concerned about the disappearance of a seventy-something agoraphobe than a forty-something-year-old in full employment. If they did nothing, though? I paused on the stairs. If they did nothing and a window was open at the front, yes, I’d ask our next-door neighbour to give me access to their roof terrace and I’d climb over to Mr Rudiger’s. I wouldn’t think twice.
I turned around and went downstairs to get my cycle out again.
CHAPTER TWO
ON THE WAY back to Viv, I consoled myself: Viv was a busy woman, rarely at home; it wasn’t likely she’d be sitting around waiting for me to come back. But I never had that kind of luck. It was as if she had followed my thought processes, and knew that I would return, and, to the second, when. I had barely knocked before the door opened and Viv came out, already equipped with the stepladder. ‘The backstairs,’ was all she said as she set off towards the rear of the building, me scuttling along behind her like a remorseful child.
Viv had been slightly economical when she described the neighbours looking through Harefield’s sitting room window from their balcony. They could only have done that by climbing over the railing that separated the single balcony into two. Viv had briefed them today, too, because their door swung open at Viv’s knock. She didn’t trouble to introduce me to the couple who stood there, just marched through their flat and out to their balcony with nothing more than a ‘Lovely day’ thrown over her shoulder. For breaking and entering? I felt like asking, but didn’t, being far too cowed. I also didn’t ask why, if they were all agreed that this was the right thing to do, the neighbours, both taller than me (and, truthfully, while I was taller than Viv, almost everyone else is taller than me), couldn’t have done it. Maybe it was against their tenancy agreement: No pets, no ball games in public areas, no B&E.
Viv was right about one thing. If you had access to the connecting balcony, it wasn’t difficult for anyone over five feet tall to reach the next flat. I hit the qualifying height with a few inches to spare, and slid across without a hitch, unfortunately. The neighbours, still silent, passed the ladder over to me, and with that I had no trouble reaching the open bedroom window next to the sitting room, pushing it wide. I left the ladder by the door to the sitting room. I might break and enter to get in, but there was no reason not to leave by the front door.
As I sat on the windowsill, Viv stood on the neighbours’ terrace like a staff sergeant giving me my marching orders: ‘You might not be able to tell if he packed any clothes, but see if his toothbrush is there. And check the fridge. Did he empty it out, or are there any perishables?’
If she was going to play detective, she could be part of the illegal section of the day’s activities too. ‘I’ll open the front door. You can come in that way.’ And I slid inside without waiting for her reply.
I didn’t stop to look around, but even walking straight through, by the time I reached the front door, Viv was there already. So were the neighbours, but she wasn’t having any of that. This was her moment. ‘Thank you,’ she said, regal as the queen, dismissing them without any other words.
And by God, it worked. The man looked like he wanted to protest, but his wife was smart enough not to question Viv. She stepped back right away, towing her husband away behind her before closing their door firmly, leaving us felons on the other side.
‘You take the bedroom,’ said Viv. ‘I’ll look around the sitting room.’ I didn’t know quite what she expected to find – a hand-drawn pirate map with an ‘x’ marking the missing neighbour? But I didn’t protest, and meekly headed to the bedroom. I didn’t want to be there, and the faster I looked around, the faster I could get out.
I stuck my head into the bathroom first: towels on the floor, toothpaste spit and beard-bristles in the sink. Toothbrush and toothpaste in a glass on the counter. I opened the medicine cabinet. If he’d packed to go away, I couldn’t tell. There didn’t appear to be gaps where things had been removed. There was a cellophane packet of disposable razors on a shelf, so if he’d taken one, I’d never know. And he might have a travel toothbrush if he went away with any regularity. The towels and the soap were dry, so either he hadn’t been back since he was last seen, or he hadn’t washed. We could put up a notice: Missing, One slightly smelly council employee.
I returned to the bedroom, which was no tidier. The bed was unmade, piles of clothes were thrown over the single chair, and more spilt onto the floor. I checked his cupboard. More clothes on the floor of it, as well as on hangers. There wasn’t a clutch of empty hangers to suggest that some items had been taken for packing, but there was no way of telling for sure. I toed the clothes on the floor to see if there was a suitcase or bag of some sort behind them, but there was nothing. Nor was there anything on the top of the cupboard. Again, he might have taken the bag, or the bag might not exist. I checked the bedside tables. One was empty, the other had a heap of odds and ends on it: dirty tissues, a pair of reading glasses, a part-filled glass. I sniffed at it. Water. Under it was a pile of magazines. I thought that porn had all moved online, but apparently not.
I hastily continued. The drawers beneath were empty, but whether that was because the contents were laid out above, or they’d been packed and taken with him, or whether he just didn’t keep anything in them, I had no idea. At any rate, no itineraries, diaries, notes with names of places or hotels or travel plans. I swept my hand across the bottom of the first drawer. Dust, which suggested he didn’t put anything in them.
I turned in a circle, but there was nothing else in the room. No chest of drawers, no other furniture. I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. If there wasn’t a bag in the cupboard, he might keep his suitcases there. The blankets and sheets thrown back made a little dark tent underneath, and I reached into my pocket for my phone, which had a handy-dandy torchlight app that my life as an editor had never provided me with an opportunity to use thus far. It gave little more light, but made me feel as if I knew what I was doing. I squinted in the gloom. There was no visible road atlas, no envelope of bus or train tickets, no pad with a list headed ‘Leave for Acapulco tomorrow’ that I could see on the side near me, but the weak torchlight beam barely lit half a metre around. I needed to check the far side to see if there were more than dust bunnies and dirty socks there. I was just disentangling myself from the hanging sheets when a phone rang behind me. In my jittery breaking-and-entering condition I jumped and hit my head on the slats of the bedframe above.
I forgot I was nervous and in a place I wasn’t supposed to be. ‘Shit!’ I shouted. That hurt.
The ringing phone was under the pile of clothes on the chair. I started to look through them as Viv bustled through from the sitting room, glaring. ‘Language!’
I was damned if I was going to apologise. At her urging, I was in a place I didn’t want to be, doing something I didn’t want to do, in the course of which I’d hurt myself. That was worth a ‘Shit!’, and if she didn’t like it she could find someone who didn’t swear when they hit their head. I wasn’t planning on saying any of that to Viv. I’d hit my head, I hadn’t lost my mind.
Instead I said, ‘There’s a phone here, in the pocket of a pair of trousers. I didn’t get to it before it stopped ringing, so I didn’t see who was calling. They didn’t leave a message.’ Viv took it out of my hand: anything worth looking over was, the gesture said, her job. I left her scrolling through his contacts, and dug around on the floor for my own phone, which I’d dropped when the one on the chair rang.
Once I had it in my hand I gave up. There was nothing to be found in the bedroom. ‘Did you look in the kitchen?’ I asked.
Still scrolling, she shook her head. That ‘shit’ had seriously put me in the doghouse. I didn’t care, I just wanted to be out. I checked the fridge, as ordered. There was nothing in it apart from a six-pack of beer. The freezer had a lone bottle of vodka and an ice tray. I opened the two cupboards that were all the tiny galley space contained. Four plates, four bowls, four glasses, four mugs. Cutlery in a drawer. A jar of Nescafé. No food. The bin explained that: at least half a dozen empty silver-foil containers, and a couple of bags with logos of Indian restaurants. The emptiness of the fridge didn’t indicate he had gone away, it indicated that he didn’t cook.
Viv stood in the doorway. ‘We’re finished here,’ she said. The words every trespasser wants to hear, so I was right behind her.
Once back in her flat, we went straight to her kitchen, and Viv had the kettle on in an automatic gesture: you were in the kitchen, you made tea. I told her what I’d found, or not found. There was not only no food, there had been no plants anywhere in the flat, so she seemed to be reassessing her friend’s character.
‘Nothing looked out of place in the sitting room, either,’ she said. ‘If he had a computer, it was a laptop, and it wasn’t there. I didn’t see a case for it, or a charger, so either he took it with him, or maybe he just used his work computer for everything.’ Viv had missed her calling. The CID should have snapped her up long ago. ‘There was a phone charger, and it fitted the phone you found.’ She looked approvingly at me, as if finding a ringing phone a metre away from me was on a par with winning a Nobel Prize.
‘Did you find anything on his phone?’
‘No messages. The texts were all sent before Wednesday, and none of the ones coming in since indicated they knew where he was, or that the senders thought he’d gone away, apart from one from a work colleague, it looked like, reminding him of a meeting he was missing.
‘His contacts are there, but we can’t ring each one, can we?’ For a moment she looked like she wished we could. ‘There was one labelled “Mum”, but …’
She trailed off and I picked up, ‘But you can’t ring a strange woman and say her son is missing, and he left his phone behind …’ and you got her number by prowling uninvited through his flat, I added silently.
She acknowledged the spoken part. ‘There wasn’t much in his desk,’ she went on. ‘Mostly to do with the boys’ club he runs. And his spare keys.’ She jingled a ring of keys at me.
‘His keys.’ I’d thought we were breaking and entering, but Viv had decided to up the stakes and move on to burglary.
‘I’ll keep the keys.’ I must have looked blank, because she became defensive. ‘It will be easier when one of us goes back for his post.’
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 anempty 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.
