A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders Read Free Book Online Page A

neighbourhood, which was getting on for twenty years. If there was anything worth knowing in the area, he was the man to tell you.
    He shrugged. ‘Apart from the fire? The school up near your house was graffitied again.’
    That was a pity – or a blessing, depending on the qualityof the work – but it didn’t shake me to the core. ‘Hmm,’ I said as I scrabbled in my bag for the change which always collected at the bottom. I hoped that would be ambiguous enough to be taken as a general ‘tsk-tsk’ at the state of the world, or at least engagement with the conversation. Then that seemed rude, so I went on. ‘Do you have kids there?’
    Azim looked astonished. ‘My children have children.’
    And so we had a discussion about his grandchildren, their ages, likes, dislikes and general all-round wonderfulness, despite the fact that what I really wanted to do was ask about the empty house, but I couldn’t work out how to shift from what his youngest grandchild was expecting for her birthday to the fire. I also realised that using a superpower merely to murder tourists on the Tube, who, it was now abundantly plain, were entirely harmless, was a waste. I was going to develop a time-travel machine that would return me to an era when I hadn’t asked someone about his grandchildren.
    Finally, however, an influx of passengers off the next train saved me, as a handful appeared in the shop. I waved and slid out, moving quickly up the hill until I reached the corner of Talbot’s Road, where I slowed, just as everyone else was doing. The summer warmth had combined with the fire to drive home-loving Brits out onto the street, where they stood in groups, mingling as effortlessly as if they’d been born in Sardinia, and performed a sociable evening passeggiata every day of their lives.
    In general, apart from superficial chats with shop people, etiquette requires that you wait a decade or two before you do anything as emotionally striptease-ish as nodding to someone you recognise when you pass inthe street. Catastrophe, however, was an extenuating circumstance to the otherwise ironclad three-monkey rule – see-speak-and-hear no neighbours. Everyone accepts the rules are in abeyance if there is something really horrible to be chewed over. Fire qualified.
    Or this fire did, at any rate. Because whatever we’d been told that morning about the safety of the squatters, once the fire had been contained, and once everything that could be salvaged had been removed, a fireman had found someone who had not been accounted for. And he was dead.

C HAPTER T HREE
    A S WITH THE line in the café that morning, there was little solid information, and lots of wild speculation. Even the one fact – that a dead man had been found – turned out to be half a fact. There was a body, but he might have been a she, no one was sure. And whoever it was might have had no connection to the house – the body, word on the grapevine said, had been located in the small lean-to.
    I stood at the edge of the group, listening for a while, and then pulled out my phone. Jake had said he might be working late, which would mean I didn’t expect to see him before I went to sleep. Most evenings he came to my flat, but sometimes he went back to his place instead. It depended on where work had taken him, and how he was feeling. If a case was particularly ugly, he might go back to Hammersmith. Sometimes because he’d gone to the pub with his colleagues, to decompress with people who felt the same, but mostly, I think, because he didn’t want to talk.
    He knew I didn’t expect to hear details of the cases he was working on, but even so, the not-talking was an issue for us, one that, naturally, we didn’t talk about. That every job had confidential aspects, I understood. I wouldn’t discuss an advance I was offering for a book, either. But more than the not-talking about particular cases, there was the reality that Jake spent his working life dealing with death. He