A Cast of Vultures (5 page)

This was background affection and admiration. When she sat down I just said, ‘We need to look at some editorial work for you to take on,’ and watched her beam before she scudded back to her desk to collect some papers.

When she returned, she said, ‘I was going to talk to you about that. I had a letter from personnel confirming my job change, but it’s not very clear.’

She handed it to me and I skimmed through it. It looked clear enough to me, so I just waited for her to go on.

She started and stopped a couple of times, and finally said, as though exasperated, ‘Are you still my boss? For the new part of the job?’

I looked at the letter again. ‘I see what you mean. I assumed I was, but it doesn’t actually say that, does it?’ It didn’t. She was, according to the letter of agreement, my assistant for two-thirds of her time; for the rest, she was a junior editor, acquiring new books and authors ‘under supervision’. But who the supervisor was had been left unstated.

‘Do you want to do books for someone else?’ As long
as she had the time, I couldn’t see that it mattered.

‘Wanting to is over,’ she said crossly. ‘I already am. Both David and Ben have told me that they’d like me to take on a couple of their books.’

‘Have they, by God?’ I was sour, and surprised at myself for being sour. Ten seconds before, I had thought that it didn’t matter. Now that it had happened, I found that I thought exactly the opposite. ‘Are they books you want to take on? And how many is a couple? Did they ask you if you have time?’ I thought about the two men and revised. ‘I assume they didn’t ask you, they told you.’

David Snaith is my boss, and the company’s editor-in-chief. He was, therefore, entitled to tell Miranda, not to ask her, and without speaking to me first. It wasn’t polite, but he was entitled. Ben, however, was not. He was a colleague on the same rung as I was, and unless Miranda had been made a group junior editor – I looked at the letter from personnel again – she didn’t work for him, or at least she didn’t without the work being siphoned through me.

She flushed. ‘Yes, they told me. And yes, they’re interesting books. Ben’s more so than David’s.’

‘What does Ben want you to do?’ I tried to keep the acid out of my voice, but Ben and I were not, shall we say, soulmates, and I think my tone when I mention his name could normally curdle milk. He was twenty-six, and he treated his job like it was the finals of an Olympic 100 metres – only one person could win.

My opinion of him was not a secret, so Miranda looked contrite at the enthusiasm she was so obviously feeling. ‘It really does sound like fun. It’s a memoir, by a guy who was in a gang, then in prison. The manuscript has just been
delivered, and Ben wants me to edit it.’ She looked at me wistfully.

Who was I to say no to a book that interested her, a book its editor wanted to hand on? ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll talk to personnel, and to David, about lines of reporting. I’m happy for you to take on other editors’ books, but I’m going to remind everyone they have to come through me, so that you’re not inundated. Otherwise it will be too easy for everyone to hand over “just one thing”, and then you’ll have more work than you can get through in a year. Or’ – I scowled ferociously at her – ‘or it means you won’t have time to do my books, and even worse, my admin.’ I must be one of those bosses everyone is terrified to cross, because she giggled.

After that, the day got away from me. In lots of jobs, you never see an end result, or you never see your contribution to an end result. In mine, you do. Once you’ve negotiated a contract, or edited a manuscript, or briefed a jacket, you can see you’ve done something. At least, you can when it goes well. Today was not going to be one of those days. Even lunch, a meeting with an author I had published in the past, and who I liked very much, made me feel like I was chasing my tail. She was having trouble finding a subject for her next book. I had no bright ideas either, so while I think by the time she left she probably felt better for talking it out, I didn’t.

On my way back to my desk I paused in the open-plan area. One of the great things about working in a publishing office is that you can ask the strangest questions, and everyone assumes it’s to do with a book. I wandered over to the editorial assistants’ desks. If they’d been told a car was burning down
the road, I asked, would they go and watch? Not only would they not, I discovered, but the very notion made them laugh the way I’d laughed when Jake suggested it. So I asked the people who were standing by the coffee-machine in the kitchen. Two laughed, three said of course they would go and watch. Jake was right, it was a gender split: the laugh-ers were women, the of-course-I’d-watch-ers were men.

Even though I’d just had lunch, I checked out the table where people returning from holiday left a communal treats ‘ITUP’ – in the usual place. One of my colleagues must have been to the eastern Mediterranean. Baklava. The day was improving.

And then it wasn’t. When I got back to my desk, brushing away filo crumbs, I found an email to the entire company from Olive, our publishing director. I’m told by friends who work in other fields that ‘publishing director’ sounds like one of those job titles you get when you’re middle management, with layers of bosses above you. But in the book world, it’s about as high as you can get, unless you work for a conglomerate, when CIA-sounding three-letter acronyms start to appear: CEO, CFO, COO. I’d want to be the last one, because I’d force everyone to pronounce it as a word – Coo! But I’m not the boss, and Timmins & Ross is not a conglomerate. We’re owned by a small number of investors, some of whom are the descendants of Mr Timmins and Mrs Ross, and mostly they leave Olive to run the company without a Fortune 500-sounding job title. Which she has done very efficiently since she was appointed nearly ten years ago. Despite this, office gossip had reached a pitch and velocity remarkable even in such a gossipy industry, once it became known that
Olive had been having early-morning meetings that were so private she wasn’t even telling her secretary whom she was meeting. Whom she was meeting, and what they had been discussing, were the million-dollar questions. The answer, we feared, was that a takeover was in the offing.

Now an email was asking the entire staff to be in the big meeting room on Thursday morning at ten. I had worked at T&R for half a dozen years, and I couldn’t remember a company-wide meeting being called. I would definitely have remembered, because the big meeting room wasn’t very big. Our office was three converted eighteenth-century houses rabbit-warrened together by passageways that had steps occurring at random intervals. The big meeting room on the ground floor had probably once been a grand reception room. There was a conference table there, which seated twenty, twenty-five with a push. I assumed our warehouse staff, who were based outside London, wouldn’t be coming. Even so, there were eighty-five people in the London office, and eighty-five people in the big meeting room was going to make it worse than the centre of Edinburgh at New Year. Except that we’d be sober. Or was ten in the morning too early to start drinking? A company-wide meeting suggested otherwise.

And on that happy thought, I decided to head home. On the tube I stood, squashed into a corner and without enough space to take out a book. It didn’t matter. My thoughts moved between lunch with my author, and how I could have done that better, and forebodings about tomorrow’s meeting.

At the station before mine, a passenger kneecapped me with her shopping bag as she fought her way to the door,
which made me focus on more mundane matters. Namely, we barely had anything to eat at home. Jake had said he’d be back at more or less a normal time, and because of my distracted trip to the market on Saturday, I wasn’t sure I had enough to put together a meal. There were half a dozen portions of chilli in the freezer, and probably another half-dozen of stew. (What can I say? I grew up in North America, and keeping the freezer stocked is as close as I come to religious observance.) I could stop at the station café and get a couple of salad-ey things to go with one of those. That would cover us.

A station café is not normally a place I’d think of doing food shopping, but about a year ago I noticed a sign in the window:
Daily Specials
. And behind it was always some sort of salad. Once, pressed for time, I’d tried one. It was good, and since I walked past the café every day, I’d got into the habit of picking something up when fresh food ran low.

Mo was behind the counter. She’d been there at seven-thirty when I went in to work; it was after six now.

‘Long day,’ I said.

She looked as if it was just one more in a long line of long days, but she waved it off. ‘I took a few hours after the lunch rush.’ She was packing up a green bean and tomato salad neatly, which is easier said than done – green beans are slippy little buggers.

‘It looks like I got here just in time.’ I nodded to the salad dish, which she was scraping to get the last pieces for my order.

‘They’ve done much better than I expected.’

‘They were your idea? Because I’ve got to say, they’re terrific.’

For the first time, her smile spread to her eyes. ‘Thanks. Yes, they were my idea. They’re mine. That is, Steve grows the veg, and I make the salads.’

‘Grows the veg? Where?’

‘That patch out the front of the house, and window boxes. We’re on the waiting list for a council allotment, and we thought that next year we might get one, but now, who knows where we’ll be living?’

They produced enough veg to feed six people, and still have enough to sell, from window boxes and a front space so small it was barely bigger than a window box itself?

‘I need to introduce you to my neighbour. And to Viv, in Chantry Close. They both grow fruit and veg in window boxes too, and on a terrace.’ Mo nodded in recognition when I mentioned Viv. That wasn’t surprising. Knowing everyone, and everything, was the air Viv breathed. And if Steve was a keen gardener, even if he had almost no space, it was a given. ‘Wait, I’ve just thought. I have a front garden – not big, but bigger than a window box. Would Steve like to use it? It’s planted with bushes, because I don’t do anything with it.’ I know I’m supposed to love gardening, it’s the national obsession, but to me it’s like making your bed: you do it, then you go to sleep and have to do it again the next day. Except gardening is worse. If it’s not watering, it’s mulching, or weeding, or pruning, or dead-heading, or any of the other ninety-seven things gardens require. I was always looking for new ways of not-gardening. ‘We could trade. If he keeps me in salad, or cauliflower, or whatever, he can have the rest.’

Mo put her hand to her mouth and her eyes teared.

‘Mo? You’re supposed to cry when you peel onions. Not when you talk about them.’

That brought a smile. ‘Everyone is being so kind, and it’s not like we really live here.’

‘Of course you live here. And I’d be getting a great deal: someone would look after my garden, and I’d get all the broccoli I could eat.’

She pushed the salad box she’d packed over the counter and waved off payment. I wrote down my number again, and told her to get Steve to call. He could come and look at the garden and tell me if he thought the idea would work.

I was buzzing with the brilliance of this scheme when Jake got home, and as we sat down to dinner I began to expand on the possibilities. I’d been building, if not castles in the air, at least an elaborate greenhouse in my front garden, and it took me a while to realise that Jake was not only not contributing, he wasn’t eating, either. Instead he was looking at me as if I’d started to speak in tongues.

I stopped abruptly. ‘What?’

He chose his words carefully, which he did when he was very angry. ‘Did you miss the part earlier where I told you that your friends the squatters had drug dealing going on in their house?’

I stiffened. ‘Yes, I think I did miss that part. Because what I heard you say was they’d allowed their shed to be used by a youth worker. A youth worker who, if he was working with minors, had to have passed a criminal records check. So I heard the part where you implicitly told me he’d been approved by the police. I entirely missed the part where there were drug deals being made in the house belonging to “my” friends.’ I let my voice
make the quotation marks for him and stared him down.

He broke first, pushing his hand through his hair, frustrated. ‘You don’t know these people,’ he said finally. ‘You don’t even know their last names. A drug dealer and arsonist was operating out of their front garden. And now you plan to give them the run of your house?’

He had a point. Not a good one, but a point, so I tried to match his care in my answer. ‘I agree, having a drug dealer operate in your front garden is not a good sign. But we don’t know that they had any awareness of it – after all, the council who employed him, and the police, thought he was OK. I don’t think, therefore, that we can hold the house’s residents responsible for his criminal acts. As a separate issue, I agree, I don’t know Steve’s last name, but I can find it out.’

Jake threw up his hands and flung himself back in his seat.

I didn’t wait for him to say anything. ‘I’m not giving Steve the run of my flat. There’s a tap outside, and there’s no reason for him to come into the house. But I will add, there’s never been a problem before.’

Jake had loosened up when I said there was no need for Steve to come inside, but I’d blown it to hell with that last sentence. ‘Before? Why was he here before?’

‘I told you, and so did the woman in the street yesterday after the fire. Mike’s the local electrician, and he does some plumbing too. He’s probably worked for everyone in the neighbourhood. Steve does odd jobs.’ I gestured outside. ‘He cuts the ivy back when it needs it.’

Jake had his don’t-mess-with-me-matey police mask firmly on. ‘You use a cowboy trader, with no fixed address?
Someone whose skills you know nothing about? To do something as dangerous as wiring?’

I was not going to lose my temper. I was not going to lose my temper. I repeated it twice, to make sure I knew. And I was proud I managed to keep my voice level. ‘He does have a fixed address. He works from that house. And he’s not a cowboy. He’s qualified. And, what’s more, he pays his taxes: he never does work without receipts.’ I was calm, but I didn’t mind playing dirty: Jake’s car mechanic of choice insisted on cash payments.