A Cast of Vultures Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 hadbeen 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 thousandsof 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