A Cast of Vultures Read Online Free PDF

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 an empty 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