A Cast of Vultures Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 knowwhy 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 theirgarden on summer weekends. Compared to those last ones, the squatters were model neighbours.
    From a distance, the house didn’t look too terrible. The white-stuccoed front had black streaks across it, like mascara the morning after the night before. The wooden boards that had covered the ground-floor windows for so many years were gone, presumably ripped away by the fire department, and the windows behind had no glass in them. Then we turned the corner and I sucked in my breath. I realised then that, just as I had never smelt wet soot, so I had never actually seen the after-effects of a fire. Like most people, any fires I’d seen had been on television or film, and in a twisted way my brain had never grasped that it had not experienced the reality. The reality was a wall that was almost entirely a single huge scorch mark. The reality was that you could see the sky through the first-floor windows, since the roof had caved in, and only a few