A Cast of Vultures (17 page)

‘She’s not here.’ He wasn’t whispering, but he pitched his voice low.

‘If she fell, she wouldn’t have been able to run. Try the railings,’ came the reply I didn’t want to hear.

The light began to play along the underside of the walkway. It wouldn’t take long. It didn’t. The beam of light found me. Pinned me.

‘She’s there. No way up for her. No way down.’ No shit.

I heard Sprained Ankle move above me, and then his
shadow on the grass returned as he leant out to look down. The lift-door light flashed out and Baldy got back in. I felt the vibration behind me as he returned to the top, and then the two voices arguing. If I could get over the railings and onto the support pole, so could Sprained Ankle, said Baldy. He was in charge, but Sprained Ankle was putting up a good fight. He might fall and break his neck, was his main complaint. A girl can always dream, but I had to agree with Baldy. If I could do it, so could someone else, and Sprained Ankle was in much better shape than me.

I looked up at the struts again. The second one, the one I hadn’t been on, was hidden at its far end by branches from the surrounding trees. Branches wouldn’t keep me hidden for long, but even that amount of cover might make me feel less like a sitting duck. If Sprained Ankle came down the strut I’d been on, he’d be able to kick at me from above. If I was at the far end of the second strut, I’d be somewhat hidden, and above him I could be the kicker rather than the kicked. On the other hand, if I crawled up there, I would lose the support of the lift-shaft wall. I’d be back to koala-clinging mode, which was not one I had planned to repeat.

Not planned to repeat until I heard Sprained Ankle say, ‘Fuck it, just go down and shoot the bitch.’

Plans change.

A
S WITH MY
abrupt descent down the first strut, my ascent up its neighbour was done without conscious thought or volition. In case this ever comes in handy, I can tell you that ‘Shoot the bitch’ is a phrase that makes hazardous physical activity seem like a catnap in the sun. I’d shinned my way up and was pulling the branches around me before I was even aware I was on the move.

And also before I heard Baldy’s reply, which, once I was in place, my brain processed for me: ‘It’s supposed to look like an accident, you fuckwit.’

‘So shoot around her. Scare her into falling.’

I scrabbled with my feet, pushing myself higher up the strut, further into the branches of the tree. I wasn’t sure if that was smart or not – if they couldn’t see me, they might shoot me even if they weren’t aiming at me – but just as closing your eyes when something frightening happens is a natural response, so, I found, is hiding in trees when men
argue the merits of shooting you, or shooting at you.

I pressed my mouth closed, determined not to make a sound. And then, if I’d had a hand that wasn’t clinging onto metal and branches for dear life, I would have slapped it against my forehead. Not make a sound? That had been the right thing to do when they didn’t know where I was, but there was no advantage to it now. Now I needed someone to hear me. So I screamed. And screamed. And then, for a change of pace, I screamed some more.

Two things happened. Screaming released my tamped-down fear, and I became hysterical. And it gave me a sore throat. Nothing else. No one appeared astride a white charger, looking for a stray damsel in distress to fill their monthly rescue quota. Even so, I went on screaming long after it became clear that it wasn’t going to help, just because I couldn’t stop.

And then, suddenly, I did. I stopped, and listened, and heard – nothing. If the two men were still there, they were being entirely silent. I waited. Still nothing. It had become dark enough that, in the shade of the tree, I could no longer see my watch, so I counted off what I thought was about five minutes in my head. I did it again. Still nothing.

I tried shouting some more, telling myself that this was shouting now, not screaming, that this wasn’t panic, that it was part of my plan. My plan was – I scrabbled around – my plan was to shout intermittently for a while, and listen out for the men for the rest of the time. It wasn’t the best plan I’d ever heard of. It didn’t seem to have much purpose, but it was the only one that I could come up with. After a while, I decided to try and count out an hour. If the men were waiting at the base of the pole, I’d hear them sooner or later: they didn’t strike me as being very good at their
jobs, more like they’d been rented from the Thugs ‘R’ Us bargain basement. I didn’t believe that they could wait in silence for an hour.

I had barely counted out a minute before I heard them, first back on the walkway, then on the ground. My shouting had had the single result of letting them know that no one was in earshot. Their voices raised, they continued their argument about getting onto the strut from above. Baldy finally conceded that it was only possible for those in a state of blind panic, or possibly just those who were totally nuts. The need to have my death – they discussed my death as if it had no more importance than getting caught in rush-hour traffic – the need to have it look accidental was apparently paramount, and now they could no longer see me, Sprained Ankle agreed that they couldn’t risk shooting around me, for fear of hitting me. Instead, they tried climbing the pole (a failure), and then the tree among whose branches I was hiding (also a failure, although a longer, slower, less absolute, and therefore on my part a more nerve-racking failure). They debated the location of ladders, and vanished, presumably to search for one.

I kept watch for the torch that would mark their return. Because they might come from a direction behind the tree, where I wouldn’t be able to see the light, I kept a hand on the largest branch, hoping that I would feel the vibrations as they set a ladder against the trunk, or started to climb. I didn’t know what I would do if that happened, but I wanted to have a head start on whatever it was going to be.

I pushed myself more firmly into the crook of the strut, jamming my feet against the metal. I thanked the good lord that I hadn’t been a better person, and had been too lazy to
change my clothes and put on a dress to meet Jake’s friends. If I’d been wearing a dress, I’d have been wearing shoes with a heel, instead of the rubber-soled flats I had on. Next time Helena bemoaned my lack of interest in fashion, I’d explain that I was keeping things pared down to maximise emergency tree-and-strut-climbing needs.

I had time to think that through. Hell, I had time to recite the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, had it still existed in this age of Wikipedia. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. Had they given up and left? Were they going elsewhere for a ladder, and they’d be back? If I knew that an hour had passed, or two, or three, then I could have made guesses. But I couldn’t see my watch, and I’d long lost count in my attempt to measure out an hour. Perhaps it just felt like an hour, and they had been gone less than a quarter of an hour? It was possible. The whole episode, from the moment I’d bumped into Sprained Ankle, seemed to have flashed by in seconds, and yet also to have taken hours to unfold.

I began to count again, but kept getting sidetracked by thoughts of ladders, or guns, and losing my place. I started to shiver. Excess adrenaline, I informed myself, based on extensive first-hand knowledge of crime fiction. But it wasn’t just internal. My clothes were clammy with sweat from the climb, and were clinging damply to my cooling body as I sat unmoving.

No one returned, as far as I could tell: no lights, no voices. There were no vibrations to suggest climbing. I sat and shivered and clung to my perch. I didn’t really have any choice. The two men had failed to climb the tree because it had no branches for the first five metres or so from the
ground. I had been pleased when I heard them say that, as it prevented them from getting up. It also now prevented me from getting down. The pole by the lift was worse, a full eight metres without a handhold.

Small sounds filled the air. Night birds. Rustling in the grass, which at various points I attributed to the wind, to animals, and to my two attackers. I sat some more. I was hidden, I was fairly well supported, and if I could hang on until the gardens reopened, I would most likely be fine. I repeated this out loud. I tried it again, replacing ‘most likely’, which was beginning to sound sarcastic, with ‘will’: I will be fine, I will be fine.

Gradually the adrenaline crash caught up with me. Fear should have kept me awake, but instead I was so tired I could barely hold my head up. I decided to make lists. Things I needed to do at home: the plant in the front hall needed watering; I still hadn’t completed my passport application; a button had come off a skirt long enough ago that the safety pin I’d been using as a temporary fix was itself in danger of falling off. I moved from there to thinking about Ben, and the conversation that we needed to have about his author. The management consultants kept me going for some time. Then for a while I sang to stay awake. I can’t carry a tune, but I didn’t think the Kew animals were in a position to complain, and if the men were nearby, they deserved to hear a ferociously off-key rendition of ‘Don’t You Feel My Leg’ (the Dirty Dozen Brass Band version).

I moved on to worrying about Sam. With Connie representing him, and Helena prodding her along, I was sure he’d be fine, but it would have been good to have spoken to him, or at least have received confirmation that
he’d been released. I thought about that prick Andrew Reilly, and Jake’s assertion that he was so nasty because he agreed with me about Harefield.

That brought me back in a circle. Once I knew that this wasn’t a random mugging, it was impossible to think that the two thugs after me had nothing to do with Harefield’s death, or at least the fact that I’d been asking questions about the man. It might have been because I’d rejected a string of jacket roughs produced by the art department’s latest wunderkind, but somehow I doubted it. I mean, it was more than likely that the designer had said he wanted to kill me. Agents too had most likely said the same. And while I liked to think that every one of my authors loved me dearly, it might be that some of them wouldn’t have been brokenhearted to hear I was dead. But kill me? Kill me as in dead, not as in that-woman-is-such-a-pain-in-the-arse kill me?

The last time someone had tried to kill me – I spent a few minutes distracted by the fact that my life had reached a place where I could formulate a sentence beginning ‘The last time someone had tried to kill me’ – the last time it had happened, a friend had been murdered. This time, no one I knew had been murdered. Dennis Harefield was dead, it was true, but I didn’t know him. And according to the police, he was a drug dealer who had died accidentally in the place he stored his drugs.

But today, with Reilly, Jake had let slip that the police agreed with my view of the situation: that Harefield’s friends and colleagues thought the notion of him dealing was absurd. If that were the case, then perhaps my idea that the drugs that had been found in the shed were not his was not so far from the truth. But that didn’t explain how
I came into the story, much less why someone wanted me dead. I tried to remember everyone I’d discussed Harefield with. I’d left a message with his colleague at the council, saying I was trying to locate him for a friend. I’d talked to Sam and Viv, but neither of them wanted to stop me: I was Viv’s garden seedlings connection, and she valued that too much to lose me. I couldn’t even think frivolously about Sam. Sam wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. Victor? Arthur? I briefly toyed with the image of Arthur haring through Kew Gardens, bent over and waving his stick, but while that was entertaining, it didn’t get any closer to answering the question. The only person I’d spoken to who seemed dangerous was Kevin Munroe. He knew I was asking questions. But he should know, too, that I didn’t know anything, and, from my cack-handed attempt to interview him, it was unlikely I ever would.

And how would he know who I was, much less where I was? I hadn’t looked behind me after I’d left the market. It was possible that he’d followed me home, and then had sicced these two men onto me. But for what? Just asking questions? If he’d followed me and investigated me enough to find out who I was, he’d also have learnt I lived with a CID detective. Surely me dying, even accidentally, would cast more suspicion on those people I’d spoken to. Much as I’d have liked to pin this on Kevin, I couldn’t work out why he’d have done something so counterproductive.

I thought about Azim, who was popping up everywhere, but that sounded even more far-fetched. Even if he was using his delivery boys to distribute drugs – and while the method was theoretically possible, there was no evidence that this was the case – and even if he thought I was
suspicious of him, as with Kevin he had no way of knowing I was going to Kew, and even more reason than Kevin to make sure I didn’t die in suspicious circumstances. That was a dead end too.

I tried from another angle. The men had said my death had to look accidental. What I knew was important enough that someone wanted me dead, but in addition, that no one should know that I had known it. I ran back through the idea, and it didn’t make much sense. But neither did someone trying to accident me to death. The word ‘accident’ took me back to the top of the pagoda. Someone had been there, and had carefully kept out of sight until Jake had left. Then they had begun moving towards me. If the children hadn’t appeared, what might have happened? Someone else, or possibly the same someone, had knocked into me on the stairs going up to the treetop walk. If I’d been a few inches taller I wouldn’t have bounced off the railing, I would have gone over it. I mentally apologised to the children I’d blamed. Soz, kids.

All the while, I tried very hard not to think about Jake. He’d been called out to a crime scene, and when that happened, he often didn’t come back to the flat, which meant no one would know I wasn’t at home. Mr Rudiger would, because he had super-hearing and kept track of the people in the house. But I hadn’t promised to go up and see him, so as far as he knew I might be at Jake’s, or out at a party. There was no reason for him to do anything, call anyone. I couldn’t see if my handbag was still on the ground where it had been tossed from the walkway, but it was likely it was there: if my death was to look like an accident, they’d want it found near me. Jake might have
texted to say he wasn’t coming home, but he wouldn’t expect a reply. If he’d gone back to his own flat, I was on my own.

I didn’t know what time Kew opened. I prayed it might be early, for pre-work joggers and dog-walkers, but imagining a British institution might set its hours for the convenience of its paying customers was delusional, a sign I’d been sitting in a tree for far too long. My head snapped against the strut: I had nearly dozed off again. I gripped more tightly, and began to sing once more. If, at some future point in time, the lyrics to ‘Waterloo Sunset’ are needed to save civilisation as we know it, or for a pub quiz tiebreak, I expect to be in heavy demand.

I was running through ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ for a second time when I heard voices. And they weren’t just talking. They were calling. It had to be Sprained Ankle and his friend, because the staff wouldn’t arrive before dawn, and even when they did start work, why would they shout? Maybe the men had lost track of which support I’d climbed? I pushed back more firmly into the leaves.

The voices faded, and then came nearer once more. I could see a torch bobbing, then more than one. There were five, no six, torch beams swinging back and forth in measured arcs. Had Baldy got some colleagues to help? And did thugs call their fellow thugs ‘colleagues’? I thunked my head on the strut. This was not the moment for editorial nit-picking. I refocused on the lights, and then thunked my head again, even if I was going to give myself concussion if I stayed there much longer. They couldn’t be Baldy’s friends, because Baldy knew where I was: up. The people holding these torches didn’t. They were searching the ground.