A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders Page A

Your friends the squatters let him use their shed to store sports equipment for the boys, but the fire investigators found traces of drugs there. And when they searched his flat they found cash. A lot of cash. The kind of cash you have if you’re dealing.’
    ‘That sounds nasty.’
    ‘And nastier if he was the arsonist, which is the working theory.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Why is it the working theory, or why is it nastier?’
    ‘Neither. You said he had accelerant on his hands; I presume that’s why they think he was the arsonist. But why would a youth-worker-slash-drug-dealer be an arsonist?’
    ‘Arson’s not my area, I don’t know much about it, but arsonists tend to fall into two groups – firebugs who set fires for the hell of it, to watch things burn, or people who want to destroy a specific building for a specific reason, usually insurance. Most of the buildings in this series weren’t insured, so the latter doesn’t hold. In this case, it might be that he wanted to create distractions, to draw attention away from a deal that was going down. And since most firebugs are adolescent boys, or young men, it wouldn’t be hard for him to co-opt one of the boys in his group so that he could do whatever deals he was doing while a fire was set elsewhere.’
    ‘So he burnt down the house where he was known and stored his club’s belongings because …’ I trailed away.
    ‘It was probably an accident. He might have stored the accelerant there, and it caught when he was moving it, or adding to his stockpile.’
    Mo and Co. had offered him space to be kind, and had been burnt out of their home. No good deed goes unpunished.
     
    The fire, and the death of a drug dealer/arsonist, would normally have been a distraction at work, but when I got to my desk, with an effort I pushed it to one side. Miranda, my assistant, had recently been quasi-promoted, and I needed to sort out the admin that went with that. ‘Quasi’, because while there was no money to promote her properly, I’d managed to get a holding position carved out for her so she wouldn’t leave and find a better job elsewhere. The plan was that she’d work as my assistant three days a week, and two days a week she would be allocated a few books as a junior editor. To start that part of her job, I had asked her to read half a dozen manuscripts that I had on submission. She’d already done some reading for me, writing reports on books she thought were worth pursuing. Now, though, if she liked something, instead of me taking over from there, she’d do what I normally did: run the costings to see what we could afford to pay, then bring the manuscript to the acquisitions meeting to pitch it to our colleagues; if she got the go-ahead, she would make an offer, negotiate with the agent and get a contract finalised, meet and deal with the author, edit the manuscript, brief the art department for the jacket – in short, she would be the editor of the book, not me.
    Even if she found a potential acquisition in the pile I’d handed over, however, publishing schedules make frozen treacle look like a speeding bullet, and it would be a year or more before one of those manuscripts turned into abook. In the interim I planned to turn over some of my own books to her. I didn’t want her to have to deal with the more difficult agents, or with authors who were known to need lots of hand-holding, or with a manuscript that needed major reconstructive surgery. I wanted to ease her in slowly, although there’s no such thing as an edit with training wheels: you have to let go and balance on your own every time. Miranda would ultimately have to cope with all of those things – if she was really lucky, she’d have to cope with them all in one book. For the moment, though, I looked through my list to find half a dozen titles at various stages that she could take responsibility for. So when she called good morning as she breezed by on her way to her desk in the open-plan area outside