Read Online A Cast of Vultures by Judith Flanders - Free Book Online

his name could normally curdle milk. He was twenty-six, and he treated his job like it was the finals of an Olympic 100 metres – only one person could win.
    My opinion of him was not a secret, so Miranda looked contrite at the enthusiasm she was so obviously feeling. ‘It really does sound like fun. It’s a memoir, by a guy who was in a gang, then in prison. The manuscript has just beendelivered, and Ben wants me to edit it.’ She looked at me wistfully.
    Who was I to say no to a book that interested her, a book its editor wanted to hand on? ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll talk to personnel, and to David, about lines of reporting. I’m happy for you to take on other editors’ books, but I’m going to remind everyone they have to come through me, so that you’re not inundated. Otherwise it will be too easy for everyone to hand over “just one thing”, and then you’ll have more work than you can get through in a year. Or’ – I scowled ferociously at her – ‘or it means you won’t have time to do my books, and even worse, my admin.’ I must be one of those bosses everyone is terrified to cross, because she giggled.
    After that, the day got away from me. In lots of jobs, you never see an end result, or you never see your contribution to an end result. In mine, you do. Once you’ve negotiated a contract, or edited a manuscript, or briefed a jacket, you can see you’ve done something. At least, you can when it goes well. Today was not going to be one of those days. Even lunch, a meeting with an author I had published in the past, and who I liked very much, made me feel like I was chasing my tail. She was having trouble finding a subject for her next book. I had no bright ideas either, so while I think by the time she left she probably felt better for talking it out, I didn’t.
    On my way back to my desk I paused in the open-plan area. One of the great things about working in a publishing office is that you can ask the strangest questions, and everyone assumes it’s to do with a book. I wandered over to the editorial assistants’ desks. If they’d been told a car was burning downthe road, I asked, would they go and watch? Not only would they not, I discovered, but the very notion made them laugh the way I’d laughed when Jake suggested it. So I asked the people who were standing by the coffee-machine in the kitchen. Two laughed, three said of course they would go and watch. Jake was right, it was a gender split: the laugh-ers were women, the of-course-I’d-watch-ers were men.
    Even though I’d just had lunch, I checked out the table where people returning from holiday left a communal treats ‘ITUP’ – in the usual place. One of my colleagues must have been to the eastern Mediterranean. Baklava. The day was improving.
    And then it wasn’t. When I got back to my desk, brushing away filo crumbs, I found an email to the entire company from Olive, our publishing director. I’m told by friends who work in other fields that ‘publishing director’ sounds like one of those job titles you get when you’re middle management, with layers of bosses above you. But in the book world, it’s about as high as you can get, unless you work for a conglomerate, when CIA-sounding three-letter acronyms start to appear: CEO, CFO, COO. I’d want to be the last one, because I’d force everyone to pronounce it as a word – Coo! But I’m not the boss, and Timmins & Ross is not a conglomerate. We’re owned by a small number of investors, some of whom are the descendants of Mr Timmins and Mrs Ross, and mostly they leave Olive to run the company without a Fortune 500-sounding job title. Which she has done very efficiently since she was appointed nearly ten years ago. Despite this, office gossip had reached a pitch and velocity remarkable even in such a gossipy industry, once it became known thatOlive had been having early-morning meetings that were so private she wasn’t even telling her secretary whom she was