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

meeting. Whom she was meeting, and what they had been discussing, were the million-dollar questions. The answer, we feared, was that a takeover was in the offing.
    Now an email was asking the entire staff to be in the big meeting room on Thursday morning at ten. I had worked at T&R for half a dozen years, and I couldn’t remember a company-wide meeting being called. I would definitely have remembered, because the big meeting room wasn’t very big. Our office was three converted eighteenth-century houses rabbit-warrened together by passageways that had steps occurring at random intervals. The big meeting room on the ground floor had probably once been a grand reception room. There was a conference table there, which seated twenty, twenty-five with a push. I assumed our warehouse staff, who were based outside London, wouldn’t be coming. Even so, there were eighty-five people in the London office, and eighty-five people in the big meeting room was going to make it worse than the centre of Edinburgh at New Year. Except that we’d be sober. Or was ten in the morning too early to start drinking? A company-wide meeting suggested otherwise.
    And on that happy thought, I decided to head home. On the tube I stood, squashed into a corner and without enough space to take out a book. It didn’t matter. My thoughts moved between lunch with my author, and how I could have done that better, and forebodings about tomorrow’s meeting.
    At the station before mine, a passenger kneecapped me with her shopping bag as she fought her way to the door,which made me focus on more mundane matters. Namely, we barely had anything to eat at home. Jake had said he’d be back at more or less a normal time, and because of my distracted trip to the market on Saturday, I wasn’t sure I had enough to put together a meal. There were half a dozen portions of chilli in the freezer, and probably another half-dozen of stew. (What can I say? I grew up in North America, and keeping the freezer stocked is as close as I come to religious observance.) I could stop at the station café and get a couple of salad-ey things to go with one of those. That would cover us.
    A station café is not normally a place I’d think of doing food shopping, but about a year ago I noticed a sign in the window: Daily Specials . And behind it was always some sort of salad. Once, pressed for time, I’d tried one. It was good, and since I walked past the café every day, I’d got into the habit of picking something up when fresh food ran low.
    Mo was behind the counter. She’d been there at seven-thirty when I went in to work; it was after six now.
    ‘Long day,’ I said.
    She looked as if it was just one more in a long line of long days, but she waved it off. ‘I took a few hours after the lunch rush.’ She was packing up a green bean and tomato salad neatly, which is easier said than done – green beans are slippy little buggers.
    ‘It looks like I got here just in time.’ I nodded to the salad dish, which she was scraping to get the last pieces for my order.
    ‘They’ve done much better than I expected.’
    ‘They were your idea? Because I’ve got to say, they’re terrific.’
    For the first time, her smile spread to her eyes. ‘Thanks. Yes, they were my idea. They’re mine. That is, Steve grows the veg, and I make the salads.’
    ‘Grows the veg? Where?’
    ‘That patch out the front of the house, and window boxes. We’re on the waiting list for a council allotment, and we thought that next year we might get one, but now, who knows where we’ll be living?’
    They produced enough veg to feed six people, and still have enough to sell, from window boxes and a front space so small it was barely bigger than a window box itself?
    ‘I need to introduce you to my neighbour. And to Viv, in Chantry Close. They both grow fruit and veg in window boxes too, and on a terrace.’ Mo nodded in recognition when I mentioned Viv. That wasn’t surprising. Knowing everyone, and