Vacant Possession

Ashworth Vane wanted the association's solicitor in their building at seven o'clock at night, and the letter that said so had been opened with a knife. Megan could tell from the edge, which was straight and clean the whole width of the envelope, and from the knife itself, a bone-handled thing that lay beside it on the tablecloth as if it had been called as a witness.

Mrs Tordoff had put both of them in the middle of the table before she put the kettle on. She did not touch either again. She set down two cups and saucers, a milk jug and a plate with four digestives on it, and then she sat, small and upright, with her back not touching the chair, and waited for Megan to read it.

Megan had already read it. Mrs Tordoff had read it to her over the phone at ten past four, slowly and with every comma, while Megan stood in the corridor outside the interview room at the law centre with her coat half on. She read it again anyway, because she was being watched reading it, and because a letter read aloud by someone else is never quite the letter.

It was one page, on heavy cream paper that did not bend when she lifted it. ASHWORTH VANE LLP across the top in small dark capitals, the Park Square address beneath, a list of partners' names down the left margin in a type so fine she would have needed Mrs Tordoff's glasses to read the bottom of it. It was addressed to the Chair, Cottam Court Residents' Association, Flat 2, and it was written in the voice of people who had never in their lives been made to wait in a corridor.

We should be grateful if the association's solicitor would attend at our offices on Thursday 14 January at 7 p.m. for a without-prejudice discussion of the position at Cottam Court. We are conscious that the notices served in October have caused concern among residents, and we believe a meeting may be of benefit to all parties.

Signed, in blue ink with a broad nib, Gareth Farrar, Partner.

"Of benefit," Mrs Tordoff said.

"It's a form of words."

"I know what it is." She took her reading glasses off the cord round her neck and folded them and laid them beside the knife. "I spent thirty-four years reading the notes consultants wrote for each other, Megan. I know what a form of words is. I am asking you what it means."

Megan put the letter down square to the edge of the table.

The flat was warm. It was always warm, and it always smelled faintly of furniture polish and the gas fire, which ticked on its lowest setting under a mantelpiece that held a carriage clock, a wedding photograph in a silver frame, and a framed certificate from the General Infirmary at Leeds with a ribbon on it. The table they sat at had been the same table for thirty-one years. There was a ring on the cloth under Megan's saucer where someone, long ago, had put down something too hot.

Outside, beyond the metal-framed window, it was fully dark and had been since half past four. The street lamp on Cottam Lane threw a flat orange square on the net curtain. Somewhere upstairs a television was on too loud, and under it the pipes knocked twice, the way they did every evening at this hour when flat 9 ran a bath.

"It means they want something," Megan said. "I don't know what yet. That's the honest answer."

"And to find out, you go to them."

"Yes."

"At seven o'clock at night. On your own. Into their building."

"Into their conference room. It's an office building, Mrs Tordoff. There'll be a receptionist and a security desk and a visitors' book."

Mrs Tordoff looked at her over the plate of biscuits. She had grey eyes, very pale, and the white hair set close round her head was exactly as it had been on Friday and would be exactly as it was next Friday, because she had it done every Friday at half nine on Otley Road and had done for longer than Megan had been alive. She wore a navy cardigan buttoned to the second button and a dark wool skirt with a pleat in it that had been pressed. She did not look old. She looked like someone who had run a surgical ward for a long time and could still tell from across a room who was going to faint.

"I'll tell you what it looks like," she said, "since you haven't asked me. It looks like the people who bought this building for six million eight hundred thousand pounds would like a private word with the people's solicitor. Somewhere comfortable. Somewhere with good coffee. In the evening, after everyone's gone home. And then the people's solicitor comes back and says, well, they were very reasonable, Mrs Tordoff. They've got a lot of costs. Perhaps we ought to listen."

"I'm not going to say that."

"Not on Thursday, you won't."

Megan did not answer that straight away. It deserved an answer and she wanted to give it the right one.

She was still in her work clothes, because she had come straight from Burley on the 49 and walked up from the stop. The black trouser suit had been a good one second-hand and was a better one now, after the forty pounds she had paid a woman in Kirkgate Market to take the jacket in at the waist and the trousers up an exact inch so they broke clean on the top of her boots. Her long black wool coat was over the back of the chair. Her hair was still in the low ponytail she put it in at eight every morning, pulled tight enough that by this time of the evening she could feel it at her temples. She knew how she looked across this table. She looked twenty-six, and blonde, and five foot one, and very well pressed, and Mrs Tordoff had been looking at junior doctors who looked very well pressed for most of her working life.

"Thirty-eight households," Megan said.

Mrs Tordoff waited.

"Thirty-eight households, every one on an assured periodic tenancy since May. Every one served with a notice in the second week of October on the redevelopment ground, four months, so they expire in February. You're on six hundred and forty a month. Flat 9 is seven hundred and ten. The Ahmeds' — flat 14 — is seven twenty-five, because they had the kitchen done in 2019 and the old landlord put it up after. Mr Kitching in 21 is six ninety, and he's been paying it by standing order from the same Yorkshire Bank account since 2008. The two-bedrooms at the back on the second floor are seven ninety. The top floor runs from seven ninety to eight hundred and fifty, and 38 is the eight-fifty, because it's the corner and it's got the extra window." She did not look at her notes. She had not brought them out of her bag. "If they get possession on that ground, the statute gives each household its reasonable moving expenses and nothing else. Not the deposit on somewhere new. Not the difference in rent. Not the bus fare to a job you can't get to any more because the only place you could afford is in Seacroft. I can tell you every one of those figures, Mrs Tordoff, flat by flat, and I can tell you who's on Universal Credit and who's got a child at Brudenell and whose mother is in the home on Wood Lane and can't be moved further than a walk. And I can't tell you what Ashworth Vane wants. I don't know. I don't know why they bought a block full of sitting tenants and then served notice on all of them in their first four months. I don't know what they think it's worth empty. I don't know if they mean to fight or settle or sit on it. If I don't go, I go into a hearing not knowing. I'm not prepared to do that to anybody in this building."

It came out level, which was how she had meant it to come out. Only the end of it was quicker than she would have liked.

Mrs Tordoff picked up her cup and drank from it and put it back precisely in the ring on the saucer.

"You can say all that because you don't live here," she said.

"Yes."

"I wasn't being unkind."

"I know. It's true." Megan turned her own cup a quarter turn on its saucer. The tea had gone the temperature of the room. "It's why I'm any use to you. I go home at night to a flat over a launderette in Hyde Park. I pay my rent to a man in Roundhay who's never once asked me what I do. Nobody at Ashworth Vane can put pressure on where I sleep, and nobody here can make me feel I owe them something I don't. I'm not your neighbour. I'm not your friend. I'm your solicitor. That distance is the only thing I've got that's worth anything, and I'm not going to give it away for a cup of coffee on Park Square."

She believed every word of it. She had believed it since her first week at the centre, when a man in a bookmaker's shirt had sat across from her and told her how kind the landlord had been, how understanding, how he'd let the arrears run for months because they got on, and she had read the tenancy file and seen exactly how far the kindness ran and exactly what it had bought. People who stood too close could not see the shape of a thing. That was not a weakness in them. It was what standing close did to anyone.

"They'll know who you are," Mrs Tordoff said.

"Probably. I've two reported cases. It isn't hard."

"They'll know what you're paid."

"Law centres publish their salary bands. It's on the website." Megan almost smiled and did not. "Thirty-three thousand. They'll think it's a weakness."

"Is it?"

"It means I can't be bought for anything they'd notice spending."

Mrs Tordoff looked at her for a long moment. It was the look Megan had seen her give the gas-safety man in November when he'd tried to sign off the boiler in the basement without going down the stairs to it. Not hostile. Just entirely without the expectation of being lied to and entirely ready for it.

"Thirty-one years I've lived in this flat," she said. "Raymond and I came in the March. The council still had the lot of it then. We bought nothing, because we never had anything to buy with, and we never needed to, because nobody ever came and told us we were going. I've had three landlords since. Every one of them sent me a letter on good paper. Not one of them asked for the residents' solicitor to come to their house in the evening."

"It's their offices."

"It's their house, Megan. Whatever they call it."

Upstairs, the bath stopped running. The pipes gave one last knock and went quiet, and in the quiet Megan could hear the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and the gas fire and, faintly, from somewhere much higher in the building, a door shutting.

She did not argue. There was nothing in it to argue with. Mrs Tordoff was right about what it looked like, and Megan had never in her life won anything by pretending a thing did not look the way it looked.

"I'm still going," she said.

"I know you are. I could see it on you when you came in." Mrs Tordoff unfolded her glasses, put them on, and picked up the letter again. She read it through once more as if a third reading might give up something the first two had held back. Then she laid it face down. "One condition."

"Go on."

"You come back and tell me. Everything. Who was in the room, and where they sat, and what they offered, and what you said, and what they said back. Not on Friday. Not in a letter from the law centre with a reference number on it. The same night. However late. You ring this number and you tell me."

"It might be late."

"I did nights for eleven years. I shan't be asleep." She took the glasses off again. "And if there's anything you'd rather not tell me, Megan, that's the thing I'll want to hear first."

"There won't be anything."

"Then it'll be a short call."

Megan reached for her coat. Mrs Tordoff did not get up to show her out — she never did, she said a door was perfectly capable of opening itself — but she pushed the plate of digestives an inch across the cloth, which was as near as she came to asking anyone to stay, and Megan took one and ate it standing, because she had not had lunch, and because refusing it would have meant something she did not mean.

"Thursday," Mrs Tordoff said.

"Thursday. Seven. I'll ring you after."

She let herself out into the hall and pulled the door to behind her until the latch caught.

The common hall of Cottam Court was the same red brick as the outside, painted over to shoulder height in a cream gloss that had been cream once and was now the colour of old piano keys. It smelled of cold stone and somebody's frying and the faint, sweet damp that came up off the cellar steps in winter. The street door at the far end stood an inch open on the night, as it had stood an inch open for over a year now, because the lock had gone last January and the old landlord had not fixed it and the new one had not either. The association had written about it. The association had written about it four times.

Megan stood with her hand on her coat buttons and looked up.

The stair rose from the end of the hall in four flights, square-turning, with a black iron balustrade and a wooden handrail worn pale by ninety years of palms. The first landing was lit. The second was lit. The bulb on the third had gone in October and been reported, and the light on the top landing came only from whatever was spilling out under the door of flat 38, which tonight was nothing. From where she stood she could see the stair go up into the dark and the handrail go up with it, turning and turning, until it simply stopped being visible.

Thirty-eight doors. Four flights between the ground and the top, no lift, and on the third landing Mrs Whelan in 27 with her bad hip, who went up and down those stairs twice a day holding the rail with both hands, and who would have her reasonable moving expenses paid by statute if Ashworth Vane got what it wanted, and nothing else.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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