by Tom Grass
The top of the wall wasn’t flat. Two triangular tiles met in the middle, forming a ridge. He tried to do it his way. Stand upright and tightrope it like any self-respecting bipedal hominid, but his feet slipped out from under him and he hit the ridge hard, falling to his right, hooking his left calf in tight to stop himself from falling.
Pulling himself back onto the wall he could see her disappearing fifty feet away, her arse in the air as she ran, monkey-like, using her hands and feet. He got down, gripping the ridge with his hands and starting to walk them forwards, faster, slowly getting the hang of it, feeling the burn in his deltoids and his shoulders.
He stopped and looked up. She was a long way from him now. Beginning to climb a four-storey whitewashed apartment block, pulling herself up from one balcony to the next. Never once looking down or looking back.
‘Hey!’ he shouted after her, winded by five pints of Stella and the gut-rot red that sloshed around inside him, the pain of the stitch biting through the numbness of the alcohol, the endorphins and the cold.
The climb was easier and the balconies were like a climbing frame. He pulled himself up with his arm strength, using his feet to guide him and reach up above him to get purchase in the gaps between the balcony railings and the apartment walls. By the time he reached the roof he felt less fucked up but he was too late to catch her.
She was one hundred feet ahead of him now, vaulting railings from one roof terrace to the next. The building made of mirrors rose up above her at the end of the row of terraces, maybe ten or eleven storeys, some four hundred feet tall, reflecting the streets of Bethnal Green below.
From a distance a lot of things looked impossible but up close you could always find a way. Just as Red was doing now, finding handholds on window ledges, using the secure, modern drainage pipes and cable TV lines to climb swiftly up the vast mirrored edifice.
He remembered watching an old climbing movie. About a free climber who scaled without ropes up overhangs that people said couldn’t be climbed. The film was called Les Pointules Du Mort. All the time people would be saying to him that it couldn’t be done but he’d always be philosophical. That nothing was impossible until the moment you fell.
And Twist was trying not to fall now. Trying to get close to Red as she climbed effortlessly up the mirrored glass that reflected the headlights of a late-night minicab dropping off on Cambridge Heath Road below them, losing sight of her as she reached the roof, climbed up a trellis and over a wall onto a lavish roof terrace at the very top of the building where a pool lay steaming in front of a glass-fronted penthouse.
It was incongruous, Twist thought, having a penthouse in a neighbourhood like this but that was just one of a bag full of questions that would keep until the morning. He looked up as the last of his breath deserted him to see that she was stepping out of her clothes and walking to the pool and smiling to herself as she reached up her arms to dive in.
The water was warm. Magically warm in the night air around them that was now below freezing.
‘How d’you know about this place?’ Twist asked, sculling a few strokes away from her on his back after she surfaced, too close for comfort.
‘Bill brought me here once,’ she said. ‘We used the lift.’
Twist looked around. It was impressive.
‘Who lives here?’
‘A man called Rodchenko. Arkady Rodchenko.’
Twist took a moment to register before it hit him. He gulped a mouthful of water and started coughing and had to raise his head to stop himself from choking.
‘Don’t worry, Twist. He’s probably fast asleep.’
He lunged towards her until he was close enough to grab her wrist and turn her to face him, feeling her place her fingertip on his lips to silence him.
He looked at her, up close like that, thinking she fitted right in here, like the mirrors on the walls. Revealing only what was on the surface. Nothing of what was inside.
‘You know Fagin’s a liar, don’t you?’ she began, breaking his grip and pulling away from him, sculling backwards across the pool.
‘And that all that stuff he told you at the beginning about working for insurance companies …’ she said, smiling, ‘…that it’s all nonsense?’
Twist could see the outline of her body, visible but shrouded by the dark water as she swept her hand around in a tight arc showing him the pool and the penthouse belonging to Rodchenko.
‘This is who Fagin’s working for now,’ she said.
And so Twist listened, resisting the urge to move closer and touch her out of sympathy as she recounted the story of her capture the night after Sikes had come home without Harry. How Sikes had come to get her and done a deal with the Russian gangster at his club. A deal in which he would ‘buy’ her back by delivering the first three paintings in Hogarth’s series, A Harlot’s Progress to Rodchenko here at his penthouse and then secure his fee by taking the remaining three paintings while they were out of the safe on display during a high-profile auction a week or so later.
Twist blinked and looked nervously up at the low-lit penthouse lounge.
‘Bill has sworn some kind of oath to Rodchenko,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to come here. In case anything happens to me.’
Twist drew back as Red slid through the water towards him, trying to get his head around the information she’d just laid on him before she reached him and he lost the capacity for rational thought altogether.
‘Sorry?’ he managed. ‘So Sikes has sworn an oath to this bloke Rodchenko and you wanted me to come here and swim in his pool in case anything happens to you?’
He felt the lip of the swimming pool tap him gently on the back of the head and the tiles of the wall behind him press against his shoulder blades. He raised his arms but she took his biceps in her hands and drew herself quickly into him until she was close enough to pincer his chest with her knees, then hook her feet around the small of his back as he pushed forwards off the wall, struggling to free himself.
‘No … Red … talk …’ he started but it was no good. She had her thighs wrapped tight around his diaphragm and she only had to squeeze gently to silence him and freeze him there. He was powerless to break away from her as she leaned forward and bit his lip, releasing the pressure with her thighs so that he could breathe, drawing air from her lungs as she closed her mouth on his.
Twist did not know how long they hung like that in the water. But it was the most complete happiness he had ever known and it obliterated everything, reducing his field of awareness to a single sensory stimulus, the feeling of her body, pressed tightly against his so that he didn’t see the moon falling in the sky and the halo of dawn rising up on the skyline, or the electric light flicker on inside the penthouse.
But Red was faster than Twist. She saw it before we did. Not that Twist was capable of responding. He was watching hers. Wondering if he would ever touch her again.
The terrace was freezing as he ran across to his clothes, struggling to get into his jeans and feeling his T-shirt wet against his back, then running to the edge and lowering himself until he was hanging, looking back into the penthouse. There, through the French windows, was a shirtless Russian standing staring at the sun which was rising in the east, a pair of black eyes, deep-set in a long face sitting atop a bull neck and barrel chest.
‘Come on!’ Red whispered from beneath him but Twist held on. He was looking at the Russian’s back as he turned and squatted, drawing up a steel bar with two hundred pounds on each end in a dead lift, the lateral muscles framing a sword-carrying angel whose ink wings had been carefully grafted onto his massive shoulder blades. And then, when the man turned, Twist saw more tattoos on his vast, white, hairless chest. He found himself staring at a picture of the Madonna and Child and there were steeples and church spires.
And then Twist relaxed his grip and fell to the deck to find that she had gone.
* * *
‘This never happened, right? We were at the club all night,’ she said, looking
up at him, seeing that he understood, before lowering herself onto the wall and dropping off into the church grounds.
He watched her sprint across the churchyard, vault the iron railing on the far side then land with both feet on the pavement and look back at him before turning to jog on.
The sun had already been glinting off the mirrors as they’d sprinted past the entrance to the Russian’s block. He’d caught her pretty quickly, faster than her on the flat, and stolen a kiss, and then suggested they follow the canal, out of sight to his tower in Newham to get some more sleep.
They’d covered the ground fast, following Old Ford Road then bearing due south on Parnell and Fairfield roads before hitting the hard shoulder of the A13 which took them all the way towards the East India Dock and the broken land east of the Blackwall Tunnel approach road.
After crossing the Limehouse Cut and Bow Creek they dropped down off a brick wall into a railway siding then crawled through a hole in the fence and out onto Twelvetrees Crescent. It was here that Twist, turning sideways, caught Red’s flinch but missed the fist which came out of nowhere and slammed straight into his face and took his legs clean out from under him.
‘Got you!’
Twist could hear the words but he was blind. There was just the pavement, cold and hard beneath him as stars danced in the half light above his face and he tasted blood in the back of his throat where it was flooding down from inside his nose.
‘Call the police, young lady!’ Bumbola boomed, his voice familiar but distant as Twist struggled to push himself up off his back.
‘I will. You’re a psycho!’
Red’s voice sounded real enough. Aggressive and in Bumbola’s face, as she stood over Twist, protecting him from the hands that were reaching down to take him.
‘Vandalising council property. It’s a serious offence,’ Bumbola boomed.
Twist winced at the pain as he lifted his head from the pavement and opened his eyes to see Red still standing above him, preparing to fight a man who was over twice her weight.
‘Go on! Try it!’ Bumbola shouted, as Twist blinked and kept his eyes closed, listening to the sound of a car approaching, and pull to a stop as hands took his arms and hoiked him to his feet.
34
The sun was shining low across the building site as she skirted it behind the corrugated iron fence to its left. Down there the day was just beginning. An engineer in a hard hat briefing his foreman and his crane operator, wolf whistles greeting the catering lady arriving on her bicycle as the apprentices sloped in past the security guard on the gate.
Prising back a piece of fence she took a steep path down through thick undergrowth to what would once have been the sun deck on the south-facing side of the old hotel. An ash tree had fallen across it perhaps ten years ago and a wilderness had sprung up around it, complete with a den of foxes, buried deep below the roots of the upended tree.
The fire escape was still covered in frost and it stuck to her hands as she pulled the ladder down to climb up, rehearsing the whole time what she would say to them when they asked her where she had been and where she had last seen Twist. And she wondered, despite all her practice, how effectively she would be able to lie to them, because something had changed up on the roof looking down, watching the policewoman leaning next to him as he lay on the pavement bleeding.
And she still felt guilty. Knowing that it should have been her by his side.
The guilt had eaten her up as she’d run from the scene knowing that she could not present herself as a witness, telling herself she had to go back, as her feet had carried her left behind a row of shops to a fire escape behind a kebab house, which she had climbed, out onto a frosty, slate roof.
And from up there she’d watched as the fat traffic warden accused Twist of trying to mug him. Watched him play the victim, miming each action and hearing those lies. She’d look around her, but there were no tiles she could have thrown at the liar, just concrete beneath her fingertips.
So she’d been forced to watch silently from the roof. The policeman calming down the traffic warden, swallowing his lies as the policewoman had cuffed Twist and placed him in the back of the car, radioing in shortwave, letting Red know where they had taken him.
‘You’re late,’ Bill said.
They were all there. Fagin, Bill and Dodge, gathered in a semicircle round Batesy who was backtracking through the email logs on the hard drive she’d bagged at Losberne’s gallery. They were looking to correlate a text from Losberne to his PA telling her to arrange for the paintings to be moved to a second vault before the auction, with one giving the password for his Securicor account.
‘Of course he’s going to move them after Red barged in there the other night. Yes, go on! Down a bit, Batesy … Yes. That one … Where have you been?’ Fagin asked as Red crept into the room.
‘Yeah, sorry, I fell asleep …’ she said.
‘Where’s Twist?’ Bill said, keeping his eyes on her as the others turned to look back at the screen and Fagin punched the desktop as Batesy opened an email from Securicor detailing the exact time and date they would pick up Losberne’s Hogarths.
‘He left with you, right, Dodge?’ she said, catching Dodge’s eye as he turned.
Back me up on this, please God, back me up …
‘They went off to this after-hours party. I was knackered. That whole thing with Losberne. I had to crash …’
‘Why didn’t you come back here, like FBoss told you?’ Bill said.
‘One too many, I guess,’ she replied, willing someone to step in and save her as Bill stared into her without blinking. She felt a wave of relief as Fagin finally raised his left hand and spoke.
‘Bill, I gave them the night off,’ he said, eyes still glued to the screen, ‘the paintings weren’t going anywhere until morning. There’s no harm done.’
She watched Bill’s face, his dead eyes holding her gaze for just a second too long before turning back to join Fagin with the question that she could not answer.
‘It is morning. So where is he?’
35
DS Charlie Brownlow sat alone in the back of the bar thinking maybe he hadn’t in fact seen it all. He was fifty-nine now. In 1989 he had reopened Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiquities Squad and his career had seen many successes. Even conservative estimates suggested he might have saved the insurance companies over one billion pounds.
He’d recovered a Rubens, a Vermeer and a Goya from the Provisional IRA’s most feared criminal organiser, and uncovered a plot to smuggle the head of Amenhotep III out of Egypt dipped in plastic to disguise it as a knick-knack from an airport shop. But he had never, as far as he could remember, ever attempted to break open a gang of wannabe ninjas whose members could, according to several eyewitness police reports, fly.
His mobile rang. The theme from The Godfather. Taxpayers’ money every Friday at three, or a tip-off to the rival you were supposed to be fingering. An offer no self-respecting snitch could refuse.
And it was most likely one of these informants who was calling him now. A criminal who might be at any level of the trade from knocker to organiser, drug to diamond dealer, or perhaps one of his captains of organised crime who might be seeking a plea-bargain having been offered a stolen painting as collateral on a loan.
He put down his pint of Guinness and picked up the phone. A glimmer in his eye as he saw that the caller was a good person, his partner, forty-year-old DS Olivia Bedwin, overeducated and currently in possession of a parole-breaking graffiti artist called Twist who she claimed had recently decorated the back wall of the National Gallery with an exact replica of Blake’s The Simoniac Pope.
‘So what’s the connection?’ Brownlow asked, listening to the silence on the end of the line.
‘A young homeless vandal who climbs buildings and likes art …’
Brownlow rubbed his eyes. He felt tired and old and wondered if anything would change the shell game. A game in which gallery curators and the auction houses where the
gods of art and money ran down underground channels to the ‘dark’ auctions where the global elite could buy stolen art, anonymously and tax free.
He heard Bedwin’s theory. It reminded him of a time when he was young and ambitious.
‘A would-be Banksy who was fallen in with a gang of acrobatic thieves who have been systematically stealing contemporary and modern art works, apparently freelance for the past twelve months …?’
* * *
‘Quite a shiner,’ the lady detective said to him, courting sympathy as he looked up at her nice teeth which became visible when she smiled.
They were the only white thing in the airless interview room in Newham’s police station. Everything else was a dull matt grey, including the stationery. Twist looked beyond his interviewers to the door where a single foot-square panel had been cut into it. He saw the visitors to the police station coming and going. Twist looked up at the lady cop. He could see she didn’t want to be here any more than he did.
‘Oliver, don’t mind if I call you Oliver, do you?’ she went on. ‘Can’t keep saying “Twist”. I’ll sound like I’m in a—’
‘Casino. I’ve heard that one before,’ Twist replied, watching as the old man Brownlow looked down at the photo of Bumbola’s van covered in his tag which he’d been having trouble convincing them he’d had absolutely no hand in.
‘Personally I think it’s an improvement,’ she went on. ‘Well, in any case, judging from the state of your face, I’d say the punishment already rather exceeds the crime.’
‘So let me go,’ Twist said.
‘Metropolis Parking Solutions, the contractors whose property you vandalised take a very different view, as does your parole officer, who understandably feels very let down after securing you the work experience with the undertaker …’