Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  Meanwhile, the north side of Piccadilly Circus has been cordoned off until Westminster City Council contractors can clear the area of debris.

  ‘They’re never going to let me forget that bloody “vampire” business,’ said Hargreave, tipping back in his chair. ‘It gets dragged out every time they ask for a quote.’

  He watched with interest as Sergeant Janice Longbright clambered onto a filing cabinet with a pencil in her mouth. Her glossy auburn hair was arranged in a long-forgotten style and uncurled across her broad face as she reached for an envelope box.

  ‘You want me to get that for you, Janice?’ he asked, leaning further back. The sergeant’s reply was unintelligible. As she stretched, her brightly painted lips rose to reveal hard white teeth biting down on the pencil in concentration. Hargreave noticed that she was wearing seamed stockings again. She looked a real policewoman, big, solid and sexy, like a fifties caricature. Nothing about her seemed to belong in the present day. He liked that.

  ‘Would it constitute sexual harassment in the workplace if I told you you’ve got lovely legs?’

  Sergeant Longbright eased herself down from the cabinet and dropped a pile of manilla envelopes onto Hargreave’s desk.

  ‘Yes, it would,’ she replied finally. ‘I don’t go around telling people you’ve got nice tits.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t talk to other people about you,’ Hargreave complained.

  ‘Oh, no?’ Janice leaned forward and lowered her voice. ‘Then how is it that just about everyone around here knows that we’re sleeping together?’

  ‘They’re just taking guesses. You know what this lot’s like.’

  Hargreave knew how sensitive Janice was on the subject. That was why he made sure that they came in to work by different routes in the morning. She was a bright, strong-willed woman, fast to pick up on the changes of atmosphere in the office. And she was ambitious enough to make sure that nothing jeopardized her chances of promotion. Looking at her, Hargreave could not imagine what she saw in him. He was at least twelve years her senior and much the worse for wear. Overweight and thinning on top, he appeared to be slipping into comfortable middle age, but his clear brown eyes revealed the deception, for they retained a dangerous youthfulness which was not otherwise readily apparent. Then again, a disastrously early marriage had left him with a suspicious nature when he encountered women as attractive as Janice. In his worst nightmares, he saw her using him as a means of getting on within the force, but one look at her eyes told him this could surely never be the case.

  ‘Did you want anything else?’ Janice sorted the files and pushed one forward for his attention.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘You’re staring.’

  Hargreave snapped forward in his seat. There was so much to get through today that he was aware of consciously delaying the start of his work. He hardly knew where to begin. Christmas in the capital was bringing with it a record number of bag snatches, thefts and break-ins. Last night, several of his men had entered the Knightsbridge apartment of an Arab woman and discovered over thirty thousand pounds’ worth of stolen goods, most of it from Harrods alone. And there were hundreds of similar, if less spectacular, shoplifting cases to deal with, though mercifully most of those were too minor to demand his attention.

  ‘You could ask Finch to give me a call. He should have some kind of preliminary diagnosis on the boy by now.’

  Janice nodded and turned to leave.

  ‘One other thing. You may want to stay with me on this one.’

  ‘The Piccadilly suicide?’ she asked, puzzled. Hargreave rarely consulted her about his own cases.

  ‘It’s just a feeling, I don’t know. I mean, we haven’t even got a positive identification on him yet. But it couldn’t have been an accident and it’s a bloody odd way of committing suicide. Did you know they found over forty feet of fine nylon cord tied around his waist? So stick close, eh?’

  As Janice smiled to herself and closed the door, he stared beyond the glass wall of the office, where a special operations room had been set up to deal with the increased Christmas workload. Fingers rattled at keyboards and faces glowed green in the reflections of report monitors. Someone had made a half-hearted attempt to bring the season’s cheer into the operations room with a few sprigs of mistletoe taped to the tops of the monitor screens. Hargreave rubbed a forefinger over his peppery moustache and watched the printouts passing from desk to desk.

  Suicides were traditionally an irrational lot, but this made no sense at all. He caught the telephone on its second buzz.

  ‘Finch here. I’ve almost finished with the boy. There’s something I think you’ll be rather interested in. Have you got a few minutes?’

  ‘Don’t go away. I’ll come down.’

  As he left the office, Hargreave threw a plastic file card to one of the detective constables.

  ‘Transfer this onto disc, will you? Give it a codename as well as a file number.’ He found it easier to remember disc codes than strings of serial digits. ‘Call it—I don’t know, how many letters can I have?’

  The constable broke off from his keyboard and looked up. ‘Seven, sir.’

  ‘OK….’ He counted on nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Call it Icarus.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Look it up, lad,’ said Hargreave with a smile. ‘Didn’t they teach you anything at school apart from computer technology?’

  —

  Finch always gave him the creeps. A pale, serious man with creaking knee joints, he appeared to have stepped from an engraving depicting the activities of Burke and Hare. His lab coat reeked sourly of chemicals and as he strode creakingly from his instruments to the sheeted body he left a bittersweet trail, like a woman wearing too much perfume. People tended to steer clear of him in the canteen.

  Hargreave stood at the back of the stainless steel draining board while Finch rinsed his hands and removed his rubber gloves. He had always found the morgue a fascinating place, full of grotesque secrets hidden in steamed-up Easi-seal plastic bags. He looked over at the scales, where some interesting-looking red lumps awaited Finch’s probing instruments.

  ‘Still no positive I.D.?’ asked Finch, crossing to the boy’s body and pulling the plastic sheet down to his chest.

  ‘Nothing so far. What about teeth?’

  ‘A couple of fillings, nothing out of the ordinary. We’ll run X-ray matches, of course. But we should have him narrowed down to an area by this evening, anyway. Stomach contents were pretty specific. Also his system was packed with drugs, mostly soporific—Valium-based, probably. That should lend support to the suicide theory.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Hargreave, ‘there are a couple of things that bother me more than his identity.’

  ‘I think I know what you’re going to ask,’ said Finch, his face splitting with a rare and unearthly grin. With a long face like he’s got, he shouldn’t smile too often, thought the inspector. He’ll scare people to death.

  ‘It wasn’t an electric shock that killed him. He’s full of broken glass, but it was he who hit the sign, not the other way around.’

  ‘You mean it didn’t explode over him.’

  ‘No, look here.’ The face and hands of the boy were blackened beyond recognizable form. The skull was fractured in several places and peppered with fragments of glass, the lower jaw resting flat against the boy’s throat, torn wide at the joints. Finch pointed his pencil at the remains of the face.

  ‘He must have hit the sign with incredible force. The nasion—the top of the nose—has been pushed back into the brain and several other points on the lower part of the body, notably the crushed state of the knee joints, indicate a pretty ferocious impact. The shattering of the glass particles beneath his skin are consistent with a collision.’

  ‘So we’re dealing with someone who threw himself—say, he swung down from the cord found at the site—into the sign of his own volition.’

  ‘Either that, or somebody gave him a shove,’ said Finch thoughtfully.
>
  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, I was saving the best for last,’ said Finch, unleashing his grin at Hargreave once more. The inspector shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘When the body was brought in, the upper part of the clothes, the head and the hands were covered in a fine black dust, like soot. At first that’s what we thought it was, but we ran a scan and it didn’t match with the grime taken from the wall of the building.’ Finch removed a small plastic bag from a trolley beside the body and carefully opened it. He shook a small quantity out into the palm of his hand. ‘You see, it’s too refined. Spectral analysis showed that the grains were far too evenly graded, as if it had been through a pretty thorough reductive process.’

  ‘You mean it’s something produced in a factory?’

  ‘No, not necessarily. It could be natural.’ Finch tipped the powder back into the bag. The small amount he had poured into his palm had left an irregular black smudge, like a birthmark.

  ‘Pebbles on a beach are part of the reductive process, subjected to an endlessly repetitive wearing down which brings them uniformity. Now with that in mind, I did some scans and rematched our “soot” with substances found in nature and here’s what the computer came up with. I didn’t believe it at first, so I ran a double check.’ He removed a folded printout from his lab coat and passed it to Hargreave, who perused the columns of mineral contents uncomprehendingly.

  ‘It’s silt,’ said Finch triumphantly. ‘A rare kind of black silt that could only have come from one place.’

  ‘The Thames?’ the inspector asked doubtfully.

  ‘The Nile, Mr Hargreave. The contents of this boy’s mouth could only be found in an Egyptian riverbed.’

  Chapter 4

  Charlotte

  The offices of Paul Ashcroft & Associates had that ancient, dingily respectable look that Robert had come to associate with the British literary establishment. A vague-looking secretary came down to meet him, then led the way along endless narrow corridors and up tightly twisted stairways lined with stacks of books.

  Mr Ashcroft’s room overlooked the homegoing Bloomsbury traffic. The windows were opaque with dirt, the walls studded with the garish jackets of Christmas bestsellers, the modern equivalent of Victorian penny dreadfuls. Ashcroft himself turned out to be a small sprightly old man with smiling eyes the colour of old pewter. He looked suspiciously like a character actor from a building society commercial. Perhaps because of this seeming familiarity, Robert immediately felt comfortable with him. They sat across from each other, drinking insipidly weak tea over a large green desk cluttered with contracts and manuscripts. Ashcroft replaced his cup and looked at Robert apologetically.

  ‘I’d like to help you, Mr Linden,’ he began. ‘The problem is that Charlotte Endsleigh died recently.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Robert, ‘I didn’t realize…’

  ‘So you see, your call seemed rather, ah, unfortunately timed.’

  ‘Does this mean that someone else now retains the rights to her novels?’

  ‘Novel,’ corrected Ashcroft. He hunted through the papers on his desk for a minute. ‘She only wrote the one. It received a marvellous critical reception…never made her a penny, sad to say.’

  ‘But I thought it was successful.’

  ‘In the eyes of the upmarket Sunday papers, indeed it was. But the public didn’t take to it. We never went into paperback.’

  ‘And the rights?’

  ‘Well, you see…’ Ashcroft perched forward on his chair. ‘Therein lies the problem. Mrs Endsleigh died at her home about two weeks ago. It seems she had the misfortune to surprise a burglar. Charlotte was long divorced and rather a game old stick. She tried to see the fellow off, but he got there first and knocked her head in. She never regained consciousness and died in hospital a couple of days after the attack. Naturally you will understand my reluctance to give out details on the telephone.’

  Ashcroft switched his attention to the bottom drawer of his desk and at length pulled out a red cardboard file. ‘There is a daughter, Sarah, and by rights all decisions concerning the disposal of Mrs Endsleigh’s royalties—not that they amounted to anything much—would have gone to her, but I gather that the girl didn’t get on very well with her mother.’

  ‘You mean that she wouldn’t be prepared to let Charlotte’s book be filmed?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’ He lowered his voice to a confidential tone. ‘As far as I can gather, she’s a bit of a radical, a punk, all that sort of thing. She got into some kind of trouble with the police…drugs, I think. She’s supposed to be living in a squat somewhere, probably not even under her own name. The point is that so far we haven’t been able to trace her. And as she now technically holds the rights to her mother’s book, we’re in rather a standoff position.’

  ‘You really have no idea where I could find her?’ asked Robert. ‘What about her father?’

  ‘He died some time ago, I’m afraid. How keen are you to acquire the rights to this?’ He tapped the book on his desk with a forefinger.

  ‘Let’s just say that I’m expressing an interest.’

  Robert knew that if the novel had failed with the general public, the rights, if they could only be traced, could probably be purchased for a song.

  ‘Well, you might try visiting the flat,’ suggested Ashcroft. ‘I’ll tell you why—there’s a neighbour in there at the moment, sorting out her affairs. Charlotte died intestate, but they’re hoping to turn up something amongst her papers. It could well be that she made provision for the book rights in the event of her death. Not much of a hope, but it’s surely worth a try….’

  ‘It is. This has been a great help, thank you.’

  ‘It’s in my interest,’ smiled Ashcroft, holding the book in front of him. ‘I’ve always wondered when some sharp young person would come up with the idea of turning The Newgate Legacy into a film.’

  The old man rose and showed him to the door. ‘Do let me know if you have any success. It would be a pity to have to wait fifty years for the book to fall out of copyright before you could touch it. And with all these new satellite networks crying out for quality product, I believe…’ He twinkled pale eyes, a caricature of a harmless old pensioner offering a farewell handshake. ‘So nice to have met you, Mr Linden.’

  The crafty old bastard, thought Robert, as he marched through the rain toward Tottenham Court Road tube station. He wants me to stay interested so that I’ll do all the groundwork, then he can step in at the negotiation stage and cop a fee. But the old man was right about one thing. The book would make a damned good film and new technology meant that opportunities for selling such a series internationally were growing daily. It suddenly occurred to Robert that if he kept the project from Skinner he could even have a go at scripting it himself. He could estimate a rough budget breakdown and present a complete package.

  In his raincoat pocket he had a folded piece of paper with Charlotte Endsleigh’s Hampstead address on it. He uncovered his watch. Nearly six. He’d head home and make the call, catch the neighbour in with any luck and arrange to go up there first thing in the morning.

  Robert joined the umbrella-rattling queue at the station ticket office, wondering what it would be like to live in a hot, dry country. His sneakers were soaked through and squelched when he walked. His radarlike ears, so cruelly exposed to the elements, had gone completely numb in the rain. London in December. A day passed in a dream, the hours largely spent flicking paper clips into a wastebin, and a night to be spent drying out and keeping warm. He resented the weather dictating the pattern of his evening. But then, there were a lot of things Robert Linden resented in his life.

  Opening his apartment door was a moment Robert nightly dreaded. The three-room flat above the video rental shop in Kentish Town High Street was, in the landlord’s own words, comfortably furnished. This meant that the huge old sofa in the middle of the lounge released a steel spring symphony when sat upon and the chairs and tables looked a
s if they’d been thrown away at least once before in their lives. Mercifully he did not have to share the place with anyone other than his ex-girlfriend’s hateful, balding cat. Robert loathed the moulting creature, which spent most of its days lurking beneath the sink. It was a remnant of the past, a constant painful reminder of the one girl he had truly loved and then stupidly lost.

  After living with Anne for three years he had made the accidental discovery that she was seeing a DJ called Darren on the evenings she was supposed to be attending adult institute classes in Women’s Studies. Back then, well over a year ago, he had been amazed at her duplicity and naively convinced of his own innocence in the inevitable break-up which followed. He was aware that the experience had increased his cynicism concerning relationships to the point of bitterness, but found himself powerless to change the way he felt. Consequently he seemed to have become a person best described by negative words—untrusting, unfriendly, impractical, disorganized.

  ‘If you don’t come out from under there, I’m going to kill you and bury your body in the litter tray.’

  Robert knelt beside the sink waving a can of cat food at the hissing creature for a full five minutes before giving up and opening a tin of spaghetti hoops for himself. While waiting for the food to warm, he crossed to the kitchen window and pulled aside the curtain. Running slim fingers through black curly hair, he released a snort of annoyance. Ahead, swirls of streetlights led down to the Telecom Tower, the river and beyond. He had a vague feeling that somewhere out there, behind an all-obscuring curtain of drizzle and darkness, people were having a wild time, but he could not imagine how to be a part of it.

  Chapter 5

  Rose

  Two hundred years ago, when the areas around Pall Mall and the Haymarket were still rubbish-strewn sites where rogues and whores crowded the inns and houses of entertainment, it was deemed that a road should be built connecting the centre of the city with Marylebone Park, a five-hundred-acre area of dense woodland now known as Regent’s Park. Despite the original scheme of the architect being greatly altered as work on the road began and despite the dusty chaos under which it was constructed, John Nash was able to bring such unity to the great sweeping quadrant that it made his new street as grand and stylish as any of its European counterparts. As decade followed decade, Regent Street remained a centre of fashion, a street so dependent on the custom of society that out of season it was virtually deserted. Now, at the end of the nineteen-eighties, at 11.30 on a wet Monday evening in December, the street was once more empty—and despite the modern shop facades, the computerized traffic systems, the buses and taxi cabs, the elegant simplicity of this hundred-and-seventy-year-old quadrant remained unchallenged by any of the modern architectural conceits surrounding it.