Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Robert!’ shouted the mad woman. ‘I need your chequebook! I’ll pay you back!’

  —

  ‘Are you always like this?’

  ‘Like what?’ Rose was barely listening as she thumbed through the photographs in her lap. They were sitting on a green wooden bench at the edge of the road while trucks and buses wheezed past them on their way up the hill, heading from the West End to the concrete wasteland of the North Circular. The air around them was blue with lead-laden fumes, but Rose had failed to notice in her anxiety to check through her precious photographs.

  ‘They’ve come out really well. Look at that.’ She passed over a picture of a roof. Then another picture of a roof. And another. She’s completely demented, thought Robert, although at least they prove that she’s been telling the truth.

  ‘Now, where are the really interesting ones? Ah!’ Triumphantly, Rose pulled out a set of photographs and spread them across her knees. Seen in slow progress from the middle of Regent Street to its upper reach were sixteen distinct tiny figures and, sure enough, something that could only be a dog. They looked inhuman, or rather, misshapen, but Rose was at a loss to explain why. The last few photographs were slightly blurred, but showed the stragglers of the group in startling proximity.

  ‘I managed to get some close-ups just as they were heading off,’ said Rose, turning over the final photograph. For a moment she stared at it in surprise, then held it closer. The picture showed a girl in her late teens, dark and attractive, laughing, frozen in mid-turn as she called to someone at her back. Her face was pale and free from make-up, her hair a blackish purple. Behind her in the distance glowed the Telecom Tower.

  ‘There, you kindly paid for the photos and now God has given you a reward.’ She turned to Robert and held the picture in front of his nose. ‘This is Sarah Endsleigh. I’d recognize her pasty face anywhere.’

  ‘Is this some kind of practical joke…?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She began checking through the other pictures. ‘I wonder if her two charming friends were up there with her.’

  ‘Sarah Endsleigh? I don’t believe you.’ Robert scratched his chin doubtfully. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘Listen, our building was burgled twice from the roof. One of those times, Charlotte was accidentally killed. Now her daughter’s running with some kind of rooftop gang. Don’t you see? It’s all connected, it has to be.’

  ‘You should go to the police with those pictures. They could check the whole thing out. I mean, if there are people running around up there the law’s bound to hear about it.’

  ‘You forget that I was trespassing when I took those shots. Anyway, it’d be more interesting to find out for ourselves. There’s something weird going on around here. Don’t you want to find out what it is?’

  ‘Not particularly, no.’ Robert rose to his feet. ‘Look, I’ll return the notebook as soon as I’ve finished with it.’

  ‘Drop it in to her agent.’ Rose was annoyed and disappointed at her failure to kindle a spark of interest in this skinny, worried-looking man.

  ‘I’d rather leave it with you.’

  ‘Whatever you want.’ She shrugged disinterestedly and returned the photographs to their yellow envelope. ‘I’ll send the money you lent me back by post.’ Rising, she thrust her hands beneath her T-shirt and strode off along the pavement. In taking him into her confidence she had misjudged him and he had failed her.

  Suddenly Robert realized that she must have been freezing, sitting there all this time without a topcoat. He was tempted to call her back, to try and explain his reluctance to get involved, but instead he watched helplessly until she had disappeared around the corner. Then he tucked the notebook under his arm and disconsolately headed back in the direction of the underground station, his feelings of inadequacy redoubled.

  Chapter 8

  Asleep

  She slumbers on.

  And while she sleeps, she dreams.

  In her dream she is a maiden, young but far from innocent, lured to a skytop castle by foul brigands. She has been bound hand and foot. For committing an unforgivable crime, she is to be executed at dawn. Six hundred feet above the kingdom she hangs, her scarlet tresses raised and tangled by the wind which hurtles around her. Below her naked feet, kites wheel and scream in constant battle with the flowing air. Up here there is no hope of rescue. She is sure that the night will yield no thundering stallion, no gleaming saviour, for who even knows that she is here?

  Now darkness has fallen upon the kingdom. Far below, the eerie cries of unnatural predators can be heard as they forage and fight. Her wrists and ankles ache from the tension of her bonds. Enervated, she starts to sob, her tears falling out into the night sky to be snatched away by the willful winds.

  She cannot reconcile herself to death, cannot face the knowledge that these hours of darkness are the last her senses will taste and touch. She tries to twist and turn, aware that she is imprisoned in a dream. But soon she will awake, to discover what she already dreads and knows to be the truth. That, far from being a dream, all this will prove to be so very real…

  Chapter 9

  Anubis

  Earlier that morning, as a faint silver mist still hung in the sloping streets which led from Charing Cross down to the embankment, Detective Chief Inspector Ian Hargreave gave his men the unenviable task of removing the Toad’s body from atop the railings of the Prudential Insurance Company. Guided by a police surgeon, two constables manipulated the trunk from the spikes in an effort to prevent any further damage to its internal organs. Due to the grotesque state of the corpse, its head and shoulders had been wrapped in heavy opaque plastic. So far Hargreave had managed to keep the public away from the site by ordering the road to be sealed off at either end.

  ‘What the hell is Cutts doing here?’ The inspector aimed a thumb at the balding man in the brown raincoat who had climbed through the plastic tape of the police cordon and was now heading towards him. He rounded on one of the uniformed officers. ‘I thought I made it quite clear that this was to be kept out of the papers until we’ve had a chance to program the lab analysis.’

  ‘I’d like to remind you,’ began Stan Cutts, forcing his way to the front of the small group that had gathered around the operation site, ‘that it’s my duty to provide the public with information that may affect their rights and their personal safety….’

  ‘Come off it, Cutts. You’re not a journalist, you’re a tabloid hack. You couldn’t give a shit about personal rights.’ He waved the little man back. ‘Somebody get him out of here.’

  A year earlier, Hargreave’s reputation had suffered badly when Cutts’ newspaper had publicly accused him of mishandling a case. Since then he had refused to tolerate the presence of reporters unless they were specifically requested to attend a press conference. At the same time, in deference to their power, he remained wary of alienating them too severely. One of the two constables who was diverting traffic away from the corner of Craven Street stepped forward and fixed a gloved hand over the reporter’s arm.

  ‘Answer me one thing, Hargreave,’ called Cutts as the officer attempted to lead him away, ‘is this connected with your “Vampire of Leicester Square” fiasco?’

  Hargreave spun on his heel, his cheeks growing mottled in the chill morning air.

  ‘You know damned well it isn’t,’ he said, his voice dropping to a menacing tone. ‘You try to build a link with this and I’ll suspend your access to all of the report channels.’

  ‘Then it must be something serious,’ Cutts reasoned. ‘Anyway, these days you know we can access information from several other sources. But of course, I’d rather get it from the horse’s mouth.’ His grin suggested that he knew more than he was prepared to admit. The crumpled coat he always wore smelled of sweat and stale whisky. Cutts put Hargreave in mind of a shambling, amiable pornographer. ‘Let me in on this and I’ll guarantee to keep the past out of any reports that get filed.’

  ‘You want in?
’ asked Hargreave, a sour smile playing on his face. ‘C’mere. Let go of him, Duncan.’ He beckoned the reporter over to the plastic sack which had been straightened out on the floor of the unmarked police ambulance. Carefully, he pulled back the top flap of the sack. ‘We’ve got a male, early twenties, body impaled on railings which pierced clean through the neck, chest and right thigh.’

  Cutts leaned over the corpse and blanched. ‘What happened to his eyes and throat? You couldn’t get scalp and facial lacerations like that from a fall. What is this?’

  It was Hargreave’s turn to play the innocent. He shrugged his shoulders in defeat. ‘Well, Stanley, that’s something we don’t know yet.’ He directed the reporter’s attention away from the body of the huge bird which hung in its plastic sack at the back of the vehicle. That would have to remain a secret until he could figure out what the hell it had been doing tied to the body. ‘Give me a couple of days before you print any conjectural copy on this and I’ll make sure that you get an exclusive on any developments occurring in, say, the next twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Come on, Hargreave, first the Piccadilly boy and now an impalement? Maybe there’s a killer loose. “Rooftop Rambo Strikes Again”. The city’s full of Christmas shoppers. Could turn out to be a pretty big story.’

  ‘Handled badly it could also start a pretty big panic. I have to tell you that if you print a single word linking the two deaths I’ll bring you in for obstructing police procedure and—let’s see now, how about falsifying information?’

  ‘Who’s falsifying? It’s here for anyone to see.’

  ‘You’ll get an official denial.’

  ‘Jesus, whatever happened to integrity?’

  ‘It must have read your newspaper.’

  ‘Thirty-six hours,’ bargained Cutts, who knew enough to tread lightly when there was the possibility of an even better story further down the line. ‘Give me information access for thirty-six hours and I’ll delay filing the story until late Thursday.’

  ‘You’ve got a deal. By the way, how’d you hear about this so quickly in the first place?’

  ‘I can’t give away my contacts, old man. You know that.’

  Hargreave smiled to himself. He had been prepared to figure out another way of keeping the press off his back until Thursday. Now he would simply have Cutts arrested for withholding information if the reporter decided to step out of line. Meanwhile, he would keep two files on the case—one for himself, and another for the newspapers.

  —

  ‘They nearly lost it on the way over, did you know that?’ Hargreave lit a cigarette from the end of another and looked up at the monument. The granite obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle thrust upward into a sky that was the colour of old ice. Sergeant Janice Longbright stamped her boots on the pavement and followed Hargreave’s gaze. ‘The needle was being towed from Alexandria in an iron pontoon, like a huge cigar in a case. Halfway across the Bay of Biscay there was a terrible storm. Six men were swept overboard and drowned. But the needle was saved.’ He turned to Janice and smiled. ‘It’s been around for nearly one and a half thousand years before Christ, a memorial to gods we can scarcely imagine, and what do the British do? We stick it on the embankment and bury a razor, a box of pins and a copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide underneath it. That’s one for the gods to puzzle out.’ Janice watched the inspector’s breath condense in the damp Thames air. She gently slipped her arm through his, mindful of breaking his train of thought.

  She knew that there had to be a reason for his requesting to meet her at such an odd venue. Ian never did anything without a carefully reasoned purpose. Not that he was an unimaginative man—on the contrary, his thinking had an amiable perversity that pleased and surprised her. She brushed a curl of red-brown hair from her eyes with her free hand and looked back at the obelisk.

  ‘What do you know about the ancient Egyptians?’ He dropped his cigarette to the pavement and stepped on it, turning to face her. Janice thought for a minute.

  ‘Well, they had an exaggerated reverence for the dead. Didn’t they bury their servants alive with their masters? Anubis was something to do with that, I think. He had the head of a dog.’ She shrugged. ‘Guess I didn’t pay much attention in history class.’

  ‘Anubis was jackal-headed, the god of the dead. He was supposed to have invented embalming. OK, what about ravens?’

  ‘Ravens?’

  ‘The victim was attacked by one. A big bugger, over two feet long. It was tied to his face.’

  ‘I think you can get them to talk. And they live a long time. Sorry, you’re catching me on my weak subjects here.’

  ‘Let’s walk.’ Hargreave gestured ahead to the broad curve of the roadway where it passed beneath Hungerford Bridge. ‘There has to be a connection between the two deaths, but what has a boy with a mouthful of Egyptian silt got to do with ravens, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Why don’t you wait for the lab analysis to come in before you try to find a link,’ Janice suggested. ‘You’ve presumably had a team up on the roof?’

  ‘First thing we did. Nothing to be seen up there at all. The place looked as if it had been swept clean. Last night’s rain didn’t help much either.’

  ‘The toxicology analysis on the Piccadilly boy showed elements of methadone, Benzedrine and quite a few other drug traces, by the way. But there’s still been no positive identification of the body.’ They fell silent as they passed beneath the bridge.

  ‘I have a very bad feeling about this,’ said Hargreave finally. ‘It’s as if we’re seeing the tip of a submerged mass. I used to think I understood this city. Now it seems like the old criminal loyalties have been chucked away. Something else has taken their place.’

  ‘What do you think that is?’

  ‘I only wish I knew.’ He had already decided upon a course of action. Starting tonight he would spend a few hours in the computer room. The system was already capable of duplicating logical thought processes and Hargreave had found a way to make it dream, or at least to produce logic-jumps that seemed to operate with dreamlike associations. By calling up certain key words and phrases, then following their cross-indices, he could use the computer to freewheel through a series of random thoughts and ideas. He had considered trying to explain the system to others, but had decided instead to wait until the right occasion presented itself. In this case he felt himself growing increasingly disturbed by the thought of what might eventually surface in his investigations.

  Watching the lovely Miss Longbright striding purposefully out from the shadow of the overhead bridge like a postwar pin-up marching to prosperity, he turned his mind to more cheerful things.

  Chapter 10

  Notes

  Members of the Order who have been designated certain official duties are entitled to wear a plain black tunic emblazoned with a sash of coloured cord. Headdresses representing Phoebus exist for ceremonial purposes, but are rarely, if ever, worn. Ceremonies, once necessary in maintaining discipline, but now occurring purely as observances of past traditions, take place beneath twin lamps which represent the Brightness of Diana and the Purity of Apollo. The order remained unchanged until the New Age.

  Robert carefully replaced the handwritten page in the notebook as the tube train lurched beneath his feet on its way into Belsize Park station. As soon as the seat in front of him was vacated, he sat down and gingerly opened the slim volume once more. This was no manuscript, rather a collage of scrawled notes and clippings which seemed to constitute the factual preparation of a first draft. As the train pulled out toward Chalk Farm Robert began at the first page of the book, which was blank but for Charlotte Endsleigh’s address and signature, neatly inscribed in soft pencil. There was no date or description of the contents within. On the next page stood a vertically printed list of names. It read:

  MAIN STATIONS:

  Holford

  Lombardo

  Jones

  Winde

  Wren

  Barry

  Bedfo
rd

  He stared at the list for a minute, searching for some kind of connection, unaware of any such stations, rail or tube, existing in London. Turning the page over he found scribbled across the back in Charlotte Endsleigh’s now familiar hand: ‘Many other stations exist throughout the city, but these seem to be the busiest.’ Increasingly curious, Robert riffled through the next half dozen pages only to find them completely filled with cryptic names and ciphers. Occasionally he came across a dated remark, as if it had been designated for later inclusion into a diary.

  The sudden change in air pressure made him look up just in time to see the end of the platform at Chalk Farm station vanishing into darkness. He would have to change at Camden Town and head into the centre to alight at Leicester Square. Skinner would be wondering what on earth had happened to him. He watched his reflection in the blackness of the window opposite. Further along, a pair of twelve-year-old skinheads were painstakingly inscribing obscenities with a black felt-tip pen on the glass partition. A tramp dozed in the corner seat, his head lolling with the rhythm of the train. The hanging straps throughout the carriage jiggled as the train crossed a set of junction points and came to a halt just outside Camden station.

  Robert took out a pencil and attempted to decode one of the ciphers, but its cryptic message irritated him into casting it aside. He looked down once more. Another page, the seventh. Here the pencilled notes became tight paragraphs of black ink, as if the subject matter had suddenly changed. Another list was arranged, this one reading;

  HERMES

  APOLLO

  DIANA

  MERCURY

  VENUS

  MARS

  JUPITER

  SATURN

  Robert was puzzled. Why should three such deities head a list of planets? He felt as if he were examining random footnotes to a main topic, the subject matter of which eluded him entirely. The book contained half-explained scraps of information that were possibly mere ramblings, a faintly delineated map charting the journeys of an increasingly senile and disoriented mind. Perhaps it took a sharper brain than his to bridge the distance between points. He needed someone to help him unravel the puzzling information held within the pages, someone with whom he could treat it as a kind of wintry parlour game.