Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘But we know that she’s been captured. It’s a trap, it has to be. Nat, you’d better get out of there while you still have a…’

  Zalian snapped off the power switch and returned the walkie-talkie to his pocket. He looked back up at the leather-clad figure, his ice-blue eyes narrowing. In the distance, Sarah shifted her weight from one foot to the other and slid her gloved hands slowly inwards to the top of her thighs. Zalian was mesmerized. Suddenly she spun on her heel and walked away, striding over the angled roof in the direction of the city marina’s main body of water.

  Zalian unclipped the line-gun which was strapped to the top of his thigh, aimed it at the wall of the opposite building and carefully squeezed the trigger. With a sharp snap of steel the line connected and the cable pulled taut. He clipped himself on and swung out over the buildings in a single highly-practiced movement, travelling far above the motionless yachts docked neatly along one side of the marina. The fire-engine-red paintwork of a lightship flashed by beneath his feet as he approached the broad sloping roof of the renovated warehouse which now lay directly ahead of him.

  Sarah had vanished over the peak of the roof by the time he landed. Unclipping the line from his belt, he nimbly ran across the sheets of grey metal to the summit of the warehouse. From the corner of his eye he could see a security patrolman walking his Alsatian around the corner of the naval museum which lay to one side of the marina. He slid quietly across the peak and moved unsteadily down the other side of the roof. Ahead at the far edge, Sarah stood with her back to him. He rose then and ran to her, seizing her shoulders and roughly pulling her around to face him.

  Sarah kept her eyes lowered and stared at his broad chest, her hair falling forward. Her black-painted lips parted suddenly, glistening in the hard darkness of the winter night. He fell on her with a gasp, crushing her leather-cased body against his chest, sliding his hands around to the top of her buttocks as he searched for her open mouth with his. As his lips pressed over hers he raised his hands to touch her hair, but she gently moved his arms down. He closed his eyes gratefully and felt his sense of balance shift as she leaned into him, the warmth of her body radiating to his skin through creaking leather.

  ‘Sarah, you made it back. I always knew you would….’

  Equilibrium shifted again as she pushed harder into him with her pelvis, then suddenly he was losing his balance as he opened his eyes to find himself falling towards the edge of the roof and the distant ground. He reached for her hair once more, the purple-black wig slipping off in his hands to reveal a shaved head as he saw now that the girl before him was nothing like Sarah, a painted doll in pantomime make-up designed to recall the face of the woman he loved. She threw her hands around his back and pushed hard, sending him to his knees and then onto his side as he rolled to the guttering and lodged there. Zalian looked up. The shavenheaded girl withdrew a hypodermic syringe from her breast pocket and uncapped it, spraying a thin jet of liquid crystal into the air as she advanced.

  ‘A man in love is an easy target, Zalian,’ she said, stepping forward and leaning over him. Behind her, three other figures appeared on the crest of the roof. Could they be his own men, or did they belong to Chymes? He couldn’t see. There was a metallic crack as the guttering started to bend beneath his weight. Below, he could hear running footsteps, followed by the barking of the security patrolman’s Alsatian.

  ‘Get away from him, or you’re dead meat.’

  The voice belonged to Lee, one of Zalian’s finest men. Zalian clung to the gutter as it slowly sagged. His body was too long and heavy for its weight to be sustained for much longer. The girl rose and turned, tossing aside the syringe and withdrawing her razor-gun. She fired at the approaching men. Suddenly Lee threw himself forward and brought her down with a crash, headbutting her in the stomach as the two of them landed flat on the roof and rolled toward the edge.

  Other figures approached and in the next moment strong hands were lifting Zalian to safety, pulling him away from the fighting couple.

  ‘Don’t hurt her—we’ll take her with us,’ someone shouted as Lee flipped the girl over onto her back and stripped off her gloves, tying a length of cable around her crossed wrists.

  ‘Let’s get out of here quick,’ warned Lee. ‘The place is crawling with security.’

  As soon as she recovered her breath the girl tried to scream, but was prevented by Lee. Supported on either side, Zalian was led away to the far end of the warehouse roof. Behind, Lee pulled his captive along by the cable linking her hands.

  ‘Stay with us, lady,’ he grinned into her sullen face. ‘You’re going to lead us to Chymes.’

  The group prepared to disembark in the direction of the Tower Hotel, an ugly stack of brown boxes standing along the north side of Tower Bridge. Zalian seemed dazed and unable to talk as the other two helped him into his line-belt. For the first time, even he had begun to realize how much his actions were leading the others into danger. Lee was clipping a similar belt around the girl’s leather-clad waist when there was a distant burst of air and the sound of something heavy thudded against her back. She fell forward, her eyes wide in shock, a small gasp escaping from her lips. The tip of a rusty iron spear, a makeshift weapon from part of a broken weathervane, protruded from between her shoulder blades. Lee let the body fall to the roof, waving to the others with the flat of his hand in a gesture which told them to keep low.

  ‘I guess someone doesn’t want us questioning the opposition,’ he said, turning to Zalian’s supporters. ‘Might as well leave her here. She’s no good to us now.’ He stepped over the lifeless girl and attached his own line-belt. If he felt any emotion at all he failed to show it.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get back without attracting any more attention. You were bloody lucky we had some men in the area, Nat.’ Lee wondered how on earth the former leader of the Roofworld could ever have fallen for such an obvious ploy. Apparently, things were worse than even he had realized.

  The group headed away from the marina amid a confusion of barking and bellowed orders from below as the marina’s guards ran first in one direction, then another. On top of the warehouse the leather-clad limbs of Chymes’ dupe lay sprawled in death, her purple-black wig rolling across the roof like nylon tumbleweed.

  Chapter 14

  Assailant

  ‘OK, give me the book.’ Rose waggled her fingers at Robert until he passed the small blue exercise book across to her. She opened it at a page she had noticed Robert studying earlier on in the day and began to read. The saloon bar of the Three Tuns was crowded for a Tuesday evening. Cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air above the ticket touts who stood at the narrow bar deafening each other with conversation. Robert slid a whisky and soda across the small circular table to Rose and sat down beside her as she read.

  ‘This list headed “Main Stations”…’

  ‘I have no idea about those.’ Robert shrugged and took a swig of his pint. ‘They’re certainly not railway or coach stations.’

  ‘You’re right, they’re not. No, the names are the easy part.’

  ‘You mean you see a connection?’

  ‘Well, of course. Holford, Lombardo, Wren, they’re all architects.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The stations, they’re named after architects. Barry designed the Houses of Parliament. Christopher Wren, everyone knows about. Jones, we can assume is Inigo. Winde built Buckingham House…’

  ‘Wait a minute, I thought that Nash built…’

  ‘No, Nash designed Buckingham Palace. He replaced Winde’s building in the early 1800s.’

  ‘What are you, some kind of trivia mastermind?’ asked Robert, dumbfounded. Rose ignored him. ‘The odd one out is Lombardo. He was Venetian. Presumably the names give a clue to the actual location of the stations.’

  ‘Perhaps they’re not geographical locations. They could be like stations of the cross or something.’

  ‘Don’t complicate things by bringing religion into it, Robert. Think. Vene
tian. Water. “Lombardo” station could be by the river….’

  ‘Or Islington Canal. Or Little Venice. It still doesn’t get us anywhere. Your health.’ Robert drank a toast to her and replaced his glass. ‘How come you know your architects so well?’

  ‘It’s not just architecture, it’s everything. All the fault of my parents.’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘Warren and Shirley.’

  ‘Come on, those can’t be their real names.’ Robert sat back on his stool and snorted derisively.

  ‘They can and are. Second generation West Indian. The kind of names you expect to hear in old sitcoms, very white. Just like my parents were trying to be. White was a popular status to attain back then. They’re living apart now. I don’t see them any more.’ Rose paused to take a slug of her whisky.

  ‘Why, what happened?’

  ‘Oh, it goes back a long way. They christened me Rose Hildegarde Leonard, which shows you how much my mother must have hated having stretchmarks. I went to a lot of schools. Each time I got settled, Dad decided it was time to move on, so we followed the work around until he decided to throw in the towel nerves-wise and have his breakdown here in London.’

  ‘And you stayed here.’

  ‘Yeah, but by that time I’d been streamed with the deadbeats and dim kids in school. I spent my days watching a twenty-one-year-old relief teacher trying to explain the intricacies of the Tudor monarchy to a bunch of no-hopers whose sole interests were heavy metal and streetfighting. As for me, I just wanted to understand the bloody Tudors.’

  ‘Did you eventually get to figure them out?’ asked Robert. ‘I don’t think I ever really cracked history.’

  ‘I did, but not until I left school. While my girlfriends spent their evenings in the backs of vans learning how to fit condoms I came home each night and went straight to bed with the Tudors. Then it was the turn of the Victorians. Then Cromwell. The Industrial Revolution. The Tolpuddle Martyrs. And after history a little art, then English novels. Architecture. Economics. Mythology. I have a virtually perfect photographic memory and I’m a walking bloody encyclopedia on the dissolution of the monasteries, but could I get a decent job?’

  She sighed and stared down into the remains of her drink. ‘Believe me, there’s not a great demand for supermarket checkout girls with a working knowledge of British constitutional history. So I became a superintendent up at Misery Mansions. Moved in with a guy who told me that he wanted to be the father of my children. Turned out that, owing to a slight inaccuracy in semantics, what he really meant was that he wouldn’t be too concerned if I got pregnant. I still miss him on cold nights. And at least by staying on as caretaker I don’t have to worry about paying the rent.’ She raised her eyes to meet his. ‘Now what about you?’

  ‘Me? Oh, there’s nothing much to tell.’ Robert shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I started out as a journalist.’

  ‘So you know how to hold your alcohol.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t really journalism. I worked for a fantasy film magazine.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, while other writers were out interviewing Madonna at the Ritz you were covering comic conventions filled with weird kids in anoraks.’

  ‘That was pretty much it. We had a small, dedicated and deeply disturbed following, the kind of readers who spent their spare time buying horror movie stills of girls with their faces ripped off.’ Robert traced a finger through the spilt beer on the table. ‘And the pay was rotten, so I left and found work in a film production company. That was three years ago and I’m still there on the same pay.’

  ‘Are your parents still around?’

  ‘Like yours. They split the photo albums a couple of years back. Pa went off to live on a Kent commuter estate with an Estée Lauder sales representative and my mother decided to investigate the wide world of alcohol for a while. Dad came back when my sister got knocked up and for a brief period we were a regular suburban family, heavily into noncommunication. Now I just go home at Christmas. We sit around and talk about decorating.’

  ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘When you spend time with people who don’t care much about anything it starts to rub off on you.’ Robert looked at his watch.

  ‘You keep doing that. Are you rushing off anywhere?’

  ‘That’s a laugh. My life is nowhere right now. If there’s one thing I have plenty of, it’s time.’

  ‘If you want my advice, you shouldn’t feel so sorry for yourself,’ said Rose sharply. In the uneasy silence that followed, she picked up the notebook once more and opened it. Robert could see that she felt guilty about speaking out and tried to repair the damage. He leaned forward and tapped a page of the notebook.

  ‘Anything else in there catch your eagle eye then?’

  ‘The lunar cycle chart is interesting, although it raises as many questions as it answers. And this is very odd.’ Rose held the book closer to her face and read aloud. ‘ “The moon has two sides, that which basks in the reflection of earth’s light and the side which is shunned, forever turning from view. How easy it will be for the dark to swallow light.” Do you think they could be a bunch of mystics? Satanists, stuff like that?’

  ‘With any luck we’ll find out tomorrow,’ said Robert, rising and draining his glass. ‘Listen, if I get to write this book, can I dedicate it to you?’

  ‘I’d be very flattered.’ Rose cocked an eyebrow and smiled. ‘Let’s hope we don’t find out so much that it winds up getting published posthumously. Can I borrow this tonight?’ She held up the notebook.

  ‘Sure,’ said Robert. ‘I have to go into work in the morning, but I’ll call you. Come on, I’ll walk you to the station.’

  Together they rose and left the pub. Outside, the streets were still crowded as the cinemas and theatres discharged their audiences.

  ‘I’ll go from Leicester Square,’ called Rose, divorcing herself from a gang of drunken secretaries who were just leaving a wine bar. On the corner of the square a Salvation Army band were gamely leading an unsteady crowd in a rendition of ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. Rose turned into a side alley which connected the square to Charing Cross Road. Behind, Robert fought to keep pace with her. The alleyway stank of urine and stale hamburgers as he followed the tic-tac of Rose’s shoes into darkness.

  ‘Couldn’t we just have stayed on the main road?’ he asked.

  ‘Quicker this way.’

  Rose was a black shape between the high walls, the flat-top of her haircut standing in relief against the lamplight ahead at the end of the alley. Suddenly there was a rush of wind and a thump, as if a heavy object had just flown over Robert’s head into the shadows beyond. Seconds later, a shape appeared by Rose’s side. Robert could make out the unmistakable form of a man. Rose screamed as the figure dropped over her. There was a scuffling sound and a dustbin lid clattered against the far wall of the alley.

  Robert ran ahead and blundered over a kneeling form. He tried to grab at Rose’s attacker and received a brutal kick in the stomach. Falling back against the wall he watched helplessly as the assailant turned once more to Rose. There was a sudden hissing sound and the air was filled with an acrid smell of pear-drops. Shouting in pain, the figure loped off to the end of the alley and vanished around the corner. Robert tried to part his stinging eyelids, but was unable to make out anything beyond a blurred outline. He tried to catch his breath.

  ‘Rose, are you all right?’

  ‘I think so. Are you?’ She rose from the ground with a grunt and started to dust herself down.

  ‘Yeah. What on earth did you do to him?’

  ‘I finally got to use my trusty can of Mace is what I did,’ she said, coughing. ‘Whoever he was, he won’t be able to see straight for the next few hours.’

  Robert felt for Rose’s arm and steered her from the alleyway into the brightly lit street ahead.

  ‘Did he manage to get anything from you?’ he asked, wiping his watering eyes with a paper handkerchief. ‘Where’s your purse?’


  ‘He wasn’t after my purse, Robert.’ She slipped her hand into her jacket and withdrew a fistful of torn pages from her inside pocket. ‘He was after the book.’

  Chapter 15

  Awake

  She awoke and looked down.

  This had indeed been no dream. She was bound hand and foot with rough nylon cord. She knew that she would be executed soon, at the dawning of the New Age, and that she would not be alone when she died. Six hundred and twenty feet above London she hung, her scarlet-black hair whipping across her tear-streaked face. She still wore a jacket, shirt and jeans, but somehow must have kicked off her shoes in the struggle earlier. How long had she been up here? Recent events had blurred together in her memory. Someone had come to feed her yesterday, or had that been the day before? She felt no cold now. She had been given drugs to counteract her pain, she was sure of that. There could surely be no hope of rescue. Darkness had fallen, but on either side of her lights buzzed, tall and yellow. Pigeons warbled beneath her bare feet, scrabbling for sheltered perches beyond the reach of the wailing wind.

  Further below, she could hear the irate horns of snarled traffic. Her wrists and ankles were numb and bleeding from the tightness of the cord binding them. Exhausted, she cried again, unable to believe that soon she would no longer be alive. She was tied upright, in the position of the cross, on show for all to see, yet no one could see her. Above, a handful of stars cast a cold, lonely light. Up here the bitter night air seemed cleaner, fresher. Sarah breathed deep and prayed for sleep to come once more as the icy darkness slowly crawled into her heart.

  Wednesday 17 December

  Chapter 16

  New Blood

  ‘You’re late, Mr Nahree. And on a sale day, too. What happened this time?’ The little man raised himself up on tiptoe and adjusted his tie in the huge gilt mirror behind the counter.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry, sir,’ said the young Indian clerk, wringing his hands apologetically. ‘The trains. A body on the line, I think.’