Roofworld

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘The original Roofworld followed the noble ideals of the Greek gods,’ Zalian continued, ‘and we retained their passive and peaceful symbol—the moon. Our new rivals call themselves the Bringers of the New Age and are a reverse of all we represent. Their first leader was fried alive above Piccadilly by the usurper they call Chymes. He is a man who has obliterated most of his enemies in a matter of days. Now it seems that only a handful of us are still left in his way. And once we are gone, no one on the ground will be safe.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Rose.

  ‘When you look down on something from a height,’ said Zalian, ‘it seems easier to understand how it works. You learn how to milk the system. You discover its weaknesses. We have broken laws, but we have never murdered and we have never injured those below. Still, we have made the ground system work for us. Our enemies are different. They will steal and kill from the sky when they take control. Then the old rules will be gone forever and the streets will be awash with blood. The slaughter that has occurred so far will have simply become a way of life.’

  Zalian looked at his watch and moved off once more, this time toward the centre of the roof upon which they stood. ‘They’ve taken our leaders, our best men and women. They are torturing them for their knowledge and they will kill them when it is the right time to do so. Just as ours is an old society rooted in good, Chymes seems to honour something much more ancient and evil. Sunrise signifies the death of night, their sacrificial ritual denoting the end of the moon.’

  ‘You think they’ll attack you, then murder your people at sunrise?’ asked Rose.

  ‘It seems likely. But when? Tomorrow? The next day?’ They had reached a large arrangement of aluminium ducts. Along one side was a workman’s cabin with its door open. Inside, two young women sat rewinding hundreds of yards of nylon cable. Zalian stood silently watching them. ‘Our supplies are almost exhausted,’ he said. ‘They have destroyed nearly all of our depots.’

  ‘You can’t give up hope,’ said Rose. ‘Remember, you can often see the moon during the day.’

  Zalian gave a bitter laugh. ‘The Bringers of the New Age will be the new lords of the Roofworld,’ he admitted. ‘They are tribal, violent, devoid of conscience, bred from the sterile wasteland of what this city has become. To join with them is to enter the realm of darkness.’

  ‘If they outnumber you and they’re so strong,’ asked Robert, ‘how can they be beaten?’

  ‘We should have acted days ago,’ said Zalian, appearing not to hear him. ‘Instead we waited. I underestimated them. I underestimated him.’

  ‘What was Sarah Endsleigh’s connection in all this?’ asked Robert.

  ‘It was I who asked her up here in the first place,’ said Zalian. ‘I was Sarah’s lover.’ Zalian leaned back against the wall of the workman’s cabin and rubbed his hand across his forehead. He seemed oblivious to the bitterness of the wind which had begun to pick up across the rooftop. ‘It was all my fault. We knew nothing about the new leader of the New Age except his name—Chymes. He sounded like a character from a comic book.’

  ‘Then why did so many kids take him seriously?’

  ‘The man acts like a comic book character, carrying out psychotic stunts, filling their heads with crazy ideas and images of blood cults and revenge. He must have every maladjusted thug, every screwed-up junkie, every twisted loner in the city under his control. And now he’s killing our family.’

  ‘You were saying about Sarah,’ Rose gently reminded.

  ‘I asked for volunteers to infiltrate the New Age,’ said Zalian, his voice low. ‘Sarah wanted to go. I couldn’t stop her. She passed back information she obtained from two members, one they called the Toad and another one called Samuel. But she was discovered. And while Chymes decided her fate, he sent her down to street level with two of his men…’

  ‘…To dissuade her mother from talking. That was the morning I saw her,’ Rose exclaimed.

  ‘One of the men she travelled with was also on our side,’ said Zalian, ‘but for his own protection we had to keep Sarah unaware of him. Charlotte was a stubborn woman. She’d managed to bully the secrets of the Roofworld out of her daughter. Now she refused to give up her notes. I doubt that she realized the danger she was putting herself and Sarah in by doing so.’

  ‘I knew there was something odd going on that day,’ said Rose. ‘I’m so bloody unobservant. If only I’d realized that Sarah was there as a prisoner.’

  ‘If you’d known, you may never have made it this far.’

  ‘I very nearly didn’t make it through this afternoon,’ muttered Robert, shoving his hands deep in his pockets.

  ‘Of course, Chymes didn’t believe Sarah when she returned empty-handed. So he sent someone to search the old woman’s apartment. Unfortunately, the burglar he chose was a junkie, a crazy boy. He broke into several other flats before searching the right one. He was caught in the act by Charlotte and he murdered her.’ Zalian fell silent and stood staring off into the bitter night sky.

  ‘I’m freezing,’ Robert complained. ‘Can we go inside and start work on the book?’

  ‘What do you think we can gain by studying it?’ asked Rose.

  ‘We don’t know what motivates the New Age,’ explained Zalian. ‘We need to understand their doctrines, their way of thinking. Why do they perform ritual killings? Do they believe in the supernatural? The power of Satan? A lot of people here seemed to think so. They were afraid of facing Chymes for fear of being—I don’t know—destroyed by something diabolical. Chymes is a clever man. He rules by using our most basic terror, the fear of primitive evil. If you can make people believe in that, you can control them for life.’

  He turned on his heel suddenly, facing away from them. ‘Sarah knew what drove Chymes on. I can only pray that she passed the information across to her mother. Once we understand his motives, we can find a way to beating him. I suspect that without Chymes spear-heading this grand New Age, the rest of his men will fall into disarray.’

  ‘And what if your theory is wrong?’ asked Robert.

  ‘Then we fail and the last barrier between them and the ground will have fallen. Madness will have triumphed over reason.’

  ‘How much time do you think we’ve got?’ asked Rose.

  ‘Judging by their previous attacks, about three hours.’

  Robert beat the others back to the conduit.

  Chapter 31

  Beneath the Bridge

  ‘That’s not the point, Ian. You promised that we’d be able to spend at least part of the Christmas break together. I thought we’d be able to get out of this damned city for a few days.’

  ‘But that was before all hell broke loose. And now that I’m getting somewhere with the investigation, I have to stay in town and see it through. Surely you of all people must appreciate that.’

  Janice Longbright had been expecting to stay the night with him, but Hargreave knew that tonight, and every night for the foreseeable future, he had to return to work after seeing her back to her comfortable Belsize Park flat. ‘It’s not as if I’m angling for promotion, quite the reverse. If I don’t put in the hours and there’s another murder…’

  ‘I know, Ian. And I understand, really. I’d feel the same way. I suppose I’m just being selfish. Why did it have to happen at Christmas of all times….’ Janice stood in the gap of the doorway, the hall light glossing the tidy, old-fashioned style of her hair. She seemed to be wearing a shade of lipstick that nobody manufactured any more. He leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the mouth. ‘I’ll see you first thing tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll put in some overtime myself,’ she mused. ‘At least that way we could have lunch together. I might even let you shoulder me into the Xerox room with a sprig of mistletoe.’

  ‘You’d need a whole branch to cope with what I have in mind,’ said Hargreave, buttoning up his collar and glancing up at the sky. ‘They reckon we’re going to get snow before the end of the week. I’ve got Butterworth leading a team of
men on the roof areas around Soho, but they’ve come up with sod all so far. We have to act now, before any remaining tracks get covered.’

  ‘Where are you going? Back to work?’

  ‘I’ve a meeting with Stan Cutts. Maybe he’s going to come clean and give me a lead. I’ll call you later, let you know how I got on.’

  Earlier that evening, he had received a telemessage from the journalist asking to meet him beneath Hungerford Bridge. It seemed an odd request, but Hargreave was going to make sure that he was there on time, in case Cutts had come up with a decent suspect, or even better had decided to reveal the source of his information.

  As he walked along the broad, dimly lit pavement of Northumberland Avenue towards the embankment and the bridge, he began to grow suspicious. Why would Cutts send him a note rather than simply make a call? He had never done so before. He rounded the corner of the avenue, passing the smart white exterior of the Playhouse, and found himself facing one of London’s saddest and most disturbing sights. Here, beneath the dripping ironwork of the railway bridge, were the derelicts of the city, the vagrants who had been turned away from the overcrowded hostels of Camden and Soho and Stepney and Bow, who slept in sodden cardboard boxes on the pavement and who fought desperate, bitter battles among themselves for a cigarette or a swig of wine.

  It seemed bizarre that they should be camped here, next to a theatre that nightly discharged smartly dressed playgoers who stood looking on and sipping white wine while they waited for the intermission bell to recall them. Even on a night as bitterly cold as this there were hundreds of the down-and-outs, bundles of flesh and rags who blended against the stained brickwork until they seemed to have become part of the bridge’s structure.

  Hargreave shifted uneasily at the base of the bridge, checking his watch every few minutes. Opposite, the darkened windows of the soon-to-be demolished shops at the bottom of Villiers Street stared blankly back. In a couple of years, new glass and concrete office blocks would stand here, ready to house the new executives who would insist on removing the despairing eyesore beneath the bridge. Then where would they sleep? These days, even the churches locked their doors at night. He checked his watch again, then dug into his overcoat for his cigarettes. Cutts was over twenty minutes late.

  Behind him there was a scuffling sound as two vagrants fought for space among the huddled sleepers. He looked up at the grey steel railings of the bridge above.

  There were people on the bridge.

  The more his eyes adjusted to the dark, the more individual figures he could count. There were four of them—no, five. They were carrying something—it appeared to be a large sack—and tethering it to the handrail with a length of rope. Suddenly the sack was tossed over the side of the bridge, the rope pulled taut and the bulky object swung like a pendulum across the road at the bridge’s base.

  Hargreave followed the path of the pendulum in time to see the sack crash through the window of the nearest shop with a deafening bang. Before the vagrants had time to stagger to their feet amid coughs and cries, Hargreave sprinted across the road and climbed through the demolished window of the shop. At the end of the now-taut rope was the body of a man, the end of the cord fastened in a noose around his neck. Stan Cutts was lying in a pile of souvenir dolls and teddy bears with his hands tied behind his back, his legs twisted at grotesque angles beneath him. His eyes were wide and still.

  Hargreave rose and looked back at the railway bridge. Even now he could hear fast footsteps clanging across the bridge’s narrow pedestrian walkway. He knew all too well that the only way onto it from here was to go back up the street and through the terminal. Opening the frequency on his walkie-talkie, he requested a car and a team of men to begin a search, starting from the darkened far side of the bridge. He crouched over the body and began a systematic search of Stan’s pockets, first going through his overcoat, then turning the body over to check inside his jacket. Behind him the vagrants stood silently watching, unable to comprehend the cause of this disturbance to their troubled sleep.

  Hargreave quickly pocketed several scraps of paper, a couple of ticket stubs and a wallet, leaving some small change and a bunch of keys. As he leaned over the broken body of the reporter, he grimaced. There was a strange, but vaguely recognizable smell in the air. He rubbed his thumb and forefinger across the shoulder of Cutts’ overcoat and sniffed his fingers. Faint traces of yellow powder brushed the ridges of his thumb….

  A few feet away from him a heavy, triangular piece of glass fell from the top of the shattered window with a crash, making him start. He checked the body once again and this time noticed the painful blisters which surrounded the dead reporter’s mouth. He bent forward and examined them more closely. They appeared to be consistent with acid burns. The same smell lingered here, but with a more stinging chemical acridity. He knew the compound, remembered smelling it in chemistry classes. Sulphur. The body had been sprayed or brushed with a large quantity of sulphur powder. And by the look of it he reckoned that Stan Cutts had been forced to swallow sulphuric acid. He rose unsteadily to his feet, his head sinking to his hands. It was all beginning to fit with the theory that he had first started to consider when he freewheeled the computer.

  Of course it would be sulphur. It was the basic material most closely associated with the devil. Brimstone.

  Friday 19 December

  Chapter 32

  Search Parties

  By 10.30 that evening Zalian’s group, including Robert and Rose, had gathered on the roof of the Stock Exchange once more. The previous night’s search had proven fruitless. Chymes and his men had failed to launch any kind of attack and an uneasy silence had settled over the roofscape. Much to Rose’s annoyance Zalian had jealously guarded his precious notebooks, laboriously copying sections of them into his desktop computer. He now had a wealth of facts and figures at his fingertips, but had so far been unable to draw any firm conclusions from them. The clues to Chymes’ grand plan remained elusive, hidden in an overabundance of information.

  Rose and Robert had finally climbed down from the roof in a state of exhaustion at just after 5.00 a.m. that morning. Both of them slept through the day that followed, while all around them the residents of the city continued their traditional Christmas rituals of shopping and getting drunk. Now they were back on the roof once more and this time Rose felt sure that something would occur. Spice’s team, nine in all, lined up to receive weapon packs from Lee, who handed each one a small nylon satchel containing a marine flare, spare line cartridges, a knife and something which looked like a miniature crossbow.

  ‘I wasn’t going to have them issued until I’d really perfected them,’ he told Spice, passing her one of the crude prototype devices. ‘It’s the reload. I can’t get it to work automatically and the whole thing’s really too light for the ammunition.’

  ‘Which is what?’ asked Spice, balancing the aluminium crossbow in the palm of her hand.

  ‘It’s a modified dart.’ He withdrew one from the bag and held it up. ‘You can’t carry more than six of them around and they’re only good for close range.’

  ‘Are the tips poisoned?’ asked a girl standing behind Spice.

  ‘Unfortunately, no,’ said Lee. ‘Zalian wouldn’t let me use poison, but I’ve managed to coat the tips in a mix which will sting in a wound like a son of a bitch. I’ve no covers for them, so be careful you don’t stick yourself.’

  ‘We’ve got to have something for long distance, Lee. Haven’t you got anything in there we can use?’ Spice accepted a cluster of darts and carefully pocketed them. ‘I mean, they’ve got all of the razor-coin guns now.’

  When Chymes’ men had first begun their kidnapping raids, they had stolen Lee’s complete supply of coin-guns, which at best had been merely capable of stunning someone, and had adapted them into murder weapons.

  ‘I don’t have anything for long distance,’ admitted Lee. ‘I wasn’t expecting a war.’

  ‘OK, finish kitting my team and I’ll figure out wh
ich area we’re going to cover.’ Spice walked off, restrapping her belt over her small, muscular frame. In the operations room she talked briefly with Zalian, who had decided that the groups should start the search for Chymes by splitting the central part of London into three sections, beginning at the top of each section and fanning out to meet with each other in the centre.

  Damien, the young punk leading the third group, was the first to leave, his team using existing runs to take off across the tops of the city’s financial institutions. Then Spice was over the side, her two-way micro-transmitter crackling as she led her group away towards the lights of the West End.

  Lee handed out the last of the weapons to his team of eight, who stubbed out their cigarettes, joking nervously to one another, and took off over the empty streets, the rusting steel pillars of the cable stations creaking and groaning beneath their collective weight. Then the roof was suddenly silent and empty, as the combined body heat of Zalian’s troops evaporated into the escalating iciness of the night.

  —

  Spice aimed her line-gun and slowly squeezed the trigger. There was a nylon hiss and a glitter of steel, a clinking sound as she connected with her target. Quickly, she ratcheted the line in and attached it to the metal bar on the wall of the building at her feet. They had travelled to the north of Oxford Circus via one of the oldest permanent runs in the city, but were now forced to leave it at Portland Place because several of the stations from here were almost completely rusted through. Spice ushered her men forward onto the line and, clipping themselves in place one by one, they silently crossed the deserted street.

  Although the front of it was lit by dim sodium streetlamps, the top of the opposite building was in darkness. Spice was the last to cross, nimbly hopping over the broad ledge around the roof and unclipping the line after her so that no one could follow them.