Looking Down (21 page)

‘I don’t quite understand,’ Steven said. ‘Why not call the police?’

Mrs Fritz exploded into a stream of expletives and gestures. They all listened attentively.

‘Mrs F was saying earlier,’ Sarah translated, ‘that the Chinese would get them the sack if they did that, and the police would take Minty away. And they might mention someone climbing up the walls.’

Steven ignored the latter part.

‘Sounds as if she’d be safer if she was taken away. They wouldn’t get sacked if
you
called the police,’ Steven said.

‘And if I tell the police, where would I have got my information from? Where else but the caretaker? Oh for Christ’s sake, just get in there, you’re good at it,’ Sarah said impatiently. ‘And if she’s in there, bring her down without disturbing anything.’

‘They’ll know if Fritz overrides the alarm.’

Fritz shook his head, confident about that.

‘I don’t steal people,’ Steven said, helplessly, but still feeling a surge of excitement. ‘What language does she speak, this girl?’

‘Romany,’ said Mrs Fritz. ‘Gypsy to you, bit of English.’

‘Jesus, that’s all I need. Who the hell else speaks Romany?’

‘I do.’

‘Nobody’s asking you to
steal
her,’ Sarah interrupted. ‘If she doesn’t want to go, leave her. Get on with it, there may not be much time.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, don’t be ridiculous. I can climb up there,
probably, but bring her down? I’m not a sodding rescue service. I’d need harnesses, three men and—’

Steven, nobody’s asking you to bring her down the drainpipe.’

‘What are you asking then?’

Sarah sighed in exasperation. He was supposed to be able to read her mind.

‘We’re asking you to get in secretly, see if Minty’s there and what state she’s in. If she’ll go out of the place with you, then you pick the lock on their door from the inside where it won’t show, and bring her down here. In the meantime, you smash a back window or something, make a mess, or whatever, and make it look as if
she
went out by climbing out and down. See? There’s even ropes up there, over the balcony. A broken washing line, even. Make it look as if she shinned down. Then no one else is implicated.’

‘Why can’t I just pick the lock from the outside with you standing guard? And what makes you think I can pick the lock?’

‘You grew up around me, Steven. You can pick any lock, you did it at school. And if you pick it from the outside, it might show. And if they come back, you’d be stuck on that landing with nowhere to go. Anyway, Fritz says it isn’t a special lock. Like he said, they’re paranoid, antisocial, but cocky. That’s what they are. They’ve got used to no one interfering. Or noticing.’

Steven sat back, arms crossed across chest, hands hidden beneath his armpits, feeling the sweat. Mr and Mrs Fritz leaned forward, simultaneously.

‘These fucking Chinese by way of being out, just now, Mr Steven. Whole bloody lot. Place empty, but for crying Minty. I bin up there. I got no key, no going-in rights, gotta job. But they in’t there this minute. Mrs and Mr Beaumont, they out, too. Son’s birthday. You go and look, please? They got line hanging over back balcony, Sarah’s right. Messy people. They don’t care.’

Despite himself, Steven could feel a terrible tendency to rise to
the challenge. He had surplus energy and surplus guilt and other motives he was not willing to discuss.
Yes.

‘You can see the way from my back window,’ Sarah said.

He wondered for a minute if she was trying to kill him, or had greater faith in his climbing prowess than he did himself. Still, he had climbed with great ease to the Beaumont floor, so what was another floor?

‘I can do it, but I don’t know how to get in. It usually needs some kind person with a preference for fresh air and open windows.’

Fritz had the answers, as if rehearsed.

‘Window at back broken,’ he chanted. ‘Always was, before they lived there. They don’t fix. They never fix. They don’t let anyone in to fix nothing. They don’t move ropes, neither. Lazy bastards.’

‘Your gear and your climbing suit is in my bedroom,’ Sarah said. The way she said it made it sound like a set of pyjamas.

‘And if I do it, then will you give me the painting?’

She did not answer, but he trusted his sister to keep a bargain. She always did, in her way.

There were terrible flaws in this stupid plan, but he knew he would do it anyway. Those soulful eyes of Fritz, that sensation of being seen as powerful, Sarah needing him, all worked like an aphrodisiac. And Lilian’s face: there was always Lilian’s face. The glamour of a rescue mission. Steven surveyed the terrain as best he could. Then, dressed in his black Lycra with the gear neatly stashed at his waist, he climbed out of the window into the well, feeling this was insane, and also gallant. Someone might praise him for it. He ducked his head back to speak to Sarah.

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just gave her a box of chocolates?’

She shook her head and backed away. She could not watch.

Fritz went downstairs to turn off the burglar alarm. Then they sat and waited. The phone rang again. A small carriage clock in
Sarah’s living room struck midnight. Fritz leant forward and patted Sarah’s knee.

‘He’s a good boy, he. Very good climber.’

‘Have you watched him, then?’

‘Oh yeah. Very good.’

‘Didn’t you mind that he was getting inside the flats?’

Fritz shrugged. ‘Better the devil you are knowing. I think he is only playing. I am only the porter, why should I care?’

‘What’s your real name, Fritz?’

‘None of your business, Fortune.’

They waited.

Steven chose the drainpipe route up to the next level, glad of its iron solidity, until he reached the balcony and hauled himself on to it. So far so easy. This was the window into the Beaumonts’ flat, his previous point of entry, and his heart, already pounding, pounded harder. The window was firmly shut, with an opaque blind drawn across it, through which an eerie light seeped. It looked as if it was daylight inside, an almost blue light which somehow gave him the feeling that Lilian had left it to guide him. Would Lilian approve of what he did now? Surely. It was crazy, but in his way, he was doing it for her. So that he would survive until tomorrow, when they were going to meet and study
zing.
So that he could get back that painting, which would make her happy. He stood on the balcony rail, placed his right foot into a space between the girder of the old lift arrangement and the wall, and his left against the drainpipe. There were old brackets in the wall. Rust crunched between his toes. His taped fingers, dusted with chalk, were glad of the friction created by rust. He jammed his fist into a crevice created by broken brick. He never looked down, kept his face level with the brickwork of the wall until he was spreadeagled safely. He tested his toes in his rubber-soled slippers. A heel hook to the ironwork on the side, then he
eased his whole body to follow. Then the drainpipe, which held. Another fist jam. He moved to the second pipe and the metal-work left from the old lift. Then he looked up. The rope hanging over the balcony was almost within reach. Now he had to commit, leap for that thing just out of reach. It was dark up there. His hand clutched at the rope, a slippy, plastic-coated line, as strong as wire, which bore his weight as he wrapped it round his knuckles and pulled. He climbed, hand over hand, then pushed himself away from the wall so he swung into space, and as he swung back, caught the balcony with his hands and hung there. Slowly contorted his body until his heel was above his head, holding on.

My next trick is impossible, he told himself. I wish someone was watching.

Someone was.

He saw the face behind the cracked window as he hauled his way on to the balcony. Small and pale with a mouth shaped into an O! before she moved out of sight. There was a pile of old clothes in a basket. He threw them out of the way, down into the well. The window was dirty and cracked. Fritz was right: they were messy. They made it easy. He was beginning to feel contempt for the owners, recognised that as dangerous. Get in, open window, rearrange rope first. Smash glass from
inside.
Get on with it, you great, soft bastard. It’s the best job you ever did.

Downstairs, they waited. Sarah had begun to pace between the front and the back, and from the back, heard the glass and began a slow gnawing of her fingernails. Then she went and stood by the front door. Then came back. It was better not to know what he was doing. They were both a little mad.

John paced up and down, waiting for daylight. It felt as if it was the darkest hour before the dawn, but midnight was still close behind so there was time to go. He had got it: he had finally
cracked the code. Sleep was out of the question, despite the exhaustion. He had slept too much for too long.

There would be regret, too, for the whisky consumed as he paced, but that was not important. Overindulgence was better than going out of doors and hitting people, which he might otherwise have done.

John had consulted his library, that much-loved, often ignored collection of books on plants, gardening, birds, explorers and medicine, excluding a single unreal story or anything frivolous. He had always assumed that most of his knowledge came from the dry pages of books, and that knowledge thus acquired was the most important kind. He had never rated the more instinctive knowledge he had acquired through prolonged contact with sick human animals as anything like as important, and at the moment he wanted to shoot himself in the head for the realisation that the opposite was true. If only he had trusted himself: he was a walking encyclopedia on human behaviour. He had eyes, for God’s sake. It was his eyes and his ears and his daily experience that truly informed him. Another slug of whisky. He was full of useless energy and sleepy at the same time. If he slept, there would be nightmares, and it was disappointing that Sarah did not answer her phone, but what did he expect? Just because he wanted to talk and refine his thoughts, and she was suddenly the only person he could think of. He wanted to say out loud that it was unpleasant to conclude that Edwin was homicidal, that Edwin was a friend he had come to loathe, and then he was angry with himself for being so vulnerable to his new friendships that the isolation he had once enjoyed seemed to have turned against him.

Sleep beckoned. He resisted it with the irrational crossness of a two-year-old, beating at it with fists and cries for fear of being left behind and missing something. Squinting at that damn painting, with the light at another angle, vowing that this dram would
be the last, he repeated his own conclusions, dredged from the paint, and the books, and everything he thought he never knew. He thought of his own daughter and how much they had wounded one another; thought of Richard Beaumont, and then thought back to his daughter, and how much he preferred the status quo to the bottomless pit of horror that would exist if he did not know if she were alive or dead.
I can’t make it up to you. I can to her.
The love of a child put all other loves into perspective.

He looked at the oil painting through a haze of smoke. The cigarette made him dizzy. He was still imagining this room with bright colours, gracefully faded by nicotine, bad habits and good company. He would do it, when this was over. Never again would he live in his former sterility, or neglect a duty dictated by passion. He would reach out, he would interfere, he would instigate, instead of waiting. When this was over. As he grew calmer, he realised again that he owed a terrible duty to that pathetic body at the bottom of the cliff because it was what had awakened him into a new lease of life, opened his eyes to the pity he had lost, made him want to be in some small way useful, and unique, because others would forget. And he owed it in particular because he now knew what no one else did, and knowledge always imposed a duty. Knowledge imposed dangerous, inevitable obligations. He was not sure he was up to it. That was why he phoned Sarah, ashamed to admit he needed a woman and there was no one else. For the last three years he had shunned his friends.

‘You were a sweet lad, once,’ he told himself. A bookish lad with a great knowledge of birds. A boyhood passion, until he became bored with it, like he had with the stamps and the music. He had come to be wary of them. So, back to the volume containing
Corvus corax.

There were the ravens in the painting, surrounding the dead
body of the girl, the smaller ravens hopping and dancing as they had today, the larger adults slashing and pecking and carrying away. He was confused about what he thought he could see and what he had read. Adult ravens carried away flesh, hid it for future consumption. Babies were nervous, followed examples. Ravens were discriminating, charming, yet the omens of doom.
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting . . . And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor.
They were all crows. Carrion was carrion: flesh was food, and the more scarce the food, the more they pecked. They did not kill: they found what was already dead.

And they liked bright things. They went for wide open eyes, anything that shone, the tawdry and the precious, as long as it glittered. Thieves. Something about the punctuated thread of gold around the neck of that painted body failed to convince. John remembered the dog he had once walked on the cliffs. It had careered after a rabbit, caught it and then, unable to arrest its own headlong pursuit, went straight over the edge, to be found later, dead, broken backed and bloodless on the rocks below, with the rabbit still gripped in its spaniel jaws. Perhaps the body at the bottom of the cliff also held something in her mouth, or in her clenched fist.

He had a brief moment of pity for what Richard Beaumont had seen, and then it was temporarily displaced by an acute dislike for anyone who could have sat, sketched and dispassionately absorbed the terrible sight of Edwin’s ravens pecking at a young body. It was the work of a ghastly voyeur, with blood the temperature of ice or an enjoyment of revenge. Not only had he watched and sketched, but he had, painstakingly and with loving clumsiness, transferred it into paint. The bastard. But oh, the painful shock for a man with such a soft and sentimental reverence for innocent birds, to see what they could do. Take out the
eyes, widen the wounds, tear at the flesh and remove what glittered. John struggled to remember his huge liking for Richard Beaumont, contemplated the perils of any friendship. Friendship was love of a kind and involved accepting what you could not understand and forgiving it. Artists were different anyway. They viewed selectively; they were mesmerised and blinkered by turns; they were intoxicated by the visual, like boys on drugs. Maybe Richard was not aware of what he had seen. Oh yes he was. Perhaps simply paralysed. And he thought he had seen the chough, because he had dreamed of seeing it, and because it was infinitely better than what he had actually seen: the carnivorous brutal raven, raping flesh. Far better to have seen the gentler chough, with all its optimistic associations. When he had had the clarity of just enough alcohol, John was sure he had also discovered the mystery of this red-beaked thing, which crowded into the right-hand corner of this small oil painting. He squinted at it again, thick paint, rough shape. The black bird with the red beak and red feet. The thing that Richard included because he thought it might have been there, or wished it was there, or wanted it to be what it was not. And it was not the ancient chough of his fond imagining, but a baby raven, with feet and feathers still bright red with blood. A bloodied raven, rising to a height, yelling at the parents to go, go,
go.
Enough to fool a man who was denying what he had seen, and preferred it to be the gentler chough, which fed on invertebrates, insects, crustacea, molluscs, spiders and worms, but never carrion.