by Robert Young
Roth knows that the game he must play is a dangerous one. He seeks to be found by those that he cannot find but to evade those searching for him. Passing shops he sees his own face on the cover of newspapers, grainy and pixelated, and headlines demanding his capture. He knows that the net is cast and will be closing. What he cannot be sure of is if he will be found again by someone that can give him answers. The police will have only questions and Roth has more than enough of his own.
But this is the tightrope that he feels he must walk, to advertise his presence and hope that it is seen widely enough that they come back to him again so he can ask them for what he needs, to demand that he is given the answers he craves, one way or another.
The first paper that he grabs though, tells him that though most of the country seems to know something of him, or his deeds - though his identity remains a mystery - that days have now passed and Roth can see that the response he craves has not been forthcoming.
As he walks through beating sun and a pounding head Roth chews this bitter pill for a while and wonders at its import. Have they seen it? It seems impossible that they can have failed to see this flare he has sent up, so brightly has it burnt that it has reached every corner.
Two possibilities exist in Roth's estimation; that they do not know him, or what they have done; or that they know and don't care.
But there are clearer memories of what took place that night, of what was said and done, and that sense of what they were that he can only feel and not articulate. Roth is certain now that they knew what they were doing and that they had some dark purpose.
Which leaves only the second option. And if they are ignoring him, then Roth must do something that cannot be ignored.
Chapter 40
Not surfacing for a few days in a hotel room is an acceptable thing for honeymooners but a man checking in by himself and leaving the Do Not Disturb sign hooked over the door handle for so long, that will get noticed by more than just housekeeping.
Time to pack my things up and make a discrete exit from here. Perhaps I'll leave behind a few of the more persistent scraps of the nightmares I've had to endure.
The spanking new laptop has no carrier but slips easily enough into the holdall I have. My preparation has included more than just buying a half-decent computer. I've enough with me to be able to keep on the move and not look like a tramp - a new set of clothes, changes of underwear. All this to replace the things that lie abandoned in some distant stand of gorse and bramble.
My dwindling time has not been wasted and has given me a degree of understanding and a sense of purpose. Knowing something of Frost and Stanford tells me something of myself. My new self, however briefly my flame may flicker.
I feel as though I want to know something more than the two of them imparted to me before we clashed. In the main they were answering my questions, questions which were born of ignorance and so there remain a very many unasked. The encounter was revelatory but the sense has persisted that they were telling me only those things that they would have me know.
But that can wait. Their crushed and battered bodies have lain in a field for several days now, a week or so of long hours unrelenting daylight. It will surely have drained any resistance that they had stored up from any recent feeds. If I did not finish them, the sunshine will have done and though that guilt persists for the vagrant in the horse box, taking down the two of them helps me to feel like a little balance has been restored. I'm not convinced that anything will wash it away, but my vengeance was his as well a little bit.
Nonetheless, more pressing is my need to get to Issy's killer. This man whose face I have seen staring back at me from the laptop screen, who has taken another innocent life. Not in a darkened room, a lone victim and a futile intervention from a too-weak adversary. But in a crowded daylight spot, bang in the heart of London, there for all the people to see and to film on their phones and tourist cameras. There on the cctv of the shops and the council watching each street and alleyway, from every angle and elevation.
So many shots of the man in the act, in the throes of violence, in his fleeting escape and the confused mass of contradictory time-stamped images that seem to show him in too many different places at too many times, then nowhere at all. Too many shots for anyone to have excused the police their failure to apprehend a suspect.
The newspapers are delirious in their horror and their anguish, their chest-beating editorials and their screeching headlines are incredulous and outraged. They want answers, demand them for their readers. They want blood too, every bit as much as the man reproduced so many times within their pages. The television news is no different, replaying each grainy, shaky video clip as if it were supposed to somehow aid the search for this terrible man, this angel of death on London's safe and sanitised shopping streets.
It is early evening as I exit the hotel, explaining briefly the flu bug that laid me low for a spell to the man on reception who can scarcely muster the effort to pretend he cares.
Along the main road in the early evening I wander for a while with the bag slung across my shoulder, the long thick strap resting diagonally across my chest.
In a few hundred yards I am passing by a large pub that looks warm and welcoming, a row of gleaming hand pumps and chrome lager taps line the bar. I notice that all eyes in the room seem to be staring in the same direction and at once I am assailed by a need to do something to feel a little normal again, and to wander in and watch the football match that must have these men enthralled.
Inside I make for the bar and order a pint of beer and swivel toward the television to catch what is fascinating everyone. The barman has scarcely looked at me when taking my order and heaves the pump absently, one eye still on the screen.
It is not the spectacle that I had expected to see. No lush green grass, no football stadium. No preening millionaire sportsmen.
A news-reader looks grave and at the same time edgy, the look of the live broadcaster who can never entirely rely on a tightly-worded autocue and a well-mapped programme schedule.
They cut to a live news feed and it is hard at first to divine what it is that I am supposed to be seeing and what has every punter in the pub under its spell and it is then I see it. Or more specifically, I see him
Chapter 41
He walked for hours before he found a place. Another derelict building, one more place of decay to house Roth who has become petrified and ageless. There is a notice that tells him that this old cinema has been purchased by the Kingdom of Righteous Glory Mission and is soon to become a Centre for Worship and Education.
Roth scoffs at that final word. What kind of education can they offer? Myths and fairy tales, stolen stories and borrowed legends. Roth has shown them what truth is, what power means. Where was the preacher's God when he needed to fend off the demon? Where was his saviour? Where is Roth's?
He will defile this house of God before it is even consecrated. He will curse it before it can be blessed. He feels entitled to expect that the preacher might bring him deliverance but instead he is condemned to the wilderness, forsaken. Roth needs someone to hate for that, someone to punish, regardless of their culpability.
The velvet seats and threadbare carpet are a deep red in the gloom, a red that seems to flow down the incline to the front. Roth follows it and drops his bag on the stage.
They will place a lectern on this spot, front and centre. They will raise a pulpit and Roth fished a knife from his belongings, slashed his palm and wiped a cross upon the floor to mark the spot. Let them stand in his blood as they speak their words of absolution and redemption. Roth will seek his own.
Back into the cool evening he ventures toward people again, seeks another crowd. He goes north until he hits the river and the landmarks on the northern bank rear up against the darkening backdrop of the evening sky.
Straight across, above the sea of heads rises the tower of Big Ben and a dozen different scammers dot the bridge, relieving tourists of t
heir unfamiliar notes with their rigged games of cup and ball, their card games and their sleight of hand. They have accomplices on hand to win a game or two before the real suckers step forward convinced so easily by the charade.
These people are fools and they believe what they want to believe. Their faith the in the goodness of others is merely their weakness and these scammers may rely on deception and theft but they have adapted to their environment and will survive. Roth sees this, sees that simply trusting to fate will be fatal and he will not wait meekly for his epiphany.
Turning right he sees the glass and steel spires of the City glittering against the pink red sky and he turns and moves along the south bank of the river which is high this evening with the tide.
Above him looms the slowly turning wheel of the London Eye, rising and falling through the night. The queues to board the glass pods are long and the people chatter with excitement as others crane their necks and focus their camera lenses.
Roth drifts away from the crowd and across the open space behind. When he reaches the huge steel anchors that pin the support cables to the ground, he notes their size and strength and with barely a look around him he springs up and onto one, straddling its solid white girth.
He scrambles up the thick steel cable with an ease and dexterity that allow him to go unnoticed until he is within ten feet of the spindle of the wheel. As he steps across the spindle, he looks beneath him to the two vast cantilevers that support it and then he dashes across to the hub of the wheel.
Stepping between the spokes that radiate across to the rim, Roth hears the voices beneath him begin to call out as he is spotted by more and more of the crowd on the ground. There is no fear yet, just confusion and wonder at this new spectacle. Is this a stunt? Some unscheduled daredevil show or publicity seeker? A protester come to announce their grievance to the world?
Roth stands on the edge of the hub and grips two huge cables in his hands, leaning forward into the night and peering below him to the slowly moving pods. His feet shift to account for the slow spin of the wheel which rotates at scarcely more than half a mile per hour.
There are calls from below now as they finally halt the wheel and begin to shepherd people out of those pods that are at the platform and in the others that are arrayed around him, the occupants have surrendered all interest in the skyline of the capital.
When more are watching and the clamour grows, Roth stops moving his feet and clings on as slowly he tilts round with the wheel until he is horizontal and then he begins to dip lower and invert. The excitement rises and the noise below peaks and though many minutes have passed the wheel still moves on its creeping journey. If the operators have spotted him they have not reacted yet and do not do so until he is almost completely upside down, almost a full one hundred and eighty degrees from where he started.
Roth hangs there upside down a while longer as he hears them beseech him by turns to either hang on or to come down. He can hear the indecision as the operators debate whether the wheel should be put in motion again to set him upright, or if that motion might dislodge him from his precarious grip. But a full rotation takes half an hour and in any case they worry that he will fall before another half turn can be completed.
Roth spares them any further debate.
Releasing one hand his body drops and swings down, his feet sweeping out into empty space as gravity takes him and then he grabs again with his free hand at the cable so both hands clasp it. His legs swoop down and crash loudly against the cable and the sharp noise strikes out across the night.
There are audible gasps from all around him and high clear screams. He holds tight, suspended from the tense cable and grasps it tighter with his legs.
Roth hangs a little longer clutched to the cable, everybody's attention now undivided and then he shimmies back up, hand over hand, feet clenched together around the cable, back up to the hub. He springs up and stands again at the centre of the wheel and some applause and cheers ring out that tragedy has been averted.
But their enthusiasm is short-lived and as Roth's hands reach up to the cable above his head a few of them sense that this will not end well. The rest will not take much longer.
He covers the first twenty feet quickly, pulling with his hands, pushing with his feet, pull and push, pull and push. But progress is difficult and for a moment he considers starting over, instead working his way horizontally out to the rim of the wheel on a different spoke and climbing upward from there but there is noise and movement below him and for the first time he notes the blue strobing of approaching police lights. The news crews will not be far behind. Not for something like this.
So up it is.
He keeps going methodically, pull and push, pull and push. He slides hands and feet upward, like he is pulling the rim toward him and no matter the distance he puts between himself and the crowds, their noise and chatter do not seem to fall away from him. Still he can hear them talking and asking and for every one that sounds fearful and concerned there is another that has an edge to their voice that suggests something altogether more ghoulish. But of course Roth knows full well that they watch to see if he will fall. It is why he climbs.
When he pauses twenty metres from the top he is more than one hundred metres high and he sees the people in the pods pressed up against the glass, the better to see him, to observe his fate in this fight he has picked with gravity.
But he presses on and for a spell as he climbs he focuses his gaze on the nearest pod and its rapt passengers who stare back, increasingly fearful as he moves toward them looking at them all instead of the cable.
He times his arrival at the top of the wheel with the police's arrival at the bottom. He is surprised at how long it has taken for the vans to arrive as the ground beneath him is beaten by the pounding flash of blue that floods the crowd and is gone, in pulsing waves. The vehicles stream in from behind the vast edifice of County Hall and uniforms spill across the grass and onto the wide paved pathway and the efforts to disperse the watching crowd proves slow. No-one wants to give up their good view, their prime spot. No-one waits on line to be there at the front just to surrender their position freely when someone else turns up, uniform or not.
Roth perches on the steel rim of the wheel and watches the scene down there unfold. They chase the crowds back, berate and beseech and erect makeshift barriers of plastic tape. They bring in a man with a loudhailer and he notes the flitting black shapes of the police armed response unit moving below and picking out their spots on rooftops around him, on County Hall, on the Shell building. Roth can also hear the hum and drone of helicopters finally scrambled to the scene. There are too many for police and so he knows that he has achieved at least some of what he came here for because those other helicopters are TV news helicopters.
Those cameras will point at him up here and watch his every move, broadcasting it to watching millions live and uninterrupted. They will watch him on their TV screens with the same unwavering focus as everyone here.
Roth senses that his audience is growing restless. He stands and walks across the wide white steel rim and then leaps straight up onto the glass roof of the topmost pod. The people inside scream and curse and they back away to the edges of its ovoid space. The crowd below shriek and he hears something loud and sharp from the loudhailer but he pays it little mind as he crawls across the domed pod peering in.
For a while he merely sits there waiting, counting off the minutes that he is being beamed onto TV screens, wondering what is long enough. He is tuned to his surroundings, his senses sharp, and he can hear everything down to the crackly conversations that rasp in the earpieces of the men pointing rifle scopes at him.
He has no exit strategy and whilst he expected, once he began climbing, that a response like this one would be inevitable, Roth is not planning carefully here. He is doing what he thinks might work and what his instincts dictate.
The buzz of the helicopters and the anxious sobbing from the pod beneath him b
egin to wear at him a little as his patience thins and then he decides that the wait is over. If they do not see this - they for whom he is staging this entire spectacle - then they either have no interest in him, or they exist only in his head after all. In which case, he cares nothing for what might happen next.
He notes as he looks around him that crowds have assembled at the wall on the far bank and the crowds on Westminster Bridge have stopped moving. All eyes are on him.
Standing up Roth begins to jump up and stamp down on the glass roof of the pod which jars and shakes and booms the loud impact across the river. He does this until the police respond through loudhailer and radio and then suddenly he drops to his knees on the roof of the pod and stares down at those cowering within.
Some are crouched and crying whilst others gesture at him to stop and to come down, as if he might slide open a lid and drop in on them.
Roth shakes his head and begins to pound his fists on the glass and as he speeds up the pace and the force of the pounding the loudhailer kicks in again and he hears the police radios crackle into life.
He lets it all run through him, all the fear and anger, all the frustration and regret. What they did to him, what they have made him do. Why he has been forsaken.
He beats harder, faster and he begins to shout, his head thrown back and his mouth wide open as the horror and the anguish pour from his throat.
He pounds and he shouts, beats and screams, smashes at the glass and then he hears it, they all hear it and those few inside the pod see it close up. The strengthened glass of the air conditioned ten-tonne pod has cracked and the spider-webs splay out across the surface.
A ripple goes through the crowd below and he knows that everyone has heard it. Another burst of words carried on static jumps across the rooftops.
Roth lands another hammer blow and a faultline opens in the glass from the roof to the base with a sound like a twang. He raises his fists again to strike down on the roof.
