I went looking for him.
My arm was in a sling, and I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but climbing hundreds of steps with one arm is a sod of a job. It would probably be easier with one leg instead. I don’t know what it is that makes it so knackering. Maybe it’s to do with balance. Or maybe it’s nothing to do with balance and all to do with posture. In any case, both things rate very low where I’m concerned.
I went up a couple of days before Christmas. There were festive lights on all the cranes. There was one guy on duty, the poor sap, a policeman because of what had happened. And he wasn’t making an effort. He was sitting in a squad car with a radio playing Perry Como, sipping from a cup. ‘Christmas Dream’. I hoped there was a nip of something other than coffee in that. I silently sent him best wishes and got myself up the damned skyscraper.
There were the leftovers of a party on the summit. There were windows too now, presumably put in especially so some pissed labourer didn’t take a dive off the thirty-third floor. The wind howled outside as if complaining at its banishment. A skip full of empty Brew Dog bottles. Crumpled foil bags of dry roasted peanuts.
I found a candle, warm and soft at the business end; and there was the hot, plasticky odour of recently extinguished flame. I called out to him.
‘That’s not my name,’ he said.
‘But it’s who you are.’
‘According to some. To people who can’t cope. Who think that giving a name to something they don’t want to think about makes it more manageable.’
‘It’s the way we’re hardwired,’ I said. ‘When you’re a kid you fear what’s underneath the bed if you don’t know what it is. But as soon as you find out it’s a zombie or a vampire, you have the upper hand. You can deal with it. You can prepare.’
‘So, fifty storeys high, how do you prepare for me?’
‘You saved my life,’ I said. ‘I wanted to thank you.’
‘We did all that,’ he said. ‘You’re here to turn me in.’
‘To ask you to give yourself up,’ I said. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I stopped. Years ago.’
‘And that’s supposed to mean anything? The passage of years? People forget, scars heal, that kind of thing?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You said you were the architect.’
‘I was an architect. Of sorts.’
‘Of death.’
He smiled and walked to the window. Teeming lights everywhere. Traffic surged across London Bridge like something molten.
‘What is your name?’
‘Whittaker,’ he said. ‘Struan Whittaker.’
‘Why did you stop, Struan?’ I asked. ‘Jesus, why did you start?’
He rubbed his face and I heard the hiss of stubble in the open space like water thrown on a hot plate.
‘I was young and angry,’ he said. ‘I used to be able to see things from my bedroom window. Tower block on the High Street in Stratford. I used to be able to see park space. A view down the river. And then the skyscrapers came and started blocking out life. I could no longer see the river. Or the parks. Just sheets of steel and glass. Shining columns of money.’
‘You lived in a tower block.’
‘Yes. And well loved, it was. Well used. The residential blocks being thrown up now in London… who can afford to live in them, other than the stratospherically rich?’
‘The people building them… the people you pushed off the upper floors… they weren’t stratospherically rich. They were construction workers. They were dads and brothers and sons. Why did they deserve to die?’
‘You’re right,’ he snapped. His voice quivered with some kind of emotion I couldn’t discern. Anger, guilt? It seemed defensive and belligerent in equal measure. ‘And that’s why I quit. I took a step back. It was a protest but I couldn’t see what it was I was really doing. When I understood, when I saw the newspapers and the faces of the people who died – not just shadows in hard hats – I stopped. That and the birth of my son. I recognised the monster I’d become.’
‘You recognised it but you did nothing about it. You can make up for that now. You can give yourself up.’
‘Or?’
‘I won’t grass. Not tonight. But tomorrow the police will be here. And I’ll give them your name. I’ll give them a description.’
‘If you walk away from here.’
‘You’re an old man now, Struan.’
‘I kept myself fit.’
‘Maybe. But the truth is, I don’t want another fight.’
‘My son died, you know.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Really, I am.’
‘He was killed on a train track. Dicking about with his mates. Playing chicken with InterCity 125s. One of his mates told me later that he never looked like leaving the tracks. He wasn’t poised, ready to jump out the way. He just stood there. He was thirteen.’
‘Why did you come back to these buildings?’ I asked. I was getting cold. The ache in my arm was intensifying. I needed some co-codamol and a glass – one glass – of something warming.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘You weren’t going to—’
‘What? Reignite my reign of terror?’
‘Jump. You weren’t going to jump, were you?’
He looked at me thoughtfully, but he didn’t say anything.
‘Your life falls apart when you lose a child,’ he said.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘My wife walked away. I lost my job. Drink, you know. But I made some progress. Maybe I come up here because, ironically… the view…’
‘It is spectacular.’
‘To fly above this,’ he said. ‘To soar over the city. Imagine that.’
‘Imagine.’
‘Give me this evening,’ he said.
I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t know how to phrase what I should have said next.
I left him, remembering the fire in his eyes when he saw Henry Herschell step across the threshold, and I went home.
In the morning it was on the news.