Chapter 11
ROSALIE
The rope is forty metres of eight millimetre and I have had it in the bottom of the canvas bag since Wednesday, when he gave the bag back and did not look inside it.
That was a mistake. His only one.
I take it up at two in the morning and I do the north face properly this time, with a torch and a tape, because the first time I came up it I was working and when you are working you do not survey, you climb.
Bracket at four metres. Bracket at nine. The gutter run at fifty six is good for my weight and a good deal more, and there is a stack pipe on the north east corner that goes all the way to the yard and is bolted every metre and a half.
Twelve minutes down, in the dark, with a hurt rib.
Nine, healthy.
I write none of this down because I do not need to.
Then I sit on the parapet with my legs over the outside and the rope coiled beside me and the whole city doing its orange thing under a low ceiling of cloud, and I run the actual problem, which is not the wall.
Here it is.
Nobody is stopping me.
No guard on this roof. No lock on the hatch.
The hatch squeaks, and the squeak is the only alarm in the building, and it exists because I agreed to leave it that way.
That is not an alarm. That is a courtesy.
My boots are mine. My kit is mine. There is a car in the yard and the keys are in a bowl by the kitchen door with everybody else's.
There is money in a drawer on the second floor.
Eleven people in this building at any hour and not one has followed me anywhere since Tuesday.
I have been free to leave for six days.
I have been free to leave since the moment I could stand up, and I could stand up on Thursday, and it is now Sunday night, and I am sitting on the edge of a building I could be off in twelve minutes with a rope I have been carrying the whole time.
So.
Why am I here.
I do it properly. I do it the way I would work a room.
Reason one: the wound. Rejected. It is nine days old and stitched and I have worked with worse and the climb down is easier than the climb up.
Reason two: the contract. Rejected. Being in the house is convenient but it is not necessary and it has not been necessary since Wednesday, when I established that he sleeps four feet from me and does not lock the door. I do not need thirty four more days. I need ninety seconds.
Reason three: Wren. Rejected, and this one takes longer, because it is the one that feels true.
Leaving does not help her. Staying does not help her either.
The only thing that helps her is a closed file, and a closed file requires a body, and the body is asleep three floors under my feet with a strip of tape above his head.
Reason four.
I sit with reason four for a while.
Reason four is that on Thursday he stood in a doorway and asked me to leave a hatch broken so that he would know when I went up on the roof, and that I said all right, and that I have not fixed the hatch.
That is not a reason. That is a symptom.
I have been trained to identify compromise in other people.
That is a real part of the work and I am good at it. You watch for the asset who changes route. You watch for the one who starts eating on schedule instead of when there is food. You watch for a favourite chair.
I have a favourite chair.
It is a terrible chair, on a roof, that a man dragged up here in July and left in the rain, and I have sat in it four nights out of the last five, and tonight I did not sit in it because I brought the rope instead, and I want to be honest about the fact that when I came up through the hatch and saw it sitting there in the dark I felt something that I am going to have to call disappointment.
At myself. For not sitting in it.
If I were Hanno, and I were reading a report about an asset who had done what I have done in the last six days, I would have that asset brought in.
That is the assessment. That is the professional judgement, made by the professional, sitting on a parapet in the cold with the evidence in her own file.
I make it and I do not move.
I am still there at three, and I have not touched the rope in half an hour, and the hatch goes.
It squeaks. Of course it squeaks.
I do not turn round. There is one set of footsteps on the gravel and they are not quiet and they are not trying to be, and they stop about eight feet away, which is exactly where they always stop.
"There are two coffees," Cesare says. "One is on the chair. I am going to sit on the parapet about there, and there is nothing behind you."
"I know there is nothing behind me."
"I know you know. I am saying it out loud because it is three in the morning and you are sitting on the outside of a wall and I would like everybody to have the same information."
He sits down on the parapet, four feet along, with his legs on the inside like a sensible person.
We do not say anything for a while.
The coffee is on the arm of the terrible chair and I do not get up for it and he does not mention it.
"That is a rope," he says eventually.
"Yes."
"That is a substantial rope."
"Forty metres."
"How far down is it?"
"Sixty one feet," I say. "Eighteen and a half metres."
"So you have twice what you need."
"You always carry twice what you need."
"Do you," he says, and looks out at the city, and drinks his coffee, and asks me nothing else about it at all.
That is the moment.
I want to be exact about this, because I have spent nine days being unable to explain anything that has happened to me, and this one I can explain.
No question about whether I am leaving. Nothing about why there is a rope. No you would not get far, no do not be stupid, no after everything. He does not put himself between me and the parapet. He does not do the thing where a man says I trust you in a voice that means the opposite.
He drinks his coffee.
A cold wall at three in the morning, four feet from a woman who is contracted to kill him, with a rope lying between them. He asks how far down it is. I tell him. He says so you have twice what you need, and lets it go.
He is not keeping me here.
That is the thing I have got wrong for six days. I have been sitting on a roof doing arithmetic about a building I could leave, and the building was never the problem, and I have been checking the walls of a room that has no walls.
I get down off the parapet.
On the inside. Legs over, feet on the gravel, the rope still in my hand. Then I go and sit down in the terrible chair, and pick up the coffee, and drink it.
Neither of us says anything about that either.
"Ask me a question," he says.
"It is after eleven. Rule five."
"Rule five is a bedroom rule. We have established this. You are going to have to write a great deal more tape if you want to run this the way you seem to want to run it."
"Then no."
"No?"
"You have been up here twenty minutes and you have not asked me one thing," I say, "and I know exactly what that is. You are waiting. You are doing the thing where you say half a sentence and stand there and let me fall into the hole, and it has worked four times, and I have noticed."
Cesare turns his head.
"You have noticed."
"On Wednesday I told you about the receipt.
On Thursday I told you about Hanno's name.
This morning I told a woman in your aunt's back room that I do not have a family, in front of nine people, because she asked me sideways and I have lost whatever it is that lets a person hear that.
" I put the cup down. "You do not ask. That is the technique.
It is the best one I have ever seen and I have been in rooms with people who do this for a living, and you are better than them, and I would like you to stop. "
He looks at the cup.
"All right," he says.
"That is it?"
"You have asked me to stop. I have said all right.
" He turns the cup round in his hands. "For what it is worth, it is not a technique.
I have been doing it since I was eleven because the alternative is asking a question and getting an answer, and I have had one answer in twenty three years that I wanted, and it was on Tuesday, in a bathroom, when you told me about a crack in a pane of glass shaped like Portugal. "
The wind comes across the roof.
"So I do not ask," he says. "I have got very good at not asking. You are correct that it is effective and you are wrong that it is a technique, and I am sorry, and I will stop."
I sit in a terrible chair with a rope across my knees.
"Do not stop," I say.
He walks me down at four.
At the hatch he goes first, which he has never done, and stands on the ladder with his head and shoulders still up in the cold, so that we are face to face with me standing and him three rungs down, and it puts his eyes about level with my collarbone and it is the closest either of us has been to the other outside a bathroom.
"Rosalie."
"What."
"The rope."
Here it comes.
"Keep it in the bag by the door," he says, "and not in the bottom of the bag. If you ever have to go off that wall in a hurry you will not have ninety seconds to dig through a bag, and I would rather you got down alive than tidy."
And he goes down the ladder.
I stand on the roof on my own for another minute with my heart going in a way that has nothing to do with the climb.