Saul positioned himself underneath the hand, stretched his arms upand leapt.

Strong fingers caught him around his left wrist, locked tight, duginto his flesh. He opened his mouth to cry out, caught himself,hissed. He was hauled silently through the air, all thirteen stone ofblood and flesh and clothes. Another hand slid around his body, abooted foot locked efficiently underneath him. How was his sinewybenefactor holding on? Saul twisted through the air, saw the windowapproach him. He turned his head to one side, felt his shoulders andchest lock in the tight space. Hands slid over his body, findingpurchase, easing his passage into the outside world. He was slippingthrough the window now, his stomach pressing painfully against thelock fixed on the frame, but moving much too smoothly through thatnarrow gash and out into the shock of cold air.

Impossibly, he was delivered.

Wind buffeted him. Warm breath tickled his neck.

‘Cling on,’ came the hissed order, as Saul was pulled into theair. Saul clung. He wrapped his legs around King Rat’s thin waist andthrew his arms over those bony shoulders.

King Rat stood on the tiny ledge, his boots clinging precariouslyto the paint. Saul, who was much the bigger, perched on his back,frosty with terror. King Rat’s right hand held the window-frame; hisleft hand was locked into an absurdly tiny crack above his head. Overthem rose an expanse of sheer brickwork four or five feet highcrowned with a strip of plastic guttering. Above that the roof, itsslates too steep to be seen.

Saul turned his head. His stomach pitched like an anchor. Fivefloors below him was the rubbish-strewn concrete of a freezing alley.The shock of vertigo made Saul feel sick. His mind shrieked at him toput his feet on ground. He can’t possibly bold on! he thought. Hecan’t possibly hold on! He felt the lithe body shift under him and henearly screamed.

Dimly Saul heard the voices from the stairwell approach thewindow, but they suddenly receded as he felt himself movingagain.

King Rat lifted his right hand from the window frame, and reachedup to wrap his fingers around a nail rusted into the wall, itspurpose long forgotten. His left hand moved now, creeping swiftlyalong invisible paths in the brick and mortar to stop suddenly andgrip at a seemingly arbitrary spot in the surface. Those fingers wereacute to unseen clues and potentials in the architecture.

The booted feet stepped free of the ledge. Saul was twisted to oneside as King Rat swung his right foot up above his shoulder,suspending himself and his burden from only clenched white knuckles.His feet scraped at the wall, investigating like octopus tentacles,till they found purchase and locked on some minor aberration, someimperfection of the brick.

King Rat reached up with his right hand, grasping; then his left,then his right, this time gripping the rim of the black plasticgutter that marked the border between brick and slate. It creakeddolefully but, unperturbed, he tugged at it with both hands. Hepulled his knees up into his stomach, his feet planted firmly againstthe brick, hung poised for a moment, then pushed out with his thighslike a swimmer.

Saul and King Rat somersaulted through the air. Saul heard himselfwail as the wall, the alley below, the lights of buildings,streetlamps and stars spun around his head. The guttering cracked asKing Rat clung to it, his hands the centre of the circle his bodydescribed. He released his grip, his feet met the sloping roofslates, he bent low to muffle the sound and, twisting his body, flunghimself flat on the roof itself. Hardly pausing, he scrambled on upthe tiles like a spider, with Saul holding so tight to him it felt asif he would never come loose.

King Rat scampered on all fours up the slate incline, his heavyboots making no sound. Like a tightrope walker the surreal figurethen crept swiftly along the apex of the roof towards the chimneys,and a looming tower block beyond. Terror had cemented Saul to hisbody, his fingers twisted into the fabric of the stinking trenchcoatwith the tenacity of rigor mortis. But King Rat prised him loose withease and swung him off his shoulders, depositing him shivering in theshadow of the chimney.

And there Saul lay.

He shivered there for several minutes, with the unclear shape ofthe thin man who did impossible things standing above him, ignoringhim. Saul could feel a part of himself going into shock, shaking witha terrible cold out of all proportion to the night wind.

But the spasm passed, the threat receded.

Something in the insanity of the night calmed him. What was thepoint of being afraid? he wondered. He had suspended all common sensehalf an hour before and, with that gone, he was free simply toimmerse himself in the charged night.

Gradually Saul stopped gasping. He unfolded. He looked up at KingRat, who stood staring at the vast tower block above them.

Saul braced himself with his hands, then, holding his breath, herose to his feet, one planted each side of the building’s vertex,wobbling with gusts of vertigo. He steadied himself with his lefthand against the chimney stack and relaxed a little. King Rattwitched his eyes over him momentarily, then sauntered a few feetfurther away, balancing on the apex of the roof.

Saul looked out over the London skyline. A swell of euphoriagathered in him and crescendoed, he swayed and yelped withincredulous laughter.

‘It’s unbelievable! What the fuck am I doing up here?’ Heswivelled his head to stare at King Rat, who again stood regardinghim with those imprecise eyes. King Rat gestured briefly over thechimney’s bulk, and Saul turned, realizing that those eyes had notbeen fixed on him at all. The side of the tower block beyond wasstudded with lights.

‘Look at them,’ King Rat said. ‘In the windows.’

Saul looked and saw, here and there, minuscule figures bustlingpast, each reduced to a snatch of colour and motion. In the centre ofthe building one patch of shade remained still: someone leaning outof their flat window, looking over the hillocks and knolls of slateon which Saul and King Rat stood, brazen in their night-timecamouflage.

‘Say goodbye to that now,’ King Rat said.

Saul turned his head to face him, quizzical.

‘That geezer there, stopping and staring, that’s as close as youever got to this before now. The place he’s looking at now — no, he’snot looking at it, he’s caught a glimpse, a hint, it’s teasing himout of the corner of his eye — that’s your gaff now, me old son.’Emotion was disguised in King Rat’s bass snarl, but he seemedsatisfied, as if with a job well done. ‘The rest of it, that’s justin-between for you now. All the main streets, the front rooms and therest of it, that’s just filler, that’s just chaff, that ain’t thereal city. You get to that by the back door. I seen you in thewindows, at night, at the close of the lightmans. Staring out,playing look-but-don’t-touch. Well, you’ve touched it now. All thevacant lots and all — that’s your stomping ground now, your pad, yourburrow, Saul. That’s London.’

‘You can’t go back now, can you? You stick with me, boy. I’ll seeyou’re alright.’ ‘Why me?’ said Saul slowly. ‘What do you want fromme?’ he stopped, remembering, for what seemed the first time inhours, why he had been in the police station. ‘What do you know aboutmy father?’

King Rat turned and stared at Saul, those features, already soobscured, now invisible in the moonlight. Without taking his eyesfrom Saul, he slowly sank until he sat straddling the roof ridgelike a horseman.

‘Slide over here, cove, and I’ll tell you the story. You aren’tgoing to like it.’

Saul lowered himself carefully, facing King Rat, and pulledhimself forward until he was only a couple of feet away from him. Ifanyone could see them, Saul realized, they must look like twoschoolboys, ungainly figures from a comic strip, sitting with theirlegs swinging. Saul’s exhilaration had dissipated with as littlewarning as it had arrived. He was swallowing with anxiety. He wasremembering his father. This was the key to everything, he thought;this was the catalyst, the legend that would make sense of the surreality which had caught him up in its gusts.