‘A tricky location,’ said Kotsev.
‘It couldn’t be worse.’
As he’d approached the tower, Cooper had called Control to report the situation. Help would be on the way, and it looked as though he might need it. But it would take time.
When Cooper looked up at the parapet again, a fine mist fell on his face and trickled into his collar. Lowther must be getting cold and uncomfortable up there by now. He wasn’t even dressed for the rain.
‘OK, let’s go and talk to him.’
Rain had blown in through the doorway, creating a dark patch in the stairwell. Inside, the view upwards was dizzying. Stone steps curled away into the tower, with bare tree trunks zigzagging overhead from wall to wall. Cooper could see both the outer and inner surfaces of the staircase at once, which seemed entirely wrong. His instincts were telling him that it was impossible to walk on stairs that coiled so tightly and rose so steeply.
Standing close to the wall, Cooper took hold of the handrail and began to ascend. Mounting the spiral staircase was like walking up a twisted ribbon, or climbing a strand of DNA. It was a sort of stone helix, cold to the touch and smelling of earth. You had to be careful on these steps, or you could fall right through the spiral and plummet to the base of the tower.
Just before the last turn, the bulkhead lights on the wall ended, and Cooper stopped when he saw daylight from the platform. He jumped when he became aware of Kotsev’s breathing below and behind him on the steps. His mind had been so distracted that he’d forgotten his companion.
‘Georgi, you’d better stay back out of sight. We don’t want to frighten him too much.’
‘
Cooper’s heart was beating harder after his climb. All the way up the tower, he’d been conscious of the narrowness of the steps, and the drop through the spiral. One slip could be disastrous.
Slowly now, he eased himself the last few feet on to the platform, trying not to make any sudden noises. Leaving the stairwell was like emerging into a different world, with light and air and an awareness of the valley all around him — banks of trees whispering in the breeze, the cables hissing as they pulled another string of swaying cars across the river. Lowther was standing nearby, his hands resting on the parapet.
‘Mr Lowther, do you remember me? Detective Constable Cooper.’
Lowther seemed to become aware of him for the first time. He tried to back away, but he was already pressed hard against the parapet and could only scrape slowly around the platform until he was on the eastern side. He stood with the Heights of Abraham behind him, birds swooping through the woods, water dripping from branch to branch, cable cars descending to the base station.
Cooper took a step backwards, trying to judge a safe distance that wouldn’t make Lowther feel under too much pressure. At the same time, he had to find some way to keep the man’s attention on him. At the moment, his concentration seemed to be wandering, his eyes darting around the landscape, distracted by the whir of cables and the voices of people on the ground below.
‘Just take it easy, sir. There’s nothing to worry about.’
He felt faintly ridiculous as soon as he said it. He could see from the expression on Lowther’s face that the man had plenty to worry about. Real or imagined, it was all there in his eyes and in the twist of his mouth. Fear, verging on panic.
‘You’re quite safe, Mr Lowther. I’m here to help you.’
Trying to inject a calmness into his voice that he didn’t feel himself, Cooper spread his hands in a reassuring gesture. His fingers touched the edge of the parapet, and he saw the stone was yellow with encrusted lichen.
‘Is there a dog here somewhere?’ said Lowther.
Cooper smiled then. Bizarrely, it sounded like progress. ‘You recognize me, don’t you, sir? You remember me? I’m DC Cooper. We talked yesterday. I was with a colleague, and you told us about your neighbour’s Alsatian.’
‘Tyrannosaurus.’
‘And we showed you a wooden dinosaur, that’s right.’
‘You don’t have to believe what they’re saying.’
A gust of wind brought the sound of children’s voices up the valley from Gulliver’s Kingdom. Laughter and screams. Kids hurtling over the switchback, plunging into the log flume, their mouths open, their clothes flying.
Lowther inclined his head. ‘They’re there,’ he said. ‘Not far away now.’
Cooper was concentrating so hard on the other man, tensed for a sudden movement, that he was hardly aware of movements on the edge of his vision, the increasing number of sounds around him. He reminded himself that John Lowther saw the world differently, and was probably already in an entirely abnormal state of mind where he saw things that didn’t exist and heard voices that Cooper couldn’t.
For some reason, Cooper couldn’t stop his thoughts wandering. He remembered thinking about the indoor area at Gulliver’s Kingdom, the place his nieces wanted so much to visit. The Wild West, an ice palace, jungle adventures. It was just there, in the distance, prominent among the trees. He could see it without taking his eyes from Lowther’s. Right now, Cooper could imagine himself in the middle of a Wild West shoot-out, that nerve- jangling moment when two men waited for each other to make the fatal first move. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Perhaps he was in the ice palace. Skating on very thin ice indeed.
‘There’s nothing to worry about, sir,’ he repeated. ‘Let’s just go down to the bottom of the tower, and we can talk. We can talk about whatever you like.’
Lowther shook his head. ‘It’ll soon be Monday,’ he said.
‘Monday?’
Frowning, Cooper found the lines of a song going through his head. An old Boomtown Rats classic.
‘So what don’t you like about Mondays?’
‘Not Mondays,’ said Lowther. ‘Next Monday. The thirty-first of October.’
‘Oh.’
Of course. Halloween. The time when the forces of evil were at their most powerful, the night when the doors to the underworld stood open and it was possible to communicate with the dead. Another belief that died hard, despite the efforts to make it all about pumpkins and apple bobbing.
‘I can’t be alive by then,’ said Lowther. ‘I can’t.’
‘All we need to do,’ said Cooper, ‘is get you down from here and take you to see a doctor. They can stop the voices, John. You know they can. They’ve done it before.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Lowther, shaking with agitation. ‘Mum said you understood, but you don’t. When people talk to me now it’s like a different kind of language. It’s too much to hold in my mind at once. My head is overloaded and I can’t understand what they say. It makes me forget what I’ve just heard because I can’t hear it for long enough. It’s all in different bits, you see, which I have to put together again in my head. Until I do that, it’s all words in the air. I have to try to figure it out from people’s faces. But their faces always say something different from their voices.’
‘Mr Lowther, please calm down and stop talking for a minute.’
‘I have to keep talking, to drown out the voices.’
‘We’ll get you some treatment, to make the voices go away.’
‘They’ll never go away — not completely. They’ll always be there …’ He seemed to be listening to something. Whatever he heard terrified him, and he shouted the next few words. ‘It’s Lindsay’s voice. Lindsay — and the children. I heard them scream. I’ll always hear them scream.’
‘Look — ’
What happened next, Cooper wasn’t quite sure. He’d been trying to concentrate on what John Lowther was saying, so he could respond and reestablish a connection. He’d been trying to maintain eye contact, to hold the man’s attention and keep him talking. But something had spooked him. Lowther jerked backwards against the parapet as if he’d been shoved in the chest or pulled back by an invisible hand.
Then he was going over, and Cooper was diving forward to grab hold of him. He found only clothes to clutch at, smooth material that slipped through his fingers and left him nothing to grip. He felt Lowther’s weight shifting inexorably outwards as gravity seized him and dragged him over the edge.
‘Georgi! Help me, quick!’
Kotsev came thumping up the steps, gasping as he reached the top.
‘
But Kotsev was too late. Cooper felt his muscles scream against the effort of holding on to Lowther’s coat,
