The Night Climbers
About the Book
James, a new student at Cambridge, is overwhelmed by the thrill of opportunity and startled by his own hunger for friendship. He finds himself seduced by a covert and exclusive circle of friends – the ‘Tudor Night Climbers’ – who scale the university’s turrets after dark, transforming it into a dangerous playground of spiralling heights.
When he falls head over heels for the enigmatic Jessica, James finds himself in a fatal love triangle with the group’s reckless leader, Francis. But there is soon to be much more at stake when Francis dreams up a heist that will test their very souls.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
The Night Climbers
Ivo Stourton
For Miff Stourton, Clare Wagg and Jessica Lennard,
without whom I would be someone else.
1
THERE WERE SECURITY barriers in the foyer, thick glass turnstiles that fell open when you stuck the right card in the slot. The receptionists, however, were the real security. Their ‘Can I help you?’ and bright smiles were the modern equivalent of ‘Who goes there?’ It was a surprise, therefore, to find Jessica sitting in my black leather chair, waiting for me to return from the basement gym, where I had spent a cathartic lunchbreak pummelling my personal trainer, sweating out the last drops of the previous night’s whisky. I knew from the way she looked at me, tilting her head forwards and peering out from under her blonde fringe with a lopsided smile, that she had lied her way in. Her expression was just as I remembered, and pulled me back into the past with the force of a scent. At thirty-two she was already losing her looks. They were not going gracefully, with the haunting quality that briefly heightens doomed beauty. She had bags under her eyes and a spot on her chin where her make-up had formed a beige scab. I took no pleasure in this, but I did take pleasure from the fact that I didn’t care. Indifference, not feigned but genuinely felt, was a hard-won victory, and I prized it. I shook her hand and smiled.
She had been playing with the objects on my desk. My pens were scattered over the blotting paper.
‘How can I help you?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you want to know how I got in?’
‘I pretended to be from London Underground. I read about the deal you’re doing, turning public services private. You used to be so left wing. I’m your two-thirty.’ She grinned. ‘You look nice. And you look rich. Nice and rich.’ She leant across the desk and lifted one of the silver balls on my Newton’s cradle, letting it go to hit its fellow with a gentle click.
As I looked at her, I tried to gauge her financial situation. It seemed the quickest way to divining what she wanted. Her platinum hair had been recently cut and highlighted. Her fingernails were salon neat and unpainted, but glazed. The jewellery she wore was simple, a scuffed Tiffany’s silver pendant. Her black suit could have been tailored, but Jessica had always had a body that made cheap clothes look expensive. In the days when I had known her well, she had practised a policy of sartorial simplicity designed to exhibit her natural gifts, and I think to embarrass the girls who dressed up. I could not tell whether this policy had survived the passing of her beauty. I thought on the whole that choice had given way to necessity. There was no ring on her finger.
Jessica sat back in her chair and met my eye as if to say, ‘And what has become of you?’
‘So, you’re my two-thirty. I bill at two hundred and fifty pounds an hour. What can I do for you?’
‘You can give me a discount, for starters.’
We looked at each other with fixed smiles, headlights speeding towards one another in the dark. She relented first. ‘I need a place to stay for a few days. I don’t want to go to a hotel. I don’t want to go to friends. I don’t want to be found.’
She rose from my seat. Her movements still had the light accent of childhood ballet. Born of parental ambition, undone by a teenage growth spurt, a graceful precision was the last legacy of repetition and bleeding toes. To my displeasure I noticed that behind the chair sat a briefcase and a piece of fake Louis Vuitton luggage, its beige midriff distended with female packing. Jessica knew the difference that social leverage could make, and it would be that much more awkward to dismiss her if she had all the practical necessities already to hand. I wondered what the receptionists downstairs would think of my attractive female clients arriving prepared for an overnight stay. It was typical of Jessica to cause disruption simply by virtue of her presence. With an air of unimpeachable honesty, she addressed me eye to eye. The air was still filled with the faint metallic click of the toy she had set in motion on my desk.
‘Is there somewhere else we can go to talk? I don’t mean to be melodramatic, I just haven’t seen you in a long time, and if I’m going to get turned down I’d prefer to do it somewhere pretty. Don’t you have client hospitality or something? After all, I am a client.’ She grinned again.
We stood in the lift, and I watched as the two halves of my image slid together in the metallic panels of the doors. Jessica’s appraising look was still fresh in my mind, and I checked myself out discreetly. My dark hair was perfectly slicked; my blue eyes glowed even in the dull surface of the metal. My arms were thick from the gym. The slight bulge of flesh around my collar appeared again today. I raised my chin a little to tighten the skin. Jessica almost caught me in the reflection, and I looked away. The lift deposited us smoothly on the top floor, like riding up in the palm of a giant. The doors slid apart, and my image divided and disappeared. By the time we arrived Jessica was solemn, demonstrating one of those mercurial shifts of mood that had confounded her youthful suitors. The young men at Cambridge could never tell whether to court her as a child, a princess, an executive or a clown. Only the few of us who had become truly close to her had learnt to read her sudden shifts, like sailors at the mercy of an unpredictable sky.
The great glass wall of client reception disclosed a cinematic view of the City, stretching down to the glittering ribbon of the river and the stately dome of St Paul’s. On the South Bank the great blocks of culture faced the towers of commerce, the National Theatre hunkered down on the edge of the Thames, its grey concrete balconies camouflaged against the sky. I put on my overcoat and led Jessica past the ranks of black leather sofas and neatly stacked periodicals, and the fresh fruit and orchids quietly dying in their glass vessels.
The Japanese garden on client reception had one of the best views in the City. Old enemies appeared on the eastern horizon: Magic Circle law firms sitting in state by Moorgate. From the balcony you could see St Andrew’s Church, a tiny nub of conscience subsisting in the centre of the financial monoliths, so much older than the buildings that blocked it from the sunlight. The leaves of the weeping willow in the churchyard spilled over the wrought-iron railings on to the pavement. The roof garden itself was composed of large obsidian stones and elegant little shrubs arranged on a bed of white sand. The sand was raked into perfect parallel trenches, like a ploughed field in delicate miniature. A slate walkway paved the edges, and formed a bridge over a tiny stream that bubbled up through the rocks. The sky seemed huge so many floors above the skyline, with no other buildings hemming it in. It closed like the lid of a freezer over the cold city. I felt proud to have brought her up here, on top of my impressive building, above my kingdom.
I slid the door closed behind us, and heard the comforting click of the catch, sealing my working world inside like the body of a despot in a vast stone tomb. The wind was strong so high above the street, and carried a film of drizzle that coated the garden with a thin layer of cold moisture. She walked away from me, her heels sounding on the grey slate, and leant on the stainless-steel railings that separated the balcony from the empty air behind.
‘I know what you’re thinking, James. I’m not on the run from the Mafia or the police, and I don’t want money from you or help or anything else really except a couple of showers’ worth of hot water. You work during the day. I go out at night. You won’t even see me, if you don’t want to.’
‘I don’t know how you are placed financially, Jessica,’ I said, slipping into my professional idiom, ‘but it seems to me that you could easily budget for a hotel with a higher degree of anonymity than an old university buddy’s house.’
She sat on the metal bar that ran around the side of the balcony and put her feet against the large black boulder nearest the edge of the carefully raked white sand, dimpled from the raindrops. Behind her I could see the roof of a building the architects had never intended for public view. It was ten storeys down. I thought how best to guide her back from her perch without showing that it made me uncomfortable.
‘You have become pompous. Is that what we are? Old “university buddies”?’
Angry horns bleated down in the street. With her hands clutched around the bar, and her shoulders hunched a little forwards against the chill, she straightened her long legs slightly, leaning her slender torso fractionally backwards into space. I felt the sharp edge of a fledgling concern tapping against the inside of my skull. With a steady voice, I answered: ‘I haven’t seen you in the best part of a decade. What would you prefer to be called?’ She was already drawing me away from a proper examination of her motives.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something with a little feeling. Playmate, darling, co-conspirator . . .’ This last one she delivered in a theatrical, breathy whisper.
‘I think I have company this weekend,’ I said.
‘She’ll understand. Women like to be made to wait. You can’t be overly available.’
Not these women, I thought.
She shivered and tugged the thin material of her jacket tight around her thin body and straightened her legs with little jerks, a childish gesture of distraction that pushed her body further and further out over the edge. I clenched my hands behind my back so that she could not see them. There was a light wind, so high above the street, and it carried the loose strands of her blonde hair up and over her cheekbones.
‘My place isn’t big. I don’t have a spare bed, and—’
She pushed suddenly with her feet; the gesture carried her too far and she fell first backwards, then forwards with a spasmodic tightening of her stomach to the floor. A surge of adrenalin manned my chest, and I ran towards her with an inarticulate cry. She was laughing with the exhilaration of her near disaster, and with triumph at the terror in my face. I had started out across the perfect garden, breaking the patterned surface with my feet. The cut of my suit pushed me into an unnatural feminine jog, and I knew that I must have looked ridiculous. I acknowledged her victory with a sheepish smile, and walked over to where she leant laughing against the rail. Her laughter gave way to a coughing fit, and she bent over almost like an old man, clutching her stomach. Somehow the moment seemed vulnerable rather than disgusting.
‘So, can I stay or what?’ she said when she had regained some measure of control.
‘Fuck it. Why not.’
She was lying, but there would be time to uncover her lie. I could not remember when an obligation had been placed on me that was purely human. I did things because of what I had signed, what was expected, what was right, what was paid. This I would do because of who had asked me. I said yes because I would have done anything for her once, and required nothing in return. There were once many people who would have done anything for her, but from me she would have accepted.
‘We’ll stay up all night. It’ll be like old times.’ She said, ‘You might even have fun.’
My flat, designed to accommodate no one but myself and infrequent visitors whose opinions were irrelevant, was not the most hospitable place. Jessica cast a critical eye around the apartment. She lifted the single crystal tumbler from the surface of the table, sniffed the residue of dirty brown liquid and made an exaggerated moue of surprise and disgust, wrinkling her nose. I did not remember putting the bottle back in the kitchen, but was relieved that I had. She inspected the apartment with the judgemental eye of a mother-in-law.
The bookshelves, painted a cream that was chipped in places to reveal an old, somnolent green, were entirely filled with law books and DVDs. The former were mostly guides to commercial litigation and corporate finance, but there were some, such as my Chambers guide, that were as old as the decision I had taken to study the law. It had been a sudden and arbitrary choice, made in the conflicting currents of idealism and financial necessity that swept me along in the year after graduation. The DVDs were mostly pornography, a relatively expensive habit that had accrued over the years into a whole library of perversion. She began to browse the titles. She spared me the humiliation of reading them out loud.
‘I watch a lot of porn. It helps me switch my mind off.’
‘How can you find these sexy?’ she asked, running her finger over the DVD boxes, turned spine out to reveal slivers of garish nudity.
‘I don’t find them sexy,’ I lied, ‘I find them distracting.’
‘Why do you have them all on display?’
‘I’m not ashamed of what I like.’ And no one ever comes here to see. ‘Shall we talk about something else?’
‘Sure,’ she said, casting one last critical glance over the ranks of DVDs.
It occurred to me as her eyes dissected the visible portion of my life that I was seeing her in a curious double perspective. I knew her well, as only a friend can who has seen that final transition from adolescence into adulthood. I had watched her opinions and her priorities lose their plasticity and cool in the mould of complacent maturity. But I did not know the barest details of her life. She was unmarried, or divorced, that much I knew from the lack of a ring. Something in her manner, a certain residual selfishness, precluded the possibility of kids. She did not have the distracted amiability of someone used to factoring others into their decisions, and her stomach still fit snugly into the unforgiving waistband of her suit trousers. I looked at her flat belly with the judgemental eye of a consumer. It was not right to turn this gaze on her, but habit was stronger than morality, and I knew she could watch out for her own interests. I allowed the fingertips of memory to run over the thin white line where the surgeon had slipped his tongs into her belly, the brand of childhood appendicitis. Despite the great blank of her personal narrative, I still knew her by the way she nosed around my flat, peering into confidential files and collecting dust on the tip of her finger in a playful parody of a disapproving woman. It occurred to me how meaningless were the details of someone’s biography beyond a certain age, when placed in the balance against an understanding of their nature.