Glow (25 page)

‘I’ve got a pizza delivery for the third floor but they’re not answering.’ Seven eighths of the sky is clouded over, which makes the sun setting in the west look even brighter by contrast, like someone pushing open the door of your darkened bedroom to let in the glare from out in the corridor.

‘I don’t let strangers in,’ she says, her Irish accent shredded by the speaker.

Just then, Raf is perplexed to see what looks like a small waffle taped up over the lintel of the door. But then he remembers Cherish explaining that her Uncle Chai used to keep honeycomb as a charm because for some reason the Danu believe that ghosts can understand only right angles and so are confused by hexagons. Zaya must be more superstitious than Raf realised. Then again, part of Cherish’s job is to supply Lacebark with information that won’t be any use to their ImPressure• network: inputting hexagons when it’s compatible only with squares.

On the way home, Raf wonders what to do. He doesn’t have Cherish’s phone number, and she specifically told him not to go back to the Burmese restaurant, and he can’t just wait for her to get in touch with him. The only mode of contact he has left for anyone in Zaya’s network is Lotophage. Until tonight, it didn’t seem worthwhile to register for a second account, since Fitch/Win could block that one too, or even ask the forum administrators to ban Raf’s IP address. But this is too urgent for Win to ignore. The only trouble is, if Win passes on Raf’s warning, then Cherish will learn that the two of them have been communicating without her knowledge. Win might not want that. On the other hand, he might not care.

Sitting down at his computer when he gets home, Raf looks through Fitch’s last few posts to get a sense of whether Win is likely to check his messages soon. He’s discouraged to find that Fitch hasn’t shown himself on Lotophage for about a day: his last activity was a quarrel with two other users about the possible interactions of pramexipole and aminopropyl, which started at 6.11 p.m. BST and tailed off around 11 p.m. Raf isn’t sure what to do, and to put off deciding he switches over to the problem of how to find Fourpetal. He knows Fourpetal doesn’t have much money to spend, so he must be living in a cheap hotel or hostel somewhere in south London. If he was following the McDonald’s principle, he might have chosen a Premier Inn, because apparently the InterContinental Hotels Group has a market capitalisation of about four and a half billion dollars, which is much less than Lacebark and much, much less than McDonald’s but still more than Whitbread or Travelodge. The problem is, there are Premier Inns in both Greenwich and Southwark, and Raf can’t stake out two hotels at once. He’s still clicking around when he’s distracted by the thought that something is wrong with what he just read on Lotophage.

Fitch made short, flippant posts at 9.38, 9.45, 9.49, and 9.56 on Tuesday. When Raf saw Win’s laptop in the kitchen, the screen was shut and the power cable was unplugged and coiled around the AC adaptor, as if Win hadn’t used it for hours. Right after that, when Raf checked his watch in the bathroom, it was 9.51.

This doesn’t actually prove anything. Raf has already surmised that Win would want to keep it a secret from Cherish that he was posting on Lotophage. So in theory it’s possible that he hastily stowed the laptop away as soon as he heard Cherish coming and then took it out again as soon as she was gone. But it’s enough to make Raf wonder.

He goes back to the spreadsheet he made that sorted into chronological order the exact times of every single one of Fitch’s posts on Lotophage. Tonight, instead of just scanning the list by eye, he adapts it into a format that he can load into the program he bodged together a couple of years ago to chart his own sleep/wake cycle. The program begins by rounding off every time stamp to the nearest fifteen minutes and then drawing a line graph of the results, with the X axis as the twenty-four-hour clock divided into ninety-six increments of fifteen minutes and the Y axis as the total number of posts in each increment. At first, he can’t make out anything meaningful. The frequency distribution looks densely random, like a musical score for the white noise machine in his bedroom. There’s certainly no hint of a longitudinal time zone, British Summer Time or otherwise.

He’s just about to start work on the more intricate polyphasic calculation he’ll need to refute his own ridiculous fancy that Fitch might also have non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome. But before that, to be sure, he triples the height of the Y axis on his screen and then gradually lowers the periodicity to see what will happen to the graph. And before the periodicity gets to zero, the pattern shows itself. For a moment he has a sense of petals opening, legs spreading, black bin liner curling away from a window, and he pities the ImPressure• algorithms that could make a thousand of these determinations a second and yet never feel this tremor of discovery.

He’s looking at a reverse sawtooth wave with a phase of exactly one hundred and eighty minutes, like the deepest synthesiser tone in the world. Fitch is most likely to post at 12.15, 3.15, 6.15, etc., and he’s least likely to post at 3.00, 6.00, 9.00, etc., and in between there’s a gentle 165-minute decline. This is Raf’s best explanation: every three hours, on the hour, something happens to draw Fitch back to his computer; it takes him about ten minutes to catch up on the rubbish people have been offering in his absence; he soon starts posting himself; and then at some point over the next three hours he drifts away from his computer again. This isn’t happening in every three-hour period, or even in most of them – the wave is shallow and foamy, and Fitch sometimes does post at 3.00 and 6.00 and 9.00. But the pattern is too regular to be an accident.

What it looks like to Raf is that Fitch is a guy who likes to nap when it’s dark, but every three hours he gets woken up because the lights come back on.

2.46 a.m.

If Raf was right and Belasco was lying about Lacebark deliberately introducing foxes into their training facility, then maybe the only reason they’re still there is that Lacebark can’t get rid of them. Therefore the foxes can’t have set up home inside the freight depot, because in that case it would have been easy for Lacebark to find their dens and throttle their young, which is probably one of Bezant’s favourite ways to spend a lazy Friday afternoon. Instead, the foxes must live somewhere nearby, but they must have some way of getting in and out that Lacebark don’t know about yet, like the Mujahedin with their mountain passes. This still leaves hovering the question of what might have drawn the foxes to the depot in the first place. But maybe Raf will find that out when he gets back inside.

On three sides the depot is surrounded by a high palisade fence topped with barbed wire and security cameras, and on the fourth side is the railway viaduct. Before he left home, he checked Google Maps, so he knows that the next warehouse down makes a right angle with the railway viaduct to the south-west, but the depot doesn’t quite line up squarely with either of them, creating the sort of annoying gap you might find in a badly assembled flatpack dresser. No more than a couple of metres wide at the base, it’s just a fuzzy tine of brown and grey on the satellite photo, so he can’t tell if it will be any use until he sees it for himself.

Standing in the weirdly clean and unsmelly alleyway beside the Serbian café, however, he observes that the depot’s fence is contiguous with the north-east wall of the adjacent warehouse, so there’s no way to sneak in between them. For a while he wonders if it might have been better to get up on to the railway line somehow, pick his way along the track for a bit, and then climb down, but he decides he certainly would have fucked it up, even if Isaac used to have adventures like that all the time when he was still into tagging. (That hobby came to an abrupt end the night Isaac and his spraycans fell through rotten boards into a kebab-shop septic tank.) Instead, at ground level, Raf will have to loop clockwise all the way round to the other side of the warehouse, hoping there’ll be access from that end. Tightening the drawstrings of his hood, he looks up at the silver pill half dissolved on the tongue of the night, and when a slow cloud interposes itself, muffling the moonlight a bit, he takes that as a good omen. Nonetheless, he feels as if a whole nest of maxillary dentures are snapping around in his stomach.

He’s almost at the back of the warehouse when he sees exactly what he was hoping to see. A fox is sauntering down this cul-de-sac towards the brick flank of the viaduct. But, like the recollection of a dream, the animal seems to disintegrate the moment it feels the clumsy breath of conscious observation on the back of its neck, and before he even has a chance to quicken his pace, Raf finds himself alone in the shadows again. Still, he has some confidence now that he’s going in the right direction. The rusty metal gate on the right leads to a long narrow yard between warehouse and viaduct that he hadn’t noticed on the satellite photo. Unlike the depot’s fence, the bars of this gate are spaced a few inches apart – convenient for foxes – and it’s only a couple of metres high – convenient for Raf. If he climbs over it, that will officially be trespassing, but he thinks this warehouse might be derelict: almost every window is a grid of smashed and blistered panes like the back of a used pack of aspirin, and although there’s a sign at the entrance that says protected by teymur security systems, the phone number underneath starts with 0171 instead of 020, which means it must be at least ten years old.

The gate is padlocked shut with a burly chain, but the chain has enough slack that it actually helps him: with the gate pushed open as far as it will go, he puts one foot on the chain and boosts himself up as if it were a stirrup. Getting both legs across is a lot harder, and he nearly sodomises himself with one of the spikes at the top, but soon enough he drops panting to the tarmac on the other side. At the opposite end of the yard there’s a white van, just like one of Lacebark’s, that must have been towed here after an engire fire: speckling the mound of blackened offal beneath the propped-open hood are paler flakes from the grey impasto of the melted paintwork. Above, the clouds have consolidated, and it’s starting to rain. Since there’s nowhere else to go, Raf climbs up on the creaking roof of the van and takes a look through the chink of space between the terminal wall of the yard and the overhang of the viaduct.

Beyond, there’s yet another purposeless, rectal yard, and this one is even less inviting. Slumped against the wall to the right is a beach of junk rising almost to chest height: tyres, cardboard, styrofoam, paint cans, bin bags, telephone directories, computer keyboards, fake flowers, broken wooden pallets, and a surprisingly extensive library of what look like books of carpet samples.

All that, and the Bic flame of a fox’s tail, flickering down under the morass as Raf watches.

He hops to the ground and starts pulling stuff aside to make a tunnel, smelling stale rainwater and musty glue and maybe a few dead rats down at the bottom. For a while he can’t work out where the fox could possibly have gone, but then, at last, he finds it: a small cavity in the brickwork, with a square collar of missing rivets, that might once have had something to do with ventilation or plumbing. On any other day, if someone bet him he could fit through it, he wouldn’t take that bet.

He lies down on the ground, hunches his shoulders, and jams himself into the hole. His head bumps against a barrier on the other side. Here in the dark there’s evidently lots of vertical space but not much horizontal space. In other words, he can only get into the hole supine, but he can only get past the hole upright. He feels like Santa trying to climb back up a particularly brutal flue, wishing he had a series of necks and waists all the way down his body.

Inch by awkward inch, Raf snakes inside, until at last he’s on his feet again. The cold corridor is too tight to turn around in, so he’s stuck facing forward. And because he’s still too cautious to switch on the torch he brought, he can’t see a thing, and instead gropes along the sides as he crabwalks to the left. He has an odd sense of being trapped backstage in the middle of a play.

Quite soon, on the exterior wall, his fingers find a ladder – but not a real ladder with metal rungs, just a column of wooden slats bolted at regular intervals into the brick. Still, a ladder has to go somewhere. So he starts climbing.

By the time he’s about twelve feet up, he’s relaxed into the rhythm of hand over hand, and he’s trying to decide how much farther it would be sensible to climb before giving up and coming back down. Then, as if he weren’t distracted enough already, he realises he can hear music from somewhere. So when he reaches for the next slat, and it isn’t there, it catches him totally off balance.

He topples backwards. Somehow, the wall behind him yields. And light explodes in his eyes.

Fitch looks down at him. ‘Oh, hi,’ he says.

Raf is lying in a fridge. Or, in fact, he’s lying half in a fridge and half out of it, just like when he was squeezed part of the way through that hole in the wall. From the thighs down he’s still dangling on the other side. The fridge, he realises, must be open at the back, operating as a hatch between this kitchen and the space behind the wall. In terms of props and set design, everything else looks just as it did when Belasco gave him the tour of the core scenario installation, although of course he hasn’t seen it from this angle before; light streams in through the small window over the sink, toasted to a high-colour temperature to suggest daylight. Only the foxes are new.

There are at least a dozen of them hanging out here, some on the floor and some on the kitchen table and some out in the corridor. When you see so many in one place, that’s the first time you can get a real sense of how much they vary. One is stout and fangy, like a crossbreed with Rose or some other bull terrier; another is gymnastic, surgical, almost arachnoid; another has a broad leer of a mouth to match a skull the shape of a flattened diamond. Raf is stricken to his ventricles by their gaze, their scent, their colour. The foxes, on the other hand, don’t seem intrigued by him at all.