Joe dropped us on the pavement outside my apartment, and waved goodbye as he drove off, his meaty hand flapping behind the filthy windscreen. I waved back to my imagined assassin as he cornered out of sight, driving down towards Liverpool Street.

Jessica pulled out a cigarette, and I cupped my hands around her lighter to keep the flame. I spoke to her as she took the first deep drag, making the coal glow.

‘You know, before we got the letter, I had a whole day planned for us. I was going to take us to a pub for lunch, then maybe go to Hyde Park and do something stupid like take a buggy ride or something . . .’

She exhaled smoke. ‘Fine. I’d like that.’

‘Do you need to call anyone? To tell them where you are, I mean?’ I asked. She saw through my clumsy attempt to mask an enquiry about her boyfriend, and smiled.

‘Not now. Later.’

The two of us set out together from Hoxton Square. Before we left, I went back up to my flat to get coats and jumpers. When I switched on my phone there were two missed calls from the office, and I ignored them. I fetched my hip flask out of my bedside drawer and brought it up for a pull. I thought better of it and, indulging my taste for the symbolic, I went into the bathroom and poured it down the sink. The loss was not great, as the kitchen still held a half-bottle, but it still gave me a little thrill. Jessica was waiting for me on the stairs; she looked up with a smile on her face. The snow had settled on the ground, and each second swelled with soft additions. We walked down the pavement, arm in arm, past the plate-glass windows of the restaurant on my corner. As a couple, we drew glances. I thought of how we must look to people eating lunch in the warm belly of the dining room: two lovers, or two friends, stepping out together to enjoy the weekend.

THE END

Author’s Note

The events in this book are fictional. The characters are fictional. The places and the climbing, however, are based firmly in reality. I first encountered night climbing in the form of photographs shown to me by a friend in the quiet corridors of the Wren Library. They showed young men in old-fashioned clothes hundreds of feet in the air, clinging to the stonework. The photographs reminded me of drawings of comic book superheroes I had seen as a child, of Batman perched in silhouette on Gothic outcrops of masonry. I was amazed by how the activity seemed to prefigure urban free running, as well as stunts by such figures as the ‘French Spiderman’ Alain Roberts, who illegally scales the tallest buildings around the world.

In the time of relative political apathy at Cambridge, when few people seemed to feel passionately enough about any particular issue to make the kinds of protests or statements that characterized earlier generations of students, I loved the fact that the night climbers of the past had been guerrilla compaigners. In 1936, climbers mounted King’s College Chapel and attached Ethiopian flags in support of the Emperor Haile Selassie’s war with Mussolini. In the 1960s another generation risked their lives to install a Peace in Vietnam banner between the Chapel’s pinnacles, the highest points in the city. The climbers themselves went on to extraordinary things after graduation, sometimes tragic, sometimes heroic, but always somehow a little larger than life, stretching the world at the seams.