thought, open in the almost flat part of the roof that covered the centre of the house. Denton could come within only four steps of it; even then, he had to duck his head. The trapdoor had been locked with a chain heavy enough to haul logs, and a padlock as big as his fist.
Which had been broken.
Denton felt his heart lurch. He looked at the lock, which hung from the chain as if still locked, perhaps arranged so that the casual eye would think it was. He put his eye close to it, his hands on the dirty stairs, his hat off. A gouged scar marked the inside of the lock’s curve, but he saw nothing to tell him when it had been made. The metal was dark with time, the gouged line hardly brighter. It could have been made months before. Or yesterday. He reached to take the lock out of the loops of chain, stopped himself, thinking of Guillam. Tampering with evidence. Would he even tell Guillam about any of it? Well, just in case— He took out the white handkerchief that Atkins insisted he carry and removed the lock with the care of a man stealing an egg from under a hen. Then he used the handkerchief between his fingers and the trapdoor to push it open.
The trap must have weighed thirty pounds. He let it rest on his head and neck while he peered under it over the roof. Here, the roof was made of four triangles like pieces of a square pie that met in the centre; at their outer edges, the roof plunged into the steep decline he had seen from the street. Orienting himself, he turned his head towards the side where the Inventorium sat behind its locked door.
He made himself breathe slowly. He knew he was going to have to go out on the roof, and he was afraid of heights. But he would go out only to look. Only to look.
He lowered his head, letting the trap down; gloom closed in on the stairs. He laid his folded overcoat on the top stair, then put his hat - grey, American, soft and somewhat wide-brimmed - on top of it. He hesitated. It was early December, cold outside; the grey sky threatened wet snow. He decided against taking off his jacket. He breathed.
Unable to postpone things any longer, he raised the trap again and got ready to step out. Then, thinking that somebody (but who?) might put the broken padlock through the chains while he was on the roof, he used his handkerchief to slip the padlock into his pocket. Only later did it occur to him that anyone who wanted to lock him out need only loop the chains - no padlock needed. But it would be too late to go back by the time he had the thought.
He went up a step; his head rose above the roof, and he was able to look along the slight incline and beyond to the grey sky. Up another step, he could see housetops and chimney pots, and if he’d dared look that way, he could have seen the edge along the Inventorium where the roof plunged down its final dozen feet to the eave. He went up another step.
Edgar Allan Poe had written a story about the pull of an abyss on the onlooker, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’. That imp had tempted Denton all his life - on barn roofs, on cliffs, on the rail of a steamship. Now, it beckoned to him from the edge of the roof: Down here - come down - look over the edge, it’s lovely - take a step out into the void— His fear was not so much of heights as of the imp, and what he might make Denton do.
The central peak was to his left, the slope down towards the Inventorium’s edge to his right. Ahead - he didn’t dare turn his head yet - was the peak and then the panorama of London. Even dimmed by autumn mist, it seemed inhumanly large, the sky as huge a bowl as over Montana. Far off to his left was St Paul’s; nearer to his right, the sand-coloured bulk of St Pancras station, Euston beyond it; move the eyes a bit to the left, there was the British Museum. The Thames was there somewhere in the middle distance, hidden by buildings, but he could make out London Bridge and the clock tower at