was He opened the door and took the back stairs up to the roof.
He reached the top, pushed the door gently, and stepped out.
The futuristic hinges that looked like space-aged bicycle pumps hissed softly as the door closed incredibly slowly behind him. The sun had dropped, and London’s skyline was leaking upwards with the colour of the city. It wouldn’t be long before the sky was full of blinking stars that moved gracefully across the night sky, attached to the wings of continental jumbo-jets as they took up their positions in an invisible line in the sky in order to land at Heathrow to the west. To the south, the red eye of the tower at Crystal Palace blinked from its side of the river, intermittently telling London that all was still well, like a silent town crier.
The gravel on the ro
