CORVIN

Item, a glove. Red leather, the left. Worn through at the thumb by her rope.

Item, her hairpins.

Item, a note she taped across my eyes: STOP STARING.

Item, a lighter, from the roofer who watched her climb as if she belonged to him. He works on the ground now.

Returned, before first light: the glove.

MORGAN

My secret admirer lives two hundred feet up a cathedral, and this morning he's left me a stone feather.

It's on my ledge: a string course no deeper than my hand, below the spire on the north face, that you can only reach on a rope or by being a pigeon.

I've got drops to finish before the light goes. I hang off my working line in the frost and look at the feather instead, and my pulse kicks against the chest strap of my harness.

It's the length of my hand, grey as the tower, every barb cut fine as an eyelash. Somebody carved this. Somebody very good, very patient and very strange.

Under it, folded in half, is my glove.

Red leather, the left one, worn through at the thumb where the descender eats it. I lost it nine days ago and blamed the jackdaw I call the Bishop, who steals from everyone.

The Bishop didn't fold it.

I pull my right glove off with my teeth and pick up the left, and it's warm.

It's freezing, the sun hasn't touched the north face since September, and my glove is as warm as if someone's had it inside his coat all night.

My stomach drops before my head catches up, and heat climbs my throat into my face.

"Right," I say out loud. "Okay. That's new."

This is the fifth. Before it: a jackdaw feather, a coin worn smooth, a sprig of ivy I'm fairly sure was a comment on my hair.

Last week I taped a note across the gargoyle's eyes as a joke. STOP STARING. Next morning it was gone, tape and all.

He crouches on the corner beside my drop, the gargoyle: horns swept back, wings folded, the face of a bouncer who's just heard a joke he didn't like. I've talked to him every day for three weeks. Everyone on ropes talks to something.

"Was it you?" I ask him.

He doesn't answer, being a building.

The roofer who used to watch me climb from the tower door went to ground work last week, white as a sheet.

I put the glove on. It's like being held by the hand.

"Morg." Gav, on the radio, from above. "Are you working, or are you proposing to him?"

"I'm assessing the stone."

"You're assessing a gargoyle's arse."

"It's a better arse than yours, Gav."

"Everything's better than mine," says Gav, who has the romantic instincts of a spanner, and goes back to his flask.

I put the feather in my chest pocket. It sits heavy over my heart all day.

Late in the afternoon the sun goes down and takes the colour out of everything.

Gav's gone down with the rope bags; his knee takes the stairs slowly. Two people on the roof, always: rule one, and I'm breaking it to coil the last line.

Also because I don't want to leave.

I'm kneeling at the north corner, flaking rope, when somebody behind me says, "You missed a bit."

My hands stop. Everything else in me starts at once.

The voice is low and slow, and it's in the stone somehow, under my knees, the way a lorry is in a pavement before you hear it.

I don't turn round. "Where?"

"Left of the third window down. Under the drip mould. You were watching the jackdaw."

"I was watching the jackdaw because he's a thief."

"He is." A pause. "He isn't the only one up here."

I turn round slowly. The north corner is a block of black: the parapet, the pinnacle, the shadow of the spire. Somewhere in it is a shape too big to be anything, and I can't make it out at all.

I reach up for the torch on my helmet.

"Don't," the voice says. Then, quieter: "Please."

It's the please that does it. I take my hand away.

"The feather," I say. "The coin. My glove."

"You were cold."

"I'm a rope tech in December. Cold's the job." My heart is banging so hard I can hear it inside my helmet. "And my note. You took my note."

"You put it over his eyes. It seemed rude to leave it there."

"Who are you?"

"Someone who lives up here."

"Nobody lives up here. I've had the keys three weeks."

"Three weeks," he says, as if it's a very long time. "Yes."

"I talk to that gargoyle every day," I tell the dark. "He's a brilliant listener. You've completely ruined him for me."

The silence goes on so long I think he's gone.

"Have I," he says. It isn't a question, and I would swear on my ticket that he's trying not to laugh.

My radio crackles. "Morg? Verger's rattling his keys at me."

I look at the black corner. I could tell Gav. I could tell the verger, the police, the Dean and Chapter, that a man is climbing their tower at night and leaving me feathers.

Stone feathers. I'd have to tell them that too.

I press the button. "Coming. Just talking to the gargoyle."

Gav sighs into the radio.

Then I take the tower key off my harness, the big iron one I'm meant to hand back at the bottom, and I tuck it inside my thermal, against my skin.

"Ten o'clock," I tell the corner. "If you're a man, be here. If you're a joke, be a better one."

At the bottom of the stairs I tell the verger Gav's got the key. Gav's already in the van. Nobody checks.

My room is over a chip shop. Before this it was a power-station chimney, before that a road bridge, and before that years of other people's buildings. I've never stayed anywhere long enough to get post.

After dark I put my thermals on. A sensible woman would ring the police, or at least Gav, who'd come in his slippers and stand at the bottom of the tower all night with a torch and a sandwich.

I'm a Level 3 rope access technician. My whole job is being sensible two hundred feet up. Night work and working alone are both banned. If anyone finds out, they'll take my ticket and I'll be clearing gutters in Swindon.

I pack my harness anyway, and the feather, which I've carried about all day like an idiot.

The Close is frozen silent. The key turns without a sound, and the stairs wind up in the dark, narrower every turn, until my thighs burn.

At the top, I switch off my head torch before I open the door.

The cold takes the breath out of me.

Above me the spire goes up into the stars. Below, Salisbury is orange and small. The frost on the lead is white enough to see by.

And at the north corner, in the shadow of the pinnacle, there's a dark too big for its edges.

"You came," I say.

"I was here first."

"How long?"

"Tonight? Since the sun went." The voice comes from higher than a man's head has any right to be. "Before that, longer."

"How much longer?"

"Six hundred years I've watched this city," he says. "Three weeks I've watched you. Guess which felt longer."

I laugh. It bursts out of me and goes off across the roofs. "That's either the best line anyone's ever used on me, or you need help."

"Both," he says. "Probably."

I take a step towards the corner, and my boot goes on the frost.

A hand catches my elbow out of the dark. It's there and gone, quicker than I can fall, but it's warm. In December. Two hundred feet up. Warm right through my jacket.

"Careful," he says.

"Close enough?" I ask, when I can.

"Never. But stop there."

I stop. If I stand still I'll start shaking, so I work. Tomorrow's first drop goes off the north-east pinnacle. I kneel to wrap a sling round its base, the way I have every morning for a week.

"Not that one."

"It's my anchor."

"It's iron," he says. "Inside. They put a cramp in it after the great storm, and it's been rusting ever since. Rust swells. It's splitting the stone from the inside. Use the next one along."

"Three surveys have been over this tower."

"Three surveys came up in daylight and looked at the pretty bits."

I put my torch on the pinnacle, only on the pinnacle, and get down on my knees with the light an inch from the stone.

There's a crack.

It's hairline, running up from the base in a slow S, and all along it the stone is weeping a rust stain no thicker than a pencil line. I'd have hung my whole weight off that in the morning. Then Gav's.

"How did you know?"

"I watched them put it in."

I don't laugh at that one.

"I need a photo of the outside face," I say. "Where the crack comes through. Nobody will believe me without one."

"Then take it in daylight."

"In daylight there'll be a meeting, then a form, and the form will get lost." I'm already stepping into my harness. "Five metres. Ten minutes."

"On your own. At night."

"You're here."

Silence. Then: "Your leg loop's twisted."

I look down. It is. "You can see that? In this?"

"I can see you in anything."

"Then check me."

"Check you."

"Every morning Gav checks my kit and I check his. You've been watching. You know how it goes."

"I know how it goes," he says, very low, and then he's moving.

He doesn't come into the starlight. He comes round the edge of it, so the dark just gets bigger and closer, until I have to tip my head right back.

Then his hands are on me.

They're enormous. One of them covers my hip and half my back, and the heat of it comes through the thermals and the softshell and the webbing, warm as a wall that's had the sun on it all August.

"Leg loops," he says.

His fingers slide under the strap at my thigh. He untwists it, slowly, lays it flat against me, and stops.

He holds still.

I can feel what it costs. His whole hand on my thigh, not moving, careful as a man holding a rope with someone's weight on the end. Deep in his chest, stone grinds on stone.

"Waist," I say. My voice isn't working properly.

He checks the buckle, doubled back. He checks the maillon at my centre with a fingertip: screwed up, then a quarter turn back, the way Gav does it. The way I do.

"Descender. Back-up. Chest ascender." His thumb on each. "You're good."

"I know I'm good."

"I know you know." His hands are at my waist now, one each side, and they're shaking. Very slightly. This huge warm thing that sees in the dark, and its hands are shaking on my harness.

"How long have you wanted to do that?" I whisper.

"Since the first morning he did it," he says, "and you laughed at something he said, and I couldn't hear what."

"You kept my glove for nine days."

"Yes."

"Nobody's ever kept anything of mine," I tell him. "I'm never anywhere long enough."

His hands tighten. Just once, just barely. Then he lets me go, and it's like stepping out of a doorway into snow.

"Go and take your photograph, Morgan."

I never told him my name.

I switch my torch on to go over, pointing it down. As I swing my leg across the parapet, the beam slides along the north corner.

Half a second. That's all.

The corner is empty. The place where my gargoyle has crouched for six hundred years is bare stone with frost all round it, and in the middle of the frost there's a dry, dark patch the shape of something that has sat there a very long time.

I don't say anything. I file it, next to a warm glove and a stone feather and a voice that knows where the iron went in, and I go down and take picture after picture of a rusty seam with fingers I can't feel.

When I come back over, the torch is off, and I can feel the heat of him behind me, close, on the back of my neck.

"Go home, Morgan," he says. "It's minus four. You've done enough mad things for one night."

"What time's sunrise?"

He doesn't answer.

"Four minutes past eight," I tell him, because I know. Rope techs live by the light. "I've got a flask, a sleeping mat and a jacket rated to minus twenty."

"You'll freeze."

"Then you'll have to do something about it."

The heat at my back doesn't move. If anything, it comes closer.

"Whatever you think you saw," he says, very quietly.

"I didn't see anything. You asked me not to."

"Then go home and keep not seeing it."

"No." It comes out plainer than I mean it to. "Somebody kept my glove warm for nine days. I'd like to see his face."

"You won't like it."

"I'll be the judge of that. I'm not going home until I've seen you."

I sit down on the frozen lead beside his empty corner, put my back to the stone, and switch off my torch.