Rudy likes fires and starlight. He likes streetlights, the smell of petrol. He likes sabotage and chance and artificial worlds.
Something could go wrong: the bomb blows up in the terrorist’s hands, the fire claims the arsonist, the disease cures itself in greedy self-sufficiency. A crowd gathers—Rudy likes a crowd, aghast, in shock. Mothers hug their damaged children. An office worker sinks to the pavement clutching his beaten heart. Policemen try to disguise their own panic by bullying civilians who show no fear or guilt. We do not think so little of Rudy that something should go wrong.
Martin walks through his own city like a tourist. There is no hierarchy to his perceptions. Nothing has any meaning in itself, it is all potential. He looks up. Vauxhall, by the river. A tall 1960s office building. A malicious young man at a high window could become a killer by dropping pennies on to the heads of passers-by, the queen’s head drilling a path through a shopper’s brain. That man at the bus stop, hair hidden beneath a knitted hat, face behind a goatee, holding a plank of wood, could so easily lift the plank out horizontally into the road, a cyclist slammed in the chest falls into the path of an oncoming car, which twists to avoid him and collides with a motorcyclist who crashes into the windscreen of the car coming the opposite way, and the motorcycle has crashed into the front of a bus, which is slowly toppling over, while the bicycle, operating in a parallel, faster dimension, is skittering on its side along the pavement, knocking over old men, baby buggies, women who, just an innocent second before, had been speaking on mobile telephones. Rudy likes violent chains of events.
There is no such thing as accident in Rudy’s world. Rudy has plans for him. Rudy has plans for the city and Rudy intends for him to be part of it. He wants to be found but he is challenging Martin to do it. Everything is connected, by a malicious thread that leads back to the perpetrator’s hands. Can You Help Us?

Rudy loves clocktowers, which means, of course, that he might always intend them harm. I used to watch him smoking cigarettes in the shade of the clocktower at Highbury Barn. Lapiz lazuli clockface. Rudy cupping the cigarette in his hand, practising a scowl to offend babies and matrons, a leer to impress the girls. The scowl was more reliable in its effects than the leer. Martin was less dramatic, more ordinary, and girls always liked him more. Sometimes at night Rudy would throw bottles at the clockface, broken glass spinning around his feet.