Christopher Fowler - Disturbia

'It's your go, Maggie,' said Harold Masters. 'Stop daydreaming.'

'I can't help thinking of that poor boy out there all by himself,' said Mrs Armitage. The flame-haired occult specialist of Camden Town was not concentrating on her hand. 'We should be doing something to help him.'

'The best thing we can do is be on the other end of the telephone line when he calls,' said Masters, checking his cards once more.

'Perhaps we should ring the police.' Mrs Armitage ran nervous fingers through the brightly varnished shell necklace that looped her neck. 'Explain what's going on. I have connections. I know people who could psychically assist them in their investigations.'

'That would slow them down a bit,' said Stanley Purbrick, a curator at the British Museum whose usual field of expertise was Victorian ornithology. He had no time for Maggie Armitage's new age brand of vaguely holistic spiritualism. He was a rationalist, and a conspiracy theorist. He could find a conspiracy inside his morning cereal packet or behind the lateness of the train that bore him to work, and frequently did so. 'They have no idea what goes on in this city. Besides, talk to the police and it stays on your files for ever. For God's sake play your hand, Maggie, you're driving us all mad.'

'What files? They have files on us?' Mrs Armitage distractedly laid out her cards in a hand that made so little sense it seemed impossible to imagine that she had been paying attention for the last half-hour.

'What on earth have you been keeping there, you silly woman?' Purbrick tossed his cards aside in disgust. 'If you'd spent less time arguing about spontaneous combustion and more remembering what cards you were holding we could have finished playing ages ago. These are spades. Those are clubs. Christ on a bike.'

Harold Masters and his wife were used to this sort of behaviour. Virtually every meeting of the Insomnia Squad featured a card game disrupted by the most arcane arguments imaginable, but the five of them continued to meet, which, he supposed, proved that they still had something in common.

'I can't concentrate,' said Mrs Armitage, walking to the window and staring down into the darkened street. 'That poor boy needs spiritual fortification.'

'So do I,' said Purbrick. 'Harold, I seem to recall that you have a decent twelve-year-old malt whisky over there, don't you?'

'I might have,' Masters replied carefully. Once the last member of their group arrived and got his hands on it, the bottle would be lost. 'Jane, have a look in the sideboard and give our guests a drink.' His wife gave him a gentle knowing smile as she crossed the room.

'So it's agreed,' said Masters. 'Mr Reynolds needs our help, and I for one don't think it's cheating. After all, the League has at least twelve members working against him, and we are only five.'

'Four at the moment,' Mrs Armitage pointed out.

'The least we can do is stay up with the poor fellow until dawn,' said Masters, 'and try to guide him through. What are you doing?'

The occultist pulled something from the unruly red mop of her hair and set it down before her. 'It's a divining rod.'

'It's a pencil.'

'You can use anything so long as the wood is right.'

'I don't see how that helps us at all,' complained Purbrick. 'What use is that?'

'I use it to write with,' she explained. 'Harold, why don't you start by telling us everything you know about these people? Perhaps we can do something more positive than just sitting beside the phone.'

Pam watched in annoyance as they argued around her.

'What I don't understand,' Caton-James complained, 'is why you couldn't find some ordinary rope.'

'How many people do you know who can lay their hands on a coil of rope at short notice?' shouted St John Warner. 'It's all very well for you to say "tie her up" as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. You don't even carry a penknife on you.'

'I'm not a fucking boy scout. If I have any dirty work to do, I'll get someone congenitally stupid to do it for me, right, Barwick?'

Barwick gave them both a long hard stare as he knotted Pam's hands behind her back. In the absence of rope he had been forced to make do with an old 16mm print of Carousel someone had once borrowed from the BFI and not returned. Knotting strips of plastic proved problematic, though, and Pam had complained that it was cutting into her wrists right up until Sebastian gagged her with his handkerchief and the end of a roll of parcel tape.

They arranged her astride a bentwood chair with her arms tied around the central supporting column of the reading room. Still clad in her navy-blue suit and faux -pearls, she looked like a flight attendant getting into bondage.

'What are we going to do with her, anyway?' asked Caton-James. 'She can't stay here.'

'She can for the remainder of the night,' said Sebastian. 'She was helping the enemy.' He looked over at Pam, who was glaring at them in forced silence. 'I think she's putting gypsy curses on us all. It makes one wonder if all unattractive women are really witches.' Pam threw him a look that almost struck him dead.

'I think we should go upstairs and check the subject's progress on the big monitor. We're wasting time down here.' St John Warner made for the spiral wooden staircase in the corner.

'For once I agree with you,' said Sebastian. 'Barwick, you stay here and guard.'

'Good dog,' said St John Warner, barking and laughing as they trooped upstairs, leaving the miserable student with his captive.

'My first thought was the Elephant and Castle,' Vince explained as they climbed towards the roof. Below them, the cacophony of several different sound systems competed for dancers in different parts of the warren-like building. 'Crenellations are those dips in battlements that troops fire from, so Pachyderm Castle – it seemed a reasonable assumption. But the instructions brought me here instead.'

'And quite rightly too,' said Jason. 'I'll show you your elephant and castle in a minute. There's an emergency exit up here. It isn't alarmed or anything.'

'How do you know?' Vince struggled to keep up with him. For a man whose tabescent appearance suggested that he might keel over at any second, Mr Wentworth was surprisingly agile.

'Listen, in my line of business you always make sure you know where the exits are, know what I'm saying? Here.' He hammered a fist down on the steel exit bar before him and shoved back the great red fire door. A blast of icy air blew in over them, snowflakes satellising in the sudden square of light. 'Blimey, fresh air in Nine Elms, there's a novelty.' He barked out a phlegmy cough, then held out his hand and hauled Vince onto the roof. 'Come on, squire, you can do it.'

Vince carefully levered himself onto the narrow concrete ledge that ran past the fire door. At his back an odd four-foot brick wall ran off into darkness. In front of him lay the sluggish ebbing river, and on its north bank the hazy floodlights of the Tate Gallery.

'Follow my finger.' He held his scrawny arm out, pointing across the yellow grid of the intersection to a battered edifice caught in the traffic's crossfire. 'Observe the name of the building,' Jason instructed.

Vince could vaguely make out some stone lettering around the edge of the first floor. 'I can't read it from here.'

'Then look at the roof.'

He found himself staring at a large gaudily-painted stone elephant. On its back was a giant chesspiece, a rook. 'That's the other elephant and castle,' he explained. 'A boozer, a right old trouble-spot. People don't notice the statue from the road, but from up here…'

'Up to steel and stars,' said Vince, puzzled. Just then, the bricks behind him started to vibrate ominously. He turned in alarm to see a great dark mass curving towards him with a rumble and a screech, and suddenly understood where they were. The club was hollowed out inside the structure of Vauxhall's vast red-brick railway bridges, with its sweeping roof underneath the track.