The Rooftop Signal

Ben had been on the force for six years, and in that time he had learned that most noise complaints came from neighbors who hated each other. So when dispatch sent him up the coast road at eleven on a Tuesday night to the old Raven Hill Weather Station, he figured he was driving forty minutes to tell two old men to turn down their television.

He was twenty-eight, and he was tired. The shift had started at three in the afternoon and should have ended at eleven. His patrol car smelled like the coffee he'd spilled that morning. The road up the bluff was single lane and full of potholes, and the heat wave had been sitting on the Highlands for nine days straight, so even at night the air came through the window warm and dead.

The weather station sat at the top like something dropped there by accident. Concrete, rusted railings, a tall crane parked alongside it that caught the moonlight. There was one light on near the top. Ben sat in the car for a minute and read the dispatch note again. Noise complaint, caller said metal banging, every night this week. No name on the caller. No flat number, because there were no flats. Just the station.

"Well," he said to nobody, and got out.

The fire escape on the east side was the only way up that wasn't a locked ground door, and it was painted over rust that flaked on his palms. He climbed three flights and came out on a narrow walkway with the whole black sea below him and the lights of the town flickering miles off, small and orange. The heat came up off the asphalt roof in waves. Somebody was hammering.

He followed the sound around a ventilation housing and there was a man standing on the actual rooftop, on his knees on a tarp, working on a loose metal panel with a drill. He was huge. Not fat, just built, shoulders like a doorframe, forearms shiny with sweat. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. He had a headlamp on and he didn't hear Ben until Ben's boot scraped the gravel.

The man spun, drill up like it might do something, then saw the uniform and put it down.

"Christ. You scared the life out of me." He pulled the headlamp off and blinked. "Are you the police?"

"Sergeant Ben Rao." Ben showed the badge out of habit. "We got a noise complaint about this building. Metal banging, every night. I take it that's you."

"That's me, aye." The man wiped his face with a rag from his pocket. It didn't help much. "Sorry about that. I'm Edward. I run the crane for the construction crew, we're refitting the station, and I've been sleeping up here in the old watch room because the site caravan is an oven in this heat. The panel behind me works loose when the wind comes off the water and it bangs against the frame. I've been trying to fix it so it stops waking me up, which means I'm the complainant and the complaint at the same time."

Ben looked at the panel, then at the crane, then back at him. "Somebody called it in."

"Probably the farmer at the bottom of the hill. He's called about me three times this week. I'd have left a note on his gate if I'd known." Edward shrugged, and the movement was enormous. "I can stop the night work if it's a problem."

"Night work is fine. It's after eleven, you're on private property, and the noise is a loose panel, not a party." Ben crouched down and looked at the panel's edge. "Whoever did this weld last did a bad job."

"The last crew, aye. We're redoing all of it." Edward was looking at him with something close to amusement. "You came all the way up here for this?"

"Dispatch gave me this address. Somebody near here reported it, so here I am." Ben stood. His knees cracked. Forty minutes up, forty minutes back, for a weld. He didn't say that part. "Do you have water? It's stupid hot up here."

Edward grinned. "I have better than water."

He walked to the corner of the roof where an old red fire extinguisher stood mounted on a bracket, except the top had been cut off clean and inside was ice and cans. Ben had never seen anything like it.

"Vintage extinguisher. Dead anyway, out of date by a decade, so I made it a cooler." Edward pulled out two cans of lager and handed him one. "It's not cold cold, but it's colder than you."

It was. Ben stood at the low wall drinking it, looking down at the dark water, and Edward stood beside him, and for a while neither of them talked, which was fine. Ben noticed he didn't mind the quiet. Usually he filled silence at calls because people got nervous. This man didn't seem nervous at all.

"So you sleep up here every night," Ben said.

"When it's like this, aye. It's cooler up here and I can hear if anything shifts on the site." Edward took a pull of his can. "It's a strange thing to explain to people. Big lad like me, sleeps on a roof."

"Why strange?"

"Most folk hear crane operator and picture a thug with a flask." He said it lightly, but Ben heard something under it. "You didn't. You looked at my welds instead."

"Your welds are bad."

Edward laughed, a big real laugh that rolled off the roof. "The last crew's welds. Mine are decent."

Ben found himself smiling at the dark water. He finished the lager. Edward offered another and he said no, he was driving, and Edward put the second can back in the extinguisher like that was a normal thing to respect.

It was when Edward reached up to loosen the panel again that Ben saw it. The back of the man's right hand was red and shiny, a burn the size of a coin, skin tight over it. A hot cable burn, the kind you get from a live line you brushed by accident.

"That's infected waiting to happen," Ben said. "When did you do that?"

"This afternoon. Bit of the hoist cable, it holds heat." Edward flexed the hand with casual ease. "It's fine."

"It's not fine. You need burn gel and a proper dressing on it. Is there anything open up here?"

Edward's face did a small thing. "The village shop closed at six. Nearest pharmacy is in the town, forty minutes down, and it's shut at this hour anyway."

"There's a twenty-four hour one by the harbour. I drove past it Tuesday last." Ben was already checking his watch. "I'll run down and back. Twenty minutes each way."

"You're not serious." Edward was staring at him. "You're off the clock on a wild goose chase and now you're going to drive forty minutes for burn gel?"

"You've got a burn. I've got a car. That's the whole maths of it." Ben was already walking toward the fire escape. "Give me ten quid for the gel and I'll bring the change."

Edward dug a folded note out of his pocket and handed it over, and their fingers touched for a second, and Ben felt it go up his arm as if from a static shock and pretended it hadn't. He was married to the job, more or less. He'd had one strange good night with a bartender in Inverness five years ago that he never told anyone about, and he'd put it in a box and sat on the lid since. He wasn't thinking about the box. He was thinking about the pharmacy.

"I'll be back before you finish that panel," he said at the top of the stairs.

"Ben." Edward said it like he was testing the name. "Thank you."

"Don't weld anything while I'm gone."

The drive down was all hairpins and dead moths on the windscreen. Ben rolled the window down at the top and the heat came in anyway, nine days of it sitting on the hills like a lid. The radio had nothing but a phone-in about the weather. He turned it off.

Twenty minutes, like he'd said. The harbour pharmacy had a green cross lit up and a woman of about sixty behind the counter watching a portable telly. He bought burn gel, a non-stick dressing, and a roll of tape. The change from the ten pound note was three forty. He put it in his shirt pocket and then, for no reason he could name, bought two bottles of water and a bag of salt and vinegar crisps as well.

"Late shift?" the woman asked.

"Something like that."

"Mind yourself on the coast road. Lot of idiots on it in this heat."

The idiots, as far as Ben knew, numbered one, and he was him.

He was back at the bottom of the fire escape in under an hour total, which he counted as a personal best for a night he was technically still on call. The east side stairs went up in a slow corkscrew, every rung hot through his boots, and by the time he came over the wall Edward was sitting on the concrete with his back against the low parapet and the red extinguisher cooler beside him, the panel forgotten.

"You didn't weld," Ben said.

"I kept my word." Edward held out his hand for the bag as a child would at Christmas, then caught himself. "Sorry. Nobody's brought me anything in a long time."

"Three forty's your change."

"Keep it. You drove forty minutes."

"The gel and bits came to six sixty. The rest is yours, it was never mine." Ben crouched down beside the hand. "Let me see it."

Edward held the hand out, palm down. Up close the burn was worse than it had looked under the roof light, the skin tight and shiny and starting to rim pink at the edges. Ben cleaned it with water from one of the bottles first, and Edward hissed through his teeth but held still.

"Sorry."

"Don't be. It should hurt."

"You're good at this."

"Six years on the force, you patch up a lot of hands. Doors, handcuffs, drunks with bottles. Mostly drunks with bottles." Ben worked the gel in with two fingers, then laid the dressing over it and taped it down at the edges, tidy, the way he'd been taught. "There. Don't grab hot cables with it for a day or two."

"I'll try to remember that." Edward flexed the hand and looked at it. "Ta, Sergeant Rao."

"You remember my name."

"You told me it twice. I remember things." Edward pulled a can out of the cooler and opened it and didn't offer Ben one, which was its own kind of manners. "So what does a sergeant do when he's not driving burn gel up mountains?"

"Paperwork, mostly. Then calls. Then more paperwork." Ben sat down on the concrete, which was still warm even at midnight, and opened his crisps. "I was going to be a mechanic. Did two years of it. Then a mate of mine joined up and I went along to the interview mostly to keep him company and somehow I signed things."

"And stayed six years."

"And stayed six years." Ben ate a crisp. "He quit after two. Lives in Bristol now, sells kitchens. I kept going. I liked the nights, weirdly. Everything's quieter and more honest at two in the morning."

"That's poetic for a copper."

"Don't tell anyone."

Edward laughed again, that big easy laugh, and drank. "I was going to be a diver. Commercial diver, out of Aberdeen. Did the training and everything, then my dad got sick and I took the first job that paid weekly, which was scaffolding, and scaffolding turned into cranes because I was the only one daft enough to climb them. Then daft enough to sit in the box all day." He looked up at the crane against the stars. "Eleven years now. She's an old girl but she's mine till this job's done."

"Your dad all right?"

"Died four years back, spring of the year." Edward said it the way men say things like that, flat and quick, and then took a long drink. "Mum's in Nairn. She still thinks I fix lifts."

"Why?"