Free Looking Down by Frances Fyfield

list was of limited usefulness: if he confined himself to that, someone, somewhere would make the obvious connection that a series of not-so-fine-art burglary victims had a bank account in common. And some of them had taste. Steven thought it better to sell to them. He did not wish to disgrace the bank. There were nice people in there. They had given him a career and let him climb walls, literally and metaphorically, and they seemed to accept him as human, despite his churlish resistance and mocking of their culture. Remaining an outsider was entirely his choice. This was a grudging admission he made to himself as he went through the doors.
    There was not a single thing in this building which moved him, not a colour, an artifact, a water cooler, a door, a window or the flicker of a skirt which created a single impulse that was even a distant relative of
zing.
It was a deliberately faceless, featureless place, designed to provide no distraction from the task in hand. He nodded hello to others in the room and sat down as if weary from a tiresome lunch with a sober client distressed about market performance.
    Tiepolo came up on the screen. Triangle upon triangle,
zing, zing, zing,
as if it were really there instead of imprinted on his mind. Then it faded, giving way to the usual jumble of figures. He thought of the journey home to the dark flat he disliked but was too lazy to leave. He thought of the Tiepolo again, sadly this time, and then, at one remove, he smarted with anger that his sister would no longer let him stay with her, for the sake of her rich neighbours, and his fingers began to itch with the desire to climb.
    He tapped at the keys of his computer. He had always tried to say it was the hand that set him apart, but it was not. Scarred, ugly thing, minus the smallest finger. Never mind; the next finger did the work of two. That hand, crushed beneath the wardrobehe had tried to climb in a four-year-old’s dare against himself, only to drag it down. And no one heard the screaming, because Mummy was too busy with ever-naughty Sarah. Oh God, that soulless little house of childhood, full of girls. No wonder he preferred
zing.
No wonder Sarah owed him something. Then he smiled, nodded to himself and smiled again.

C HAPTER F OUR
Always use stiles and gates
    The sea always excited him, lifted his spirits, gave him a surge of energy. Richard Beaumont puffed up the path from the car park. There it was again, the seductive hum of the hovercraft with its effect of blotting the brain and then, in that odd moment of silence, unclogging it again. He felt odder by the second and did not care. Maybe coming back to the cliffs would encourage someone to hit him again and shock him into real life; maybe he was a masochist. Maybe he was simply drawn back to a place which had become familiar, with all the ingredients he needed. A bit of grandeur, a distinct lack of romance, ugliness mixed with beauty and sometimes hellish noisy, what with the wind and shipping and the crashing and bashing of the sea. There was also the allure of the human traffic, as long as it did not come too close. He had never wanted isolation for long, either in life or in art; he needed the human form as well as the landscape, and he felt ashamed for coming back. But he knew the way, and that counted for a lot. He knew the hotel, he knew the railway station and he knew the route, with or without his car. And he liked it. He felt like a determined child insisting on his own way in doingsomething unwise, but still, he was here, and he knew the way back.
    Familiarity with routes was important because his memory had become so poor. His conscience was unaccountably heavy. There was something he had to remember, such as why, the other day when he had sat and sketched that girl, had he ever dared go down that path beneath the overhang. Whatever was it had provoked him to do that? He returned to the same spot, passing en route the place where he had sat behind bushes