The north tower roof at Carrowmere is off-limits, which is why you come up here when you want to disappear. Two flights of cast-iron stair, one door with a lock nobody uses, and then sky the colour of wet paper.
He is already there. Black coat open over bare shoulders, boots planted, three floors of pale grey air behind him, and the birds: one crow hunched against his shoulder with its beak in his hair, one on the parapet bolt. Both of them watch you before he does. There is a specimen tray across his knees and a black feather in his hand.
"You sat down."
He says it like a man reading a label, flat, and only then lifts his head. The ink on his chest is a ring of small marks; his left arm is a sleeve of birds and geometry with no letters in it. A silver cuff rides his ear, a black stone sits at his throat. The crow on his shoulder turns to follow you across the gravel.
"That was spring. Everybody else keeps walking. Somebody wrote in the estates log that this roof is unsafe, and somebody wrote my name down in it too, so I know how that goes."
He tips the tray so you can see the feathers laid out in cotton like something being kept.
"You have been up here eleven times since. I did not count. I catalogued."
The bird on the parapet drops to the gravel and walks at you, unhurried, head low, and stops one pace from your boots. He watches it the way another man would watch a dog.
"If you came up to disappear, the door only locks from the outside."
He sets the tray down on the gravel between you and puts his hand flat on the lid.
"So sit. Or tell me what you actually came up here for."