The Midnight Mayor (14 page)

I left the shop before testing the phone, and found a patch of wall in an alley, with a small play area facing it and an angry declaration of:

written in three-foot-high white letters. Polish: a relatively new language come to the city.

The phone took for ever to power up. The first thing it did on settling down was send me a text message welcoming me to my new network and inviting me to enjoy many of the wonderful benefits I hadn’t yet signed up to. I deleted this and went thumbing through the details of Nair’s sim card. There wasn’t much. No one had sent him a text message, and he had sent only one, to another mobile phone, a couple of nights ago.

I read it with a sinking heart. It said:

That was all. Nair was clearly not a man of many words, but when he picked them, he really did.

His phone book was a little more busy. I recognised some of the names: Earle, who had received the one text message ever sent from this phone; Kemsley; Anissina. There were others, which I saw with sinking heart. Sinclair; a few Whites, including Vera; and - of course - Bakker.

Robert James Bakker.

I guessed Nair hadn’t bothered to delete the names of the dead from his phone. I told myself I shouldn’t be surprised, that only a few months ago in London, if you didn’t have dealings with Bakker, you didn’t deal in magic at all. We felt sick.

One other number caught my interest. It was simply “Black Cab”, and a standard 0800 dialling code. I looked at it long and hard. Lots of people had numbers for cab companies on their phones, for that decadent day when, out late, a little tipsy and too far from the bus or Tube, their will, and then their wallets, would break and they’d splurge on a private cab home. But though the black cab was the most common taxi in London, this wasn’t just a cab number. This was Black Cab.

I filed this thought away at the back of my mind under “S” for “Stuff”, to worry about another day.

Then I checked Nair’s call record. There was only one incoming, from Earle, a few nights ago, which didn’t tell me anything I couldn’t have guessed. There was also only one outgoing. It was registered at 2.25 a.m., the night that the phone had rung, and I’d answered.

I called the number, my heart a lump of muscle weighing down my chest.

An old-fashioned ring at the end of the dialling signal, as if a bell actually was being hit with a hammer, rather than a sound effect. Maybe just a very good sound effect.
Tingalingalingalingalinga
. . .

Then a voice answered, with a very, very careful “Yeah?”

I said, “I want to get my car washed.”

“Sure, we can do that. Just bring it up here any time.”

“How much do you charge?”

“£7 for a standard wash, £15 for a full clean, insides, out, with varnish. That takes about twenty-five minutes.”

“And I can just bring it along any time?”

“Sure. We’re open eight till ten.”

“And where are you, exactly?”

“Willesden - near Dudden Hill Lane?”

“Yes,” I sighed, “I know Dudden Hill Lane. Thanks. I’ll find you.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. I’ve been there before.”

“OK, cheers.”

“Bye.”

“Bye!”

I hung up.

 

Well . . .

shit.

 

Time passed.

A lot of time.

People walked by and I stayed still.

I think I might have laughed a bit, and then stopped laughing, and then laughed again.

We wanted to cry.

 

Well . . .

 

Just stop it.

Stop it. I’m smarter than this. We’re more than this. Just stop it.

Better?

Thank you.

What next?

Answers. I didn’t really care who gave them.

 

I found a public phone, hit it until it obeyed, and dialled the number on Nair’s phone labelled “Earle”.

It was an 0207 landline number, somewhere in the middle of the city. I didn’t want to use the mobile, just in case the Aldermen were the kind of magicians who understood that technology and magic really, really wanted to be friends.

The phone was answered almost instantly, but not by Mr Earle. A nervous, young male voice that stammered on every hard consonant and stuttered on the rest said: “H-Harlun and Phelps, how may I help you?”

I said, “I’m looking for Mr Earle.”

“I’m sorry, M-Mister Earle isn’t here right now, c-can I take a message?”

“I guess so. Tell Mr Earle that Mr Swift called. Tell him - and you need to get this right - tell him I think I know who the new Midnight Mayor is. Tell him I’ve seen the face of the man who killed Nair. Tell him he has no smell. You got all that?”

“Th-th-that you’re Mr Swift calling for Mr Earle, you know who the Mayor is, you know who k-k-killed N-Nair and he has no smell. Is that Nair who has n-n-no smell or Mr Earle?”

“Neither,” I replied, and hung up.

 

I had an idea, and it was so bad, in so many ways, who the new Midnight Mayor was.

You can’t kill an idea, a title. Not that easily. Nair might have died, skin torn to a thousand kinds of clinging shreds by ten thousand paper cuts, but the Midnight Mayor, the legend and the story, the protector of the city, doesn’t die like that. Doesn’t die at all, while there’s a city left to protect. Just the man dies - just Nair. The title moved on somewhere else, and where there’s an idea, there’s always power lagging along behind, even if it doesn’t like to brag about it.

My hand hurt. My head hurt too, but not with the same hot sharpness of my hand. It cut away all other sense, burnt beneath the bandages for attention.

I thought:
make me a shadow on the wall. Let me be secret, safe. Let it be just a bad idea.

We mustered our strength, and went towards Lincoln’s Inn.

 

Lawyers.

Hundreds and hundreds of lawyers.

I approached Lincoln’s Inn from the south, through a tight grey alley wedged between a barber’s shop and a shop selling barristers’ wigs and judges’ robes. I hugged close to the walls and the gloom, sheltering from the brightness of the winter sun, and watched the people around me.

Quite how the legal profession merited offices and apartments inside one of London’s most desirable pieces of land was beyond me. Great courtyards of grand old houses, and modern replicas of the same, with high chimney stacks and thick oak doors, gazed out onto deep, lush flower beds and grass mown into spacious, do-not-walk-here rectangles. Cobbles ran beneath tall, many-paned windows behind which were bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, oil paintings of long-dead judges, desks exploding with papers and of course, hard at work or in a sombre-faced meeting, lawyers.

At the lodge gate, uniformed wardens monitored all traffic; beneath an arching fountain, gardeners in rugged shoes planted spring bulbs; inside the great red Gothic belly of the central hall, a lunchtime concert was under way; besides the remains of a medieval church, all pillars and dark echoing staircases worn smooth by centuries of shoes, the tourist guides explained the myths and wonders of this ancient place to awe-struck onlookers. Weaving busily between it all were, of course, more lawyers.

They dressed nearly the same; the women, all young, in tight suits that forced them to walk from the knees, not the hips, and strutting on sensible heels - not too gaudy, but high enough to give them the same stature as the men. The men, mostly young or middle-aged, dressed in matching dark suits, with only the pinkness of their shirts or the stripiness of their ties marking out one individual from another. The youngest wheeled great trolleys stacked with boxes stuffed with paper; the oldest strode along in big coats worn over a watch chain, and drove cars ten years too young for them. Outsiders were mostly the occasional student taking a cut-through to the library, all baggy trousers and bad hair, or a TV scout for the latest docu-drama surveying the Inns of Court in search of “authentic” historical London.

The air smelt of mown grass, and time. Time with a paper-thin edge. There were ghosts playing in Lincoln’s Inn, trailing their fingers along the edges of the old stones, sticking their noses into the shrapnel holes from a fallen bomb, climbing trees taller than the spire of the church or peaked roof of the hall, just waiting for the sun to go down.

Name plaques on the doors announced the occasional private residence among what were almost entirely lawyers’ chambers: here and there Lord and Lady So-And-So, or Major-General X, who lived three doors down from Sir Somethingorother and the charming Dame Thingamajig. You didn’t
buy
a property in Lincoln’s Inn; money wasn’t the point. Time and tradition were the names of the game. And on that count, it made perfect sense that the Midnight Mayor had found his niche within these walls.

Bright winter sunshine makes most places beautiful. The Inn looked like English good manners made out of ancient brick and weathered stone, all golden reflections, and thin shade lost in the glare. Lurking in the shadows, I had to remind myself that, chances were, there might be nasties hiding behind the windows, and not just the legal kind.

I pulled my coat tighter around my shoulders. Any good private detective out of any good American thriller will tell you that an old, plain anorak is a city’s camouflage paint. Any good sorcerer will tell you that they’re not just right, they’re two incantations short of invisibility.

I stepped out into the sunlight, and strode towards the door of 137A New Court with the brisk pace of an Important Person with an Important Place to Be, and who, as such, shouldn’t be noticed because frankly, it’s none of your business. There was no police tape, no policeman. By the entrance to the staircase I’d been looking for, a white wooden board, lettered in black, listed everyone who worked or lived there. I climbed two flights of echoing stairs, clinging with my bandaged hand to a black iron banister, feeling its coldness even through the layers of wool and cotton and blood. On the top floor the staircase led to a door bearing the number 137A in brass; on the wall beside it, a plaque repeated the fact that here lived A. Nair Esq. I looked back down the stairwell, saw no one following; I also saw no place to hide. Fumbling in my satchel for a ring of blank keys, I found one best suited to fit the lock, slid it in and caressed it, murmuring to it until the metal of the key hissed into the shape of the barrel; turned; opened the door.

A moose was staring at me.

What kind of man sticks the antlered stuffed head of a moose to the wall by his front door? Was it supposed to be a coat rack? Perhaps a psychiatrist could derive some meaning from this.

A small burglar alarm started to beep a warning. I walked briskly over to it, flicked back the plastic panel over the keypad, and slammed my fist, crackling with stolen electricity, into the grid of numbers. The alarm spat black smoke and died.

I looked round the apartment.

It surprised me how much personality had been imposed on such a cream-washed place. The moose was not the only creature to have made its rendezvous with destiny on these walls. Keeping it company was a polar bear, mouth open to roar; also a couple of stags, a reindeer with wide glass eyes, a falcon ready to fly. And of course, at the far end, a fox. I looked at this creature a long while. Its fur was clean, dark orange, with a white band running below its jaw. Its head seemed tiny compared to the great antlers and outstretched wings of its neighbours, and its jaw was locked tight, as if holding in that last breath that would have allowed it to die. We couldn’t look away, and felt . . . sad. As I left the hall, the fox’s empty stare watched our back.

The kitchen was all terracotta tile, stainless steel and fresh herbs. The bedroom was 90 per cent book to 10 per cent bed, the texts were serious tomes, on law, history, geography, London. The bathroom was white plaster and stone, not a mark nor shaven hair to show for any inhabitant. Even the toothbrush looked new, and a great oval mirror bore not a spatter of toothpaste.

There wasn’t a TV in the living room; just more books and a computer, the screen smashed, the base scorched black. The glass had fallen outwards, away from the screen in a circle on the floor, as if it had been smashed from the inside.

End of the line.

On the walls were portraits, in outsize carved and gilded frames: dead grandees with a hand absently held out to touch the globe; plumed great ladies, seated against vast gardens; dour-faced dowagers below a portrait of their husband in full-dress uniform. The ugliest object was a figure representing one of the dragons of the Corporation of London - a squat, terrier-sized beast in dull silver, with a red forked tongue curling out of its fanged mouth, that sat up holding in its claws the white shield and twin red crosses of the city. Seen close, the wildness of the eyes and smallness of the wings gave the dragon a comical, circus-act look. It proved to be hollow plastic, which echoed faintly when struck.

This little monster sat by a great brute of a desk, all dark mahogany and green leather trimmings, that smelt almost overwhelmingly of thin polish and thick, reflective varnish. Behind the desk lurked a leather chair, built to dwarf any man who sat in it. Only one of the desk drawers was locked. I stroked it carefully, breathing gentle words into the barrel of the lock and twisting until it snapped open.

There were files inside, proper paper files in manila folders, embossed with the dragons and the shield of the Corporation of London. I flicked through them, and was disappointed by how mundane the majority were. Reports on exhaust emissions within the central, inner and greater areas of London. Details of the maintenance on the Thames Barrier; reports on roadworks near Waterloo Bridge, notes on the progress of the water mains replacement project. I went through them all with increasing frustration; we wanted to find something magical, something definitive, something that linked, once and for all, Nair to the Midnight Mayor and if necessary, the Midnight Mayor to us.