by Kate Griffin
That is, if you believe a word of it. Which under normal conditions, I didn’t.
But these were interesting times.
All of which left me with two major problems:
1. What could possibly be so bad that even the Midnight Mayor (if he was real) took an interest?
2. What could possibly be so bad that the Midnight Mayor was killed by it?
My watch had stopped at 2.25 a.m. and the Mayor died at 2.26.
I wanted to find out why.
Mr Earle had said “by the coroner’s report”.
Say what you will for the Aldermen, they were bureaucratic to an extreme. Of course they’d have a coroner’s report on the death of their boss, the Midnight Mayor, of course they would. A coroner’s report and a receipt for the funeral, if there was anything left to bury, and all of it tax deductible, thanking you kindly.
And in the Corporation of London, I had a fairly good idea where to find a coroner.
Just west of Moorgate and south of Old Street is a great grey vastness where a lot of bombs once fell. Street names reveal more about the city’s past than any lingering hints from architecture or archaeology: London Wall (where the old city defences ran), Bishopsgate (the gate for the bishops), Cheapside (a shopping street), Poultry (a street where chickens were driven to market), and so on. The name of this area is the Barbican, referring to another gateway into the old city of London; and, as any magician, tourist or lost wanderer will tell you, it is a space-time vortex, all in gritty concrete.
Someone had clearly intended it to be a self-contained utopia, and in many ways, this was what it was. At its heart lay a shallow, slightly scummy lake in which the occasional optimistic heron sometimes waded, and from which there extended a maze of flats, cafés, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, conference halls, art galleries, schools, churches, gyms, libraries and gardens, connected to each other by walkways, bridges and tunnels, and mystic yellow lines that invariably led to the roof, even if they claimed to be leading you towards the underground car parks. A music school squatted behind a theatre whose billboards advertised Japanese mime artists and Cuban street bands, a piece of the city’s old Roman wall crumbled mutely in a private garden for local residents, and on every other balcony dangled half-dead geraniums in flowerpots, maintained to the lowest standard the council could tolerate. A single, slightly grungy food and supplies shop loitered beneath a flight of slippery stairs, and among the high towers and tiled walkways, mini-tornados swished and tugged, and tore at even the best-tended haircuts. And because this was a place that had everything for an artistic, well-ordered, middle-class life, it also had the equipment for a quiet, tidy death, so that, wedged on one corner at the end of a bridge across a street some thirty feet below was the coroner’s office.
Quite how the local residents felt about this was hard to judge. Our suspected conclusion was that they simply regarded it in the same way the average punter regarded a beggar: seen, noted, and then carefully, politely and deliberately ignored and forgotten. In many ways, it was hard to believe the sign declaring “coroner” wasn’t a malign trick, pasted up by some local wit with a morbid sense of humour.
So, the wind dragging at my coat, and my right hand throbbing inside its bandage, I walked up to the small blue door tucked away round the side of the Barbican, and rang the bell.
Nothing happened.
I rang again.
A security guard appeared behind the wire-meshed glass. He looked like so many guards in the city: mid- to late forties, tightly cut hair turning greyish, dark uniform, black radio, shiny shoes, skin the colour of deep-roasted coffee. He opened the door, but didn’t stand aside for me. When you look like the Michelin man on a famine diet, trust is not so easy to inspire.
“You looking for someone?” he asked.
I looked him up and down. He seemed like a principled man, the last thing I needed to see.
“Was a body brought here last night,” I asked, “sometime after two in the morning?”
“I’d have to check the records. You family?”
“Yes” was the easy answer, but it led inevitably to the question “what name are you looking for?”. I had no idea. In all the confusion, I only knew of the Midnight Mayor as the Midnight Mayor, nothing more specific.
“No,” I said.
“Can I ask why you’re interested?”
“Journalist” was the next most obvious answer, but unlikely to make me any friends. “Police” would require identification, “friend” would be politely told to go home. We said, “Someone attacked us last night, a minute before the man in your mortuary died. We don’t know of any connection, but other people think there is one and until we find out what it is and why this man died, we are going to be hunted and assaulted and quite possibly die, and however hideous this world is, we would not for all the fire in the wire die and leave it. Please — will you let me see the body?”
The security man blinked at me. “What?” he said numbly.
“I only need a few minutes.”
“You what?”
So much for the power of honesty.
“You could call your colleague,” I added.
“I don’t have a colleague . . .” he mumbled, and realised his mistake. I reached forward and grabbed the back of his neck with my right hand, pushed the palm of my left into the gap between his eyebrows and squeezed. The magic of sleep was easy at this hour, the night so quiet, footsteps so loud and lonely; the people of the city were either in their deepest dreams or wide awake, burning up with loneliness and imagination as shadows and sounds twisted into alien forms, untouched by the blanket of daylight bustle. The guard himself was a night owl; the streets in darkness thrilled him, walking down the middle of a road whose traffic by day would be at a standstill, eating kebabs from suspicious shops at three in the morning, watching the secret people of the streets, the cleaners, painters, repairmen, engineers, delivery men, graveyard shift and junior night-time nurses scuttling between the shadows. But he was also bored in his little office above it all, with nothing but the buzzing of the electric lamp to keep him occupied, and with his heart leaping at the sound of a truck swishing down a distant street.
It was easy, easier than I’d expected, to send him to sleep, and fill his dreams with the colour of yellow neon, and the sound of lonely footsteps in the night. A simple spell.
Harder, in fact, to position him behind his desk, dragging him into the uncomfortable tight space and propping him upright in his chair. I turned off all but the desktop lamps and locked the door behind me, from the inside. Then I went in search of the body of the Midnight Mayor.
Death, as an idea, appals us.
As an experience, I cannot say I recommend it. The mind forgets pain, the physical sensation of pain. It doesn’t forget terror.
Down a flight of stairs and into a room smelling of disinfectant and nothing else. I’d half expected rows of stainless steel cupboards, each one labelled with the name of the correct inhabitant, but there was no such thing. Above the mortuary floor of scrubbed grey tile, each member-guest had their own refrigerated coffin. I looked at the name tags pinned to the end of each metal slab and remembered again that I had no idea what the name of the Midnight Mayor was, if he had a name to begin with. So I started pulling the lids off the coffins. The women I ignored, because Mr Earle had called him “he”; and I was grateful for the chance to halve the number of empty faces I had to see: Mr Braithwaite with three lines carved in his chest like a bunch of flowers opening up towards his shoulders; Mr Wang, bile and vomit still clinging with a yellow rumpled thickness to his pouting lips; and, finally, Mr Nair.
We knew it was Mr Nair the second we saw the body, if body is what it was. It should have appalled us, but the flesh of Mr Nair was nothing more than the slabs of meat hanging from the butcher’s hook, hardly a thing human any more. His skin hadn’t been sliced off, but sliced into, a thousand, ten thousand times, with a tiny, thin blade that made the skin stand up from the flesh in
little white tufts, like snowy mountain ridges seen from the window of a passing plane. The muscles exposed below looked like something out of a medical textbook, all fibre, but grey now, blood tumbled out of them so they looked for all the world like stringy chicken meat, or pork that had been boiled first and then sandpapered down. Every inch of his body had suffered from this effect, so extensive I thought it might have been a disease, if I hadn’t known better. Beneath the black clinging threads of his hair, the scalp was a churned-up mess of sliced skin and flesh; the cuts went inside his belly button and beneath his fingernails, going under the thin nail though it seemed not even slightly disturbed.
In films, the people with a moral compass throw up at these sorts of things. I didn’t. There was nothing there, no human left. Just dry organic matter. It would have been like being sick at the sight of tofu. I pulled the lid back over the thing that had once pushed air out from between lips and so declared by its vibrations and humming, “I am Mr Nair”, and went in search of personal belongings. They were in a box, each one bagged and wrapped neatly at the back of the coroner’s office. I sat in a big revolving chair designed to give you good posture, and went through his things.
No staff, chain or cloak of office. So much for fairy-tale stories.
All his clothes were drenched in blood, every inch turned red. Not a cut on them. Nair’s fate had befallen him either while he was naked, or regardless of the things he wore. No keys; I wondered if the Aldermen had taken them. No spray cans, no mystic artefacts — travelcards, obscure tickets, penknife, albino pigeon feathers or tail of rat — nothing I would have naturally identified as useful to a magician in their trade. Perhaps the Midnight Mayor was above such things. There was a mobile phone, which didn’t turn on. A bloody fingerprint was pressed onto the screen, and scorch marks stained the otherwise shining, futuristic polish of the little machine. I put it to one side and pulled out Mr Nair’s wallet.
A driving licence declared that this was the property of Nair, Anu; born 07-08-53, United Kingdom; resident at 137A New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, London. The face that stared sombrely out at me from the licence photo had warm chocolate skin, protruding cheekbones and a tiny mouth, beneath straight, cropped greying hair. I tried to imagine it as belonging to a Midnight Mayor, and failed. I flicked through the rest of the wallet. A single credit card given by a bank whose name I couldn’t even recognise, but which was pleased to give an Exclusive Gold Membership to Nair, A., and which seemed the heart and soul of his finances. No loyalty cards to any shops or supermarkets — perhaps this was a man who didn’t do his own shopping. No money either, no receipts, no video or library cards or any of the usual detritus of human existence that tended to pile up inside a wallet. There was only one business card. I read the name with a sinking feeling that went right down through my belly and into my knees: D.B. Sinclair. Plus a telephone number.
Dudley Sinclair. “Concerned citizens.” A man who made the older Orson Welles look trim and cockney. I respected him in the same way I respected the jaws of a lion — from a very long way off. He had been of use to me, in bringing down Bakker and the Tower. I had been of immense use to him. In retrospect, he’d done two parts filing to my ten parts bleeding. But that just made him all the smarter. He knew how to get others to do his dirty work.
I put the wallet to one side.
There was a police report, short, brisk, badly spelt but to the point. It announced that at 2.20 a.m. residents of Raleigh Court, North Kilburn, had called 999 to report almost every misdemeanour happening in their vicinity that could be reported. Windows were smashed, gas was leaking, electricity was going haywire, phones were ringing, TVs were smoking, water was boiling unbidden: the whole shaboom. By the time the police were headed that way, more reports were coming in, of screaming and a fight between two heavily armed men. By the time the police arrived, there was nothing to show but angry sleepless residents, a lot of broken glass, the wailing of car alarms, and a single, skinless body lying face-down in the night.
Not quite skinless.
The coroner’s report corrected the error. The skin hadn’t been removed. It had been cut, somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand times, by a blade no thicker than a piece of paper.
Obviously not a piece of paper, the coroner added, because the death was fairly quick — shock leading to cardiac failure — and it takes a long time to administer ten to twenty thousand paper cuts across every inch of flesh. Some kind of chemical compound, perhaps, or . . .
. . . or something like that.
Reading the report, I was grateful for a moment to the Aldermen. They had got the body taken to this mortuary to be examined by their coroner. I had assumed that the Midnight Mayor would have died in the City, the traditional prowling ground of the Aldermen. I’d been wrong. I’d got lucky. He’d died in Kilburn.
North Kilburn, to be exact. Willesden is a nowhere everywhere, and Kilburn is a somewhere inside that nowhere.
It was a connection I wished the Aldermen hadn’t made.
I took the wallet and the sim card out of Nair’s phone, left everything else. Lincoln’s Inn was the nearest destination I could think of, but what were the odds that someone wasn’t watching Mr Nair’s house? Police, Alderman — killer? A braver man might have seen this as a good thing: confrontation and an early night. But we could think of only a very, very few creatures walking upon the earth with the mystic fire-power at their disposal to cut a man’s skin beneath the nail, while leaving the nail itself intact. All of them frightened us.
So I went looking for Raleigh Court, North Kilburn.
There was an internet café lurking on the Goswell Road, between a launderette and an all-purpose purveyor of rotting vegetables and cheap biscuits. It was open twenty-four hours, and as in most such places, the computers had been padlocked to the desks and the desks bolted to the floor. A young man reading an A-level textbook and sitting with his feet up on the office desk took a couple of quid with an expression of apathy and gave me a computer for an hour. There were only two other people in the café: one was a woman with prunelike skin and a giant weave of orange fabric on her head, using the internet telephone to talk to somewhere far, far away where the sun was still shining; the other, a pasty-skinned man, had chosen the furthest computer in the darkest corner for what could only, at this hour, be crime or porn.
I sat in the middle of the row of whining machines, proud of my nothing-to-hide, and looked up Raleigh Court. My A-Z covered the Kilburn area, but for specific details, you can’t beat the internet. I found it, a beige blob in the middle of yellow grid streets, and, because no one can know everything, interrogated the machine a little more on how to get there. No Tube trains, but the night buses from the centre of the city understand their basic role — to carry those too drunk to walk, to the most obscure corners of suburbia quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked.
Then, because I’m rarely online, I checked my email.
**!!PILLSPILLSPILLSPILLS!!** (From: [email protected])
We need to talk. (From: [email protected])
Re: ☝ ✞☜✞☜ M ☜ ✌M ✡ ✌❅(From: Unknown)
I deleted “PILLSPILLSPILLS” on automatic. If we had been in a more malign mood, and less tired, we might have replied with something obscene or cursed the computer from which the message was sent.
“We need to talk” from Oda77 was short and to the point. It said:
Sorcerer —
The Midnight Mayor is dead, the ravens are dead, the Stone is
gone, the Wall is cursed, the city is damned — if you believe the
ramblings of the wicked. I’ll find you.
Oda
I wrote a reply:
Oda —
I’m damned too. I’ll find you. Tell no one, otherwise they’ll kill
me before you get the chance.
Matthew
I wasn’t in a hurry to meet Oda. Psychopathic fanatic magician-murderers with a penchant for dentistry and corru
pted Christian theology were not high on my list of confidantes. She’d promised on a number of occasions to kill me, by grace of being a sorcerer, and especially to kill us by grace of being an abomination crawled from the nether reaches of the telephone lines into mortal flesh. God was her excuse, guns were her weapons, and the second I stopped being useful to her and her dentistry-crazed cult, the Order, would be the day I got to meet both. She had helped me only because she feared my enemies more than she hated me.
Besides, the last person who’d helped me . . .
. . . the last person . . .
Had been Vera.
Melted into a puddle of paint.
Hadn’t even stopped to think.
Too much to do. Too damned. Too . . . too much too.
Hadn’t even stopped.
Angry.
Sick and angry. Blink and here we are, looking back with a pair of bright blue eyes colder than the iceberg that hit the Titanic. On fire with frost. Angry. Attacked, burnt, attacked, hurt, attacked, fled, attacked, attacked, attacked, gunning for us, gunning for me, gunning for my . . . for people who stopped to help.
Angry.
Didn’t know what to do about it, except doing itself. So I kept on doing while we clenched and cramped and twisted in rage.
I kept on at the computer.
The last message was obviously bad news. A sensible user would have deleted it and been done. We didn’t. Maybe it was the arrogance from using an internet café, where the computer about to be infected by bad mail wasn’t our own; maybe it was curiosity; maybe it was inspiration; maybe it was none of these things. Whatever it was, we, in full knowledge that it wouldn’t be good, opened the message.
