by Kate Griffin
We sat on a bench on Primrose Hill and watched the sunrise.
There was frost in the grass that would be gone by the time the morning joggers reached us, and a deadness in the trees that the warmth of day would turn to cold billowing. Get away from a road in London, only a few hundred yards, and the rest of the city sounds a thousand miles off, like a distant gust of wind against a castle wall. Darkness, turned yellow-orange-pink from the glow of a thousand thousand streetlights, sprawled away as far as the eye could see. Landmarks, lit up all the colours of technology — the London Eye a distant purple blob, Big Ben in orange, the Gherkin in greens and blacks, the NatWest Tower with a square of vivid dark scarlet on its tip, Canary Wharf all in silver, thin cloud and steam curling off its top where its little red light flashes to warn away the planes. St Pancras, a gothic spike with a light blue arch stretching out into a sidewinder’s paradise of silver railway snakes; the three towers of the Barbican, the lit-up column of the BT Tower, the spread-out rooftops of Soho and Great Portland Street; the sideways-on slab of Centre Point, where not so long ago good people and bad people and the majority halfway in between had died in a fight on the topmost floor. That had been the night that the Tower fell, that Bakker fell, that Dana Mikeda . . .
. . . dead Dana Mikeda who’d died too fast for me to say sorry . . .
. . . that had been Centre Point. We turned our eyes from it.
The stop-start artery of Euston Road, carrying flicker-flash headlights from east and west; the slow slope of the North Downs along the edge of sight, a line of darker darkness against the sky where the streetlamps ended and real night, solid, frightening night that crushed imagination down to a pinpoint of darkness and left no space for stretched-out shadows on the street, marked the beginning of the end of the city.
Sunrise was a point of pale greyness at the eastern edge of the darkness, starting over the mouth of the Thames and spreading inwards towards the city. It wasn’t a line of light, more the casting of a shadowy haze over the thickness of the gloom, the sun’s upper edge nothing more than a tiny shimmer of distorted whiteness lost in the haze of the early morning clouds. No one part of the city lightened more than another, but by even degrees, black streets became fragmented, revealed themselves to be thick greynesses pierced by other roads, or changes in buildings, or unevenness in style, and then greyness became sullen blue that picked out the difference between a satellite dish and an air-conditioning vent, pointed out the rooftop apparatus of the buildings in the centre of town, raised up chimneys and revealed roof tiles facing the sky. Then came texture on the tiles; and the brightness of the streetlamps began to diminish, became merely the reflection of starlight on water, rather than the stars themselves, then vanished as the lamps began to flicker and whir out, a few bulbs at a time.
With each turn of my head to scan the city, more streets were in darkness and light all at once, the night-time lamps being replaced by the cold washing pallor of the day, that brightened further now in the east, spread blueness up towards the sky, filling in between the grey puffs of the retreating night clouds, and hinted, maybe hinted, at a bright white-silver sunlight on the horizon that came in sideways at the streets, burst out from behind the haze a dozen times only to fade away coldly, as if embarrassed by its own attempts, before finally making that great bold leap and declaring to every eye that dared to look, GET UP YOU LAZY BASTARDS! and pulling great thin shadows from end to end of every street.
This being winter, and this being London, by the time the sun was properly up, the shops were already open and doing busy trade.
I went to get Nair’s sim card unlocked.
Tottenham Court Road was a strip of overpriced not-quite-illegality slammed into the heaving retail heart of London. The offices of Euston Road lay to the north, the great sprawl of University College and its teaching hospital dominated every grand building to the east, the restaurant-crammed backstreets of Fitzrovia ran behind squares and reconstructed Georgian terraces to the west, and to the south was Oxford Street, shopping hub of the city. And like all good shopping hubs, both it and Tottenham Court Road had learnt two important commercial lessons:
1. Looks aren’t everything, location is.
2. If someone wants it, sell it.
What people wanted who went to Tottenham Court Road was electronics and electronic junk, with a side order of bedsteads and coffee.
As a result, computer shops selling the latest ultra-shiny, zappyzoomy model for a mere grand or a contract on your granny’s soul were crammed into a mixture of ancient buildings and concrete slabs, wedged together with the all the tact of rush-hour commuters piling onto the last train before a strike began. Speakers next to hi-fi next to games next to stereos next to furniture next to TVs next to mobile phones next to futons next to DVDs: this was the order of the street, competing for the know-it-all market that came for its slightly seedy but within-the-law shopping experience.
Almost within the law.
Go a few streets back from Tottenham Court Road, and the haziness of just what the law meant led to the other kind of electronics shop. The kind where you didn’t buy an ink cartridge for your printer at £25 a throw, you bought an ink bottle and a very strong hypodermic needle for £5, and let’s not ask too many questions about the patent. Where the windows were full of hard drives on special offer, wiped clean, one careful owner. Where, if you knew the right place to go and didn’t mind paying cash, a sim card from a stranger’s phone might be reactivated into a new handset, and all its secrets revealed.
Not quite illegal.
Not quite.
The legal system has always been a little behind the times.
The shop I chose was run by two men, one with no hair and the other with so much he’d stuck it in a woven balloon, carrying the colours of the Ethiopian flag and large enough to refashion as a decent-sized skirt. I gave him Nair’s sim card and told him what I wanted.
He didn’t ask questions, I didn’t ask questions.
“Yeah, man, yeah, come back in like, twenty-four hours. Fifty quid, yeah, and twenty for the set?”
“A hundred and twenty and I’ll come back in two hours.”
* * *
Around Tottenham Court Road there are a thousand different places waiting to be waited in, at no great cost. The University of London Union offered services including free toilets, if you knew where to look, a gym if you felt in a guilty mood and hadn’t found religion, a variety of pubs, and above all, cafés where no one would bother a guy who looked lived in and where the feeble coffee came in at an OK price. I found a gloomy corner behind a bank of snooker tables, and curled up to go to sleep.
It wasn’t proper sleep; but the time passed faster than the crawl of normal senses, and my thoughts ran the hip-hop patterns of a brain that has switched off all higher functions, and sees without being able to look.
Then a woman said, “Mind?”
I was awake without any consciousness of having been asleep; but she had come out of nowhere and her voice was nothing but drifting sound on the air. A finger, bright pink skin underneath, dark chocolate on top, stabbed out towards an empty sandwich wrapper someone had left on an armchair next to me. She said again, “Mind if I . . .?”
“Sure,” I mumbled, a default response to polite confusion.
The woman picked up the sandwich wrapper by one careful corner, and dumped it in a bright blue rubbish bag. She was a cleaner. She wore dull grey overalls and had parked a cart nearby, laden with plastic bottles and brushes. Her black hair was done in plaits wound so tightly to the curve of her skull that the fuzzy hair in between each row looked like it was rising to a carved ridge. Her eyes were two perfect brown ovals set in a face that was itself almost a perfect oval, except for the wide protrusion of her nose.
There was something about her — a quality that I couldn’t quite seize upon.
I said, “Hello.”
She glanced over to me, surprised, maybe even a little amused, by this hung-over mature
student passed out behind the snooker tables. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry to bother you.”
“It’s no problem,” I said. “Thank you.”
“What?”
“For the . . .” I gestured meekly at the blue bin bag, and the chair where the sandwich wrapper had sat.
She shrugged. “It’s just a job.” For a moment, she smiled. It was the weakest little smile I had ever seen, a twitch around a child’s lips after it’s fallen and hurt its knee, but is trying to be brave. We stared in wonder and opened our mouth to say something; but she was already gone, pootling round the room picking up old fallen beer bottles and tossed-aside Coke tins.
And that was it: moment passed. To get up and follow her would have turned us from two polite strangers to a stalker and his prey. I stayed where I was, watching her until she went out of sight.
There was something . . . important . . .
that I just couldn’t figure.
Maybe later.
A hundred and twenty pounds bought me a flowery handset designed for ladies who liked shopping and which we nearly rejected out of hand, with Nair’s sim card lodged in its plastic depths.
“It works?” I asked.
“Hey, yeah man, like, sure.”
I handed over the cash. My wallet was getting light. If there had been any perks of my relationship with Mr Sinclair, it had been a post office box in Mount Pleasant full of ten-pound notes that I reluctantly dipped into when the desire for a soft bed became too strong.
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:
ODDAWAJCIE MI MOJ KAPELUSZ
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:
Find Swift.
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 . . .
shit.
runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun
Just stop it.
runrunrunrunrunrun
Stop it. I’m smarter than this. We’re more than this. Just stop it.
runrunrunrun
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 offic
es 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.
