it must be my natural socio-cultural gender bias. Forgive me, my dear,” he added, nodding to Ms Anissina, whose face remained empty, and Vera, who scowled.
My bag was at the foot of the coffee table. The bottle with the spectre in it was on the end. There were three lights in the room, small bulbs churning out bright whiteness from the ceiling. I had my coat and shoes on. Mr Earle guessed what I was thinking. It didn’t take much effort.
“You don’t like Aldermen, do you, Mr Swift?”
“No,” I replied.
“Why, may I ask?”
“You only come out for the big things.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“When the peasants revolted in the reign of Richard II, the Aldermen came out to send the nightmares let loose by the fear of destruction back to sleep. When bubonic plague went through the streets, the Aldermen came out to stop the dead from walking. When the Fire of London gutted the city, the Aldermen made sure to save the precious treasures from the flames: the ravens in the tower, the London Stone — the altar supposed to have been laid by Brutus at the heart of the city, the heart of the damn country. When the bombs fell in the Blitz, the Aldermen were the ones who kept the things unearthed in the rubble from getting up and walking.”
“And . . . you seem to regard this in a negative light?”
“When the plague rats came to the city, the Aldermen made sure the dead didn’t walk. But they didn’t lift a finger to stop the dead from dying.”
“Ah — I see.”
“You are the protectors of the
Silence in the room, except for the slow bubbling of the kettle. Mr Kemsley shifted his weight against the wall. Ms Anissina took a slow, quiet breath. Mr Earle smiled. Skulls smile, and in the grave, Mr Earle will grin for ever at a joke only he could understand.
“I respect your honesty,” he said at last. This is something liars say. “You’ve been frank with me, I’ll be frank with you. Quite regardless of your personal condition, our concern is larger than the mere trifle of whether you live or die again. We couldn’t care less if you were attacked or who attacked you, except that there are . . . matters at work which require our involvement. And you, Mr Swift, seem to be currently sitting in the middle of them.”
“What matters?”
“I do not think I need trouble you by reporting them.”
“You already are troubling me.”
“Then I shall be brief to save us all further inconvenience. I believe you when you say you were attacked last night. I believe that you were hurt, I believe that you were afraid; all these things are empirically obvious. I believe that there are very few powers in this city, if not on this earth, which could make creatures such as the blue electric angels either hurt or afraid. I believe that the Midnight Mayor is one of them. I believe you attacked the Midnight Mayor. I believe you killed him.”
Strangely, we have never in our life been accused of killing a man.
I stared at Mr Earle and saw nothing but serious honesty in his little lined face. I looked at Ms Anissina and saw ice, I looked at Mr Kemsley and saw fire. I half-turned my head, looked at Vera and saw . . . for a moment, not Vera. Not quite: in the blinking of an eye, something else was standing where she should have been. Blink again, and there was Vera, face as empty as the mugs in her hand.
I looked back at Mr Earle and said, “You are totally shitting me.”
“I am quite serious,” he replied primly. “End of the line.”
A threat, as well as a statement.
“Why would I kill the Midnight Mayor?” I asked. “I don’t even believe he exists.”
“Come now,” he chided. “That’s a poor argument. You know the Old Bag Lady exists, you’ve met the Beggar King, you understand that Lady Neon stalks the lamplit streets and Fat Rat scuttles in the Underground. You of all . . . creatures . . . should know that the Midnight Mayor is real.”
“No,” I replied. “Besides, even if he were real, the Midnight Mayor can’t just die.”
“Of course not! The Midnight Mayor is an idea, a concept, a drifting title, a name that happens to carry with it some considerable power. No, no, no, the Midnight Mayor isn’t dead. Merely the man who happened to be him. There’s another Midnight Mayor out there, somewhere in the city, waiting to wake up and taste the carbon monoxide. Even you can’t kill an idea.”
Three faces carved with a pickaxe from old rough marble looked at me from around the room. I rubbed my aching shoulder, tried to shake the bumble-bees from my ears. “Exactly how did you reach the conclusion that I did this, if this has even been done?” I asked, trying not to look at my bag and the spectre-filled beer bottle.
“Well,” sighed Mr Earle, “apart from the obvious qualifications — I mean as regarding your capacity to kill, which is well established, and your abilities when it comes to this matter — there’s a great deal of circumstance.”
“Circumstance? Is that it?”
“I did say a great deal,” he chided.
“It’d better be monumental,” I snapped.
He ticked it off on his fingers. “One:” he intoned, “your clear hatred for the Aldermen and by implication, our chief, the Midnight Mayor . . .”
“If you believe he exists,” I added.
“Who quite clearly exists, who was my friend and boss and who died last night face down in his own bodily fluids. Two: the manner of the Mayor’s death . . .”
“Which was?”
“Stinking of sorcery,” he replied. “Three: files left in the Mayor’s office in which you were, I am sorry to report, the star. Four: your own injuries, most likely inflicted by the Mayor during your encounter. Five: circumstances around the city of London suggesting activities of the kind it takes a sorcerer or worse to inflict — you are, I think, still the only sorcerer in town?”
“Doesn’t mean that other sorcerers aren’t coming in from outside, or finding their abilities,” I retorted. “Life is magic; sooner or later there’ll always be someone new who works this out. What kind of ‘activities’, and why do you care?”
He didn’t answer. Perhaps he was just scared of losing count. “Six: your watch.”
“My watch?”
“Your watch,” he replied. “Stopped at 2.25 when it was hit by what I’m guessing was a wallop of magical energy.”
“Yes — and?”
“And by the coroner’s report, the Mayor died at 2.26.”
Silence.
There’s no such thing as coincidence. At least there’s no such thing when it’s bad news. Everyone needs something to blame.
I said, “It wasn’t me.”
“You’ve killed before.”
“I’ve killed the shadow that killed me! I’ve killed a walking corpse with paper stuffed down his throat! We have
“You killed Robert James Bakker. Your teacher, your mentor, your—”
“Robert Bakker was the fuel that kept a walking shadow feeding on blood and death for two years! Robert Bakker was the man whose shadow ripped out my fucking throat and killed my apprentice, who . . .”
“You’re not human, Matthew Swift. To be blunt about it. You’re not human.”
We stood up slowly. “We are human,” we replied. “We have all the apparatus of humanity and more. We were
Silence again. Then Mr Kemsley said, “I don’t believe a word of it.”
