The Midnight Mayor

Nair, torn meat inside a neat black silk suit, lying in his own blood, mobile phone the last thing the bloody criss- cross remains of his fingers were going to touch. And then, because the fox had looked, finally, the fox dared to look, we looked up at the man who had killed A. Nair, the Midnight Mayor.

And the fox was right. He was absolutely right. We saw a man, dressed in a neat pinstripe suit utterly untouched by the flames still burning in the rubbish bins, by the glass spilt across the floor, by the swinging electric cables and the spitting remains of electric lightning, by the fallen aerials and shattered metal shutters, by the torn bricks and broken paving stones; not a scratch on him. He wore a suit, the crease impeccable all the way down from his waist to his ankle; a pair of black leather shoes that clacked neatly with every step, a pinstripe jacket done up over a white shirt, the collar ironed and unstained. A white silk handkerchief stuck up from his jacket pocket, his thin dark hair was swept back, not a fibre out of place, from a high pale forehead and on his face was a look . . .

no smell

. . . a look that a busy plumber might give to a boiler that’s been giving him more trouble than it’s worth and has now been fixed; the conquering contempt of an expert who has proven his worth to a dumb machine.

And he had no smell. To the fox, watching this, Nair had stank from the moment he entered of expensive cleaning products and shaving lotions, of terror and fear. His shoes had smelt, his clothes had smelt, every part of him offering a different tone to the medley. But the man who had killed him, the thing that had killed him, which looked like a man in a pinstripe suit, who now stood over him utterly uncaring for either his triumph or the pity of the dead, had no smell. Not a part of him smelt, not even of cleanliness. He was a walking blank on the fox’s recollection, even the dirt on his shoes. His heart made no sound; nor was there any proof, except that he had just killed a living man, that this man lived at all.

And then he looked at the fox. And the terror that swept through every nerve of the creature nearly knocked us from the seat, the strength of it, the absolute animal certainty that it was run or die. And we ran, us and the fox, we ran through the night with every hair standing up down the length of our back, ran until our paws ached and our spine groaned and our head was a dead weight looking down to the ground and we could smell nothing but our own fears and ran and ran and ran.

Terror broke the spell. Our fear, his fear, we weren’t making the distinction. The fox was a trembling curl of fur beside us; and we weren’t much better, every inch shaking from the shared experience of the creature’s thoughts. Our head hurt, our body hurt, our paws still hurt, although we had none, and above all, and slicing through it to an agony pitch, our right hand blazed furiously inside its bandage and when we turned our hand over to look, pulling the black mitten away from the wad of cotton rolled over our skin, we saw blood was seeping through.

I fumbled in my bag for painkillers, took three in a single gulp, cooed empty noises at the trembling fox. I tried to pick coherent images out of the confusion of the fox’s thoughts: focus on Nair, focus on his killer. I wondered how unamused the Aldermen might feel about being offered up an urban scavenger as a reliable witness for the claim “not me, guv, I didn’t do it”.

Still, it was something that I had seen the face of the man who killed Nair. If I had been frightened of him before, whoever he was, this no-smell in a suit, now I was rightly terrified. You do not walk the earth without a heartbeat and a smell, unless you were not designed for that particular promenade. And sooner or later, whether we liked it or not, we were constrained by the laws of earthly things, even if it, he, whatever it was, was not.

I patted the fox, taking comfort from the warmth of his body and the consistency of his companionship. The fox shuffled closer to me, and I stroked him some more. “There, Mr Fox,” we sighed, and then, because we couldn’t think of anything reassuring, added, “There, Mr Fox.”

We sat there a long while, and might have sat there longer if it wasn’t for the burning in our hand. The fox trembled and whimpered by us, and in time, a trembling became a breathing, a breathing a gentle sleep, and he began to forget the things he had seen. We didn’t.

We had to . . .

. . . do something.

We just didn’t know what.

A telephone had rung.

I’d answered.

Spectres had come.

The Aldermen had come.

The Midnight Mayor had died.

And as he’d died, at the hands of a whatever-it-was that could flay the flesh off a man without even touching him, who killed with ten thousand paper cuts, he’d used his mobile phone.

I reached into my bag. I had Nair’s sim card, pried from the back of his phone. It didn’t look damaged, but then what could you tell from a piece of plastic and silicon? I put it in my coat pocket, pushed the remnants of my kebab over to the little fox, and stood up.

Not much more I could do.

Dawn and sunset in winter both happen when you’re not looking. You can see the beginnings of daylight, the shimmerings of dusk, the bending of the shadows; but the actual moment when the sun hits the horizon in either direction is lost behind buildings or in a moment of distracted conversation. Blink, and you miss it. The earth spins too fast to wait for your attention.

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