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.
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:
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
