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.
Name plaques on the doors announced the occasional private residence among what were almost entirely lawyers’ chambers: here and there Lord and Lady So-And-So, or Major-General X, who lived three doors down from Sir Somethingorother and the charming Dame Thingamajig. You didn’t
Bright winter sunshine makes most places beautiful. The Inn looked like English good manners made out of ancient brick and weathered stone, all golden reflections, and thin shade lost in the glare. Lurking in the shadows, I had to remind myself that, chances were, there might be nasties hiding behind the windows, and not just the legal kind.
I pulled my coat tighter around my shoulders. Any good private detective out of any good American thriller will tell you that an old, plain anorak is a city’s camouflage paint. Any good sorcerer will tell you that they’re not just right, they’re two incantations short of invisibility.
I stepped out into the sunlight, and strode towards the door of 137A New Court with the brisk pace of an Important Person with an Important Place to Be, and who, as such, shouldn’t be noticed because frankly, it’s none of your business. There was no police tape, no policeman. By the entrance to the staircase I’d been looking for, a white wooden board, lettered in black, listed everyone who worked or lived there. I climbed two flights of echoing stairs, clinging with my bandaged hand to a black iron banister, feeling its coldness even through the layers of wool and cotton and blood. On the top floor the staircase led to a door bearing the number 137A in brass; on the wall beside it, a plaque repeated the fact that here lived A. Nair Esq. I looked back down the stairwell, saw no one following; I also saw no place to hide. Fumbling in my satchel for a ring of blank keys, I found one best suited to fit the lock, slid it in and caressed it, murmuring to it until the metal of the key hissed into the shape of the barrel; turned; opened the door.
A moose was staring at me.
What kind of man sticks the antlered stuffed head of a moose to the wall by his front door? Was it supposed to be a coat rack? Perhaps a psychiatrist could derive some meaning from this.
A small burglar alarm started to beep a warning. I walked briskly over to it, flicked back the plastic panel over the keypad, and slammed my fist, crackling with stolen electricity, into the grid of numbers. The alarm spat black smoke and died.
I looked round the apartment.
It surprised me how much personality had been imposed on such a cream-washed place. The moose was not the only creature to have made its rendezvous with destiny on these walls. Keeping it company was a polar bear, mouth open to roar; also a couple of stags, a reindeer with wide glass eyes, a falcon ready to fly. And of course, at the far end, a fox. I looked at this creature a long while. Its fur was clean, dark orange, with a white band running below its jaw. Its head seemed tiny compared to the great antlers and outstretched wings of its neighbours, and its jaw was locked tight, as if holding in that last breath that would have allowed it to die. We couldn’t look away, and felt . . . sad. As I left the hall, the fox’s empty stare watched our back.
The kitchen was all terracotta tile, stainless steel and fresh herbs. The bedroom was 90 per cent book to 10 per cent bed, the texts were serious tomes, on law, history, geography, London. The bathroom was white plaster and stone, not a mark nor shaven hair to show for any inhabitant. Even the toothbrush looked new, and a great oval mirror bore not a spatter of toothpaste.
There wasn’t a TV in the living room; just more books and a computer, the screen smashed, the base scorched black. The glass had fallen outwards, away from the screen in a circle on the floor, as if it had been smashed from the inside.
End of the line.
On the walls were portraits, in outsize carved and gilded frames: dead grandees with a hand absently held out to touch the globe; plumed great ladies, seated against vast gardens; dour-faced dowagers below a portrait of their husband in full-dress uniform. The ugliest object was a figure representing one of the dragons of the Corporation of London — a squat, terrier-sized beast in dull silver, with a red forked tongue curling out of its fanged mouth, that sat up holding in its claws the white shield and twin red crosses of the city. Seen close, the wildness of the eyes and smallness of the wings gave the dragon a comical, circus-act look. It proved to be hollow plastic, which echoed faintly when struck.
This little monster sat by a great brute of a desk, all dark mahogany and green leather trimmings, that smelt almost overwhelmingly of thin polish and thick, reflective varnish. Behind the desk lurked a leather chair, built to dwarf any man who sat in it. Only one of the desk drawers was locked. I stroked it carefully, breathing gentle words into the barrel of the lock and twisting until it snapped open.
There were files inside, proper paper files in manila folders, embossed with the dragons and the shield of the Corporation of London. I flicked through them, and was disappointed by how mundane the majority were. Reports on exhaust emissions within the central, inner and greater areas of London. Details of the maintenance on the Thames Barrier; reports on roadworks near Waterloo Bridge, notes on the progress of the water mains replacement project. I went through them all with increasing frustration; we wanted to find something magical, something definitive, something that linked, once and for all, Nair to the Midnight Mayor and if necessary, the Midnight Mayor to us.
When I found it, I nearly went straight past it in my haste and irritation, and had to flick back to make sure I’d seen it right. Inside a folder just like any other, buried halfway down the pile, was my life on paper.
I pulled it out, spread it across the desk and looked with rising disbelief at the thick, chalky sheets before me. Every detail of my existence — my mum, my gran, who liked to talk to the pigeons; my childhood, my first encounters with urban magic, my teacher Mr Bakker, my apprenticeship, my years as a not very interesting sorcerer, my time spent travelling, my death, our resurrection — everything was there, from former lovers to the average size of my annual gas bill. Lists of friends I hadn’t seen for years, who I hadn’t dare see, to whom I hadn’t known how to explain anything, whom I hadn’t dared put in danger; of extended family I’d never really spoken to, of ex-girlfriends who’d attended my funeral, with their new husband and brand new babies left at home for the sake of good manners . . .
Pictures! Where had they got so many pictures? Mum up to her elbows in rubber gloves and dodgy plumbing; Gran waddling down the street in her slippers, the rats all watching her from the grid above the drains, the pigeons from the gutters on the roofs. School photos from back when my eyes were brown, not blue, and I was just starting to grow adult teeth; CCTV shots; the place where I’d died, all blood and torn clothes and of course, most important, no body, just bloody fingerprints on the dangling receiver of the public telephone. A photo of when we came back, wearing someone else’s clothes too big for us, sitting alone on a bench in the middle of the night, then up to our armpits in the internal organs of a litterbug sent to find us, which we had destroyed. We were looking straight at the camera but I swear, we knew, we had not had our photo taken that night, there had been no one there to do it!
On the very last page was a neat typewritten page of A4. It said:
