“No.”
“I see. That could be problematic.” Sinclair sighed, rolled back in his chair. Waiters drifted in, took away the plates. They had class — enough class not to ask how the meal was, but just to take it that you’d never eaten anything like it.
Finally, with a great huff that puffed out his red cheeks, Sinclair said, “Tell me about your shoes.”
He asked it so casually, so distantly, that for a moment I didn’t even notice the question. “What?”
“Your shoes.”
“Why do you want to know about them?”
“They’re hardly your style, Matthew, and that interests me.”
“Give me credit,” I snapped.
He smiled, little neat teeth in a round mouth. “Come, now, Matthew, come. You know that I take an interest in these things. The instant I heard that Nair had been killed, I thought ‘trouble’. Then the ravens died, then the Stone was broken, and I thought ‘how tedious, someone is out to destroy the protectors of the city’; and it seemed, in light of all these facts, a sensible, yes indeed, a most sensible precaution to do a little research. Naturally I checked up on you. Who else, I thought, who else can really muster the kind of supernatural clout to do these things? Who else could have killed Nair? Who else might be mad enough to try it?”
Our fingers tightened on the cutlery. “You know us better,” we snarled.
“Yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps that was where the Aldermen made their mistake. I know about the Aldermen, Matthew. We have . . . mutual connections, in times of crisis. This is a time of crisis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that. I know about the file in Nair’s desk. It says, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Now what exactly does this mean?”
I looked down at my shoes, then back up at him. I said: “I thought it was nothing.”
“Well, that’s what we thought about the graffiti, and now look where we are. Spectres in the streets. Let’s assume for a moment that nothing is something and feel proud of ourselves for a grasp of the quantum, shall we? Tell me about your shoes. They’re clearly not yours. While I would never judge your fashion sense . . .”
I snorted.
“. . . trendy red and black trainers several sizes too big for you are hardly what I would expect. Nair said, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Why would that interest him so much? Why would he make you the Midnight Mayor?”
So, I told him.
I said: “The shoes aren’t mine. They belong to a kid. His name is Mo. Actually, his name is Michael Patrick Hall, but you can’t be cool and be called Michael unless you’ve been to prison. So everyone calls him Mo. I’ve never met him. But that’s really the point.”
It happened without bothering to explain itself.
I was in Hoxton, the street market. I can’t remember why. It can be hard, coming back. There are things, rituals, routines, that I had taken for granted. Not any more.
Anyway. Hoxton. The word is “trendy”, but I don’t know if it can be rightly applied. It’s a mishmash. Great rows of terraced houses with new paint, next to boarded-up windows. Council estates rotting from the inside out, mould and crumbling dust dripping with water from broken pipes down the walls. New apartment blocks, all bright paint, fresh brick and steel; art galleries tucked in behind the local boozer, yoga centres nestling in between the old rip-off robbed-radio garages. Tandoori and chippy, Chinese takeaway and halal kebabs, kosher bakeries and low squatting greengrocers selling strange growths that might be vegetables. Clubs hidden away underground, the door just a door by day, a purple-lit cavern at night, guarded by big men in black. Social clubs where no one cares about the smoking laws, snooker tables underneath low neon lights; leisure centres, where every shoe squeaks on old varnished floors. Hoxton is a bit of everything, all at once, a low old grandpa squinting at the scuttling kids. There’s magic in Hoxton, if you know where to look for it; enough to start a fire, although you’ll never quite know what will catch.
There was a chippy in the street market. I went there one night, for no good reason. Because we smelt vinegar on the air and cannot resist fish and chips. It was late, maybe elevenish, the shops shut up, the usual left- over debris of the market billowing in the street. Broken splattered fruits, empty cardboard boxes, torn-up plastic bags. The guy serving up the chips was called Kishan, an Indian name, though he was as white and freckled as dirty snow. He had dreadlocks and dyed black hair, and an earring that wasn’t just a piercing — it was a great round gaping hole, the size of a ten-pence piece, pushed out of his lobe by a plastic hoop. We were fascinated and appalled by it. I did my best not to stare.
I had plaice and chips and sat at a table in the window. Everything about the place was plastic, and just two squeaks short of sterile.
I had been there about half an hour when Kishan said, “Closing up, now.”
I shrugged, and ate up faster.
“Hey, mate, you getting back OK?” he asked.
This is not something I usually get asked. Men don’t ask other men if they’re getting home OK, they just assume that beneath the frail, weak exterior lurks a muscle-building kung fu master fearless of ever being mugged. I said, “I’m fine, thanks.”
He was uneasy, we realised. His eyes kept dancing from us to the window and back again. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Sure.”
I followed his gaze out of the window, but saw nothing but the slow rumpling billow of the litter in the streets. We finished the last chips, wiped our hands on the edge of the greasy paper, stood up.
“Hey, are you sure everything’s OK?” I asked.
He looked at me sideways and said, “Yeah. Fine. Yeah. Just fine.”
These things don’t take much translating.
“Well, OK,” I said. “’Night.”
And we walked out of the chippy.
There’s a phrase — curiosity killed the cat.
We are very curious. The world, this
We are curious and, like I said, I didn’t have much better to do.
We walked about fifty yards, then looked back. The street was bare. I turned up the collar of my coat feeling for those little enchantments sewn into the lining. Then I walked back. There was a doorway between a chemist and a bakery where I snuggled myself out of the wind. Waiting is an innately boring process. In the old days, men who watched and waited would smoke a cigarette, for something to do. We’d read detective books, devoured the films. Philip Marlowe, loitering in some handy bookshop opposite the staked-out joint, would find a girl with blonde hair, and glasses that transformed her when they came off, and they’d drink bourbon and talk about nothing in particular and everything, without it needing to be said.
That was there; this was Hoxton.
When it started, it was a smell. We thought there was an open drain somewhere, the wind carrying the sharp stench of it. Not turn-your-stomach sewage; it was too precise a bite. It went in via the tear ducts, then wriggled down the nose, and by the time it had drifted into pockets in your lungs and writhed down your gullet there was little sense left for the stomach to be repulsed by.
Then came the sound.
It was like plasters being peeled off hairy skin, all crackles and splats and slow ripping of a thousand tiny needles. It was like thick oil being poured out of a can from a great height, a long way off. I saw the lights go out in the chippy on the other side of the street, the shutters go down. Kishan came outside, and there was dread in his eyes, looking down the street, straight over me like I wasn’t there, and now fear on his face, in every part of him. He had seen this before, I realised, smelt this before. In the chippy, he had been trying to warn me, get me away, and I hadn’t gone. Now he stood in the street, frozen with a familiar fear that was no less for being a regular occurrence. I followed his stare, and realised
The thing was yellow-white, with a surface ooze of thick olive-brown that sloshed out from its surface skin
