The Midnight Mayor

bleeds receipts, old bits of newspaper. A summoning of some sort? But then he shows so much independence: he speaks, he enquires, he demonstrates amusement. Most things summoned from the nether reaches are incapable of much more than slobber and slash.”

“You don’t know how to kill it?”

“No.”

“That seems like quite a major problem.”

“Yes.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

She tilted her chin up to my face. I felt under my eye, found a tiny, almost imperceptible brownish stain of blood running down from my eyelid, where a paper cut no longer than a child’s toenail had been drawn across my skin. “We be blue-blood burning,” we sighed, wiping it away.

“What does that mean?”

“Mean? It is what we are.” I glanced out of the window, saw the distant windows of a lit-up Underground train fading into the night, the flicker of a traffic light going red, amber, green, green, amber, red, too fast and rhythmic to be real. “He didn’t seem to realise that I’m . . .” I rubbed my right hand. “He doesn’t seem to know I’m the Midnight . . .”

“Didn’t do you much good, did it?”

“Kemsley” — drooping flesh with a pair of shaven lips sitting opposite us, couldn’t look — “said something about inauguration. Ghosts and streets and midnight mystic doings.”

“Didn’t do Nair much good, did it?”

“No.” We were silent a while. A thought was pushing at the edge of speech, trying to get out. It was strong, angry, with claws for fingers. We let it out. “But that may have been the reason Nair made us Midnight Mayor.” Oda raised an eyebrow, a perfect half-moon. “The Midnight Mayor is just a human with complications. And we . . .”

“Aren’t,” she concluded. I said nothing. Thinking too much was always trouble. “What happens now?”

“There was a CCTV camera. In the hallway below, a CCTV camera, and only one really viable way out. CCTV everywhere.”

“So?”

“So even if Mr Pinner — the man in the suit, the death of . . . even if whatever he is destroys the camera, there’ll be an archive somewhere, records. Better than sharing the memories of pigeons, they couldn’t muster more than a day of recollections. There’ll be something, somewhere. The Aldermen can trace it, they have . . . they take their work very seriously. We can still find the boy.”

“You think it’s that important?”

“I think that if Kemsley dies, then it’s because Mr Pinner thinks it’s that important. I think that Mr Pinner had Boom Boom abduct the boy from his club; I think that’s interesting. Why keep him alive? He said alive. So yes. Find the boy, find some answers. ‘Give me back my hat’. He might know . . . he has to know something.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Well, I would hope that if I get flayed alive and the city burns, you’ll have the good manners to die an excruciating death with the rest of us.”

“Sorcerer, have you ever wondered why you have never been appointed to a managerial position before?”

“My honest honest face?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She paused, sharp eyes fixed steadily on Kemsley. “You really think finding the boy will make this better? Stop what happened to Nair happening to you?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re doing it for this woman — Loren. I don’t think there’s enough proof for any of it. Mo, Mr Pinner, the club, the shoes, the ravens, the Mayor. A lot of circumstance, but nothing else. I think you want the boy to be involved. Then you can help her while helping yourself.”

I thought about this a while.

Lights turned and drifted outside, a thousand miles away, as tall as a skyscraper pressed up to the eye of the window.

“OK,” I said. “All right. Yes. She’s lonely. She’s scared. And we are . . . we have never had a friend. Just strangers out to get something done. Acquaintances with an agenda. Never this thing, ‘friend’. I want something ordinary. It was nice. It was unremarkable. Just a friend. That’s what they say, isn’t it? We’re ‘just’ friends.”

“Matthew?”

“Yes?”

Silence. Just the rumbling of the taxi’s engine.

A moment that might have been something different.

“We’re slowing down.”

Just a moment.

I looked out of the window. I could see the reflective black slab of Euston station, the slow flickering lights of Euston Road, crawling into existence in the darkness. “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

My satchel was on the floor. I picked it up, rummaged through for my wallet. I had £40 left. It wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be a start.

The streets were becoming more solid, pavements growing out of the gloom, shopfronts edging closer and closer towards us, growing bricks and settling their way into solid reality. The driver’s voice came in over the intercom.

“Anywhere round here in particular?”

“If you could just drop us off outside the main entrance . . .”

“No problem.”

We turned, actually turned, something I couldn’t remember the cab doing in our whole journey, down a side street off from Euston, round the back of a grey office block and a Gothic fire station, towards a red, turreted building with broken windows and bright blue hoarding all around its walls, stuck with signs saying, “DANGER KEEP OUT” and posters for dubious gigs and, of course, scrawled in white paint over the blue hoarding by the door:

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Abandoned by almost everyone and left to rot. Almost being the important part.

The taxi slid to a stop outside the padlocked dark entrance, covered over with plywood. There wasn’t any traffic on the street, not at this hour, not even night buses turning onto Euston Road towards King’s Cross. Even the lights in the hotels ahead were out, even the receptions just distant dim puddles. I had to remember to breathe, watching the dark shadow of the driver’s hands reach up to check the tariff, to stop the clock, watching a hand push back the plexiglas between him and us, waiting for the damage.

“It’s thirty quid,” he said, just a voice drifting in from the driver’s compartment.

“What?”

“Thirty quid,” he repeated.

“OK. Great. Thanks.”

I fumbled in my wallet for the money.

“And her gun.”

I glanced at Oda, whose lips pursed. I mouthed, please, and she reluctantly pulled a gun from a pocket, all black metal and power, and pushed it through the gap between passenger and driver compartments. As her fingers slid in, a hand moved in the front, locked down on her wrist and dragged her forward so sharp and hard I heard the seat belt lock around her chest and saw her face wrinkle in pain.

“Her hand,” said the driver. “You seen her hand?”