The Midnight Mayor

“I could do you,” said the man with the fag. “I could do you and take your shoes when you’re stiff.”

He didn’t say it aggressively. He wasn’t laughing either.

We half-turned. “No, you couldn’t,” we sighed.

“You ain’t tough.”

“Sure.”

“I got friends who’ve done it, you know? They know places; you send the bodies down and they don’t ever come up, not as anything thicker than soup. A fiver? A quid?”

“Bigger picture,” I said, stooping to pick up my satchel, piling its contents inside, sticking the wallet back in my pocket without bothering to look if he’d taken anything, knowing there wasn’t anything to take.

“I’ll fucking do you!” he called after me, not moving from his perch on the edge of the gutter.

We walked away.

Sunrise in winter, in the centre of town. A quiet greyness rising between the streets; lamps on the edge of extinction, hovering with just that tiny sense of unease, not entirely sure if this is dawn, or dusk, or if the sun really will make it. The light brought a slow hum with it, subtle and growing, one bus on an empty street becoming one bus and a cab, two buses, a cab and a bike, three buses, a cab, two bikes and a delivery van, the streets thickening like porridge as the hot milk of the city was poured back into its veins.

It excited us, that slow wakening, like the dawn chorus thrills the druids skulking in the countryside. This was a choir playing the carburettor and the travelcard beep, tinkling on the brakes of the postman’s van and playing a chorus of ATM dispensers and Underground rattles. It made us feel awake, alive, our heartbeat in time to the turning over of the double-decker’s engine, our breath coming in the slow pumps of the blasts of wind up from the Tube tunnels, our feet moving in that sharper banker’s step that went click, click, click at the busy brisk leather walk of the City worker. It would be so easy, so simple, to turn our fingers towards the oncoming one-way streets and catch the life building in them, tangle it like water against the dam of our hands, and fly on nothing more than the pressure differential created before the sunrise, and after.

I kept walking.

London Bridge, Monument, Bank, King William Street, Cheapside, Guildhall, Aldermanbury Square.

Harlun and Phelps.

Still open, a rising buzz within its halls.

The security guard just waved me through.

Lift to the top floor, city falling away below you, only gods and great men could feel this big over something so endlessly small. Down the corridor, an office designed to make you work for the privilege of talking in it; and knock me down if Earle wasn’t there, still there, sat behind a desk on which a wicker tray of yoghurt, jam, croissants, toast, Danish whirls and boiling coffee had been laid, sipping from a stainless steel cup, eyes turned towards a newspaper open on his lap.

He glanced up as I entered, and for a moment, looked almost surprised.

“Mr Swift!”

“Ta-da!” I exclaimed weakly.

“You’re still . . .”

“Still not dead. That’s me. It’s my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time.”

“You . . .”

“Did the walk, talked the talk. Went down memory lane, Tarantinostyle. Where’s the boy?”

“The . . .”

“Boy. The boy. I’ve been out all night and I’m a firm believer in what they say about Big Brother never sleeping. Have you found the boy?”

“As a matter of fact . . .”

“Yes?”

“We just might have.”

I beamed. “Mr Earle,” I said, “I got a good feeling about all this.”

CCTV.

Someone, probably a journalist, claims that there’s one CCTV camera for every twelve people in the UK.

Or in other words, Big Brother could so very, very easily be watching you, if he had a reason. That’s the whole point, really. He, or it, or them, or best of all, They, can track you by ATM, by Oyster card, by mobile phone, by CCTV, by loyalty card, by licence plate, by items bought and items sold, by programmes watched and calls made, and while the Good People need not fear — for what reason should their lives be seen and judged by strangers? — the problem arises when no one knows what that reason is. No one even knows who’s going to make that choice.

There are advantages to being legally dead.

So here’s how it goes:

About a day after Nair died and a telephone rang, a blue van, registration LS06 BDL, pulled up outside Raleigh Court. Three hired men with unsympathetic faces and unstable morphic structures, friends of a friend who knew a guy called Boom Boom, got out of the back, walked up to number 53 and pulled a kid out from inside the flat. He wasn’t looking great in the few grainy seconds of footage that the Aldermen had recovered. He wasn’t looking alive. But then if he wasn’t alive, what was the point?

They stuck him in the back of the van.

The van drove south.

The congestion charge cameras caught it entering the zone around 4 a.m. They didn’t care a damn, because at 4 a.m. no one pays £8 to drive, but they were still watching, and even if they weren’t, the Aldermen had means. I didn’t want to know, found that I didn’t really care.

Roughly half an hour after entering the zone, the van left it, heading south from Waterloo, and was glimpsed briefly at Elephant and Castle, then caught for a moment heading round Clapham Common. No wonder it had taken a day and a half to find — too many cameras, too much watching, too many things to watch, too much to see; no one mind could take it in. A heap built on a million dead heaps built by a hundred million dead ants on the crunched-down skeletons of their predecessors; who’d track one little van?

“This is all very interesting,” I said, “but where did it end up?”

“You won’t like it,” said Earle.

“Hit me.”

“Morden.”

“Morden.”

“Yes. Morden.”

End of the line. We did not like Morden.

“Where in Morden?”

“You won’t like it.”

“Worked that out already. Where?”

He told me.

And no, I didn’t like it.

Morden.

Sometimes there are places so far, so obscure, so unlikely, so implausible and so utterly . . .

. . . well . . .

. . . Morden . . .

. . . that there’s no point driving there.

A friend once put it like this: One guy gets on a train to Isleworth, another guy gets on a train to Cardiff, and you can bet the guy going to Wales gets there sooner.

The same rule applies to Morden. A mainline train to Ipswich will get there faster than a driver departing at the same time from Liverpool Street will make it to deepest, darkest Morden.

To even the odds a little, I took the Northern Line from Bank, right down through the strange wildernesses of Monument, Borough, Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Tooting Bec, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and,