The Midnight Mayor

“Will it offer possible solutions to the deaths that seem to be occurring in ever-increasing quantity?”

“Quite possibly. And I’m just half an hour of medical attention away from divulging it.”

They had a small medical room in the offices of Harlun and Phelps.

Of course they did.

They also had a gym, two canteens, an ATM and a psychotherapist. Everything to make the running of orderly business more orderly.

They gave us painkillers.

We were beginning to understand why, in pre-anaesthetic days, the Bible had stipulated that suicide was a sin. Anything other than the prospect of eternal damnation, and the human race would probably have done away with itself at the first sign of the dentist.

Oda stood by the door, arms folded, eyebrows low over her brown eyes. Earle sat with his legs folded on the small chair of the medical room, looking displeased to be holding a meeting in a place without a PowerPoint projector. I sat on the paper-covered bed and ate. We hadn’t realised how hungry we were, until someone had offered us food. Now we scraped gravy off the plate with our fingers, and licked our fingertips, and wished I was not too inhibited to just run our tongue round the edge of the dish.

I said, “‘Give me back my hat’.”

Earle said, “This had better be good, Swift.”

“Didn’t it strike you that it was a strange thing to appear with the arrival of the death of cities? The ravens are killed and there it is; the Wall is defaced and the writing says ‘give me back my hat’. The London Stone is smashed and there it is, always, ‘give me back my hat’. I mean, I know that mystics tend to be obscure; it’s the only way they can stay in business in this litigious age. But surely this phrase, occurring endlessly across the city streets, is about as unlikely a harbinger of the end as Abba at Armageddon? It has to have a meaning, it has to have . . . something more than just random words to it, otherwise why would it appear? That’s the first thing.

“Second! The death of cities. Why is he in London, here, now? Look at the patterns of his appearances . . . Hiroshima when the bomb fell, Rome when the Vandals came, Babylon when the walls fell, London when the fire burnt, Pompeii when the volcano blew, New Orleans when the levees broke. Are we to assume that he created all these events? If so, then why hasn’t he just obliterated London already? The death of cities is not the creator of these disasters — he’s summoned by them. Sure, his presence might exacerbate them, might make them worse; he might fan the flames or shine a light in the dark to guide the bombers to their targets. But always he’s there because something is going to happen. He’s feeding off the death of cities, he is not the cause.

“So what has brought him to London? Why now? What could be so catastrophic that he has come to our city and interests himself in the activities of a kid who likes to hang around in Willesden, and goes out of his way to kill the Midnight Mayor, to poison the ravens in the Tower? What summons him to our city, when there is no war and the Thames Barrier still rises and falls? I think we can safely assume that his presence bodes a disaster of a mystical nature — if we’re talking a bomb in Westminster then I suspect Mr Pinner would be far too busy killing MI5 officers to bother with us. This is about magic, straight and thorough.

“In other words: something magical has summoned him to London.

“Are we happy with this so far?”

I looked at the faces in the room.

They looked unhappy, but no one wanted to say anything, so I ploughed right on.

“Mo said before he died, before Mr Pinner went out of his way to make sure that Mo died, having hurt him, punished him, inflicted on him . . . terrible things . . . Mo said, ‘the traffic warden’s hat’. He took a traffic warden’s hat, and for this he has been punished. The death of cities — and I think we can be fairly sure that’s what he is — doesn’t bother with individuals. He’s about bricks and stones and streets, about ideas bigger than you or me. So why bother with Mo? He was punishing him, very deliberately, very cruelly. He got Boom Boom to lift him, and him alone from the club floor, specified the kid must be alive. Alive, in order to hurt him, throw him out with the garbage, turn his blood to ink. Mo took a hat, a traffic warden’s hat, and on the walls the writing now says, ‘give me back my hat’.

“And Mr Pinner said — I made his life easier. By destroying Bakker. That . . . that by bringing Bakker down, I gave him a way into the city. Now, the Tower was powerful, but I don’t think even Mr Bakker was up to keeping out Mr Pinner if he wanted to come. But what Mr Bakker did do, did so brilliantly and without even a thought that he was doing it, was kill sorcerers.

“When Nair died, you assumed I killed him, because I am the last trained sorcerer left in the city. You dislike sorcerers, Mr Earle. You regard us as dangerous, unstable, running the constant risk of madness. You think that most of all about us. You are wrong; but just this once, that’s not the question. When I killed Mr Bakker, I stopped the systematic murdering of sorcerers, but not before we had nearly all been wiped out. There is no one left to train new apprentices. And if anyone would go mad, an untrained sorcerer is a loony job waiting to happen.

“So here’s how I think it goes.

“I think that ‘give me back my hat’ is a warning. Not from Mr Pinner, but from the city. The London Stone, the Midnight Mayor, the ravens; these are all part of the city’s defences, and while even one of them is alive, the magical defences still stand. I think it’s a warning, trying to tell us what’s happened.

“I think when Mo stole the traffic warden’s hat, he stole something from someone who has enough anger, enough vengeance, enough fury and enough power in them to summon the death of cities. Mr Pinner was summoned here by the traffic warden. I stole her hat, Mo said. That’s why Mo was left to die in the scrapyard; it was a punishment, vengeance on a kid who was scornful and contemptful enough of strangers to steal from them, just for a laugh. So, for revenge, a stranger poisoned him and left him to die as agonising a death as they could manage. ‘Give me back my hat’; that’s what it says on the walls. Think about the geography — Mo hangs around in Willesden, Mo is kept in Kilburn, Nair dies in Kilburn, the hat is stolen in Dollis Hill, in all these places just a few miles apart. Think about the writing on the wall, think about the timing of when Mr Pinner came, about what happened to the kid, about why Nair died, about the nature of all that has happened so far. There is no profession in the city more hated than traffic warden — not even the police get as much abuse or assault or common cruelty. Think about what that would do to an untrained sorcerer, who knows that the city is screaming to them, who can taste the life and the magic on the air, and finds in it nothing but hostility. Think about why you suspected me. A sorcerer could do it, a sorcerer is perhaps the only person in the city who could do it, who could summon something as powerful and vengeful as the death of cities. The traffic warden is the mystical disaster that is going to happen. She is going to destroy us, the death of cities is her vengeance on the contempt of a stranger.

“Of course, all of this is 99 per cent hypothesis.

“But unless you’ve got anything better to go on, I think we should find this traffic warden whose hat was stolen.

“Stop her, stop the death of cities.

“I think we should kill her, before it’s too late.”

Part 4: GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

In which a damnation is discussed, a hat is found, and the nature of strangers gets a thorough going- over on London Bridge.

Legwork.

Someone else’s leg, someone else’s work.

There’s pros to being management.

I sprawled across an ornate curly sofa at the back of an office just below Mr Earle’s and waited.

Occasionally people came in. The office doctor who came to check on my stitches, take my blood pressure; the office caterer who came in with cups of coffee and biscuits of such quality and expense that our taste buds, accustomed to custard creams and jammy dodgers, found them slightly unease-making. Once or twice Oda. She