masochistic, Disneyland. It was built to impress. The roof was higher than the average winter cloud on the city, the platform longer than the distance between most bus stops. Everywhere was the same pale, cold blue light, shining down on glass and steel, built one into the other like they were elements of the same nature, modern simplicity melted into Gothic grandeur. The effect should have been an uncomfortable clash of old and new, but both periods were united by the drive to achieve splendour and space, to make it clear to anyone who hadn’t guessed as they stepped off the train, that this was London, capital city, and you’d better hold on to your wallets.
The sound was the constant rumbling of the Eurostar engines, which sat right next to the main foyer, separated only by a thin glass sheet, some unsympathetic coppers and international law. Tourists about to travel could buy champagne at £70 a throw from the leather-sofa champagne bar that sat by the nearest long platform. Shoppers with space left in their bags could nip downstairs to where passport control kept its booths and, from the shops huddled around the X-ray machines and metal detectors, purchase anything from a trashy novel to an exploding bubble bath. Cafés offered travellers from Paris croissants and thick dark coffee, to cushion them against the baked-beans-based culture shock they were about to receive; off-licences offered cut-price booze to bring your family, whose present you’d failed to buy on holiday; luggage shops offered businessmen the best leatherware, and everything shone with commerce.
And everything shone, because someone was there to clean it. Oda and I stood above the escalator leading down to the main shopping hall, and watched. The station was buzzing with people, arriving, or heading for the last train to the Continent; bags and coppers and immigration control, shoppers and sellers elbowed each other for room.
Oda said, “Do we know what this woman looks like?”
“We’ll know.”
“Because of your Jedi nature?” she snapped.
“Because you can’t just summon the death of cities and not have something peculiar going on. Doesn’t your bigger picture involve using me for my essential and potent grasp of these things?”
“You haven’t been very potent so far,” she grumbled.
“We saved your life.”
Silence.
“I didn’t expect it to . . .” I stopped. “Sorry,” I said finally.
“Sorry? You’re saying this as though there’s some meaning. As in, repentant, remorseful, regretful?”
“Don’t know. Just seemed like the thing you wanted to hear.”
“I should hit you.”
“There’s a queue. You still need me.”
“Even less than you could possibly comprehend. We do have your theories.”
I shrugged. “Just theories. And if I’m wrong, you still need the Midnight Mayor. Why do you think Nair lumbered me with this?” I asked, genuinely interested.
She shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“Plenty. He seemed like a sharp guy. Smart enough to find Raleigh Court; smart enough to have a good address book in his mobile phone. Earle thinks he did it in order to tame us. To
“There is a logic to it.”
“It could have just been a good combination. A complete and utter accident. A stranger dials a random number on the phone, and you can guarantee that sooner or later, they’ll call us. Your fingers must twitch at the thought. You hate the idea of sorcerers per se; you despise the blue electric angels, you fear the Midnight Mayor. Wrap them up in one bundle . . . I’m impressed you aren’t even hitting.”
“Utility.”
“That’s what they said about the nuclear bomb. It’ll come in handy one day — sure, let’s keep it around.”
“Matthew,” she said sharply, and then seemed to catch her own breath, draw it in, as if she could suck the word back down. “Sorcerer,” she added, firmer, “unless you have something useful to say, shut up and work.”
I shut up.
We worked.
It didn’t take long. People go out of their way not to see the cleaners. There’s a shame involved — we let the crap fall from our nerveless fingers, and someone else picks up after.
Look; and ye shall find.
When she shuffled into view, dragging the trolley with its twin bins and collection of brushes and mops hooked onto the side, we knew before I had time even to reason it through. We snapped at Oda, “Wait here a moment,” and tripped briskly downstairs to the lower concourse, elbowed through a gaggle of schoolkids just off the train, ducked the swinging banjo of a musician dressed as Mickey Mouse headed for Disneyland and walked straight up to where she was carefully laying down a yellow sign proclaiming “Caution! Slippery Floor!” She had her back to me.
Sorcerers are good at killing people. It’s not in the job description, it just . . . comes naturally.
We stopped in front of the sign. She looked up. We opened our mouth, and she said, “Can I help you?”
A hundred ways to kill.
Stop it right here, right now. That’s the plan.
Burn out her heart, set her brain on fire, boil her blood, break her bones. A hundred ways to die, a thousand things we could do. Just human.
“Hey — can I help?”
There was a badge pinned to her blue overall. It said “P. Ngwenya — Hygiene Care Assistant”.
I looked into a pair of perfect brown ovals set in a face that was itself almost a perfect oval, except for the wide protrusion of her slightly squashed nose. Her black hair was done in plaits wound so tightly to the curve of her skull that the fuzzy hair in between each row looked like thin grey paint rising to a carved ridge.
Looking at her, there was something I recognised.
I said, “Uh . . .”
The empty sounds you make to buy time.
She waited patiently, not smiling, not moving, just waiting to see what I’d do next, almost as if she knew what had to come.
“Um . . .” I stumbled.
I was aware of Oda coming down the stair behind me. I heard a voice say, “Do you ever clean round the University of London?” The voice was mine.
“Yes,” she said, as if I was a child asking whether falling was always down. “Do I know you?”
“Um, no. I just . . .”
What would the Midnight Mayor do?
Save the city.
Save the stones, the streets, the roads, the stories, the treasures.
Dead is dead is dead.
(Ta-da! Still not dead.)
“Do you have the time?” I asked.
She looked at me sideways for a moment, trying to hide the scepticism in her face, then carefully raised a latex-gloved hand and pointed upwards. A clock the size of a park playground was projected onto the main wall overlooking the terminal. It said 9.23 p.m. I smiled at her, and said, “Thank you.”
And then, because Oda was at the bottom of the escalator, I turned my back to her and walked away.
“Well?” demanded Oda.
“Well?”
“Is it her?”
“What?”
“Is she the sorceress? Did you see? Is it Penny Ngwenya?”
“She’s Penny Ngwenya,” I sighed.
“Then we have to find a way to get her away from these people — the cleaners must have a supply
