The Midnight Mayor

“In my organiser.”

“Seen it, stole it, got it. What name?”

“Smith — Ms Smith.”

“How inspired. You’re really not very good at this, are you? Just a fat guy with a cardiac problem. If you weren’t such a pustulent testicle with it, I’d almost feel sorry for electrocuting you. But whaddaya know!” I was rummaging through his organiser, flicking through and there it was, under “S” for Smith, written in the same neat hand, just a name and a telephone number. “You know if this doesn’t work, or if we die in the attempt, you’ll die, right?”

“I’m telling you everything . . .”

“Not our meaning,” we sighed. “But keep up the moral revival!”

And once again, we walked away.

The number was for a mobile. That was good; that could help us.

We went to North Acton station, sat down on the nearest platform bench, thumbed on our mobile phone, and started to compose a text. It’s easier to lie briefly than to invent lies at great length.

We wrote:

IT’S BOOM BOOM, SERIOUS PROBLEM NEED HELP DANGER MEET?

Predictive texting might lend itself to good spelling, but it can’t fill in the punctuation. I entered the mobile number for “Ms Smith” and sent the text.

The reply came back in less than five minutes.

WHAT PROBLEM, WHAT DANGER, HE WILL BE ANGRY.

I replied:

MIDNIGHT MAYOR ALDERMEN HELP ME MEET?

This time, the response took nearly ten minutes. I watched the trains go by, counting down towards midnight and the last train.

Then it came:

HACKNEY MARSHES; NAVY CADETS BUILDING, TWO HOURS.

This, we could do.

I caught the first train heading east.

* * *

We could taste the beginning of the end.

I just felt tired.

Disrupted sleep patterns?

Too much of too much.

Ta-da!

Still not dead.

Still alive.

Watch us burn.

Central Line, heading east. North Acton, East Acton, White City, the beginning of the descent into tunnels, Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park. The stretch that ran beneath Oxford Street and I could still feel it overhead, its vibrancy, brightness, tacky, gaudy glee making me feel more tired by comparison, a great fire raging just overhead and me down in the cold, empty carriages of the tunnels. Holborn, Chancery Lane, our hand ached, how it ached as we passed beneath the Square Mile, the Golden Mile, the City, the Corporation, call it what you wanted, the oldest part of the city, where the shadows were most thick, where the dragons with the mad eyes guarded long-forgotten gates. Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us, city protect us, a higher power, a miracle beyond comprehension.

St Paul’s, Bank — a vortex in space and time that made the weird corridors of the Barbican seem straight as a Roman road — Liverpool Street, Bethnal Green. We climbed off the train, the last train — well, maybe not quite the very last — up onto a crossroad junction, mainline track to one side, museum and park grounds to the other, traffic still waiting by the lights, passengers still milling around for the buses. A strange place, Bethnal Green. It sat at a junction of more than just geographical borders. Druids call it ley lines, paths of power, but the Glastonbury “away days with the faeries” had undermined some of the pride of those who believed in such things. Didn’t mean such things weren’t possible. At Bethnal Green, things met and melded into each other. Hackney borough met Tower Hamlets, and on each side of border streets hung banners proclaiming that this borough was the best in London, don’t believe the lies of your neighbours! The rich towers of the city were but a few minutes away to the west, the low slabs of Mile End but a few minutes to the east; and in the middle, old Bethnal Green, just far enough from squalor to be respectable, far enough from wealth to be poor, winding enough to be old, open enough to be new, where all the buses met and divided, to take their passengers to a place more certain than the crossroads where all these things converged.

Sure, there are ley lines. Transport for London could probably draw a map.

It was an easy hop from Bethnal Green towards Hackney Marshes, made only less so by the cordon of signs warning “Olympic Site Development — Road Closed”. I got off the bus at the edge of the marshes, and the shadows were thick, crawling up from the pavements, gnawing at our feet, aching in our fingers. The old was dying, they whispered, glaring at the Olympic signs, all going to be knocked down, washed away. East End, end of the east, place where things ended, rejects and slums, squalid history of neglect, all being washed away behind gleaming steel and glass. Wipe away the history; wipe away the shame; forget that the shadows were once alive.

Midnight Mayor, protector of the city.

Remember those memories?

“Busy now,” I snapped at the darkness. “Next time.”

Hackney Marshes — get them while you can. A few more years, and they might have been mown away to make place for a running track, a tennis field, a sports ground, a swimming pool, something, where the world can come and celebrate this strangeness that mortals seem to find so fascinating — Olympic games. We do not understand why mortals, trapped in a fleshy shell, must make their own flesh suffer.

The place had once been a swamp or marsh, and still looked it. The Lee Valley might have been tamed, the river diverted to a more useful course than through valuable real estate on its way down to the Thames, but the drooping, green-brown grass and thick, razor-stemmed reeds still told you, if the spongy ground didn’t, that this was a place with a history humanity had not fully managed to tame. It was not by any means a public park — since that implied benches, bins, children’s play areas, flower gardens, ordered hedges and tactfully planted trees. Hackney Marshes had none of these things, and was all the purer for it. It was a place for the dog walkers to ramble, for the kids to slouch, for the fishermen to wait hours on end to catch a trailing shopping bag; an open patch of sullen, sagging land just like it might once have been a thousand years ago, full of unreliable dips and delves, strange smells and unlikely strangers. We liked it, although as a meeting place, it had one serious disadvantage. It was a long way from the roads, the power lines, the gas mains, the water pipes; these things that were the most natural and useful tools of an urban sorcerer’s trade. There was magic here, time and shadow and proud defiance of the “here we are, here we remain” category — but it was fainter, unfamiliar, harder to tangle our fingers in and command to our use. It was, in short, exactly the kind of place where you might stand a better than usual chance of killing a sorcerer.

We should have taken the gun from Mr Umbars’s house.

As it was, I took a few precautions. I rummaged in my satchel for my penknife and, feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane, stuck it in my right sock and pulled down my trouser over the bulge. I put a torch in my coat pocket, not wanting to risk a possibly futile effort in summoning a light so far from a reliable source of neon. I pulled my gloves off and stuck them in the bottom of my bag. We didn’t know anything about fighting with fists, but if worst came to worst, ignorance was not going to stop us.

And then, because she had guns, and I didn’t, I texted Oda.

HACKNEY MARSHES, NAVY CADETS. DANGER. SHARPEN YOUR KNIVES. SWIFT.

She didn’t text back, so I went in search of Ms Smith.

The Navy Corps building was a corrugated-iron shed whose great-great-grandfather might once have held the