The Midnight Mayor

He nodded numbly.

“Good. Which floor was Anissina’s office on?”

We took the lift to almost the top floor. I sagged against the glass walls as we rose, breathed the lights stretching beneath me. Our palm left a bloody print on the pristine glass. We could feel blood running down the outside of our leg, too much blood, couldn’t sustain this for long.

The doors opened on a dimmed floor of white strip lights and silent computers. I staggered, fell onto my hands and knees as we clambered out of the lift. Oda dragged me up. “Come on!” she snarled. “Think of Ngwenya, think of her brains on the wall, her blood on the wall, little Penny Ngwenya dead, because if you die now and don’t find this hat, don’t undo her curse, then I swear to God I’ll do it. You thinking of this, Matthew? You watching Ngwenya die, you hearing her skull burst, her blood splatter? Are you there yet?”

I nodded dumbly, she dragged me along the corridor. Pale beige doors on either side, white walls you could stick a pencil in, pictures of valued clients and random token works of could-be art, strange bits of sculpture next to the coffee machines and beside the water coolers, potted plants so bright and shiny they should have been made of rubber and saved everyone the effort. Names on the doors; I recognised Kemsley’s as we went by, locked doors, venetian blinds lowered over the window panes.

(You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.

Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.)

We passed a kitchen, Oda paused for a minute, propped me against the door frame, grabbed a green first-aid kit from above the sink, then dragged me on. “Come on!” she screamed, almost lifting me off my feet as we lurched down the corridor.

And there it was.

Ms Anissina, Senior Executive, engraved in boring white plastic on a boring beige door. The door was locked. Oda kicked it and got nowhere, Oda shot it and got in. The office inside was quiet, dull, uninspired. A harmless company picture, showing a couple of trees by a waterfall, hung on one wall; a grey filing cabinet had been wedged into a corner; a shelf above drooped under the weight of uninspiring cardboard folders. The desk had a laptop, not a computer, a thin white thing too trendy to be plugged into anything else, next to an immaculate white pad of paper and a line of perfectly ordered biros. Oda dumped me in the nearest chair, started sweeping folders off the shelves.

I opened a drawer, saw a stapler, a couple of highlighters, a notepad, a box of paperclips. I opened the one beneath it, found papers, full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money, except possibly in the City. I opened the one beneath that. There was nothing in it except a calendar. The calendar read, “Take That 2001!” It was worn, battered, fondled, and clearly much loved. I flicked through it. Various male faces plonked on various male bodies, vacuum-sucked into distressingly tight trousers. They pouted, smiled, frothed and flirted at me out of the semi-cardboard pages. I put it carefully on the desk by Anissina’s computer and stared at it long and hard.

We wondered what it was like, being digested from the inside out.

I stuttered, “Oda?”

I heard a bang from behind me, flinched away instinctively from the noise, raising my hands to cover my face. When death did not ensue, I looked carefully back. Oda had dragged open the drawers of the filing cabinet, and was going through them, throwing paper and files onto the floor in great armfuls.

“Oda?” we stumbled again.

“There’s stuff in the first-aid kit,” she snapped back.

We picked up the kit in our bloody hands, tried to undo the zip; our hands were shaking. Anxiety first, then calmer and goodbye to the peripherals, that’s what she’d said; and we’d been grateful to not fully understand her meaning. Bandages and padding, not enough; antiseptic, as if that wasn’t the least of our concerns.

“Oda?”

Silence from behind me. I half-turned in the chair, kicking it round to see.

She stood in front of the wide glass window, eyes turned down towards her hands, hands turned up towards the ceiling. Something small, quaint and black was resting in her upturned palms. It was made out of the hybrid offspring of felt and plastic, its top dully reflecting the white light. A band of small white and yellow squares ran round its base, just above the shallow, upturned rim, and a small silverish shield had been stuck to the front, that a gleeful child might have mistaken for a sheriff’s badge. It was, in short, a very boring, rather small, quite old- fashioned not-quite-bowler hat, a piece of headgear that in the 1950s would have been the embodiment of modern style and which now was just . . . a bit sad. A piece of uniform that time forgot.

Oda murmured, “Um . . .”

I took the hat carefully from her hands and turned it over.

Inside, a rim of elastic had been sewn in to make the hat sit easier on the head. On this rim, in faded yellow letters, someone had written in lopsided capitals:

PENNY

We put the hat down carefully on Anissina’s desk.

We looked at it.

Silence.

“Well?” demanded Oda. “Is it . . .”

“Shush!”

She shushed, then in a lower whisper added, “What’s the matter?” “I’m having a moment of reverence. I would have thought you’d appreciate it.”

“For heaven’s sake, I don’t have time for this. Is it . . .”

“Yes. It’s the traffic warden’s hat. It’s her hat.”

“And can . . .”

“Yes. I can break the curse.”

A pause. Then, “Well? Do it! What are you waiting for? Full moon?” We reached out tentatively, ran our hands over the black dome of the hat, picked it up by one side and turned it over in front of us. “He’s coming,” I muttered. “Mr Pinner is coming.”

“What?”

“He’s just passed across the boundary of the old London Wall. We can feel him. He hurts, right here, in the palm of our hand. He knows we’ve got the hat. The hat is the key to the spell that summoned him. Break that, undo the curse, and he’ll die. He’s coming.”

“Then do it! Do it!”

“I need Ngwenya.”

“If this is . . .”

A voice from the door said, “The traffic warden?”

I looked up slowly, ran my eyes up the immaculate length of Earle’s suit, his black coat, his stern face. There were other Aldermen behind him. None looked happy. Earle carefully pulled off a pair of black leather gloves, passed them over to an Alderman in the corridor, slipped through the door, reached out for the traffic warden’s hat. We snatched it back defensively, cradling it to our chest, and seeing this, he smiled.

“I thought Ngwenya wasn’t a sorceress, Swift? After you ran off at St Pancras, Oda informed us she was . . . just an innocent. And yet you seem to be holding a traffic warden’s hat, and seem to think that the death of cities is coming here, and seem, may I add, to have been shot and to be breaking into the property of one of our missing colleagues. You’ve clearly been busy these last few hours. Did you . . . lie to us about Ngwenya?”

We met his eyes. “Yes,” we said. “Deal with it.”

His fingers tightened on the edge of the desk. “You lied to us about the woman who has damned this city, cursed it, condemned it, whose anger summoned the death of cities, whose power is going to rain mystic vengeance down on our streets, and you . . . you dared to lie?”

We thought about it, then nodded. “Yes. And would do it again. Anissina, by the by, is a loony backstabbing bitch, and yeah, thanks for your concern, I’ve been fucking shot and yes, Mr Pinner is coming. Very very much is he coming: we can hear him on the stones, inside the city. He’s coming for this.” I twiddled the hat in the air. “So, since there’s not much time left for you to get angry in, Mr Earle, why don’t you ask me the incredibly important