The sun was down over Surbiton.
A man got off the train from Waterloo, as he did nearly every day of every week at this hour, and went to the bank. In the bank he paid in a couple of cheques, picked up a leaflet entitled “Pensions: What You Need to Know,” walked into the launderette next door, paid £5 for his freshly starched and pressed shirts, and, his goods safely stowed on his lap, rode a small single-decker red bus, into the heart of nowhere in particular.
At the end of a street of semi-detached half-timbered houses identical to all the other streets of semi-detached half-timbered houses, save for the addition of a Chinese takeaway on the corner, he got off the bus. He walked for some ten minutes past gardens of neatly mown grass, parkways lined with diligently cleaned Vauxhalls and Volkswagens, turned left past the local Conservative Party office, and cut down a small alley between a bank of houses and a line of children-friendly gardens, complete with the occasional trampoline.
Halfway down this cut-through, which was one he used every day, he hesitated.
Did he hear anything behind him?
Did his heart miss a beat at the thought that there might be something watching?
Probably not.
Probably just his imagination.
At the end of the alley he came out onto a wider street of detached houses, their front gardens a mixture of smooth lawn and raked gravel, and walked along until he came to a red-bricked, sloping-roofed number much like all the others. A light came on automatically at his approach. He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out a set of three keys, and unlocked the front door. The house was warmer, drier, than the outside world, the central heating rumbling somewhere in the distance. He closed the door, wiped his feet and in a sort of glass antechamber between the outside world and the inner, took off his coat, and his shoes, and swapped them for a pair of slippers.
He turned on a few lights as he went inside.
They illuminated some fairly banal pictures—a painting of a medieval peasant scene in France at harvest time, a black and white picture of a happy family, presumably the man’s, grinning cheesily at the unknown photographer. A series of pictures of old rotor aeroplanes, each one annotated at the bottom with details of make and model. There were a few bills on the floor which he put in a neat pile on the table, and a letter from his local MP inviting him to Do Right by Your Community.
He went through into the pink-floored terracotta kitchen and—as he always did—put on the kettle, made himself a small plate of cold ham, bread and cheese, and when the kettle had boiled, poured himself a cup of herbal, foul-smelling tea.
He didn’t bother to turn on the lights to the study as he went into it. The books were on their places on the shelves, ranging from treatises on theology to detective novels to guides to the political conflicts of the last fifty years, the newspapers folded up and ready to be recycled, the desk neat and tidy. The curtains were drawn across the window, and as he sat down, he might, perhaps, have noted that the seat of the leather chair he sat in felt warm.
As luck would have it, he didn’t.
He turned on the lamp on the desk, an old-fashioned thing cast in the shape of a giant vase and wearing a hat that was mostly tassel. The light fell across neat folders stacked up one above the other, a medical manual bookmarked at the entry on diabetes, and a Bible.
It also, not entirely by chance, fell on my feet, where I’d had them resting up on the other side of the desk.
I’m not as neat around the house as I should be.
The man considered my feet for a while, showing no sign of surprise. Then he said, “Have you had any tea, Mr Mayor?”
“I had a nose around,” I replied. “But all I could find was that herbal stuff.”
“It’s very good for a queasy stomach.”
“Just no good with custard creams.”
He leant back in his chair, folding his hands behind his head, and contemplated us for a while. Then, “How may I help you today, Mr Mayor?”
I detached my feet from the desk, put my elbows in their place and rested my chin on the palms of my hands. “A free and frank discussion, Mr Chaigneau. Sound good?”
Anton Chaigneau considered, then gave a little nod. “If you will be free and frank with me, of course. I don’t want us to engage in an unequal relationship.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Where’d you like to begin? I know—Oda’s dead.”
“I was aware of that.”
“You didn’t turn up for the funeral, did you?”
“And you did?” he asked, eyebrows raised in challenge.
“Oh yeah,” I replied. “It was a ball. There was me, and Penny, and this big man called Dudley, who I think turned up to see if anyone would cry. And a wereman called Charlie, who kinda goes where Dudley does. It was in Abney Park—you ever been there? She’s buried by the image of an angel, half tangled in ivy. I didn’t pray, because I figured it’d be kinda hypocritical, but Penny did. She’s good that way. She considers that God would be looking for what is right, not what is written. Drizzled a bit. But we brought umbrellas.”
“I am glad Oda received a decent ceremony, of a kind,” he replied.
“You should have been there.”
“Alas, duty called.”
“Alas. Oh, and I’m sending you the bill, by the by, for her headstone.”
“That seems fair.”
“I’m sending you the bill for her sister’s, too.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Her…”
“Her sister,” I replied. “Jabuile Ajaja. She’s buried in the plot next to Oda’s. We got a special offer you see, two for the price of one. There were tears at that one. Penny, again. She gets all het up over these sorta occasions. Penny’s fine, by the by. Just in case you’re wondering. I mean, you know, it’s not every day that you get plunged into an epic battle between the Court and the Tribe and I gotta tell you, apart from a little sloppy hexing in the final furlong, she excelled herself. She’s going to be difficult for your lot to kill, is my Penny Ngwenya.”
“And I see you’re recovering too,” he added breezily. “I heard rumours that you were in a bit of a state.”
I shrugged. “I know this amazing little woman in a crypt. She gets NHS funding and all. You wouldn’t approve. Taxpayers’ cash going towards the restoration of shell-shocked sorcerers. You might almost think we were people.”
“In your very specific case, Mr Mayor, I fear you’re not quite that—but please, do go on.”
His hands had drifted down from his head and were now resting in his lap, his back straight and neck stiff.
“Had a look through your files, by the by,” I went on, crumbling a piece of cheese off his plate and rolling it between my fingers. “I had no idea the Order was so petty. Going after minor witches and druids, when all this time, there’s angels and demons and sorcerers and Midnight Mayors and all sorts of stuff you could be dealing with, but oh no. Little sinners are so much easier to dispose of than big ones. Very disappointed.”
“Yes—I am curious, Mr Mayor, how you actually found this address.”
“Oh, a man called Dudley. Big guy. Lots of connections. Fingers in pies. I said ‘Dudley, I think Anton Chaigneau is the man responsible for nearly bringing about the destruction of the city.’ He said ‘no,’ I said ‘yeah!’ he said ‘seriously?’ I said ‘look at my face’ and he said ‘oh well, then you’d better go forth and do something about it, here’s his home address…’ ” Chaigneau moved. He had the drawer open and the gun out before I had a chance to get to the next syllable. It was a nasty little thing, but a little thing over a little distance would still do the job. I pushed the cheese back onto the plate, sat back in my chair. “You know,” I went on, “I think the problem was in the overengineering. You had a lovely plan. A really good plan that exploited one of the greatest weaknesses of the magical community—our willingness to believe pretty much anything on the basis that almost anything can be possible. You paid O’Rourke for a false prophecy. Or blackmailed him or threatened him or something.”
“His daughter,” replied Chaigneau calmly. “We threatened his daughter.”
“How economically efficient of you,” I said, watching the gun in his hand. “Anyway, you got O’Rourke to make a false prophecy and frankly, the Tribe and the Court were ready to go for each other anyway, you just needed to give them a shove. ‘There’s a chosen one,’ you said, ‘who’s going to destroy one or the other of them’ and then you spread the word. O’Rourke told Minjae San at the Neon Court, and you leaked the information to the Tribe. It only took one of them to even consider exploring the possibility for the other side to go ‘oh my God, our enemies believe it, so we must’ and fairly quickly you’ve got Lady Neon shuffling in and warriors in Sidcup and it’s all going swimmingly. You keep them dangling for a while and then you think, ‘Hey, I know what—I need a body count! Let’s send them to the same place at the same time chasing a ghost and see who kills who!’ So you send them off to Sidcup, ready to go and claim the chosen one. And here’s the bit where, personally, I think you got tricksy. You decided to give them an actual chosen one. I mean, shit.”
Chaigneau’s thumb ran up and down the side of the pistol, thinking about firing. We looked at him, waiting. He said, “Go on. This is fascinating.”
“You thought, ‘Genius! Let’s get rid of all the rotten eggs in one go!’ and what do you know, there was Jabuile Ajaja, Oda’s should-have-been-dead sister. Should have been killed by Kayle but oh no. You saved her life, plucked her away from her family, told Oda that she’d died and in the process made this potentially fluffy woman the psycho-bitch vessel of vengeance that we all knew and loved. For all those years Oda thought her sister was murdered by a sorcerer, and for all those years you kept JG under your wing until you began to suspect that the traits manifested by her older brother were also, possibly, beginning to kick off inside Jabuile. Oh whoops. But killing her—way too easy. You got clever, decided to screw with Oda one last time and see which way she dived. Stop me if I get any of this wrong.”
He smiled, tight and thin. “So far, Mr Mayor, so good.”
“You knew JG hung out in that old tower in Sidcup. You sent Oda in there. Would she kill a sorceress in the making? Even if that sorceress was her own sister? And of course, the answer was no. Oda took one look at Jabuile and any inclination she’d had to go around doing the decapitating thing vanished in an instant, all she was at that second was JG’s big sister. Not a servant of God at all.”
“It’s your fault, you know,” he said suddenly. “It’s your fault that Oda fell.” I raised my eyebrows, waited. “Even from your first association we detected… imperfections… in Oda’s attitude. It’s true that we ordered her to keep you alive during that business of Robert Bakker, since we considered you the most likely means to destroy a greater evil. When you became Midnight Mayor we further considered your destruction, but again the business of the death of cities had broken out and, again, your utility exceeded your potential threat. But even from an early stage it was clear that Oda was… expressing a willingness to kill you that perhaps she did not genuinely feel. We felt that her requests to end your life were increasingly coming from a desperation, an act, almost, of spiritual self-defence as if she was concerned not that you might live and cause harm, but that time might strengthen the bond between you, to the point where she would be unable to do her duty. By the end, the consensus among the Order was almost universal. She considered you… practically human. She had lost her perspective. Then there was that night in Moorgate…”
“I think I know the one.”
“You were being attacked by spectres. The pair of you. And you, Matthew Swift, armed a spell in a beer bottle, and gave it to Oda, and she, whether intentional or not, performed an act of magic. She confessed it to me, almost two months after the event. I should have killed her then, but she begged and wept and seemed repentant. So we sent her to Sidcup. One final test. One last chance to prove her loyalty, to repeat the act that had won her place in the Order. Kill her sorceress sister. And she failed.”
I drummed my fingers on the edge of the desk, looked at Chaigneau and saw only iron and fire.
“I’m curious,” I said at last. “Did you drive a blade into her heart yourself, or did you get someone else to do it for you?”
He hesitated. “There is no place for me in heaven,” he said at last. “I know that. I know where my soul is heading. But, for the sacrifice of my soul, generations may walk with the angels, that would otherwise have burnt with me.”
“Sounds sweet. Except! Unintended consequences! So you’ve killed Oda for betraying you, left her for dead in the tower block in Sidcup. The Court and the Tribe are coming, they’re going to run straight into each other while chasing a very fast, very frightened rabbit. JG runs, and, having, as you said, some of the tendencies of her big brother, manages to fall through the cracks, and is thus saved, where she should have burnt along with everything else in that tower. Court and Tribe are furious, blame each other, fighting breaks out and you, just to make absolutely certain that there are going to be bodies on both sides and this thing has nowhere left to go but full-blown war, start the fire in the lower floors, trapping the fighters, including Minjae San, daimyo of the Neon Court no less, and condemning all within to death. Court, Tribe, Oda, JG, and one bearded beggar man who, I’m sure, you considered an acceptable loss. Fantastic. Bodies all round, JG gone, Oda dead, Tribe and Court at war. The Order’s work is done. The magical community will tear itself to shreds, hurrah.
“And then the snag.
“Oda isn’t just a woman with a hole in her heart. She’s a woman who’s been betrayed. Killed by her mentor. Her dead sister, not dead. Her faith shattered, her body hurt, the things she believed in, as you yourself pointed out, dented. What a perfect vessel for nasty old Blackout to slip inside, what a wonderful opportunity. In it goes, kicks her into something resembling life. Flames are flickering at the wall, she’s panicked, scared, confused, bleeding. She needs help and, not really understanding or knowing what she’s doing, the Oda–Blackout fusion calls for help the only way it knows how, and summons us. Summons me. And now you’ve got the Midnight Mayor involved, and the sun isn’t rising, and Oda is walking, and JG’s body wasn’t among the ashes, and the city is shutting down and sure, the Court and the Tribe are still going to war: but what unintended, what terrible unintended consequences. It took you a while, I think, to realise what a total balls-up you’d made of the situation. That’s why you contacted me at Euston station—sheer panic about what you’d done. That was a mistake. If you hadn’t come forward then it might have taken me a good few hours more to work out that, basically, it was you, Mr Chaigneau. You did it. You did it all.”
His finger closed around the trigger.
The gun clicked.
Nothing happened.
“My mate Dudley,” I went on, “did I mention him? He knows a lot of different people. He knows where they live. He knows what they do, their habits, their hours of work and days of rest. He even knows, Mr Chaigneau, where they keep their guns.”
Nothing.
His smile grew wider, he half nodded and, slowly, put the gun down on the table between us. “Very good, Mr Mayor. I didn’t think the blue electric angels planned much in advance.”
“It’s the new me,” I explained, waving my hands jazz-style in greeting. “Matthew Swift, Midnight fucking Mayor—I’ve got multicoloured highlighters and everything.”
He sighed, putting his hands up behind his head and leaning back to study the ceiling. “And what now?” he asked. “Kill me? You have great roads of corpses behind you, Mr Mayor, but very rarely do you have the courage to push the knife in yourself.”
“I thought about it,” I admitted. “I mean, I don’t think anyone would really care, in the grand scheme of things. And when you shot JG… we could have killed you then. We wouldn’t have thought twice about it, and there wouldn’t have been a body left to bury when we were done. That was, I think, your most despicable act. You shot a girl, a kid, in the back at Seven Dials not because she was a threat to you, or because it was going to change anything, but because your carefully laid plans were unravelling and you didn’t know what to do. You had no better idea. My God. The righteousness of the terrified. Yeah. We would have killed you, if we could.
“But then I realised, I’ve still got this whole messy Tribe–Court thing to deal with! I mean, Lady Neon and Toxik, they’re both dead, and I’ve got a gathering of very angry daimyos and very angry shamans who I’ve got to convince that actually, ripping up Shaftesbury Avenue in their attempt to obliterate each other is not the best course of action. So, in case you’re wondering, the reason it’s taken me all this time to get round to you is because I have been locked at a negotiating table in a kebab shop in Willesden trying to get these two sides to understand that there never was a chosen one, and that this war is just a thing invented by a greater enemy, a worse enemy. Two weeks it took to convince them. And oh boy, the Court and the Tribe aren’t very happy with you. Amazing, really, the power of hate. They hate you so much that they’re practically buddies on the subject.”
He didn’t speak, didn’t move.
I stood up, pulling my coat off the back of the chair and slinging it over my shoulder. “You know, it was futile,” I said. “There will be another Lady Neon. A woman so beautiful it hurts to look at her, a vision of things you never can be, a world you can never have. And there will always be a Tribe too, the ones who can’t have so badly that they decide to have nothing at all because that’ll show them. Your war… was nothing new. There’ll be others again, and other truces. The fact that Lady Neon and Toxik are dead merely sped up the peace. All that blood, all that talking about bigger pictures, all that scheming, and for what? The temporary gratification of an ageing man worried about his blood sugar levels and the final destination of his immortal soul.”
“I don’t fear death, you know,” he replied softly. “Not that.”
I walked to the door, pushing it open and letting the light spill in from the corridor outside. “You heard of the night bus?” I asked. “You heard about how it gets its driver? Chained to the wheel, they say, every night, never sleeping, just driving for ever and ever through the streets of the city. They say it’s a curse, bestowed upon the bitterest enemies of Lady Neon. Nothing can break those chains, once they’re forged. If death is the best your imagination can run to, then I’d say you’re in for a bit of a shock. Good night, Mr Chaigneau. I’ll show myself out.”
I closed the door behind me, leaving him alone in the gloom.
There was one more funeral to attend.
I stood at the back with Penny. A handful of Aldermen had turned out, but not enough. There was a contingent of financial advisers, muffled in black hats and coats. A gaggle of smartly dressed women from the local tennis club. A group of governors from the school. An uncle and aunt. A husband and a daughter. Neither of them cried: he didn’t cry, for her sake, and she didn’t cry, for his. As services went, the priest kept it short, accurate, and as true as manners would allow. Mr Dees, a man barely taller than his departed wife, asked who we were. Business associates, we said. He invited us to the local tennis club, where drink would be drunk, memories shared and Leslie Dees, who was after all twice women’s lawn champion, would be honoured in a brighter spirit than that celebrated in those endless neat rows of neat gravestones in the cemetery.
We smiled, said it was kind, said no more, didn’t go.
When all the others had left, Penny and I stood by the grave of Leslie Dees.
Finally Penny said, “I didn’t really know her, you know?”
“Me neither.”
“Yeah but you… you know… you knew her more, right?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know… stuff. Friends, family, background. No idea where she went to school, college, how she became an Alderman, what she did for fun, where she went on holiday, favourite food… you know. Stuff. The stuff you’re supposed to know. I guess I figured we’d work it out as we went along.”
We stood a while longer.
Then Penny said, “I didn’t know her, right, but I figured… she seemed like the kinda lady who wouldn’t do nothing she didn’t mean to.”
“Yeah. You may just be right about that.”
Time stretched by.
“I am a disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”
I hadn’t been aware that I’d spoken. But looking round, I didn’t see any other likely candidates.
Penny said nothing, stared at me, waiting for the rest.
So, since she seemed to be expecting something, I went on. “All those dead. Dees, Oda, JG, Theydon, Lady Neon, Toxik, all those dead, all that blood in the city streets. What is the point of me if I don’t stop it? What’s the point of this”—I waved my scarred hand, crosses aching—“of this”—we tapped our forehead, just above our bright blue eyes—“of this”—I stretched out my fingers through the air and let the sparks flicker and flash between the gaps, “of us, what is the point of all that we are, if we could not stop this?”
Silence.
Then Penny said, “You know, yeah, it seems to me like there are two kinds of chosen one. There’s the kind who gets chosen for a thing without any say, like someone who gets picked—kings and queens and shit. Then there’s the other kind of chosen one; the guy who stands up when everyone else is afraid, when no one else can decide. Guy who chooses to fight, or do the thing that no one else will, ’cause it has to be done, yeah? I mean, most times, that guy’s a total shit. And sometimes he’s the hero. Seems to me that you’re a bit of both.”
My shoulders shook, which I guessed meant I was trying to laugh. “That’s me,” I sighed. “Bit-of-both Matthew. Bit of both, bit of everything, bit of nothing really whole.”
Silence again. Then, “Right!” she blurted. “Come on you!” She grabbed me by the arm and began to march me down the gravel path.
“Where we going?”
“You’re buying me supper.”
“I am?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my mate and that’s what you do.”
“But I…”
“Nope! No arguments!”
“But we should…”
“Nope! Only thing is…” She stopped so sharply I nearly walked into her, her index finger flailing with righteous certainty. “Thing is,” she repeated carefully, like one testing out an idea for size, “you’re not a very good Midnight Mayor, yeah, and you’re not exactly great at being human, yeah, and you’re like, way off with being an electric angel, yeah, so all that’s really left, all that you’ve really got, is buying someone like me a curry.”
“That’s what I’ve got,” I echoed numbly. “Buying you curry.”
“Yep.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Penny, as life-changing bits of philosophy go, it’s not exactly a winner.”
“Matthew,” she said firmly, “there are men who would eat their left foot to buy a girl as totally kick-ass awesome as me a poppadom, let alone a whole fucking curry, you see what I’m saying?”
I thought about it.
We began to see what she was saying.
“Oh,” we said, finally, seeing as she seemed to want us to say something at all. Then, as we thought about it a little more, “OK,” we added. “When you put it like that.”
She beamed. “You know,” she began, as we turned towards the exit of the cemetery, “I was thinking, this being Midnight Mayor shit… does it come with expenses?”
We walked away, between the neat lines of grey stone.
We had supper.
When it was done, we walked, and talked, about nothing much, to nowhere in particular.
A little before midnight, Penny blurted something about catching the last train to Lewisham.
We walked her to the station. Because it seemed like the right thing.
The last train was a dull yellow-white worm on a background of upside-down tungsten stars spread across the earth, as far as the eyes could see. We watched it from the bridge above the line, listened to it with our toes, tasted the flash of blue-white electricity from its metal wheels.
We walked north, without map or clear direction, but almost never veering from our course. We walked through the streets of the sleepy and the sleeping, down roads humming with trucks and cars, past windows in which voices could be heard arguing or laughing or in low earnest talk, restaurants smelling of garlic and cumin, kebab shops dripping grease, amusement arcades clattering with the sound of artificial gunfire. We walked down slumbering residential streets of houses, windows flickering with the blue-grey glow of late-night TV, past great grey schools, windows full of posters about Tudor history, the nitrogen cycle and tectonic plate movement, past the noticeboards of churches offering lessons in truth, God, judo and advanced yoga, round the back door of the late-night cinema where zombies and ninjas were tonight’s midnight offering. We ran our fingers over the rough wooden tops of the pub benches, chained to the streets, the cold metal of the lamp-posts and pedestrian railings, scratchy red brick and cut grey stone. We wove our way down great fat shopping streets and little suburban paths, between concrete estates and detached mansions. We thought we could hear behind us…
… but it was just our imagination.
For a while, a lone urban fox, wondering what we were, walked beside us, nose turned up, curious at our passage. As we crossed Clapham, a family of rats tracked us in the sewers below our feet, scuttling with every footstep we made. The pigeons bustled as we passed, the shadows turned to watch. After a while, even they left us alone.
We walked until the shallow spread of South London gave way to the taller buildings that clustered the river, until we could see the chimney of Tate Modern, the floodlit glow of St Paul’s, the ever-burning lights of Guy’s Hospital, the pinnacled tower of Southwark Cathedral. The traffic was a thin nothing as we crossed onto London Bridge, the waters of the river flowing out to sea, a great busy churning beneath us. We could just make out the dark round shape of Greenwich Hill to the east and, upriver, the red letters of the Oxo Tower. We leant on the cold balustrade of London Bridge and looked towards the sea.
“All right,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a ball. But you—out.”
Bakker sighed, reclining back against the edge of the bridge, face turned up to the sky. “It’s probably about time,” he admitted.
“About time?” I echoed. “When I agreed to this, I thought the words ‘temporary experience’ meant a few hours, a day at most. Do you know how disconcerting it is to wake up to find you in bed next to me?”
“Judging by the fact that you fell out of the bed on the first occasion, I would hazard that it is very?”
“I’m not ungrateful, mind. Strip out the psychopathic stuff, and you’ve come in handy at the odd moment.”
He half bowed in acknowledgment.
“But,” I added, “time to move on. Both of us.”
He sighed, stared into space. “I find at times like these that the inspiring words I’ve been mentally preparing for such an eventuality utterly fail me. It is rather compromising for a man of my stature to be reduced to empty banalities.”
“You’ll live with it.”
“No,” he replied, almost sad. “No, I won’t.” Then he straightened up, slapped his hands together. “Bye, then, Matthew. Be good and all that. Try not to murder anyone unnecessarily, keep a sense of perspective, if you have one; don’t get consumed in your own electrical glory and so on.”
“Bye, Mr Bakker.”
“Be seeing you.”
“Until then.”
He turned and looked out towards the river, spread his arms wide and closed his eyes. I took in a deep breath, turned my eyes towards the sky and let it go. The breath ran out from the tips of my toes, shivered up my legs, curled the inside of my stomach, ached out of my chest, crawled from my fingertips and out from behind my eyes. It was warm and tasted faintly of dust and earth. It spread out from me, filling the air with its quiet busy shimmer.
Then the breeze off the river caught even that, and whisked it away.
And Bakker, too, was gone.
We stayed a while longer, watching the river.
After a while, pale and discreet, as if embarrassed to be caught stirring at this delicate time, the sun began to rise.
We watched for a while, until the sun was too high and bright to look at.
Then we watched a little bit more.