The Midnight Mayor (10 page)

A train pulled up on the opposite platform. It claimed to be going to Barking, but on its arrival it just sat there, chugging and clunking and not bothering to close its doors. The few passengers sat in silence and didn’t seem surprised.

Above my bench the board announced an eastbound Circle Line train was coming, but didn’t tell me when. If London Underground isn’t telling you when the next train is due, you can usually assume it’s bad news. I slurped more fruity sugar and waited. On the far side of the track, an enterprising graffiti artist with no fear of electrocution had written:

My thoughts, which had been left behind when the rest of me decided to run, had finally slipped back into the hollow comfort of my brain. Now they were setting up shop, putting out their wares and asking for a health and safety assessment.

Earle had said: the Midnight Mayor.

Which was alarming enough in itself, but then he’d gone further: the Midnight Mayor is dead.

And the Aldermen thought we’d killed him.

Which, while not true, was still justification for our execution. And we
had
been attacked at 2.25 a.m., and they said that the Mayor had died at 2.26 a.m., and what was the use of their lying about it?

Even if the Mayor was real.

Even if the Mayor was dead?

I caught the Circle Line from Edgware Road to Baker Street; at Baker Street, changed to the Bakerloo Line for Oxford Circus; and from there took the Central Line, towards Bank and the City of London. The old city; the Golden Mile. The hunting ground of the Aldermen, and home of the Midnight Mayor.

In which the nature of telephones is discussed, a connection made, a curse exposed and a title transferred to an unsuspecting inheritor.

 

 

 

 

This is the story of the Mayors of London.

Once a year on a usually cold and often drizzling November morning, a heavy carriage of tasteless gold and plump velvet is wheeled out from its resting place in the Guildhall, at the heart of the Corporation of London, the oldest borough of the city. It’s dusted off, given a pair of footmen in white tights and a driver with a big hat, and sent to collect the Lord Mayor of London. In bright red robes and a ridiculous chain of office, this individual will then ride through the centre of town, swear a number of oaths, shake a lot of hands and generally celebrate and make merry for the good of the city. Ludgate Circus and Fleet Street are shut down for his procession; likewise Cheapside, London Wall and Bank are sealed off, cars out and policemen in, along with the tourists and onlookers who come to see the parade. Giant floats of distorted gaseous proportion, dancing bands and singing dancers, jugglers and hot dog vendors take to the streets and generally a fine if slightly pompous time is had by all. As the sun goes down, the Lord Mayor boards a boat on the Thames, between Blackfriars and Waterloo Bridge, and from anchored barges in the middle of the river fireworks are set off, funded by the big financial firms of the city. Champagne is drunk by dignitaries onboard, and the onlookers, as soon as the last boom has died away above the Oxo Tower, are quick to seek out the hidden pubs in the alleys between Fleet Street and Farringdon Road, or behind the National Theatre, Gabriel’s Wharf and Southwark. And so the day is partied away quite nicely thank you and, for another year, the people forget that the Lord Mayor exists.

In the intervening time, the Lord Mayor of London fulfils his duties, promoting the financial district of the city, and making deals with names like KPMG, Merrill Lynch, Price Waterhouse Coopers and other megaliths lurking within their glass towers. He attends meetings with Governors, Committees, Secretaries, Aldermen; he shakes no less than a hundred new hands a week, goes abroad on expenses to promote the wonders of London, snarls quietly at the Greater London Authority and
its
Mayor, who regard the Corporation of London as something of a historical blip in the history of local councils, and perhaps in his vainer moments remembers that Magna Carta permits him, technically, to ban the Queen from visiting the city within the old London walls. He opens museums, attends parties, networks on behalf of the city and every now and then is invited to a wedding at St Paul’s or tea at the Palace and all things considered, has a good time and does an OK thing.

So a year passes; so another Lord Mayor is chosen by the arcane reasonings of the Guildhall and Corporation staff, with no small interest expressed by the great financial giants of the city.

It is only after the Lord Mayor is in bed that the Midnight Mayor comes onto the streets. He too, like his daylight counterpart, must have his procession. Crawling out of the shadows, he carries around his neck the great black key of his office, an iron monster that once used to lock the gates of the wall of London. In his hand he carries a black staff whose thumping upon the cobbled stones can call rioters to order, on his back he wears a black cloak sewn together out of soot and the shrouds of the plague victims. When he walks past St Paul’s Cathedral, they say the statues turn to watch him go. When he stands by the Monument, the great golden flame on its head flickers and spins with burning fire. When he processes around the old wall of London, the shadows follow him wherever he goes. He too, like the Lord Mayor, has his duties. Like the ravens in the Tower, the London Stone, even the river itself, he protects the city, watches over it and keeps it safe from . . . who knows what? It is in the nature of his duty that we never find out what he has protected us from, since to keep us safe, he ensured that it never happened. Some theorists say that he isn’t a man at all, but a creature grown out of stones, a statue come alive from old cobbles and river mud. Others say it’s just a title,
just
a title as if titles didn’t have power, passed down from one old scrounger to another, generation after generation. Some say that the Midnight Mayor is a man, whose soul has become so consumed by the city that he often forgets he has feet at all, but sees with the eyes of the pigeons and breathes the thick fumes of the double-decker bus and finds in them ambrosia. The Aldermen are his servants - not the mundane, attend-a-few-parties, shake-a-few-hands aldermen of the Lord Mayor, but the other Aldermen, the hat-wearing, gun-toting arseholes of the magical community. And so while the city sleeps, the Midnight Mayor wanders, keeping us safe from all the nasties at the door.

That is, if you believe a word of it. Which under normal conditions, I didn’t.

But these were interesting times.

All of which left me with two major problems:

My watch had stopped at 2.25 a.m. and the Mayor died at 2.26.

I wanted to find out why.

 

Mr Earle had said “by the coroner’s report”.

Say what you will for the Aldermen, they were bureaucratic to an extreme. Of course they’d have a coroner’s report on the death of their boss, the Midnight Mayor,
of course
they would. A coroner’s report and a receipt for the funeral, if there was anything left to bury, and all of it tax deductible, thanking you kindly.

And in the Corporation of London, I had a fairly good idea where to find a coroner.

 

Just west of Moorgate and south of Old Street is a great grey vastness where a lot of bombs once fell. Street names reveal more about the city’s past than any lingering hints from architecture or archaeology: London Wall (where the old city defences ran), Bishopsgate (the gate for the bishops), Cheapside (a shopping street), Poultry (a street where chickens were driven to market), and so on. The name of this area is the Barbican, referring to another gateway into the old city of London; and, as any magician, tourist or lost wanderer will tell you, it is a space-time vortex, all in gritty concrete.

Someone had clearly intended it to be a self-contained utopia, and in many ways, this was what it was. At its heart lay a shallow, slightly scummy lake in which the occasional optimistic heron sometimes waded, and from which there extended a maze of flats, cafés, restaurants, theatres, cinemas, conference halls, art galleries, schools, churches, gyms, libraries and gardens, connected to each other by walkways, bridges and tunnels, and mystic yellow lines that invariably led to the roof, even if they claimed to be leading you towards the underground car parks. A music school squatted behind a theatre whose billboards advertised Japanese mime artists and Cuban street bands, a piece of the city’s old Roman wall crumbled mutely in a private garden for local residents, and on every other balcony dangled half-dead geraniums in flowerpots, maintained to the lowest standard the council could tolerate. A single, slightly grungy food and supplies shop loitered beneath a flight of slippery stairs, and among the high towers and tiled walkways, mini-tornados swished and tugged, and tore at even the best-tended haircuts. And because this was a place that had everything for an artistic, well-ordered, middle-class life, it also had the equipment for a quiet, tidy death, so that, wedged on one corner at the end of a bridge across a street some thirty feet below was the coroner’s office.

Quite how the local residents felt about this was hard to judge. Our suspected conclusion was that they simply regarded it in the same way the average punter regarded a beggar: seen, noted, and then carefully, politely and deliberately ignored and forgotten. In many ways, it was hard to believe the sign declaring “coroner” wasn’t a malign trick, pasted up by some local wit with a morbid sense of humour.

So, the wind dragging at my coat, and my right hand throbbing inside its bandage, I walked up to the small blue door tucked away round the side of the Barbican, and rang the bell.

Nothing happened.

I rang again.

A security guard appeared behind the wire-meshed glass. He looked like so many guards in the city: mid- to late forties, tightly cut hair turning greyish, dark uniform, black radio, shiny shoes, skin the colour of deep-roasted coffee. He opened the door, but didn’t stand aside for me. When you look like the Michelin man on a famine diet, trust is not so easy to inspire.

“You looking for someone?” he asked.

I looked him up and down. He seemed like a principled man, the last thing I needed to see.

“Was a body brought here last night,” I asked, “sometime after two in the morning?”

“I’d have to check the records. You family?”

“Yes” was the easy answer, but it led inevitably to the question “what name are you looking for?”. I had no idea. In all the confusion, I only knew of the Midnight Mayor as the Midnight Mayor, nothing more specific.

“No,” I said.

“Can I ask why you’re interested?”

“Journalist” was the next most obvious answer, but unlikely to make me any friends. “Police” would require identification, “friend” would be politely told to go home. We said, “Someone attacked us last night, a minute before the man in your mortuary died. We don’t know of any connection, but other people think there is one and until we find out what it is and why this man died, we are going to be hunted and assaulted and quite possibly die, and however hideous this world is, we would not for all the fire in the wire die and leave it. Please - will you let me see the body?”

The security man blinked at me. “What?” he said numbly.

“I only need a few minutes.”

“You what?”

So much for the power of honesty.

“You could call your colleague,” I added.

“I don’t have a colleague . . .” he mumbled, and realised his mistake. I reached forward and grabbed the back of his neck with my right hand, pushed the palm of my left into the gap between his eyebrows and squeezed. The magic of sleep was easy at this hour, the night so quiet, footsteps so loud and lonely; the people of the city were either in their deepest dreams or wide awake, burning up with loneliness and imagination as shadows and sounds twisted into alien forms, untouched by the blanket of daylight bustle. The guard himself was a night owl; the streets in darkness thrilled him, walking down the middle of a road whose traffic by day would be at a standstill, eating kebabs from suspicious shops at three in the morning, watching the secret people of the streets, the cleaners, painters, repairmen, engineers, delivery men, graveyard shift and junior night-time nurses scuttling between the shadows. But he was also bored in his little office above it all, with nothing but the buzzing of the electric lamp to keep him occupied, and with his heart leaping at the sound of a truck swishing down a distant street.

It was easy, easier than I’d expected, to send him to sleep, and fill his dreams with the colour of yellow neon, and the sound of lonely footsteps in the night. A simple spell.

Harder, in fact, to position him behind his desk, dragging him into the uncomfortable tight space and propping him upright in his chair. I turned off all but the desktop lamps and locked the door behind me, from the inside. Then I went in search of the body of the Midnight Mayor.

 

Death, as an idea, appals us.

As an experience, I cannot say I recommend it. The mind forgets pain, the physical sensation of pain. It doesn’t forget terror.

Down a flight of stairs and into a room smelling of disinfectant and nothing else. I’d half expected rows of stainless steel cupboards, each one labelled with the name of the correct inhabitant, but there was no such thing. Above the mortuary floor of scrubbed grey tile, each member-guest had their own refrigerated coffin. I looked at the name tags pinned to the end of each metal slab and remembered again that I had no idea what the name of the Midnight Mayor was, if he had a name to begin with. So I started pulling the lids off the coffins. The women I ignored, because Mr Earle had called him “he”; and I was grateful for the chance to halve the number of empty faces I had to see: Mr Braithwaite with three lines carved in his chest like a bunch of flowers opening up towards his shoulders; Mr Wang, bile and vomit still clinging with a yellow rumpled thickness to his pouting lips; and, finally, Mr Nair.