The Minority Council (61 page)

Round at the side of the church, I found who I was looking for, sitting alone on an old cardboard box that had been pulled apart to make a small mat. She had two sleeping bags, one inside the other—the first was bright blue, a camper’s sack with drawer strings; the other was a duvet, sewn together, and rotted at the corners. She wore a grey woollen hat and her face was pale, tinged with blue. Her
legs were shaking inside the bedding and there was a greyness to her lips, a wideness in the pupils of her eyes. As I approached she eyed me suspiciously, her expression veering between fight or flight. She wasn’t out of her twenties, and though the sleeves of her jumper hid the worst of the track marks, enough capillaries had burst under her skin to tell much of her story.

I held out my hands in peace as I approached, saying, “It’s okay, I’m not a copper or anything.”

She chose fight. “Spare some change?” she asked. Her voice was hard and sharp. I knelt down opposite her, and opened up my bag. Her lip curled in disgust at the smell of the clothes as I pulled them out. “What the fuck you doing carrying that shit?” she demanded.

“These are the vestments of the Beggar King,” I explained.

“You what?”

I gestured her to silence, and held each one up in turn. “These are the suspiciously soiled trousers of the beggar who has slept too many nights on cold, hard stone, and had nowhere to go when nature called, and lost dignity in the loss of all.

“This is the dubious shirt of third-to fourth-to fifth-hand, passing its way down into the pit of society through kindly intent and casual charity.

“This is the coat of infinite pockets, which hold not things but thoughts, memories and dreams tied away like knots in a string.

“And these are the shoes that have travelled too far. They walked too far and have been to too many places, not of speed, or distance, or time, not of maps and geography and the ordinary dirt underfoot of busy men. These…
you wear in those places where you may only go alone.” I pushed the bundle of clothes towards the beggar. “Take them. They are a blessing. Keep them well.”

She took them uncertainly, closing her fingers round the thin handle of the bag, then pulling the bag in close to her. I smiled and straightened up, feeling the awkward weight of the gun in my pocket, the tightness of the bandages around my ribs. She watched me, half opened her mouth as if to say thank you, then closed it again. I wrapped my arms around my middle against the rising cold and turned to walk away, and he was there.

He stood, alone, on the other side of the street. One arm was held in a sling, and there were scratches down the side of his face. But he stood easily enough by the kerb, right arm hanging loose at his side, back straight, watching me across the traffic. People moved behind him, heading for the bus stops and the bike racks, the Underground at Chancery Lane and the restaurants of the West End. He stared at me, and I stared at him, and neither of us moved.

Templeman.

There was a sickly yellow stain to his skin, which hadn’t been there before.

A crackling in the air about him as he moved, a taste on the air of damp dust and dark corners. The CCTV cameras were all turned away from him, pointing at walls or straight down at the ground.

Then he smiled, and turned, and walked away.

I followed, keeping my distance, moving between the crowd. I felt the weight of the gun and my heart beat in my throat. He stopped at a bus stop, looked up at the indicator board, sat down carefully on the little red bench
designed to be impossible for sleeping on, stretching out his legs. I stopped some twenty yards back, leaning against the wall of a bank, the ATM out of order beside me. There were five people at the bus stop. Two women, Russian by their voices, great fake-fur coats dyed a deep dark red, were getting annoyed at the delay in the bus. They flapped at each other, then at the traffic, and finally turned to the others waiting for the bus and asked in broken English if it always took this long. Templeman leant across and politely explained to them that it wasn’t usually this bad, and something must have happened further down the line.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Russia,” they replied.

Ah, Russia. He’d always wanted to visit Russia; he’d heard it was an amazing place. “Whereabouts in Russia?”

“Moscow.”

How beautiful it must be, and what an exciting place to live in.

It was okay. They were here for a holiday. They’d never been before. It was all right.

They must try Greenwich. The park was beautiful, the observatory was astonishing, the maritime museum was fascinating. Don’t do Madame Tussaud’s or any of that tourist rubbish. Go to Greenwich.

They smiled and thanked him, and with every second that passed I forced us to be still, forced us to breathe, to watch, to wait, fingers itching at our side.

Their bus came, and he boarded with them, eyes flicking back towards me as he climbed onto the bus. I let two more people file on past the driver before detaching myself from my bit of wall, and slipping on board too.

He’d gone to the top deck, sat at the very back seat.

I sat by the stairs, a pair of Chinese kids with spiky copper hair and headphones glued to their ears sitting behind me, the two Russians in front. They got off at Euston, in the grey bus station stained saturated pink by the overhead lights, as garish a gloom as the city could offer. I watched the reflection of the passengers in the darkness of my window, and waited.

Templeman got off at Camden. He walked right by me without a word, going down through the doors between a guitarist and a goth, not even glancing my way as he passed. I got off behind him, not one person between him and me, and we thought of throats and hearts and things being crushed. Here, now? Would anyone know?

Too many people in Camden.

The Y-junction where the street divided, this way for Kentish Town, this way for Holloway, was a heaving mass of big-soled boots, black coats, painted lips and hamburger wrappers. The shops selling T-shirts honouring Bob Marley and leather jackets with iron studs were still open, even now, and the multi-storey pubs and bars heaved, windows open wide to let out the heat of crowded merriment. Coppers with fluorescent stripes on their jackets stood by the Underground station, heads turned down to talk to the radios strapped to their shoulders.

Templeman made his way to another bus stop; I stood some ten yards off, watching. A girl came up to me. Her hair was dyed blonde and pulled back eyebrow-tugging-tight across her skull. She said, “You got a fag?”

Templeman’s eyes turned briefly to me; a smile lurked in the corner of his mouth.

I said, “Sorry, no; no fag.”

“Come on mate, come on, you gotta have a fag.”

“No, not me, sorry, don’t smoke.”

“Hey—you got a tenner? I really need to get a fag.”

No tenner.

“Guess how old I am,” she said.

“Don’t know.”

“Guess, go on, guess.”

A bus pulled up. Templeman stood as if examining the gutter, and didn’t move.

“Fourteen!” she exclaimed. “I’m fourteen years old, yeah, but all my friends say I look way older. Come on, you got a tenner right, I mean, it’s not like you’d miss it or anything, guy like you. You wouldn’t miss a tenner.”

We looked her in the eye and she saw something in our features that made her afraid.

She moved away quickly, and was starting to cry by the time she crossed the street to the station.

A different bus came.

Smaller, a little rat-route runner. Templeman boarded and sat right at the front, by the door. He didn’t look up as I passed, near enough to touch, but sat with his good hand folded in his lap. I sat two seats behind and watched the back of Templeman’s head. There were barely six, seven people on this bus. With bandaged hands, I might not get a good enough aim, but I could move closer, and there’d be no chance to miss. One shot and it’d be done, blood on the windows, blood on the floor, but it would be finished.

I stayed where I was.

The bus roamed through the back streets of Camden, heading west. Two passengers got off. Then another. Four of us left on the bus, and a driver. Only three people would
see it, three people would know my face, and they’d run, they’d hide, from any man who could walk up behind a stranger on a bus and pull the trigger. The police would neither know nor, once the Aldermen had done their thing, care. I could change seats, aim, fire, and be off the bus before the next set of traffic lights.

Easy.

Couldn’t move.

We laboured up towards Hampstead Heath. Nearer the bottom of the hill, grey concrete estates; higher up, white Victorian terraces. Judge the quality of the home by the number of doorbells—here, houses with twelve apartments to a stairwell, while next door, just one family occupied space fit for three. The pubs had tall ceilings and served roast dinner on a Sunday. The greengrocer offered packets of polenta and salami in its window, and discount phone calls to Kenya.

Templeman got up some hundred yards before his stop, and stood by the door as the bus decelerated. It was a single stand, request stop only, no shelter above and no people waiting. The doors swished back. He got off.

I waited a beat, and followed.

Quiet streets, quiet night.

Here.

Do it here.

He turned up an alley, a patch of darkness between the houses, heading uphill towards a place where the night thickened like oil. I hesitated, felt the gun in my pocket, took a deep breath of the cold street air, and followed.

A fence on either side gave way to open grass.

A sign said:
Be Considerate—Clean Up After Your Dog
.

Underneath it, another sign warned:
Littering £100 Fine.

The grass stretched out around us, above and below. I paused, looking up, looking down. Above was infinite sky wrapped round the crest of a bench-lined hill. Below, past the empty five-a-side football pitches lit up with floodlights and the deserted winding paths picked out by pinpoint lights, was the city, as far as the eye could see. The red light flashing on top of Canary Wharf, the orange walls of the Houses of Parliament, the deep blue circle of the London Eye, the silver arch of St Pancras, the golden cross of St Paul’s and rising spike of the Shard; it shimmered like a silent Christmas, as deep as the sky that covered it. The sight hit like a pillow fighter who forgot to pull his punch, and for a moment our hand burnt and our breath was black on the air and our shadow stretched out a pair of dragon wings.

Then someone whistled, very softly in the night.

Templeman was twenty yards ahead. He paused beneath a white lamp shining above the narrow path, and looked back at me. Then he turned again, and started to walk, up towards the top of Parliament Hill, his gait slow and steady.

I followed, eyes jerking from side to side, looking for a trap, a danger, a gun in the night.

Silence in the park.

Templeman climbed and kept on climbing, along a path that briefly vanished behind a clump of hawthorn bushes. He reappeared, looking back, waiting for me, his face open and polite. I followed painfully, the breath ragged in my chest. The magic of the city was fainter here, in all this grass and woodland, but, though faint, the
distant street lights below still gave us strength, a promise of power waiting to be pulled.

And all at once he’d stopped.

On the summit of the hill stood a concrete plaque, indicating each landmark below. There was a bench nearby, where a single street lamp shone its too-white light on the narrow path and muddy grass. Templeman sat there, looking down at the city.

I went up to the bench, and sat down next to him.

And waited.

“You can’t save everyone,” he said at last.

Somewhere beneath us, doors slammed in the night. Taxis were hailed, buses stopped, trains flashed blue-white sparks on the tracks, foxes snarled, windows were closed, shoes were pulled off aching feet at the end of the working day, lights were switched off, music was turned down, and the city kept on turning, turning, oblivious to us.

“You can’t save those who don’t want to be saved,” he added. “You can’t save your friends. You can’t save yourself.”

I rolled my head a little, trying to ease the crick in the back of my neck. A few meagre stars were peeking through the clouds.

“Do you understand?” he asked. “Do you know what it is to be the Midnight Mayor?”

I eased the gun out of my pocket. His eyes went to it, with what might have been surprise, but still he didn’t move.

I said, “You’re not looking so good. Took something nasty, did you? Something yellow?”

“What we Aldermen do… is irrelevant,” he replied. “We are irrelevant. I am attempting to change that.”

“Oscar Kramb is dead,” I said, surprised to hear the words come out. “Caughey is mad, Rathnayake is cursed. Penny’s fine, thanks for asking. The Aldermen have sworn allegiance, better late than never, and I’ve summoned a monster that is every bit as dangerous, mad and reckless as your culicidae. Every bit as stupid and pigheaded, every bit as arrogant and every bit as bad. The drug you gave me in Heron Quays… I won’t be recommending it for mass market approval any time soon. Nasty side-effects. I mean, that may just be me, it may just be what I am, and let’s face it, this was always about what, not who, I am. But, basically, there’s a lot of blood around, questions have been asked. You know how it is.”