by Kate Griffin
I knew it was Kemsley the second I saw the big blue truck turn round the corner at the end of the street; I just couldn’t bring myself to believe it. When it lumbered to a halt in front of us, the back doors opened and five men with body armour and rifles got out. I laughed. We couldn’t help ourself; I put my head back and laughed.
Kemsley climbed out of the front seat and glared at me. “Funnies?” he asked.
“Sorry. Serious face.”
“You wanted back-up?”
I jerked a thumb at Anissina. “She wanted back-up.”
“Any good reason why?”
“You don’t seem pleased to be here.”
“And you don’t seem to consider the cost to the local councils this little operation will incur,” he replied. “Overtime fees, vehicle rental, health and safety, logistic support, equipment and maintenance, property damage, personal and third-party insurance, property insurance. Management and finance aren’t your specialities, are they, sorcerer?”
Our jaw tightened. “We’re looking for a . . . thing calling itself — himself — whichever — Mr Pinner. I imagine he’ll introduce himself something like this. ‘Hello. My name is Mr Pinner. I am the death of cities. Do you think bullets can really stop me?’ I mean, I’m just speculating, but that’s all I’ve got at the moment. Thanks for coming.”
“What do you mean ‘the death of cities’?”
“I don’t know. It’s a bit vague. I mean, on the one hand, it might be a pretentious title adopted by a man who spends too much time playing online fantasy games or an attempt to confuse and befuddle his opponents — in which case congratulations to him for a successful scheme! On the other hand, it might be exactly what it says on the cover. A walking talking thing in a pinstripe suit who is, quite literally, the death of cities. The embodiment of the end made flesh upon this earth, one of the riders of the urban apocalypse and so on and so forth. It’s just not clear yet.” We put our head on one side, stared straight into his eyes. “Are you going to stick around to help us find out?”
Now it was Kemsley’s turn to tense. “Tell us where and when, and we’ll handle the rest — if you’re not up to it.”
I pointed into Raleigh Court. “In there. Where Nair died. We’re looking for a safe house run by an individual called Boom Boom. The Executive Officer of a nightclub called Voltage who got a little bit scared of a guy in a pinstripe suit and agreed to help him kidnap a kid who liked to visit his club. That’s where the shoes went, by the way. They like clubbing. Pity the owner lacked moral fibre. And a heart. But anyway — somewhere in here, we hope, is the kid Mo. And that would all be fine and grand of itself, except, you may have noticed, this is where Nair got the skin peeled from his flesh. It’s number 53, top floor. Shall we meet you up there?”
“You know,” murmured Oda, “testosterone is one of the many ways in which God tests our natures — women, as well as men.”
“Sorcerer . . .” began Kemsley.
“I swear, I swear, the next person to call me ‘sorcerer’, as if I didn’t have a name and a small intestine, will get a sharpened pencil shoved firmly up their flared nostril.”
There was a slightly taken-aback silence. Then Kemsley said, “Mr Swift.”
“Yes?”
“Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
“Good. As Midnight Mayor . . .”
“You want me to go first?”
“No. I want you to stay as far back as you can.”
“With pleasure.”
They did the assault/SWAT thing. Rifles, corners, kneeling, standing, running, climbing, gestures — fist, two fingers, flap, twiddle — the whole lot.
We tried not to laugh as we trailed along behind. Even Anissina was playing along, pistol in hand. You have to have a lot of training to be a storm trooper, we concluded. It wasn’t just about learning when to duck and when to fire; it was about learning to take yourself seriously as you did it. I looked at Oda in the hope she was appreciating the humour. It was a naive look.
As council estates went, the interior wasn’t so bad. Someone had recently painted the stairs an unoffensive pale blue, and there was a general soft smell that I associated with my gran’s cooking and fat cushions on padded chairs, and the regular shifting of dirt by plastic brooms and warm soapy water. The troopers stormed the stairs; I shuffled along behind. Number 53 was, as promised, on the top floor, a long balcony punctuated by the occasional bike, kitchen windows and wilting geraniums. The Aldermen and co. clattered along to the green door, spread themselves out around it, and at a cry of “go!”, kicked it open with a heavy studded boot, and threw something in there that went snap! There was a burst of bright light and a high buzzing noise. I leant against the edge of the balcony and looked down into the courtyard below, wondering where Mr Fox had gone and if my furry friend was eating enough kebabs. The armoured men counted to three, then burst inside the flat, shouting impressive things like “clear!” or “go go go!” as they did. Oda said, “Gum?”
“You chew gum?”
“No. But I always carry it, to use as barter when visiting prisons.”
“Do you see how I’m not asking?”
“Smart. So, how scared are you?”
Inside I could hear the thumping of many heavy boots, the slamming of many light doors, the rattling of many, probably futile, loaded weapons.
“On a scale of one to ten?”
“If you insist.”
“Where one is ‘so doo-lally-happy I could jump off a cliff and whistle numbers from The Sound of Music on the way down’ and ten is ‘can’t open the window in case the air eats me’ scared?”
“If you feel obliged to use these assessments — then yes.”
“Pretty much up there.”
“Why?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because,” she said carefully, as in the flat lights began to be turned on and orders barked in brisk military voices, “being, as you are, an arrogant spawn of the nether reaches of creation, for something to have frightened a creature so relentlessly self-certain as you, it must be significant. It is in my interest to know about it.”
I smiled sideways at her. We respect honesty, even if we can’t stand its owner. “You’ve never heard of the death of cities.”
“As a concept?”
“As a man.”
“Then no. I never have.”
“It’s a myth.”
“Like the Midnight Mayor?”
“In that sort of region, yes. Just a rumour, a legend. You hear stories. Stuff like . . . when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there was a house right in the middle of the blast, at its very heart, untouched while the rest of the city was levelled. They say that there was a man in the house, who had his face turned towards the sky as the bomb fell and who just smiled, smiled and smiled and didn’t even close his eyes. But then again, you’ve got to ask yourself . . .”
“. . . who survived that close to the bomb to tell?”
“Right. It’s always the problem with these sorts of stories. Or they say that when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there was a man who walked through the flooded streets and laughed and the water could not buffet him, or when they firebombed Dresden there was a guy untouched by the flames, or when the child tripped running into Bethnal Green station during the Blitz, that there was someone who knocked her down and climbed over the bodies piled up in the stairway. Myths. That’s all. Rumours and myths. And just in case these things aren’t scary enough on their lonesome, they just had to go and give this smiling, laughing, burning man a name, and call him the death of cities. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of it. And yes, of course I’m scared. Just in case.”
She looked, for a moment, like she was going to say something else. Then Kemsley was there, and his face did not glow with happiness.
“There’s nothing in the flat.”
I shrugged. “Makes a kind of sense.”
“If you thought . . .”
&nbs
p; “I thought. I thought that Boom Boom probably wasn’t going to lie to me, what with me having my hand in his chest cavity at the time. Then I thought Nair came here; Nair was killed. It makes sense that whoever — whatever — killed him would only do so if Nair was getting close to something important. It makes even more sense to have moved that something to somewhere less likely to be found. Sorry. I just can’t pretend I’m surprised.”
“Then why are we here?” he growled.
“Think how stupid you’d feel if we’d known about this place and just ignored it,” I said, beaming as sweetly as we could in the face of his dentistry. “Let’s have a gander, yes?”
Kemsley was right.
The place was empty.
Surgically empty. You could have removed cataracts in the kitchen; you could have skated across the bathroom floor. It smelt of bleach, a stomach-clenching, eye-watering smell. No furniture, no curtains, no pictures, no nothing to indicate any sort of life. Even the carpets had been bleached a faded grey-white, even the pipes. An estate agent would have called it “full of promise”, and that’s all it was, four rooms of great potential and not much else, being walked over by size-twelve assault boots.
Kemsley said, “Nothing. See? This hasn’t helped at all.”
“Mo was here,” I replied firmly.
“How’d you know that?”
“The Executive Officer didn’t lie to us.”
“Sure. Because no one would.”
“Because we had our fingers closed around his heart,” we replied. I felt cold, hearing us speak so flatly of these things. “Because when a place is cleaned this thoroughly, it’s because there is something to hide.”
“Great. Good job the hiders, I think it’s pretty well hid, don’t you?”
I looked around.
He was right. It made our chest ache to think of it. Kemsley was right. There was nothing here.
Then Oda said: “There’s a CCTV camera in the entrance hall. So much for mystical stuff.”
I could have kissed her.
“A CCTV camera,” I repeated firmly, trying to hide our sudden thrill. “And only one way in and out, yes?”
“I think so.”
I beamed at Kemsley. All praise the poor fire regulations of North Kilburn. “We can use CCTV,” I said. “There’s . . . what? At least a dozen cameras around this estate alone, probably more in all the high streets. You lot seem like escapees from an American spy thriller, right? If they moved him, we can track it.”
“Assumptions . . .” began Kemsley.
“Not really,” retorted Anissina. “Not at all. We know Nair came here, and Nair was killed. We know that the shoes of this boy were regarded by Nair as important; we know they led us to Voltage, we know that Voltage led us here. We know that this room was sometime full and is now recently empty. We know that these things are connected. You’re wrong, Kemsley. If the boy was here, we must find him, and we can.”
We fought down the desire to say something triumphant, to stick our tongue out at Kemsley and hug Anissina round the middle, to hop on the spot and gloat that despite everything, despite our fear of oh God of too many things, we were right. This was right.
Then a voice from the door said, “There’s a guy in the courtyard.” Kemsley ignored it, turning to Anissina, face red, clearly trying to find something to say that wasn’t the grown-up equivalent of a farting sound, trying to be rational in the face of his own crippling irrationalities. We turned to the man who’d spoken. A trooper, an escapee from another world, all gun and big boot and only the slightest whiff, the merest tracery suggestion that on the inside of his bulletproof vest, someone had stamped a set of defensive wards. We walked slowly towards him, his face turned down across the balcony edge into the courtyard below. I could feel Oda watching me; the Aldermen busy in their bickering. The man on the door had a face like a swollen mushroom, from which peered a pair of sharp, smart eyes. I said, “What guy?”
He nodded down at the courtyard. “That guy.”
I shuffled to the balcony and looked down.
He stood in the middle of the courtyard, black shoes planted firmly on the cracked paving stones. His hair was dark brown, not quite black but doing its best, sliced back thin over his almost perfectly spherical skull. His suit was black, his hands were buried in his trouser pockets, buttoned jacket swept back behind his wrists, as casual as a primrose in spring. His skin was that special kind of pale that has been tanned by neon strip lighting. His smile was polite, expectant. His eyes were fixed on us.
We jerked back instinctively. Our heart, without asking permission, started doing the conga down our intestines, our intestines tried to throttle our stomach, our stomach tried to crawl up our throat. I looked at the guy with the gun; he looked at me and said, “Sir?”
“We have to get out,” we whispered. “We have to get out now.”
“Sir,” he muttered, and he was too well trained to pronounce fear, but it was there, we could smell it, “there’s more.”
We crawled like a child to the edge of the balcony, peeked over the edge. There was more. A kid in a hoodie had joined the man in the pinstripe suit, standing behind, bobbing to an unheard beat. I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t think there was going to be a face to see.
“We have to get out,” we whimpered. “We have to go!”
Oda had noticed. “Sorcerer?”
“He’s here. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s . . .”
She leant over the balcony. “Who, him?”
“Him!” She was reaching for her gun. “Don’t shoot!”
“Why not? He’s just a guy, and even sorcerers can’t stop . . .”
“Bullets don’t stop spectres.”
“The kids in the hoods?”
“Spectres, yes! You’ll just make holes in them.”
“All right. So how do I kill them?”
“Beer and cigarettes.”
“If this is one . . .”
“Beer and cigarettes! Get down!”
We dragged her down from where she was leaning over the balcony behind the protection of the yellow brick wall. She looked at us in surprise. “Are you really that scared?”
“Really, honestly and entirely. From the bottom of our being, yes.”
“But he’s just . . .”
“No just.”
By now, everyone was paying attention. Kemsley strode forwards, looked at us in contempt, peered over the balcony, turned to the man with the mushroom face and said, “What is this now?”
“Possible hostile down below, sir,” replied the soldier briskly.
“It’s just a man in a suit, and a couple of kids.”
“See the kids’ faces?” we snarled.
“Well, no . . .”
“Spectres!”
“And you propose what? Cowering behind a brick wall until he goes away?”
“It’s a sensible start.”
“Is this . . . did this man below kill Nair?”
“He peeled the skin from his flesh.”
“Then that is Mr Pinner?”
“I’d guess so.”
“Then this is it! This is our chance to end it, right here!”
“Didn’t you pay attention to the part where he peeled skin?”
“Someone has to do something.”
“Someone doesn’t know what that something is!”
“And you do?”
“No!”
“I don’t have the patience for this game . . .”
“Kemsley, if he could kill Nair without touching him, think what he’ll do to you.”
“Sir?”
It was the note of urgency, that ever so slightly unprofessional rise at the end of the trooper’s words, that brought all attention to him. He nodded down at the courtyard and said, “He’s gone, sir.”
We all peered over the edge of the balcony.
There was no one there.
“Well,” exclaimed Kemsley brightly. “Not so much trouble.”
>
“So much worse,” we whimpered. “So much worse.”
“Pull yourself together! My God, you’re supposed to lead us! Sorcerer, angel, Mayor, get your arse in gear, Swift!”
I climbed to my feet, leant against the balcony wall, looked, looked again, saw nothing, staggered back, pressed our back into the wall behind us, safe and solid and reassuring. I turned to Anissina and said, “Call 999.”
“You want me to bring the emergency services?”
“Yes, fire, ambulance, police and the Good Samaritans too, please. Do it! You —” I turned to Kemsley. “Find out if this place has a big and loud fire alarm. Then start it. You —” I looked at the trooper with the mushroom face. “I don’t suppose you know anything about magic?”
The end of his nose twitched as he thought about it. “Yes, sir,” he conceded. “But to tell the truth, there’s nothing a magician can do that a shotgun won’t do better.”
“Don’t hold on to that thought,” I sighed. “Get back inside the flat. Watch windows and doors. And walls, for that matter — you never know where they’ll decide to come in. You —” I stared at Oda. “You know, I have no idea what it is you do to stay alive, but I guess you must do it well, so do that.”
“Leadership skills,” she retorted. “You can look them up another time.”
We were going to say something rude, but nothing seemed to come to mind. We hustled back into the flat, a tumble of black coat, armoured soldier, armed fanatic and sorcerer in “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt. What would Jesus do, we wondered? He seemed to have an occasional temper.
The last man in was Kemsley. He closed the door behind us, pulled the chain across, as if that would make a great deal of difference, and hustled us all into the largest room of the flat, at the end of the hall. The troopers took up various armed-to-the-teeth positions, and I found myself shuffled to the back wall. The street was behind us, neon yellow light sifting through the curtainless glass, the occasional distant swish of traffic. I could hear Anissina on the phone, whispering quietly and urgently.