The Minority Council (14 page)

Later, survivors would say that there wasn’t a warning: no rumble, no creak, no silence before the storm. There was simply the crack that one second wasn’t, and the next second was: a tear in the ground beneath their feet, a centimetre wide, into which the whole building seemed to lean like stones on a sagging sheet of plastic. It ran in a straight line, tracking the direction of the sewer, for Victorian engineers didn’t believe in wiggling. They say there was a moment before it broke, a second in which the whole warehouse seemed to hang there, the two lips of either side of the line pressing against each other, like the keystone in a bridge holding it apart. Then it snapped, simply, cleanly, briskly; the crack stretched out and the floor stretched in, the crack became a hole, a stream, a river, a chasm slashing through the valley-caved floor, and as the floor went the walls went and as the walls went the ceiling went and the weight of the ceiling crashing onto the floor made the floor go the faster and spread the effect out to the furthest corner of the wall and they say that the metal staircases screamed like living things as the bolts they were strapped to sheared away from tumbling brick and the weight of slate smashing into the thin black railings caused them to buckle into obscene dented grins and they say that the air was yellow and boiled so thick that you could swim on it, having no floor on which to stand instead.

That’s what they say, the ones who lived.

This is what we found on the surface, crawling out from the manhole onto the damp pavement:

Sirens in the night, coming from all directions to the scene of what was now a major incident.

Rattle of a helicopter overhead, diverted from its night-time course to this new adventure.

Car alarms wailing, lights coming on, doors opening as the residents of Soho and those who worked the graveyard hours poked their heads outside to see what the commotion was about.

Fine white mortar dust in the air, tinged with something else.

Black smoke in the air too, and the sound of office alarms going off, the flash of blue and white lights on security systems all around.

Templeman had the engine running on the car and was sat in the driving seat, head tilted calmly back against the rest, one hand on the wheel, the other crooked into the curve of the window, elbow-first.

Pigeons spinning silently overhead.

Street lights snicker-snacking erratically, power not sure if it was coming or going.

Smell of an open sewer.

And where the dusthouse had been, not a hundred yards away, there were now a lot of police cars, a large number of people shouting, a not insignificant percentage of whom were wearing handcuffs, and a shattered hole in the earth.

Magicians are not security experts. They only ever bother to ward doors and windows, and tell themselves that will be enough.

I got into the passenger seat of Templeman’s car and said, “Sorry about the smell.”

We were pulling out and heading away even before the door had slammed shut with the heavy sound of reinforced metal.

“Don’t worry about it,” he replied. “It’s a company car.”

A police car screamed by the other way as we headed
south, towards Shaftesbury Avenue and the freedom of wide empty streets. As we turned out onto Cambridge Circus, the bright lights of theatreland on one side, the dimmer lights of commerce on the other, he said, “Are you pleased with how it went?”

We considered the question.

“It’s a start.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said at length. “Were you close?”

“We barely knew her. But I… we… I didn’t… no. No, we weren’t close.”

“The fairy godmother will know what you did,” he added.

“We know.”

“The other Aldermen will not approve.”

“Wow, that’s new.”

“Do you… have a place to go? Someone you can stay with?”

“No.”

“A friend…?”

“No.”

We drove on in silence. Somewhere the stationmasters of London were getting up, opening the barriers for the first early morning train. Night buses were returning to their depots and daytime buses were being fuelled for the morning run. Sunrise wouldn’t happen for a while, but the city had long since stopped caring too much about the cycles of night and day.

Templeman asked, “What do you want to do now?”

We knew what to answer. “We’re going to destroy the dusthouses,” we replied. “All of them. Everywhere.”

Templeman knew a hotel.

It was tucked into a new development of glass and yellow brick, near St Paul’s Cathedral. The staff knew him, and his credit card, and they knew not to ask too many questions. They even avoided looking appalled at my smell, though the receptionist’s eyes watered.

The theme of the hotel was purple leather inclining to black, with polished copper fittings and low orange lighting. In that nothing in it was made of plywood, it had class; but it made tiring work of being cool.

Templeman gave me the key to my room, and a plastic bag containing lemon shampoo and antibacterial soap.

He said, “Only you and I know you’re here.”

We said, “We won’t hide.”

I added, “Thank you,” as he left.

Then we washed.

First we washed away the stench of the sewer, and rubbed anti-bacterial soap into every inch of our skin until it burnt with septic heat. Then we washed ourself in lemon soap, rubbing it into our hair, our eyebrows, the gaps between our toes and; when we’d done that, we scrubbed again and thought of dust, dust under our nails, and for the
first time since we had left the dusthouse and slid through the sewers of Soho, we were sick.

There was nothing in our stomach to throw up anyway, so we slid onto our hands and knees in the shower and threw up clear white acid flecked with foam.

Then we sat on the shower floor and let the antibacterial heat burn through us. When we began to grow light-headed with heat and fatigue and weakness, we got out, brushed our teeth twice, staggered into the small, overheated bedroom, put a ward on the door and then, after a moment’s consideration, another onto the floor, lay down on the bed with the light still burning, and failed to sleep.

It wasn’t sleep, and it wasn’t waking, but the dead time when the brain replays a loop to infinity.

When I finally bothered to turn my head, I saw a clock announcing it was 8.30 a.m. The light coming in through the layers of curtain was thin and grey.

I lay and contemplated our situation.

I had gone to war with the dusthouses.

Not twelve hours before, I hadn’t heard of them, and yet with the tally standing where the tally stood, I was afraid of them. Perhaps in the same way, Prince had been afraid of the Midnight Mayor—blindly, without rationale, and with a certainty that was well founded, if poorly judged.

I wondered if Prince was dead.

I had called the police, though we had hesitated at the act, and perhaps that action had saved some of those inside the dusthouse. The collapse could not have been instant either, but rather we imagined Prince looking down and seeing his end as the cracks spread through the floor. Had he understood then what he had done? Had he understood what it was we had lost?

Maybe not.

At 8.40 there was a knock on my door.

I opened it on the chain.

Someone had left a breakfast tray, and a package of new clothes. There were even some shoes, and the size was right. When had Templeman found the time to check shoes? He’d also gone through my satchel, and stuffed an extra three hundred pounds down the pocket at the back. He was giving me options, should the moment come to run.

The clothes were a pair of charity-shop jeans, a long-sleeved shirt that smelt faintly of mothballs, and a woolly jumper stitched together by someone who knew what all grandmas loved for Christmas. At 9 a.m. on the dot there was a buzzing from my bag, which turned out to be my mobile phone. The number was unknown.

It was him.

“Good morning, Mr Mayor,” he said. “Would you care to join me for a walk?”

The walk was in the Middle Temple.

Anyone with a little knowledge of the city might still be surprised when examining the map of central London to find three large, intricately shaped areas of green close by the tight winding streets of the golden Square Mile. Further exploration will determine that these are not public parks, nor residential squares, nor expensive estates. These are the Inns of Court, a spacious lost world of paved courtyards, wind-tossed antique fountains, and cobbled streets, and of wide enclosed grounds with wrought-iron benches, gravel walks and perfect lawns, open to the public only at exceptional times. No Victorian drama set in London is ever filmed without entering the Inns’ bewildering byways; nor can every tourist enter on a first attempt,
thwarted as they are by high gates and furtive entranceways, unannounced to all but the obstinately curious, the legally qualified and the criminally accused. This is barrister land, where every other sharp suit is complemented with a wig, a gown and parcels of papers tied with traditional red ribbon. Here, with a depressing energy for someone who probably hadn’t slept, Templeman was walking his dog.

The dog in question was small and white, and looked as if it yapped a lot. Templeman was still wearing Alderman black, not a crease out of place.

We walked together around a private garden set back from the river. On three sides stood dignified buildings full of lawyers; on the fourth, beyond tall railings and huge plane trees, traffic scurried along the Embankment. The morning was bright and winter crisp; the air, biting.

“In fifteen minutes,” he said, “you will get a call from your PA.”

“God, I’d forgotten I had one of those.”

“She is going to ask you a number of questions. Fourth on her list will be whether you were involved in the destruction of the Soho dusthouse last night. You will tell her you know nothing about it.”

“We will?”

He smiled, apologetically, glancing towards his feet. “I mean to say… it would be advisable if you did so.”

“Why? Aren’t the Aldermen supposed to be on my side?”

“There is no ‘your side’, Mr Mayor. There is the good of the city; and you, for all that you are an important player in this picture, are only a part of the city. There is no loyalty to little men when big pictures are at stake.
When your PA suggests that you come into the office, you will decline in your usual manner. She will at some point advise you that the fairy godmother has got the wrong idea about your involvement, and has even now sent his personal guard to find you. She will suggest you leave the city for a while. I, on the other hand, do not suggest this.”

“But you do suggest something else.”

“You struck a blow against the dusthouses last night.” We turned a corner, for another lap past a tulip tree and a mercilessly pruned wisteria. “Your achievement was not necessarily that you destroyed a dusthouse, but that you had the courage to do so. However, it was only one dusthouse.”

“I’m still waiting for the suggestion.”

Beyond the riverside traffic a tourist boat rode the high tide. A few chilly-looking passengers on the top deck were waving at passersby.

“Do you know how Al Capone was brought to justice?” he asked.

“This is going to be important, right?”

“Tax evasion. For years the authorities tried to bring charges of profiteering, murder, extortion, prostitution, corruption—any and all—against him, and he always slipped their net. But they got him at last, on tax evasion.”

“I hate to break it to you, but accountancy isn’t my strong point.”

“The trade in fairy dust is, like everything else, a business. It has supply and demand, PR and marketing, costs and liabilities. The only sure way of bringing down this business is to make the terms of trading so bad that no one in their right mind will sustain it. Do you know where the dust comes from?”

We turned another corner of the raked gravel path. I said, “No one would take the dust if they knew it meant death.”

“The detail is not strongly advertised.”

“People must know.”

“It is a question of what is certain, and what is not. If you take dust you are certain from the very first taste that you will be euphoric, powerful, do things that most men couldn’t dream of and feel things that most men do not have language to describe. That is known, and understood. The possibility that you may die from the addiction—that is unknown, unproven and, therefore, not understood. What did you see in the dusthouse?”

“I… we did not understand what we saw.”

“You saw, perhaps, your friend die?”

“Yes.”

“And not merely stop-death. Dust-death.”

“Yes.” A thought hit, like a tsunami that passes straight through the thing it strikes without slowing for obstructions. We breathed, “You knew.”

“Knew?”

“Knew what happened in there.”