The Minority Council (30 page)

Penny said, “You sure this is a good idea?”

“Sure I am,” I lied. “It’d be bad form to shoot me in front of tourists. There’d be letters.”

“He always thinks someone’s gonna shoot him,” Penny told Nabeela. Turning to me, she added, “Same old same, isn’t it? Penny, come save me from monsters, Penny, I’m being hunted by mafia dudes and smell of curry, Penny, there’s a big bad wolf and I left my magic cape at home…”

“I’m going now,” I sighed, “since it seems I can’t count on any proactive intervention here. Just remember how bad you’ll feel if I do get shot.”

“Come on, Nabeela,” muttered Penny as I crossed the road. “Let’s go find somewhere to keep an eye on Matthew, and get a
really expensive
cup of fucking coffee, yeah? Because we’re keeping the receipts.”

A few paces later, and the crowds of Covent Garden had swallowed them up.

Covent Garden.

Once a place where you could indeed find all the produce of an English garden, from courgettes not yet turned purple-black to cabbages with only half their leaves eaten by caterpillars. In recent years this sometime wholesale flower-market and traditional den of iniquity had been transformed into a tourist-trap paradise. Within its pillared arcades and vaulted glass-and-iron roof you could buy hand-made soap for only £15 a bar, hand-painted pictures of famous landmarks at only £25 unframed, or silver jewellery sold by an Irishman who delighted in
explaining why this Celtic knot, yours for only £150, embodied in it all things rich and ancient about the Gaelic way of life. The neighbouring market, only a few pennies less expensive, dealt in a wider range of goods, from leather jackets to paper lanterns, packs of custom cards to hot dogs swimming in grease. And everywhere you went in Covent Garden, there was entertainment. From acrobats juggling on stilts, to string quartets playing in the vaults beneath the market, to the sheng player by the Royal Opera House re-creating the songs of ancient China, every other step brought you to a different kind of music or the spontaneous applause of a crowd.

The crowds were why I’d named this as a meeting place, along with its many exits into the busiest part of the city. Another reason was its large number of vantage points. From the Royal Opera House bar, to the balconies of restaurants and coffee shops within the roof of the market, there were several places where an observer might see without being observed.

I went up into one such restaurant, bought myself a large pot of coffee and a small, too-sweet biscuit for a price that sent shivers down my spine, and waited.

They were late, and they came separately.

Five Aldermen, watching each other’s back. Only one of them, a man I guessed to be B. Fadhil, was wearing the full Alderman’s black: long coat fastened too tight around the neck, buttons all the way down its front, black hat. He positioned himself beneath a columned arcade, in front of a shop inviting children everywhere to come and find their perfect teddy bear.

A blonde woman with short hair and a grey suit sat with a newspaper in front of the glassy entrance to the
London Transport Museum, trying her very best to look innocuous, and failing—Lucy Holta, at a guess.

I recognised Tommy Kwan, arriving with another woman who I guessed must be Rumina Rathnayake; the two of them headed beneath my balcony, into the market itself. Finally Cecil Caughey, whose face I knew, stepped out of a cab on the corner by the Royal Opera House, briefcase in hand, wearing a black suit, blue shirt and silver tie, and as assured as a royal peacock at a noble wedding. He strutted towards the meeting place I’d assigned: a coffee shop with outdoor tables that would mostly be empty at this time of year. It faced a shop whose windows featured liquid chocolate being freshly dipped with strawberries, cherries, raspberries, before being packaged in little gold boxes as the ultimate indulgent gift.

Caughey didn’t bother to order coffee, didn’t bother to open his briefcase or make any show of reading a newspaper, but sat upright, one leg crossed over the other, a headmaster waiting for a naughty pupil.

We felt a stirring of personal dislike amid the generality of our rage.

Even in watching each other’s back, they were ignoring our request.

A waitress approached Caughey; he dismissed her with a curt shake of his head. Looking flustered, she went back inside.

A voice said, “More coffee?”

I barely glanced round, opened my mouth to say no, and he was there, right beside me, one hand resting on the back of a chair. His eyes had followed mine down to where Caughey sat. Templeman, in a charcoal-grey suit and shirt with no tie, smiled his thin smile at my look of recognition.

He slipped into a chair, asked a passing waiter for coffee and a menu, and went back to his study of Caughey in the café below.

“A pompous individual,” he remarked. “When your message came to us via Ms Shiring, Caughey insisted that he should be the one to talk to you alone, as he, and only he, would make you see sense. I believe he referred to you as ‘that silly little man,’ at which point, I must admit, my limited respect for Cecil declined to an absolute low.”

His eyes narrowed and looked up at mine so suddenly, I nearly pulled back. A paper-thin smile curled in his pale face. “I naturally considered it unlikely that you would be at the meeting place specified by Ms Shiring, and am only a little ashamed that I declined to inform Cecil of this fact.”

The waiter returned, laying out steaming coffee in a stainless-steel mug, a new bowl of sugar, jug of milk and undersized coffee cup, as well as a couple of menus. Templeman said, “Have you eaten? I think, considering the circumstances, it should be my treat.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Eggs Benedict, two toast, and some fresh fruit if you have it, please,” murmured Templeman at the waiter, who nodded and scurried away. “Well,” he said, pouring coffee before leaning back in his chair. “You’ve found us.”

“I don’t fully understand what it is I’ve found.”

His eyebrows arched like cathedral doors. “Really? As you’ve come this far I suppose it will all come out anyway. May I ask how much you do know? Not in that I wish to curtail your knowledge, but so that I don’t have to retread old ground in our discussion.”

I forced myself to meet Templeman’s gaze. “I know
about the Neighbourhood Eye. I know it’s run by you and your colleagues. I know that the night Callum’s friend was killed…”

“Callum?”

“A kid in Westbourne Park.”

“You are referring to the incident, some weeks ago, in which four youths were… incapacitated… and a fifth died?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, I see. I am very sorry for that incident; I was not aware you were investigating it. May I ask how it came to your attention?”

“Sure, but you’re not getting an answer any time soon.”

He smiled again. The spoon did a single slow circle in his coffee, chinked once more against the side of the cup, and was laid to one side. “Of course,” he said. “I do understand. Please, continue.”

“I know that when that kid died, a local resident of Westbourne Park called the Neighbourhood Eye, not the police. They hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing illegal, so the police wouldn’t have intervened, but she… she…” I hesitated, trying to find words that wouldn’t become a shout, “… she didn’t like their attitude. She called the Neighbourhood Eye, they called you, and you sent a monster to deal with it. How am I doing?”

“In terms of broad facts, so far you are correct. But what of the implications?”

“Coming to that,” I snapped. “The insect is your tool, your creation. I don’t yet know how you control it or what its exact purpose is. But from what I’ve seen, it targets… shall we call them cases of antisocial behaviour? A woman phones up and says ‘There are these kids causing
trouble’ and a guy calls up and says ‘Hey, there’s these boys drinking and making lots of noise and I think they could be a problem’ and you… what? You send in the creature to kill them?”

“Not kill, no,” corrected Templeman sharply. “It was never intended to kill. That was an unfortunate one-off, an incident which, I believe, will not and cannot be repeated.”

“What, then?”

“I believe the term was… pacify.”

“Isn’t that what the Americans said about the Iraq War?”

“Only once they’d started to lose it,” he replied. “No, the creature—the culicidae, we call it—was created to fill a very specific need. This world we inhabit—the secret world, if you will, a place of magicians—moves through the material world but is not of it. We expect our bins to be emptied and the buses to run on time, but through magic we contribute nothing to the actual functioning of society. The Aldermen have been receiving pleas for hundreds of years to assist in mundane affairs, and recently, what with the threats that have been so successfully dispelled from our city—the Tower, the death of cities, Blackout and the Neon Court—a few of us judged that the time was right to take a more active interest in how our abilities might help the community at large.”

“So you created this ‘culicidae’? What kind of rubbish name is that?”

“Latin,” he replied, sipping from his undersized cup. “I personally think it’s rather pretentious, but Caughey said it gave the creature a fine sense of learning and traditionalism. It was manufactured on a purely trial basis. The purpose of the exercise was to determine whether we could
create a device which would target a very specific problem group within our society. You said yourself, the police only intervene once a crime has already happened. By creating the Neighbourhood Eye to report crimes before they could happen, and the culicidae to… neutralise, shall we say, the perpetrators, we hoped to remove deviant members of our society before they had a chance to harm others.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it, and I could scarcely stop. Templeman waited, the smile fading.

“Can you hear yourself?” I blurted. “Pacify, neutralise ‘deviant members of our society’? Fifty years ago you’d be hunting homosexuals; a century back, you’d be going after suffragettes!”

“I think you will find that homosexuals and suffragettes—well,
suffragists
at least—have been of no danger to society. The youths to whom the culicidae is tuned have no qualms about hurting others. They have no code of honour, no future except one of crime and punishment. The purpose of the culicidae was not to harm them but, rather, to effect a cure.”

The calmer he sounded, the more the horror seeped into my voice. “Cure them? Cure them of what? Of youth, of bad dress sense, of drinking, of drugs, of smoking, of sitting on street corners, of trying to pull girls, of spotty skin and swearing? Cure them of
what
?”

“Of… too much of everything, I suppose,” replied Templeman. “The culicidae was not designed to hurt them. It is a finely tuned creation, meant to draw from the subjects certain aspects of their nature which cause distress to others, as in, for example, their rage, fury, resentment, fears. So you see,” he concluded, his voice calm and level, “our intentions were thoroughly utilitarian.”

I was breathing fast with anger and disbelief. “Well your intentions suck,” I exclaimed. “Your intentions aren’t just on the stairway to hell, they’re in the lift shaft and greasing the cogs of the fucking elevator!”

“Intentions are…”

“It’s killed!”

I’d shouted loud enough for heads to turn at tables nearby. Templeman studied his napkin, waiting for me to calm. I repeated softly, “It’s killed. And I don’t know if you’ve bothered to look at your reformed teenagers any time soon, but the one I met wasn’t just stripped of rage. He’d lost everything. Head, heart, soul. He was an empty shell sat on the edge of a bed and you… no intentions can justify this.”

He paused, considering his words. “I admit that, as the situation currently stands, the culicidae is not ideal. It is, after all, a work in progress. But it prevents harm to the majority—doesn’t merely punish, but prevents. Tell me what could be more important than that.”

“I dunno,” I said. “Due process? Rule of law? Innocence until proven guilty? How about the last thousand years of thinking about this shit and coming up, at the end of the day, with a big banner that says ‘Don’t go screwing around without the consent of your fucking peers’? Besides!”—he was on the edge of a rebuttal, and we hadn’t the time—“I couldn’t give a flying monkey’s about your intent. I called the Neighbourhood Eye last night—last bloody night—and reported a bunch of kids who I said
might
cause trouble, who
might
be a pain. And you, even knowing that your stupid bloody stupid sodding science project had
killed
, sent it after us. Not just after a bunch of spectres I’d summoned and dressed up as kids, but after
me
.”

A twitch of doubt creased Templeman’s otherwise untroubled brow. “After… you? No, it was not supposed to pursue you. If I’d been aware, in fact, that you were the one making the call, I would never have permitted its dispatch.”

“It has claws and it bloody used them!” I snarled. “We tried to fucking bind that bloody stupid monster of yours, we did bloody bind it and it tore through the spell like tissue paper! It came after me, Penny and Nabeela with long claws and a really big mouth and it wasn’t sodding stopping for anything. What kind of creature of bloody law and order doesn’t bloody stop for the Midnight fucking Mayor!”

I was shouting again. A few of the café’s more civilised customers muttered disapprovingly. Templeman let me breathe hard for a while, then murmured, “The culicidae is not designed to pursue people like you.”