The Minority Council (41 page)

She’d spent too long in the bathroom when getting up, and locked the door behind her.

On the wall above her bed, someone with a sense of the Gothic had framed a dark green panel of fake marble, on which was written in small chrome letters:

I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner,
as all my fathers were.

O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength,
before I go hence, and be no more seen.

“My aunt gave it to me,” she’d explained. “She says it doesn’t matter if you believe in God or magic or fairies or pixie dust. A good witch finds magic from the things they are inside, not the stuff around them. And that what they are inside is made by the stuff around them. My aunt said things like that.”

On the bridge, saying goodbye, she’d asked us what we were doing tomorrow night, and we hadn’t exactly lied, but neither had we said the right thing.

Waking, we thought we were with Meera, and we were not.

The city had changed.

It took us a while to place it, but now we looked, there it was.

The smell of the river; the silver lights of cloud-skimmed towers ahead; the flashing red beacon above Canary Wharf. Car parked by water, low black bollard and low iron chain, overhead gantry of the Docklands
Light Railway; the rattle of steel rigging against the masts of nearby yachts.

Herons Quay, at a guess, looking north towards the money.

I twitched, and my body reported that twitching was bad. A crick in my neck might have been from time spent in a car boot, as well as pins and needles in my right foot. There was metal on my wrists, done up just tight enough to restrict blood flow. I was propped upright against the side of a car; no, against Templeman’s car. By the cold seeping through my bones, I’d been there a while, even though it was still night.

A footstep beside me; to our shame, I jerked away.

Templeman didn’t so much sit as fold paper-tight into a crouch next to me.

There was a needle in his hand.

The substance inside this one was cloudy yellow, the sickly shade of fairy dust.

We didn’t speak, found we had no words.

He said, “The fairy godmother knows you’re here. His men are on the way, and will collect you in a matter of minutes. In the meantime, I need you to listen.”

As he spoke, he leant over and started rolling up my left sleeve. I tried to pull away but his fingers dug deep enough to make us gasp; there was a metallic strength to them, a reminder of his Alderman’s power. The needle pierced our skin and something hot and thick started burrowing under it. I pushed our head back against the car, forcing us to stay calm and breathe slow. When it was done, Templeman rolled the sleeve back down to hide the mark, and carefully dropped the used needle into a plastic bag.

“I have told the fairy godmother I am delivering you to him in exchange for his silence. I have informed him that you are tranquilised and powerless; neither of these statements is entirely true. He believes that I am a fairy, addicted to the dust, and has been blackmailing me for some time to this effect. I am not, but, as you have correctly surmised, I have been buying it from him for some time in order to further my studies. It was only a matter of time before he worked this out, and therefore his removal has become necessary. The substance you have just been injected with,” he folded the bag round and round the needle inside it, dropping the bundle into his coat pocket, “is an experimental drug derived from my studies. Its effects on humans have been… mixed… but then, Matthew, you aren’t human any more, are you?”

A laugh croaked at the back of my throat. I couldn’t look at him, but stared out across the water, trying to breathe in river smell, river magic, river strength. Everything was muddy, a long way off, his voice the only constant.

“You will feel its effects in the next fifteen to twenty minutes. Then you should be inside the dusthouse. By now,” he glanced at his watch, “your two friends will be dead. The fairy godmother will have killed them. His men will be watching you closely, despite my assurances that you are tamed; they will attempt to extract your blood, and bind and compel you. Even now the greed of the fairy godmother may overwhelm his good judgement—good judgement will have you killed, greed will have them drain your blood first. The blood of the blue electric angels will fetch a notable price, even if he has to sell it on eBay.

“The injection I’ve given you should temporarily allow
you to overcome any reasonable opposition inside the dusthouse but, as I said, it is hard to know exactly how the drug will work on your physiology. Nevertheless, even if it does not act to full potency, I know what the blue electric angels are capable of, what the Midnight Mayor can be. You may not survive the experience, Matthew, but this is going to be the only chance to take revenge for the death of your friends. Do you understand me?”

I didn’t answer. He put his hand under my chin, and pushed my face up to look into his eyes. “Matthew,” he repeated, “whatever you think of me and what I have done, the fairy godmother has killed them. He has killed your social worker friend and he has killed Penny. I want the fairy godmother dead, so do you. This is the only way to achieve it. Do you understand?”

I felt too sick to nod or speak. He drew his hand back, unconsciously wiping it on his sleeve. “I had hoped we could avoid this,” he said, straightening up. “I had hoped that we could find a better way.” His eyes swerved towards the street we’d come down, a not-quite-cobbled road of few cars, between waterways. I heard an engine, off in the dark where there should have been none, sound muffled by buildings, carried by water.

“Whatever you think of me,” he murmured, eyes fixed on the road, “remember—the fairy godmother has killed your friends. Pursue me next, if you must, but kill him first.”

A car rounded the corner, crawling past the darkened purple lights of an expensive Indian restaurant and the locked front door of a private-members’ gym. It was a blue people carrier, the outlines of heads barely visible against the glow of the night. Templeman pulled me up by
the armpit. The injection site on our arm now registered a dull burning; there was mud in our mind.

The car stopped some thirty yards away, far enough to be safe, close enough to see. Three doors opened, three men got out. From the front passenger seat came Hugo, gleaming skin and perfect dress, a man for whom pyjamas were mere theoretical notions for the weak. A fourth man stayed behind the driving wheel, the engine still ticking over. Hugo scanned his surroundings: first Templeman, then me, then everything else, head turning upwards and round to look for shadows in windows, cars parked where there should be none, disturbances in the gentle slap of the water against the quays. All to his satisfaction; his gaze returned to me, then darted to Templeman.

“Mr Templeman,” he said, his voice carrying without seeming to be raised. “It has been some months since we saw you last.”

Somewhere through the sickly heat prickling the edge of our brain, we realised that Templeman was scared of Hugo. His hands gripped the top of my arm, pulling me forward with him. I staggered, bending, trying to remember which foot did what and in what order.

“You wanted Swift,” he replied, guiding me towards Hugo. I found I couldn’t look; the stones of the street were fascinating to me. “Here he is.”

Halfway between his car and theirs, Templeman stopped. Hugo hadn’t moved, hands loose and ready by his side. “The fairy godmother appreciates the token,” he said. “And wishes to convey his grateful thanks. May I enquire how you managed to convince the Midnight Mayor to be so cooperative?”

Templeman tightened his grasp of my arm, a gesture of the hand to hide the look on his face. Then his whole body swung round, so suddenly I nearly lost my footing again. His fist came with it, a silvery coating on his white knuckles, and he landed a punch, not hard, but it didn’t need to be, squarely on our cracked ribs.

We swallowed a scream and kept on swallowing, so hard and deep we thought we were going to suffocate with the effort of it. Somehow the world had gone from upright to lying down, the brain too overwhelmed to recall the journey; I lay on the ground and the ground was good and to breathe was to die, and not to breathe was to die and so I twitched and gagged and

and Templeman was saying a very long way off, “That’s how.”

Footsteps moved, beyond the edge of our sight. Hands caught us by the arms and pulled us back up; they were dragging us towards the car.

A wall of pain had inserted itself between brain and body.

I heard Templeman say, “All debts forgiven?”

“It is good business, to keep a promise,” replied Hugo’s voice. Someone opened the back passenger seat of the car, someone else pushed me in, hand at the back of my head like a copper, avoiding another knock. The door slammed shut, I smelt the thick dry smell of all clean cars everywhere, foam and grey fabric, mixed with a hint of diesel. The driver watched me in the mirror, someone else got in beside me and pushed my head down, keeping their hand
on the back of my neck. I heard doors slam, felt the seat in front of me move. Hugo sitting. Hugo saying, “All right then. Let’s go.”

Second Interlude: I Can’t Save Ourself

 

In which the fairy godmother explains his business policy.

We felt something… | I wasn’t feeling so good.

… that we hadn’t felt before.

The journey wasn’t far, barely worth the petrol it spent. Quicker to walk, once you’d taken into account the faffing with one-way systems and time spent at the traffic lights.

The Isle of Dogs.

Once a place of industrial dockyards and quays, then a place of decline, rotten council estates and empty wharves; now reborn as an almost-island of shimmering apartment blocks, expensive bars, high-end supermarkets, and sweeps of grass over formerly abandoned sites. In a word, money. The place had beauty, in its way, clean and crisp, in a land where litter did not blow. But it was a beauty of straight lines, of steel, glass and privilege; and somehow, for all its fluorescent twinkling glory, it was a desert place, where the magic was

slithering silver smooth | of illusions and glamours

rather than the raw fire burning elsewhere beneath the streets of London.

A yellow machine accepted the swipe of a wordless
white card from Hugo’s fingers. A curved jaw of steel slid away down in front of the car, a light turned from red to green, and we descended into an underground car park which, in keeping with the spirit of the Isle, did not smell of piss, and where the lights did not flicker, but whose shadows round the walls were nonetheless thick and deep.

It took two of them to help me, one on either side. There was a lift, a smooth thing of mirrors tinted beige, with buttons that lit up LED blue when you touched them. From a tiny speaker hidden in the reflective ceiling, someone slaughtered Sinatra on an electric keyboard. I expected to go to the top, but we rode only as far as the fourth floor. There, every light fitting embedded in the wall and every tweak of blue-black pattern on the carpet, every strip of white wallpaper and every polished oak door, was the same. It was the hour for all good men to be asleep, but as we neared the end of the corridor I could hear the creaking of pipes in the wall, and the muffled beat of bass music coming up through the floor.

A door like any other, except this one was guarded by a man in the same immaculate black suit that Hugo wore, who had about him the thick treacle stench of enchantment. He nodded, just once, as Hugo approached, and swiped a badge across a monitor. A click and a snap, and the door opened to a wave of warmth and sound, tinted with the smell of chlorine.

Someone was having a party.

Not a boisterous party, not a party of disco beats and roaring crowds.

This was the party of the casually indulged, of the kind of crowd who’d long ago realised that only the medium-
rich flaunted their wealth on great spectacle, while the mega-rich let everyone else work it out for themselves. I half raised my head and saw

men in white shirts with the buttons undone, women, paid to be in bikinis and doing their jobs very well, chatting professionally on long green sofas and sipping champagne,

[idle curiosity turned to disdain in the glances of the people assembled, mortals thinking no further than their own sensory delight]

we see it all | something happening to me

The sound of jazz played by a live four-piece band. It was a place where clearly the arrival of a handcuffed beaten stranger in the night was considered a brief distraction rather than a topic of debate. Several rooms had been knocked together into one long space behind a curving glass wall two storeys high, which led out onto festoon-lit balconies where there was relative quiet for the sharing of intimate secrets. The overall theme was white and cream: cream floors and white sofas, with the odd splash of colour from the skimpy clothes of the hostesses filling out the space. Low glass-topped tables bore champagne in ice buckets and nibbles on burnished plates; for the true punter, there were also boxes of enamelled jade and silver from which yellow-eyed revellers could pinch up dust, snorting it like snuff before reclining to smile and dream fairy-dust dreams. More than a few eyes in this room were stained liver-yellow from addiction, but not, I noticed, the men in black suits, standing round the walls with hands behind their back.