The Minority Council (6 page)

“Is it just them?” I asked.

“There’s been a few odd things. You hear of kids from problem estates, you know, the ones doing the drugs and the knives and stuff, and then one day they just turn round and go, ‘I shall be good’ and everyone’s like ‘Wahey, they’re better now, they’re going to be model citizens’ and it’s kinda left at that. No one cares if a kid stops being trouble; it’s just one less bit of paperwork. But this is the first time anyone’s died.”

“And none of the kids said anything.”

“Not about the murder.”

“The police are sure it
is
murder?”

Nabeela gave me the look of a domesticated homo
sapiens starting to wonder if it was such a good idea to invite the Neanderthal cousins round for tea. “Nah,” she said. “Because, like, the dead kid totally tore his own skin to bits and completely managed to commit suicide by repeatedly banging his own head against the floor?”

“Anyone hear sounds of struggle?”

“No one heard nothing. Just the kids—they heard a high-pitched sound and that’s it.”

“Any signs of struggle on the four boys?”

“Nothing.”

“And you think it’s going to happen again? I mean, that’s where you’re going with this, isn’t it?”

“What do you think, consulting-man?”

I walked on before answering, taking my thoughts one word at a time. “I think there’s something here worth looking at. I think you’ve got very little to go on at the moment. I think if you took this to the Aldermen they’d tell you to get out, and in the grand scheme of things they’d be right.”

“Just wait a…” she began, but I cut her off.

“I think there still might be something else at work. And if there isn’t, then there’s a serious problem. I think you should probably have hired a private investigator. I think that the grand scheme of things is a cruel place. I think… I think…”

“Yes?”

“I think I’ll try to help you.”

“Good. You going to call your boss now or later?”

Despite myself, we smiled. “The Midnight Mayor’s not all he’s cracked up to be.”

“And you’re Superman on speed?”

“Just don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“I’m a social worker,” she retorted. “If something, anything good happens, it’s a small miracle. If something big happens, it’s Jesus walking on the water.”

We were heading back towards the station. A small chapel, with a poster outside exhorting us to ‘Save the Roof,’ housed a beggar in its doorway. He sat with his knees to his chin in a thick blue sleeping bag, nails cracked and hair grown white. A paper cup for any spare change stood beside him. I paused, and fumbled in my pocket for coins.

Nabeela was saying, “You know, when I said ‘You going to call now or later?’ what I kinda meant was, can you call now?”

“You’re quite… forceful, aren’t you?” I replied.

Her look could have stopped a runaway cement truck. “Call your boss. There’s something out there with claws. And this is your lucky day—someone else gets to deal with it.”

I’d found a small fistful of change, and put it into the beggar’s cup. He looked up, his gummy eyes red around the lids. He said, “Domine dirige nos.”

Lord lead us.

The words were half lost behind his almost toothless mouth, but they were still familiar enough to slurp out like a fart joke at a royal wedding. For a moment our eyes met, then he seemed to lose interest.

“You’re welcome,” I breathed. The ceremonial scars itched where they’d been carved in my hand. I glanced down the road, and thought I saw, under the glow of streetlight, another man—shaggy coat, tangled beard, crooked broken-brimmed hat—before he turned away and vanished.

“What’d he say?” asked Nabeela as we walked away.

“Nothing.”

“Your boss…”

“Where was it?” I demanded. “The murder. Where’d it happen?”

She didn’t answer, but turned off down a street of scruffy terraced houses. A few hundred yards on, and we came to a tarmacked area of open space surrounded by plane trees. A chain-link cage enclosed a small, five-a-side football pitch. Empty beer cans and a drift of crisp packets littered the edge of the cage. But only one small bunch of withered flowers with a note proclaiming ‘For Kenny’ suggested anything out of the ordinary had happened here.

The gate onto the pitch had a thick brass padlock around a heavy rusting chain. But the lock gave easily to persuasion and I let us in.

If there had been blood on the tarmac, it had been well washed off, leaving just the usual stains of spilt drinks and ancient trodden gum. A wall at the far end of the pitch bore a mixture of graffiti good and bad—at the top end of the spectrum, an urban fox in bright orange and black turned its head quizzically out of the bricks to glance at us as it trotted by. At the less arty end were the usual scrawls—
BMN TEAM
or
MD4EVR
or
JESTER
written in flares of blue and green across each other. I walked closer, letting the urban streetlight twist around me, the better to shine on the wall, looking for the tags and enchantments of the magicians who dabbled in paint. The White City Clan were the foremost graffiti artists, but other affiliations in the city—the Union, the Guild, the Tribe—as well as local hedge wizards and witches—used graffiti to mark
their territory and spread their powers. I ran my fingers over the bricks, feeling the mortar scratch beneath my nails, and felt…

Nothing.

A thoroughly disappointing wall.

Nabeela said, “What you doing?”

“Nothing. Nothing there.” I turned away and, as I did, my hand brushed over a bit of paint half scratched out below the picture of a mermaid wearing a sailor’s hat. And there it was, that buzz beneath my fingertips, taste of metal on my tongue. I bent down to see closer.

It was an eye, drawn about the size of a human head, with a vast black pupil and a tiny iris of grey, set in a perfect white oval. There were no eyelids or lashes, no gender or any other colour; but it was still, unmistakably, an eye. And, looking at it, I could not shake the sensation that it was staring right back.

I pulled my fingers away, straightened up sharply and turned my back towards the wall.

“Something?” asked Nabeela.

“Maybe.”

I walked back into the centre of the pitch, careful to keep my back still facing the wall, and squatted down to run my fingers over the tarmac. “The kid who died—how old was he?”

“Seventeen.”

“Claws, you said?”

“Callum said,” she replied. “I just reported.”

“Body buried?”

“Cremated,” she answered with a grimace. “Not so much use.”

“Family’s wishes?”

“I didn’t ask. You born suspicious, or does it come with the turf?”

“I’ve got baggage. Issues with death, you know how it is.”

From where I was, I could see most of the street around. The houses were all pretty much the same, but on the corner, right at the edge of my vision, a little green and white sign lit up the night. A shop, stuck into the corner of a building—and, more than that, a post office. I stood up quickly. “Come on, then.”

Nabeela followed, with the look of one not sure whether to be hopeful or grumble.

The post office was one of those little local institutions that sold as many water pistols and “get well soon” cards as it ever handled mail. Its longest queues were probably pensioners arriving weekly to get their weekly tuppence from the harried woman behind the counter; alone in the night, it already felt threatened. The shutters were down, but a small ATM peeked through a cut-out in the metal. Above the cash dispenser was a CCTV camera.

I needed something to stand on. From the nearest small front garden, I dragged a heavy black bin by its encrusted handles, and kicked it into position below the camera. Supporting myself against the metal shutter, I felt the lid buckle beneath my weight as I shuffled my feet to the very edges of the bin. In this precarious position, I found the CCTV camera was just about reachable.

Nabeela said, “This is going to be impressive, right?”

I shushed her irritably and, leaning gingerly forward, put myself on the same eye-line as the camera. Tightening my fingers around it, I let my eyes drift shut and

flicker in darkness behind eyes rods and cones rods and cones pattern of darkness falling

and then

flickering becomes dancing, dancing becomes darting, black and white static, static in front of the eyes and in the ears and then

and then

and then here it comes run back and back a step further and

street!

The image was bad, a black-and-white world seen through a bad hangover, but it was still recognisable. I could hear the little insides of the machine ticking over like a sleepless dream in the back of my mind, feel electricity running through me in the ridged patterns of current down a circuit board, my arms wired with silicon, my belly a microchip relaying data in and out of me in short sharp bursts, the snick-snack of information banging against the inside of my skull like metal blue-bottles in a jar. The football pitch was scarcely visible, the base of the fence’s nearest corner just peeking into my field of view. I forced the camera to roll back, digging into its memory.

It wasn’t on continuous feed, but took only a few images per minute. Cars jerked in and out of the street, captured for an instant and gone. Women with buggies talked to each other on the way to the nursery and then struggled home with shopping in the seat where babies had been. Boys in baggy trousers swanned into the post office and left with fizzy drinks in hand. The local drunk danced a lurid dance round the nearest lamppost for an hour or so of deluded circling. Cars parked, cars left. The rubbish truck obscured the image of the street for a long moment, then it and a thick pile of black bin bags were gone.

I pushed further back, searching for police cars and
monsters. The image blurred, only the houses a constant, people running in and out of sight, bicycles being chained and unchained from railings. A queue of pensioners grew outside the post office, shrivelled, then grew back. The postmistress opened and shut the place, opened and shut, opened and shut. And suddenly, for just a second:

There!

I felt a lurch in my stomach as I forced it to stop, dragged the image back to that flicker of police cars. There it was, a single police car rolling up into the street, coppers around the chain fence, then another police car, then a police truck, tape across the road, people in dressing gowns and slippers coming out of the front door to see what the fuss was about. I pushed back further, to before the first police car arrived and there they were, five of them, all boys, just like Nabeela had said. They had plastic bags, a beer bottle peeking out of the top of one, another splitting under the square bulk of a six-pack. They were only there for a moment before they had vanished inside the football pitch, out of sight of the camera. Images surged by, growing grainier as darkness fell. A couple of kids kicked a ball together down the street. A man and a woman paused to check their A–Z, bickering under a street light about where to go. An old woman pushing a shopping bag on wheels shot a dirty glance towards the invisible pitch. And then nothing.

And a little more nothing.

A plastic bag blew against the edge of the railings, and flapped there.

A car drove by and moved on.

The postmistress closed and left.

There was a shadow across the camera.

Then the first police car arrived.

Wait.

I pushed back. Forced the film to go slow, one crawling image at a time. When it came, it was almost too brief to see; but there, just for a moment in a flare of static, something half unseen flitted past the camera. No, not past the camera; across the lights. I wasn’t seeing it, whatever
it
was: just a distorted shadow, a thing thrown by the light. I froze the picture, tried to find some detail in its grainy shape. The overstretching shadow of a body, swollen and lumpen? A protrusion that might have been an arm, or a flailing leg? Or possibly, just believably, a claw?

And then it was gone.

I let go of the camera with a shudder and slipped down from the top of the bin. Nabeela too was trying to hide a look of concern. I hadn’t realised how much time had passed. My fingers were turning white, my nose was heading for numb.

“You okay?” she asked.

I nodded, trying to catch my breath.

“See anything?”

“Snatches. Bits.”

Just how big, and how bad, could have been the thing that threw that shadow? No answer satisfied me. Then my gaze drifted over to the wall of graffiti; and that single black-and-white eye stared right back.

“Wait here,” I murmured. As I walked back towards it, I opened up my satchel. Inside it I had all the usual tools of the sorcerer—blank keys, travelcard, map, Swiss army knife—as a matter of principle, and I also made sure to carry the most useful enchantment tool of the age. The can of spray paint I had for this purpose held a cobalt blue,
and had done me all sorts of service. I shook it as I advanced on the painted eye, stopped a foot away, hesitated, then carefully began to write, straight over it.