but to the point. It announced that at 2.20 a.m. residents of Raleigh Court, North Kilburn, had called 999 to report almost every misdemeanour happening in their vicinity that could be reported. Windows were smashed, gas was leaking, electricity was going haywire, phones were ringing, TVs were smoking, water was boiling unbidden: the whole shaboom. By the time the police were headed that way, more reports were coming in, of screaming and a fight between two heavily armed men. By the time the police arrived, there was nothing to show but angry sleepless residents, a lot of broken glass, the wailing of car alarms, and a single, skinless body lying face-down in the night.
Not quite skinless.
The coroner’s report corrected the error. The skin hadn’t been removed. It had been cut, somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand times, by a blade no thicker than a piece of paper.
Obviously not a piece of paper, the coroner added, because the death was fairly quick - shock leading to cardiac failure - and it takes a long time to administer ten to twenty thousand paper cuts across every inch of flesh. Some kind of chemical compound, perhaps, or . . .
. . . or something like that.
Reading the report, I was grateful for a moment to the Aldermen. They had got the body taken to this mortuary to be examined by their coroner. I had assumed that the Midnight Mayor would have died in the City, the traditional prowling ground of the Aldermen. I’d been wrong. I’d got lucky. He’d died in Kilburn.
North Kilburn, to be exact. Willesden is a nowhere everywhere, and Kilburn is a somewhere inside that nowhere.
It was a connection I wished the Aldermen hadn’t made.
I took the wallet and the sim card out of Nair’s phone, left everything else. Lincoln’s Inn was the nearest destination I could think of, but what were the odds that someone wasn’t watching Mr Nair’s house? Police, Alderman - killer? A braver man might have seen this as a good thing: confrontation and an early night. But we could think of only a very, very few creatures walking upon the earth with the mystic fire-power at their disposal to cut a man’s skin beneath the nail, while leaving the nail itself intact. All of them frightened us.
So I went looking for Raleigh Court, North Kilburn.
There was an internet café lurking on the Goswell Road, between a launderette and an all-purpose purveyor of rotting vegetables and cheap biscuits. It was open twenty-four hours, and as in most such places, the computers had been padlocked to the desks and the desks bolted to the floor. A young man reading an A-level textbook and sitting with his feet up on the office desk took a couple of quid with an expression of apathy and gave me a computer for an hour. There were only two other people in the café: one was a woman with prunelike skin and a giant weave of orange fabric on her head, using the internet telephone to talk to somewhere far, far away where the sun was still shining; the other, a pasty-skinned man, had chosen the furthest computer in the darkest corner for what could only, at this hour, be crime or porn.
I sat in the middle of the row of whining machines, proud of my nothing-to-hide, and looked up Raleigh Court. My A-Z covered the Kilburn area, but for specific details, you can’t beat the internet. I found it, a beige blob in the middle of yellow grid streets, and, because no one can know everything, interrogated the machine a little more on how to get there. No Tube trains, but the night buses from the centre of the city understand their basic role - to carry those too drunk to walk, to the most obscure corners of suburbia quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked.
Then, because I’m rarely online, I checked my email.
**!!PILLSPILLSPILLSPILLS!!**
(From: [email protected])
We need to talk. (From: [email protected])
Re: ☝ ✞☜✞☜ M ☜ ✌M ✡ ✌❅(From: Unknown)
I deleted “PILLSPILLSPILLS” on automatic. If we had been
Not quite skinless.
The coroner’s report corrected the error. The skin hadn’t been removed. It had been cut, somewhere between ten thousand and twenty thousand times, by a blade no thicker than a piece of paper.
Obviously not a piece of paper, the coroner added, because the death was fairly quick - shock leading to cardiac failure - and it takes a long time to administer ten to twenty thousand paper cuts across every inch of flesh. Some kind of chemical compound, perhaps, or . . .
. . . or something like that.
Reading the report, I was grateful for a moment to the Aldermen. They had got the body taken to this mortuary to be examined by their coroner. I had assumed that the Midnight Mayor would have died in the City, the traditional prowling ground of the Aldermen. I’d been wrong. I’d got lucky. He’d died in Kilburn.
North Kilburn, to be exact. Willesden is a nowhere everywhere, and Kilburn is a somewhere inside that nowhere.
It was a connection I wished the Aldermen hadn’t made.
I took the wallet and the sim card out of Nair’s phone, left everything else. Lincoln’s Inn was the nearest destination I could think of, but what were the odds that someone wasn’t watching Mr Nair’s house? Police, Alderman - killer? A braver man might have seen this as a good thing: confrontation and an early night. But we could think of only a very, very few creatures walking upon the earth with the mystic fire-power at their disposal to cut a man’s skin beneath the nail, while leaving the nail itself intact. All of them frightened us.
So I went looking for Raleigh Court, North Kilburn.
There was an internet café lurking on the Goswell Road, between a launderette and an all-purpose purveyor of rotting vegetables and cheap biscuits. It was open twenty-four hours, and as in most such places, the computers had been padlocked to the desks and the desks bolted to the floor. A young man reading an A-level textbook and sitting with his feet up on the office desk took a couple of quid with an expression of apathy and gave me a computer for an hour. There were only two other people in the café: one was a woman with prunelike skin and a giant weave of orange fabric on her head, using the internet telephone to talk to somewhere far, far away where the sun was still shining; the other, a pasty-skinned man, had chosen the furthest computer in the darkest corner for what could only, at this hour, be crime or porn.
I sat in the middle of the row of whining machines, proud of my nothing-to-hide, and looked up Raleigh Court. My A-Z covered the Kilburn area, but for specific details, you can’t beat the internet. I found it, a beige blob in the middle of yellow grid streets, and, because no one can know everything, interrogated the machine a little more on how to get there. No Tube trains, but the night buses from the centre of the city understand their basic role - to carry those too drunk to walk, to the most obscure corners of suburbia quickly, cheaply and with no questions asked.
Then, because I’m rarely online, I checked my email.
**!!PILLSPILLSPILLSPILLS!!**
(From: [email protected])
We need to talk. (From: [email protected])
Re: ☝ ✞☜✞☜ M ☜ ✌M ✡ ✌❅(From: Unknown)
I deleted “PILLSPILLSPILLS” on automatic. If we had been
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