Swift!”
“Ta-da!” I exclaimed weakly.
“You’re still . . .”
“Still not dead. That’s me. It’s my big party trick, still not being dead, gets them every time.”
“You . . .”
“Did the walk, talked the talk. Went down memory lane, Tarantinostyle. Where’s the boy?”
“The . . .”
“Boy. The boy. I’ve been out all night and I’m a firm believer in what they say about Big Brother never sleeping. Have you found the boy?”
“As a matter of fact . . .”
“Yes?”
“We just might have.”
I beamed. “Mr Earle,” I said, “I got a good feeling about all this.”
CCTV.
Someone, probably a journalist, claims that there’s one CCTV camera for every twelve people in the UK.
Or in other words, Big Brother could so very, very easily be watching you, if he had a reason. That’s the whole point, really. He, or it, or them, or best of all, They, can track you by ATM, by Oyster card, by mobile phone, by CCTV, by loyalty card, by licence plate, by items bought and items sold, by programmes watched and calls made, and while the Good People need not fear - for what reason should their lives be seen and judged by strangers? - the problem arises when no one knows what that reason is. No one even knows who’s going to make that choice.
There are advantages to being legally dead.
So here’s how it goes:
About a day after Nair died and a telephone rang, a blue van, registration LS06 BDL, pulled up outside Raleigh Court. Three hired men with unsympathetic faces and unstable morphic structures, friends of a friend who knew a guy called Boom Boom, got out of the back, walked up to number 53 and pulled a kid out from inside the flat. He wasn’t looking great in the few grainy seconds of footage that the Aldermen had recovered. He wasn’t looking alive. But then if he wasn’t alive, what was the point?
They stuck him in the back of the van.
The van drove south.
The congestion charge cameras caught it entering the zone around 4 a.m. They didn’t care a damn, because at 4 a.m. no one pays £8 to drive, but they were still watching, and even if they weren’t, the Aldermen had means. I didn’t want to know, found that I didn’t really care.
Roughly half an hour after entering the zone, the van left it, heading south from Waterloo, and was glimpsed briefly at Elephant and Castle, then caught for a moment heading round Clapham Common. No wonder it had taken a day and a half to find - too many cameras, too much watching, too many things to watch, too much to see; no one mind could take it in. A heap built on a million dead heaps built by a hundred million dead ants on the crunched-down skeletons of their predecessors; who’d track one little van?
“This is all very interesting,” I said, “but where did it end up?”
“You won’t like it,” said Earle.
“Hit me.”
“Morden.”
“Morden.”
“Yes. Morden.”
End of the line. We did not like Morden.
“Where in Morden?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Worked that out already. Where?”
He told me.
And no, I didn’t like it.
Morden.
Sometimes there are places so far, so obscure, so unlikely, so implausible and so utterly . . .
. . . well . . .
. . . Morden . . .
. . . that there’s no point driving there.
A friend once put it like this: One guy gets on a train to Isleworth, another guy gets on a train to Cardiff, and you can bet the guy going to Wales gets there sooner.
The same rule applies to Morden. A mainline train to Ipswich will get there faster than a driver departing at the same time from Liverpool Street will make it to deepest, darkest Morden.
To even the odds a little, I took the Northern Line from Bank, right down through the strange wildernesses of Monument, Borough, Elephant and Castle, Kennington, Oval, Tooting Bec, Colliers Wood, South Wimbledon and, right at the bottom of the map, Morden.
End of the line.
The driver even announced it as we arrived.
“End of the line,” he said. “All change, all change, end of the line.”
Oda was waiting at the top of the stairs. She had a big sports bag over one shoulder. As I came out through the barrier, she said, “You feeling inaugurated?”
“Sort of. Does that make me a higher priority for the hit list?”
“There’s an argument there. On the one hand, the Midnight Mayor is a magical entity whose very existence is an insult to the works of Heaven. On the