Just like that. We looked, me, us and the fox, through the terrified haze of its memories, and saw the body of Nair, torn meat inside a neat black silk suit, lying in his own blood, mobile phone the last thing the bloody criss-cross remains of his fingers were going to touch. And then, because the fox had looked, finally, the fox dared to look, we looked up at the man who had killed A. Nair, the Midnight Mayor.
And the fox was right. He was absolutely right. We saw a man, dressed in a neat pinstripe suit utterly untouched by the flames still burning in the rubbish bins, by the glass spilt across the floor, by the swinging electric cables and the spitting remains of electric lightning, by the fallen aerials and shattered metal shutters, by the torn bricks and broken paving stones; not a scratch on him. He wore a suit, the crease impeccable all the way down from his waist to his ankle; a pair of black leather shoes that clacked neatly with every step, a pinstripe jacket done up over a white shirt, the collar ironed and unstained. A white silk handkerchief stuck up from his jacket pocket, his thin dark hair was swept back, not a fibre out of place, from a high pale forehead and on his face was a look . . .
no smell
. . . a look that a busy plumber might give to a boiler that’s been giving him more trouble than it’s worth and has now been fixed; the conquering contempt of an expert who has proven his worth to a dumb machine.
And he had no smell. To the fox, watching this, Nair had stank from the moment he entered of expensive cleaning products and shaving lotions, of terror and fear. His shoes had smelt, his clothes had smelt, every part of him offering a different tone to the medley. But the man who had killed him, the thing that had killed him, which looked like a man in a pinstripe suit, who now stood over him utterly uncaring for either his triumph or the pity of the dead, had no smell. Not a part of him smelt, not even of cleanliness. He was a walking blank on the fox’s recollection, even the dirt on his shoes. His heart made no sound; nor was there any proof, except that he had just killed a living man, that this man lived at all.
And then he looked at the fox. And the terror that swept through every nerve of the creature nearly knocked us from the seat, the strength of it, the absolute animal certainty that it was run or die. And we ran, us and the fox, we ran through the night with every hair standing up down the length of our back, ran until our paws ached and our spine groaned and our head was a dead weight looking down to the ground and we could smell nothing but our own fears and ran and ran and ran.
Terror broke the spell. Our fear, his fear, we weren’t making the distinction. The fox was a trembling curl of fur beside us; and we weren’t much better, every inch shaking from the shared experience of the creature’s thoughts. Our head hurt, our body hurt, our paws still hurt, although we had none, and above all, and slicing through it to an agony pitch, our right hand blazed furiously inside its bandage and when we turned our hand over to look, pulling the black mitten away from the wad of cotton rolled over our skin, we saw blood was seeping through.
I fumbled in my bag for painkillers, took three in a single gulp, cooed empty noises at the trembling fox. I tried to pick coherent images out of the confusion of the fox’s thoughts: focus on Nair, focus on his killer. I wondered how unamused the Aldermen might feel about being offered up an urban scavenger as a reliable witness for the claim “not me, guv, I didn’t do it”.
Still, it was something that I had seen the face of the man who killed Nair. If I had been frightened of him before, whoever he was, this no-smell in a suit, now I was rightly terrified. You do not walk the earth without a heartbeat and a smell, unless you were not designed for that particular promenade. And sooner or later, whether we liked it or not, we were constrained by