tight grey alley wedged between a barber’s shop and a shop selling barristers’ wigs and judges’ robes. I hugged close to the walls and the gloom, sheltering from the brightness of the winter sun, and watched the people around me.
Quite how the legal profession merited offices and apartments inside one of London’s most desirable pieces of land was beyond me. Great courtyards of grand old houses, and modern replicas of the same, with high chimney stacks and thick oak doors, gazed out onto deep, lush flower beds and grass mown into spacious, do-not-walk-here rectangles. Cobbles ran beneath tall, many-paned windows behind which were bookshelves filled with leather-bound tomes, oil paintings of long-dead judges, desks exploding with papers and of course, hard at work or in a sombre-faced meeting, lawyers.
At the lodge gate, uniformed wardens monitored all traffic; beneath an arching fountain, gardeners in rugged shoes planted spring bulbs; inside the great red Gothic belly of the central hall, a lunchtime concert was under way; besides the remains of a medieval church, all pillars and dark echoing staircases worn smooth by centuries of shoes, the tourist guides explained the myths and wonders of this ancient place to awe-struck onlookers. Weaving busily between it all were, of course, more lawyers.
They dressed nearly the same; the women, all young, in tight suits that forced them to walk from the knees, not the hips, and strutting on sensible heels - not too gaudy, but high enough to give them the same stature as the men. The men, mostly young or middle-aged, dressed in matching dark suits, with only the pinkness of their shirts or the stripiness of their ties marking out one individual from another. The youngest wheeled great trolleys stacked with boxes stuffed with paper; the oldest strode along in big coats worn over a watch chain, and drove cars ten years too young for them. Outsiders were mostly the occasional student taking a cut-through to the library, all baggy trousers and bad hair, or a TV scout for the latest docu-drama surveying the Inns of Court in search of “authentic” historical London.
The air smelt of mown grass, and time. Time with a paper-thin edge. There were ghosts playing in Lincoln’s Inn, trailing their fingers along the edges of the old stones, sticking their noses into the shrapnel holes from a fallen bomb, climbing trees taller than the spire of the church or peaked roof of the hall, just waiting for the sun to go down.
Name plaques on the doors announced the occasional private residence among what were almost entirely lawyers’ chambers: here and there Lord and Lady So-And-So, or Major-General X, who lived three doors down from Sir Somethingorother and the charming Dame Thingamajig. You didn’t buy a property in Lincoln’s Inn; money wasn’t the point. Time and tradition were the names of the game. And on that count, it made perfect sense that the Midnight Mayor had found his niche within these walls.
Bright winter sunshine makes most places beautiful. The Inn looked like English good manners made out of ancient brick and weathered stone, all golden reflections, and thin shade lost in the glare. Lurking in the shadows, I had to remind myself that, chances were, there might be nasties hiding behind the windows, and not just the legal kind.
I pulled my coat tighter around my shoulders. Any good private detective out of any good American thriller will tell you that an old, plain anorak is a city’s camouflage paint. Any good sorcerer will tell you that they’re not just right, they’re two incantations short of invisibility.
I stepped out into the sunlight, and strode towards the door of 137A New Court with the brisk pace of an Important Person with an Important Place to Be, and who, as such, shouldn’t be noticed because frankly, it’s none of your business. There was no police tape, no policeman. By the entrance to the staircase I’d been looking for, a white wooden board, lettered in black, listed everyone who worked or lived there. I climbed two flights of echoing stairs, clinging with my bandaged hand to a black iron banister, feeling its coldness even through the layers of wool and cotton and blood. On the top floor the staircase led to a door bearing the number 137A in brass; on the wall beside it, a plaque repeated the fact that here lived A. Nair Esq. I looked back down the stairwell, saw no one following; I also saw no place to hide. Fumbling in