stood, on the Wall of London. Give me back my hat.”
“You are suggesting that this quaint request is somehow linked to your predicament?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. But wherever bad things happen, there it is. The ravens in the Tower are dead, the London Stone is broken, the writing is on the Wall. These things have always been protectors. Keeping out the bad things in the night.”
“What ‘bad things’?”
“I have no idea. If I knew that, then odds are the bad things wouldn’t have been kept out to begin with.”
“I see your point.”
“But as you said - spectres aren’t common in London. And they did come looking for me, when I answered the phone. You destroy the defences, kill the ravens, who knows what will come out from beneath the paving stones? Someone deliberately did that, killed the ravens, killed Nair. It can only be bad news.”
“And now you’re in the middle of it,” murmured Sinclair, more to himself than me, prodding a puddle of lumpy goo on his plate that might have been food. “How . . . controversial.”
“Yes.”
“And the odds are, Nair chose you.”
“Yes. Odds are.”
“Now why do you think he’d do that?”
I hesitated.
“You must have dedicated some thought to the question.”
“I saw the face of the creature that killed him. That killed Nair.”
“Oh? And what did he look like?”
“Just a guy in a suit. Pinstripe suit, ironed, clean. Slicked-back hair. Just . . . just a guy in a suit. He didn’t even touch him, and there was so much blood and Nair was just . . . meat and bones by the time he was finished. I’d never seen . . . we’d never imagined it was . . . we will not die like that.”
Sinclair leant forward, folding his chubby fingers together. “Ah. I think I understand.”
“He had no smell. The fox saw it all, and we asked the fox, and the fox smelt nothing. The creature that killed Nair wasn’t human. A guy in a suit and he wasn’t human. Nair wouldn’t have died if he wasn’t Midnight Mayor. That’s the reasoning, isn’t it? You get a brand on the hand, protector of the city: come gobble me up all ye nasties. Come hunt for me, spectres and shadows. We will not die like that!”
“You don’t know what it was? The thing that killed Nair?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“But he looked like a man.”
“Yes.”
“But wasn’t.”
“No.”
“I see. That could be problematic.” Sinclair sighed, rolled back in his chair. Waiters drifted in, took away the plates. They had class - enough class not to ask how the meal was, but just to take it that you’d never eaten anything like it.
Finally, with a great huff that puffed out his red cheeks, Sinclair said, “Tell me about your shoes.”
He asked it so casually, so distantly, that for a moment I didn’t even notice the question. “What?”
“Your shoes.”
“Why do you want to know about them?”
“They’re hardly your style, Matthew, and that interests me.”
“Give me credit,” I snapped.
He smiled, little neat teeth in a round mouth. “Come, now, Matthew, come. You know that I take an interest in these things. The instant I heard that Nair had been killed, I thought ‘trouble’. Then the ravens died, then the Stone was broken, and I thought ‘how tedious, someone is out to destroy the protectors of the city’; and it seemed, in light of all these facts, a sensible, yes indeed, a most sensible precaution to do a little research. Naturally I checked up on you. Who else, I thought, who else can really muster the kind of supernatural clout to do these things? Who else could have killed Nair? Who else might be mad enough to try it?”
Our fingers tightened on the cutlery. “You know us better,” we snarled.
“Yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps that was where the Aldermen made their mistake. I know about the Aldermen, Matthew. We have . . . mutual connections, in times of crisis. This is a time of crisis. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that. I know about the file in Nair’s desk. It says, ‘Swift has the shoes’. Now what exactly does this mean?”
I looked down at my shoes, then back up at him. I said: “I thought it was nothing.”
“Well, that’s what we thought about the graffiti, and now look where we are. Spectres in the streets. Let’s assume for a moment that nothing is something and feel proud of ourselves for a grasp of the quantum, shall we? Tell me about your shoes. They’re