Free A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift by Kate Griffin

day’s drizzle had cleaned the air so that tonight, at the summit of the giant, white-and-silver ferris wheel, you could see all the way to the North Downs in one direction, and to Alexandra Palace in the other.
     
I didn’t bother looking for whoever might want to speak to me. If they were worth any conversation, they’d find me. Meanwhile, I would not have been there were it not for the crowds. There is a protection of sorts in numbers – so long as the other bugger is playing by the rules.
     
I found myself in a capsule with a small flock of Japanese tourists who exclaimed as the floodlit Houses of Parliament dropped away beneath us, marvelled at the watery reflection of the lights on Victoria Embankment, photographed the pools of light sprawling out northwards to the dark splotch of Primrose Hill, ogled the purple and green lit-up walls of the National Theatre, pointed at Tower Bridge and pushed past each other to see the BT Tower sticking up from the West End; there was also a family from, judging by the accent, somewhere in south-east England, whose youngest child was only now discovering her fear of heights.
     
As for us, we sat on the bench in the middle of the capsule and watched our city expand beneath us, and felt like God. We had never seen anything so beautiful, and could not conceive of more magic in the world.
     
By the time the ride had started its descent, the staff below were already closing up the capsules ahead of us and turning away the public for the night. On our arrival at the embarkation platform, while the tourists shuffled out through the door, I didn’t move; nor did anyone ask me to.
     
I heard footsteps on the capsule floor and the swish of the door closing behind me. The river began to drop away again, the capsule making another trip skywards.
     
Behind me a voice said, “Lovely night, isn’t it? Enough to move a sentimental man to verse, I find.”
     
I shrugged, wrapping my coat tighter around myself and watching the patterns of neon spread out underneath me once more. By the sound of their steps, there were two of them. The one who spoke had a heavy, breathless voice like the deep snorts of a walrus. It was a cultured voice, well-educated to the point of being overly so. Knowledge so intense it drowns out all common sense. The man also brought with him a smell. It tingled on the edge of my senses: a deep, subtle shade of magic that tasted of cream crackers and the colour of shining oil. However, it wasn’t coming from him, I realised, but from his companion, whose reflection I saw in the glass of the capsule against the night outside – a young Asian man in a smart suit, hands folded in front of him, who stood by the shut door like it was the gateway to a treasury, eyeing me up in my own reflection even as I watched him.
     
The man who’d spoken sat down on the bench beside me; so I figured that, whatever strange aromas the younger man gave off, he was merely the sidekick to this man’s central act.
     
He said, “I hope you haven’t minded the delay.”
     
“No.”
     
“It is intolerably rude to make someone wait for an appointment. But I fear these are not such civilised times, Mr Swift. I blame the mobile phone, naturally.”
     
I turned to look at him properly. He was fat – there was no other way to describe it – a belly contained by a shiny waistcoat like a straining bulkhead, any second about to explode a shrapnel of buttons. His suit was a subtle pinstripe, finely cut to disguise the sheer scale of his form. His face, emerging out of the rolling slope of his neck, was friendly, with bright eyes peering from under gigantic eyebrows, the only hair on an otherwise polished pale head. He had a ring on his wedding finger and a pair of black leather shoes, but otherwise no possessions with him worth the name. He studied me as I studied him, and at roughly the same instant I was reaching my conclusions about him, he said, “My, yes, but the resemblance is extraordinary, isn’t