Moon Over Soho rol-2

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Is there someone you can call?” I asked. “Someone who’ll come around and stay with you for a bit?”

  She shook her head. “I’m just going to wait in my car,” she said. “Thank you.”

  Don’t thank me, ma’am, I didn’t say, I’m just doing … Who knew what I was doing? I doubted I could get anything useful from her that evening so I left well enough alone.

  SOMETIMES AFTER a hard day’s work nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it — no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule. One side of the embankment had suffered from an outbreak of modernism in the 1960s but I kept my back to their dull concrete façades and instead watched the sun setting fire to the tops of Millbank Tower and the Palace of Westminster. The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

  Officially I belong to ESC9, which stands for Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, otherwise known as the Folly, also known as the unit that nice well-brought-up coppers don’t talk about in polite company. There’s no point trying to remember ESC9 because the Metropolitan Police has a reorganization once every four years and all the names change. That’s why the Commercial Robberies Unit of the Serious and Organized Crime Group has been called the Flying Squad since its introduction in 1920 or the Sweeney if you want to establish your cockney geezer credentials. That’s Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad in case you were wondering.

  Unlike the Sweeney, the Folly is easy to overlook: partly because we do stuff nobody likes to talk about, but mostly because we have no discernible budget. No budget means no bureaucratic scrutiny and therefore no paper trail. It also helps that up until January this year it had a personnel complement of one: a certain Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Despite doubling the staffing levels when I joined and catching up on a good ten years of unprocessed paperwork, we maintain a stealthy presence within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police. Thus we pass among the other coppers in a mysterious way, our duties to perform.

  One of our duties is the investigation of unsanctioned wizards and other magical practitioners, but I didn’t think that Cyrus Wilkinson had been a practitioner of anything except a superior saxophone. I also doubted he’d killed himself with the traditional jazz cocktail of drugs and drink, but confirmation would have to wait for the tox screen. Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it — at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

  Across the river a catamaran pulled away from the Millbank Pier in a roar of diesel. I bundled up the kebab paper and dumped it in a rubbish bin. I climbed back into the Jag, started her up, and pulled out into the twilight.

  At some point I was going to have to hit the library back at the Folly and look for historical cases. Polidori was usually good for lurid stuff involving drink and debauchery. Probably from all the time he spent off his head with Byron and the Shelleys by Lake Geneva. If anyone knew about untimely and unnatural deaths it was Polidori, who literally wrote the book on the subject just before drinking cyanide — it’s called An Investigation into Unnatural Deaths in London in the Years 1768–1810 and it weighs over two pounds — I just hoped that reading it didn’t drive me to suicide too.

  It was late evening by the time I reached the Folly and parked up the Jag in the coach house. Toby started barking as soon as I opened the back door and he came skittering across the marble floor of the atrium to hurl himself at my shins. Molly glided in from the direction of the kitchens like the winner of the world all-comers creepy gothic Lolita contest. I ignored Toby’s yapping and asked whether Nightingale was awake. Molly gave me the slight head tilt that meant “no” and then an inquiring look.

  Molly served as the Folly’s housekeeper, cook, and rodent exterminator. She never speaks, has too many teeth and a taste for raw meat, but I try never to hold that against her or let her get between me and the exit.

  “I’m knackered — I’m going straight to bed,” I said.

  Molly glanced at Toby and then at me.

  “I’ve been working all day,” I said.

  Molly gave me the head tilt that meant “I don’t care, if you don’t take the smelly little thing out for his walk you can be the one who cleans up after him.”

  Toby paused in his barking long enough to give me a hopeful look.

  “Where’s his lead?” I asked.

  Chapter 2

  The Spice of Life

  THE GENERAL public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you’ve generated some sort of urgent lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life — like drinking and sleeping and, if you’re lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice. And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn’t also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England. Which meant I spent my spare time learning magic, studying dead languages, and reading books like Essays on the Metaphysical by John “never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like” Cartwright.

  And learning magic, of course — which is what makes the whole thing worthwhile.

  This is a spell: Lux iactus scindere — say it quietly, say it loudly, say it with conviction in the middle of a thunderstorm while striking a dramatic pose — nothing will happen. That’s because the words are just labels for the forma that you make in your mind; lux to make the light and scindere to fix it in place. If you do this particular spell right it creates a light source in a fixed position. If you do it wrong it can burn a hole through a lab table.

  “You know,” said Nightingale, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before.”

  I gave the bench a last squirt with the CO2 extinguisher and bent down to see whether the floor under the table was still intact. There was a burn mark but luckily no crater.

  “It keeps getting away from me,” I said.

  Nightingale stood up out of his wheelchair and had a look for himself. He moved carefully and favored his right side. If he was still wearing bandages on his shoulder they were hidden under a crisp lilac shirt that had last been fashionable during the abdication crisis. Molly was busily feeding him up, but to me he still looked pale and thin. He caught me staring,

  “I wish you and Molly would stop watching me like that,” he said. “I’m well on the road to recovery. I’ve been shot before, so I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Shall I give it another go?”

  “No,” said Nightingale. “The problem is obviously with scindere. I thought you’d progressed through that too swiftly. Tomorrow we’re going to start to relearn that forma and then once I’m certain of your mastery we’ll return to this spell.”

  “Oh joy,” I said.

  “This isn’t unusual.” Nightingale’s voice was low and reassuring. “You have to get the foundations of the art right or everything you build on top will be crooked, not to mention unstable. There are no shortcuts in wizardry, Peter. If there were, everyone would be doing it.”

  Probably on Britain’s Got Talent, I thought, but you don’t say these things to Nightingale because he doesn’t have a sense of humor about the art and only used the telly for watching rugby.

  I assumed the attentive look of the dutiful apprentice but Nightingale wasn’t fooled.

  “Tell me about your dead musician,” he said.

  I laid out the facts with emphasis on the intensity of the vestigia Dr. Walid and I had felt around the body.

  “Did he feel it as strongly as you did?” asked Nightingale.<
br />
  I shrugged. “It’s vestigia, boss,” I said. “It was strong enough for both of us to hear a melody. That’s got to be suspicious.”

  “It’s suspicious,” he said and settled back down in his wheelchair with a frown. “But is it a crime?”

  “The statute only says that you have to unlawfully kill someone under the Queen’s Peace with malice aforethought. It doesn’t say anything about how you do it.” I’d checked in Blackstone’s Police Manual before coming down for breakfast that morning.

  “I’ll be interested to see the Crown Prosecution Service argue that in front of a jury,” he said. “In the first instance you’ll need to prove that he was killed by magic and then find out who was capable of doing it and making it look like natural causes.”

  “Could you do it?” I asked.

  Nightingale had to think about that. “I think so,” he said. “I’d have to spend a while in the library first. It would be a very powerful spell, and it’s possible that the music you’re hearing is a practitioner’s signare — his involuntary signature.” Because, just as the old telegraph operators could identify one another from the way each one tapped their key, so every practitioner casts a spell in a style unique to themselves.

  “Do I have a signature?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Nightingale. “When you practice, things have an alarming tendency to catch fire.”

  “Seriously, boss.”

  “It’s too early for you to have a signare but another practitioner would certainly know that you were my apprentice,” said Nightingale. “Assuming he’d ever seen my work, of course.”

  “Are there other practitioners out there?” I asked.

  Nightingale shifted in his wheelchair. “There are some survivors from the prewar mob,” he said. “But apart from them, you and I are the last of the classically trained wizards. Or at least you will be if you ever concentrate long enough to be trained.”

  “Could it have been one of these survivors?”

  “Not if jazz was part of the signare.”

  And therefore probably not one of their apprentices either — if they had apprentices.

  “If it wasn’t one of your mob …”

  “Our mob,” said Nightingale. “You swore an oath, that makes you one of us.”

  “If it wasn’t one of our mob, who else could do it?”

  Nightingale smiled. “One of your riverine friends would have the power,” he said.

  That made me pause. There were two gods of the River Thames and both of them had their own fractious children, one for each tributary. They certainly had power — I’d personally witnessed Beverley Brook flooding out Covent Garden, incidentally saving my life and that of a family of German tourists in the process.

  “But Father Thames wouldn’t operate below Teddington Lock,” said Nightingale. “And Mama Thames wouldn’t risk the agreement with us. If Tyburn wanted you dead she’d do it through the courts. While Fleet would humiliate you to death in the media. And Brent is too young. Finally, leaving aside that Soho is on the wrong side of the river, if Effra was going to kill you with music it wouldn’t be with jazz.”

  Not when she’s practically the patron saint of UK Grime, I thought. “Are there other people?” I asked. “Other things?”

  “It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But I’d concentrate on determining how before I worried too much about whom.”

  “Any advice?”

  “You could start,” said Nightingale, “by visiting the scene of the crime.”

  MUCH TO the frustration of the ruling class, who like their cities to be clean, ordered, and to have good lines of fire, London has never responded well to grandiose planning projects. Not even after it was razed to the ground in 1666. Mind you this hasn’t stopped people from trying, and in the 1880s the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to facilitate better communications both north and south and east and west. That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in the process, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous. Where the avenue and the road crossed became Cambridge Circus and on the west side today stands the Palace Theatre, in all its late-Victorian gingerbread glory. Next to that, and built in the same style, stands what was once the George and Dragon Public House but was now named the Spice of Life. According to its own publicity — London’s premier spot for jazz.

  Back when my old man was on the scene the Spice of Life wasn’t a happening place for jazz. It was, according to him, strictly for geezers in roll-necked sweaters and goatees reading poetry and listening to folk music. Bob Dylan played there a couple of times in the 1960s and so did Mick Jagger. But none of that meant anything to my dad, who always said that rock and roll was all right for those who needed help following a beat.

  Up until that lunchtime I’d never so much as been inside the Spice of Life. Before I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I drank in, and after I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I arrested people in.

  I’d timed my visit to avoid the lunchtime rush, which meant the crowds milling around the circus were mainly tourists and the inside of the pub was pleasantly cool, dim, and empty, with just a whiff of cleaning products fighting with years of spilled beer. I wanted to get a feel for the place and I decided the most natural way to do that was to stand at the bar and have a beer, but because I was on duty I kept it to a half. Unlike a lot of London pubs the Spice of Life had managed to hang on to its brass-and-polished-wood interior without slipping into kitsch. I stood at the bar to drink my half and as I took my first sip I flashed on horse sweat and the sound of hammers ringing on an anvil, shouting and laughter, a distant woman’s scream and the smell of tobacco — pretty standard for a Central London pub.

  The sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir were bright and bold and if they hadn’t been Muslims would have probably gone on to be the patron saints of techno-geeks. They’re famous for their ninth-century Baghdad bestseller, a compendium of ingenious mechanical devices that they imaginatively titled Kitab al-Hiyal — The Book of Ingenious Devices. In it they describe what is possibly the first practical device for measuring differential pressure, and that’s where the problem really starts. In 1593 Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promulgating heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833 Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionizing radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.

  And what do Nightingale and I have to measure vestigia with? Sod all, and it’s not even as if we know what we’re trying to measure in the first place. No wonder the heirs of Isaac Newton kept magic safely under their periwigs. I had jokingly developed my own scale for vestigia based on the amount of noise Toby made when he interacted with any residual magic. I called it a yap, one yap being enough vestigia to be apparent even when I wasn’t looking for it.

  The yap would be an SI unit, of course, and thus the standard background ambience of a Central London pub was 0.2 of a yap (0.2Y) or 200 milliyaps (200mY). Having established that to my satisfaction I finished the half-pint and headed downstairs to the basement, where they kept the jazz.

  A set of creaky stairs led down to the Backstage Bar, a roughly octagonal room, low-ceilinged and punctuated with stout cream-colored columns that had to be load bearing because they certainly didn’t add to the sight lines. As I stood in the doorway and tried to get a feel for any magical ambience, I realized that my own childhood was about to interfere with my investigation.

  In 1986 Courtney Pine released Journey to the Urge Within and suddenly jazz was back in fashion and with it came my dad’s thir
d and last brush with fame and fortune. I never went to gigs, but during the school holidays he used to take me with him on visits to clubs and recording studios. Some things linger even from before conscious memory — old beer, tobacco smoke, the sound a trumpet makes when its player is just getting it warmed up. You could have two hundred kiloyaps of vestigia in that basement and I wouldn’t have been able to separate them from my own memories.

  I should have brought Toby. He would have been more use. I stepped over to the stage in the hope that proximity might help.

  My dad always said that a trumpet player likes to aim his weapon at the audience, but a sax man likes to cut a good profile and that he always has a favorite side. It being an article of faith with my dad that you don’t even pick up a reed instrument unless you’re vain about the shape your face makes when you’re blowing down it. I stood on the stage and adopted some classic sax-player stances, and as I did I began to feel something, stage front and right, a little tingle and the melody line of “Body and Soul” played far away, piercing and bittersweet.

  “Got you,” I said.

  Since all I had to go on was the magical echo of one particular jazz tune, I figured it was time to find out precisely which of several hundred cover versions of “Body and Soul” it was. What I needed was a jazz expert so obsessed that the subject had consumed him to the point where he neglected his health, his marriage, and his own children.

  It was time to go see my old man.

  MUCH AS I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stakeouts and wet dog. I had it stashed up Romilly Street with my magic police business talisman in the window to ward off traffic wardens. I’d taken the Asbo to a friend of mine who’d tuned up its Volvo engine and gotten me a satisfactory bit of zip, which came in handy dodging the bendy buses on Tottenham Court Road as I drove north for Kentish Town.