Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Good,” said the commissioner. “And while I’m always glad to have these little chats, let’s try to keep them out of my office in the future.”

  And with that we were dismissed.

  “That could have been worse,” I said as we walked past the eternal flame of remembrance that burns in the New Scotland Yard foyer. It’s there to remember those brave men and women who have fallen while doing their duty and to remind us, the living, to be bloody careful.

  “Tyburn’s dangerous,” said Nightingale as we headed for the underground car park. “She thinks she can define her role in the city through bureaucratic maneuvering and office politics. Sooner or later she’ll come into conflict with her own mother.”

  “And if that happens?”

  “The consequences could well be mythic,” said Nightingale. “I think it would be in your interests not to be standing between them when that happens.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Or anywhere within the Thames Valley for that matter.”

  Nightingale was due for a checkup at the UCH so he dropped me off in Leicester Square and I called Simone.

  “Give me an hour to clean up,” she said. “And then come over.”

  I was still in my uniform, which would have made drinking in a pub a bit of a problem, so I grabbed a coffee in the Italian place on Frith Street before proceeding at a leisurely place up Old Compton Street. I was just thinking of picking up some cakes from the Patisserie Valerie when my highly tuned copper’s senses were irresistibly drawn, like those of a big-game hunter, by the subtle clues that something was amiss in Dean Street.

  And also the police tape, the forensics tent, and the uniformed bodies who’d been given the exciting task of guarding the crime scene. My professional curiosity got the better of me, so I sidled up to have a look.

  I spotted Stephanopoulis talking to a couple of other DSs from the Murder Team. You don’t just step into someone else’s crime scene without permission so I paused at the tape and waited until I could catch Stephanopoulis’s eye. She stamped over a minute later and clocked the uniform.

  “Back on patrol with us mere mortals, are you?” she said. “I think you got off lightly. The even money in the incident room was that you were going to be suspended with extreme prejudice.”

  “Verbal warning,” I said.

  Stephanopoulis looked incredulous. “For hijacking an ambulance?” she said. “You get a verbal warning? You’re not making any friends among the rank and file, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “Who’s dead?”

  “Nothing to do with you,” said Stephanopoulis. “Construction foreman from Crossrail. Found this morning in one of his access shafts.” Although the bulk of the new Crossrail station was finished, the contractors still seemed intent on digging up the streets. “Might just be an accident anyway, health and safety on these sites is almost as bad as it is in the Met.”

  Health and safety was the current obsession of the Police Federation. Last year it had been stab vests but lately they felt that police officers were taking unnecessary safety risks while pursuing suspects. They wanted better H&S guidelines to prevent injury and, presumably, remote-controlled drones to do the actual chases.

  “Did it happen in the dark?”

  “No, at eight o’clock this morning in full daylight,” said Stephanopoulis. “Which means he was probably pushed but, and this is the important bit as far as you’re concerned, there is definitely nothing remotely supernatural about the scene, thank God. So you can just bugger off.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” I said. “I shall do that.”

  “Wait,” said Stephanopoulis. “I want you to check the follow-up interviews with Colin Sandbrow—they should be on the system by now.”

  “Who’s Colin Sandbrow?”

  “The man who would have been the next victim if your weirdo friend hadn’t gotten in the way,” she said. “If you think you can do that without generating more property damage.”

  I laughed to show that I was a good sport, but cop humor being what it is I knew I’d be carrying that ambulance around for the rest of my career. I left Stephanopoulis to impose her will on the crime scene and slipped through St. Anne’s Court and D’Arblay Street to Berwick Street. Since I hadn’t been paying attention the night before, I had to stop and get my bearings before I spotted the door—sandwiched between a chemist’s and a record shop that specialized in vintage vinyl. The black paint on the door was peeling and the little cards on the entry phone were either smudged or missing entirely. It didn’t matter. I knew she was on the top floor.

  “You wretch,” spluttered the entry phone. “I’m not ready.”

  “I can go around the block again,” I said.

  The lock buzzed and I pushed the door open. The stairs didn’t look any better in the daylight; the carpet was pale blue and worn through in places and the walls showed stains from where people had put their hands out to balance themselves. On each floor there were blind doors, which in Soho could lead anywhere from Strict Discipline at Reasonable Rates to a television production company. I paced myself so I wasn’t panting when I reached the top floor and knocked on the door.

  When Simone opened it and saw me in my uniform she skipped back a step and clapped her hands. “Look at this,” she said. “It’s a strippergram.”

  She’d been cleaning in a pair of gray tracksuit bottoms and a navy blue sweatshirt that looked like it had been cropped with a pair of nail scissors. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf in an English way that I’d only ever seen on Coronation Street. I stepped forward and grabbed her. She smelled of sweat and Domestos. It would have been straight onto the floor right then if she hadn’t gasped out that the door was still open. We broke long enough to close the door and stumble to the bed. Only one bed I noticed, but it was king-sized and we did our best to use every bit. At some point my uniform came off and we never did find what happened to her sweatshirt—she left the scarf on, though, because something about it turned me on.

  An hour and a bit later I had a chance to look around the flat. The bed took up one whole corner of the main room and was, apart from one overstuffed leather armchair, the only thing to sit on. The only other furniture was a mismatched trio of wardrobes lining one wall and a solid oak chest of drawers that was so big, the only way to get it into the room must have been to winch it in through the window. There was no TV that I could see, or stereo, although a suitably small MP3 player might have vanished among the drifts of cloth that had colonized the room. I’m an only child, so I’ve only ever had to live with one woman at a time and wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of clothes that could be generated by three sisters sharing one flat. The shoes were particularly pervasive; serried ranks of, to me, almost identical open-toed sling-back stilettos. Tangles of sandals had been stuffed into random nooks while boxes of pumps filled the gaps between the wardrobes. Pairs of boots, from calf-length to thigh-high, hung from nails on the wall like the rows of swords in a castle.

  Simone saw me eyeing a pair of fetish boots with three-inch spike heels and started to wriggle out of my arms. “Want me to try them on?” she said.

  I pulled her back against my chest and kissed her neck—I didn’t want her going anywhere. She twisted in my arms and we kissed until she said she had to pee. Once your lover’s done you might as well get up and so I folded myself into the bathroom—a tiny cubbyhole with just enough room for a surprisingly modern power shower, a toilet, and the kind of small odd-shaped sink designed to fit into the space of last resort. While I was in there my copper’s instincts got the better of me and I had a rummage through their medicine cabinet. Simone and her sisters were clearly in favor of the long-term storage of dangerous chemicals because there were acetaminophen and prescription sleeping tablets that dated back ten years.

  “Are you going through my things?” asked Simone from the kitchen.

  I asked how her and her sisters managed to get along with such a small bathroom.

  “We all went to boarding school,
darling,” said Simone. “Survive that and you can handle anything.”

  When I came out she asked me if I wanted tea. I said why not and we had a full English tea—on a tray with blue-and-gold Wedgwood crockery, blackberry jam, and heavily buttered crumpets.

  I liked looking at her naked, reclining on the bed like something out of the National Gallery with a cup of tea in one hand and a crumpet in the other. Given that we’d just had quite a good summer her skin was very pale, translucent almost. When I lifted my hand from her thigh a pink outline remained.

  “Yes,” she said. “Some of us don’t tan very well—thank you for reminding me.”

  I kissed the spot better by way of apology and then the curve of her belly by way of invitation. She giggled and pushed me away.

  “I’m ticklish,” she said. “Finish your tea first, you savage. Have you no manners?”

  I took up the willow-pattern teacup and sipped the tea. It tasted different, exotic. A posh blend I suspected, from another Fortnum & Mason hamper. She fed me some crumpet and I asked her why she didn’t have a TV.

  “We didn’t have television when we were growing up,” she said. “So we never got into the habit of watching. There’s a radio somewhere for listening to The Archers. We never miss an episode of The Archers. Although I must admit I can’t always keep all the characters straight, they do seem to be always getting married, having secret love affairs, and as soon as I’ve grown familiar with them they die or leave Ambridge.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Not a follower of The Archers, are you?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “We must seem like such bohemians to you,” she said finishing her tea. “Living all higgledy-piggledy in one room, no television, in among the fleshpots of Soho.” She placed teacup and tray on the floor by the bed before reaching out to pluck the empty cup from my fingers.

  “I think you worry too much about what I think,” I said.

  Simone put the teacup safely off the bed and kissed me on the knee.

  “Do I?” she asked and grabbed me with her hand.

  “Definitely,” I said trying not to squeak as she kissed her way up my thigh.

  Two hours later she threw me out of bed, but in the nicest possible way.

  “My sisters will be back soon,” she said. “We have rules. No men in the bed past ten o’clock.”

  “There have been other men?” I said while looking for my boxers.

  “Of course not,” she said. “You’re my first.”

  Simone was pulling on random items that she’d found on the floor including a pair of satin knickers that fit her like a second skin. Watching them go on was almost as sexy as watching them come off would be. She caught me panting and wagged her finger at me.

  “No,” she said. “If we start again we’ll never stop.”

  I could have lived with that but a gentleman knows when to give in gracefully and depart the scene. Not without some serious snogging in the doorway first, though.

  I walked back through Soho with the scent of honeysuckle in my nostrils and, according to subsequent records, helped officers from Charing Cross and West End Central break up two fights, a domestic and a hen party that had ended with an attempted sexual assault on a male stripper. But I don’t remember any of that.

  YOU PRACTICE scindere by levitating an apple with impello and then fixing it in place while your teacher tries to dislodge it with a cricket bat. The next morning I put up three in a row and they didn’t so much as wobble when Nightingale smacked them. He hit them hard enough to pulp them, of course, but the bits just hung about like a food accident on a space station.

  The first time Nightingale demonstrated the forma I’d asked how long the apples would stay fixed in place. He’d said that it depended on how much magic the apple had been imbued with. For most apprentices that meant anything up to half an hour. Which vagueness neatly summed up Nightingale’s attitude to empiricism. I on the other hand was prepared this time. I’d brought a stopwatch, an antique clockwork one with a face as big as my palm, my notebook, and the transcript of Colin Sandbrow’s interview from the vagina dentata case notes. While Nightingale headed back upstairs I sat down at a work desk and started in on the file.

  Colin Sandbrow, aged twenty-one, in from Ilford for a night on the town. Met what he thought was a Goth who didn’t talk much but seemed amenable to a bit of outdoor knee-trembling action. Looks-wise Sandbrow was at least young and fit, but his face had a sort of routine sandy plainness—as if his creator had been working on him at the end of the day and was looking to make up a quota. This probably explained why he had been just as keen to leave the club.

  “Didn’t you think it was a little suspicious that she was so enthusiastic?” Stephanopoulis had asked.

  Sandbrow indicated that he hadn’t been inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth although in the future he would take a more cautious approach when dealing with members of the opposite sex.

  It started raining apple pulp sixteen minutes and thirty-four seconds after I’d done the spell. I put aside the interview and made a note of the time. I’d taken the opportunity to put plastic bags underneath, so I didn’t have to do much cleaning up. Both my textbooks and Nightingale were a bit vague about where the power that was holding the apple was coming from. If the magic was still being sucked out of my head, how many could I put up simultaneously before my brain shriveled? And if it wasn’t coming from me, where was the power coming from? I’m an old-fashioned copper—I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

  I finished up my notes and headed up and out to the coach house and the rudiments of twenty-first-century comfort—wide-screen TV, broadband, and HOLMES. Which is how I came to catch Nightingale making himself comfortable on the sofa with a can of Nigerian Star Beer in one hand and the rugby on the TV. He had the grace to look embarrassed.

  “I didn’t think you’d mind,” he said. “There’s two more crates of this stuff in the corner.”

  “Overspill,” I said. “From when I propitiated Mama Thames with a semi full of booze.”

  “That clarifies a great deal,” he said and waved his can. “Don’t tell Molly about the beer. She’s become a tad over-protective.”

  I told him that his secret was safe with me. “Who’s playing?” I asked.

  “Harlequins and Wasps,” he said.

  I let him get on with it. I like a bit of soccer and a legitimate boxing match, but unlike my mum who will watch anything involving a ball, even golf, I’ve never been that into rugby. So I sat down at my desk and fired up my second-best laptop, which I use as a HOLMES terminal, and got stuck back into the case.

  Stephanopoulis’s people were very thorough. They’d spoken to all Sandbrow’s friends and any random customers they could track down. The club bouncers were adamant that they hadn’t seen the suspect enter despite the fact that the CCTV footage clearly showed her walking right past them. The whole attack reminded me much more of the incident with St. John Giles back in the summer than it did of the murder of Jason Dunlop—I was about to put a note pointing that out on the file when I noticed that Stephanopoulis had already spotted it.

  I wondered how Leslie was doing. She hadn’t answered any of my texts or emails so I called her house and got one of her sisters.

  “She’s in London,” she said. “Had an appointment with her specialist.”

  “She never said.”

  “Well she wouldn’t, would she,” said her sister.

  “Can you tell me what hospital?”

  “Nope,” she said. “If she wanted you to know she was in town she’d have told you.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Nightingale’s rugby finished and he thanked me for the beer and left. I switched over to the news to see whether a certain hijacked ambulance was still rotating around the twenty-four-hour news cycle but it had been knocked off by some serious flooding around Marlow. Lots of nice pictures of cars hydroplaning down rural roads and pensione
rs being ferried about by the fire brigade. For a moment I had a horrible suspicion that the floods might have been a reaction by Father Thames to Ash being injured but when I Googled for the details, I found that it had all kicked off during the following night when I’d been cavorting on the roof with Simone.

  That was a relief. I was in enough trouble already without inadvertently flooding part of the Thames Valley.

  A woman from the Environment Agency was asked why they hadn’t issued a flood warning and she explained the Thames had a complex watershed made even more complicated by the interaction of human development.

  “Sometimes the river can just surprise you,” she said. There’d been a second unexpected surge late the night before and she was refusing to rule out a repeat later that day. Like most Londoners, my attitude was that only rich people could afford to live next to a river, so I could withstand their discomfort with fortitude.

  I finished up on HOLMES and shut everything down. Stephanopoulis had found no connections among our two and a half victims. Worse, St. John Giles and Sandbrow had visited the clubs where they met our mysterious killer on impulse. In her notes attached to the nominal reports Stephanopoulis argued, and I agreed, that two young men had been targeted at random, but that the attack on Jason Dunlop felt more like a hit. If only because the Pale Lady, as I now thought of her, had made contact with her victim in a public place and in front of potential witnesses. Maybe it was a work–life balance thing. Maybe the two nightclub boys were recreational and Jason Dunlop was work.

  Mum phoned me and reminded me that I was supposed to be introducing Dad to the irregulars that afternoon. I pointed out that this was her third phone call to remind me, but as is usual with my mum she didn’t take a blind bit of notice. I assured her I would be there. I considered calling Simone and inviting her along, but I decided that I was onto far too much of a good thing to want to risk having her meet the family—especially my mum.

  I called her anyway and she assured me that she was languishing without me. I heard female laughter in the background and some comments pitched too low for me to hear. Her sisters, I suspected.