Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Definitely languishing,” she said. “I don’t suppose you could pop around later and ravish me at your convenience.”

  “What happened to no men in the bed past ten?” I asked.

  “I don’t suppose you have a bed”—More laughter in the background.—“that you don’t have to share.”

  I wondered if I could sneak her into the Folly. Nightingale had never actually forbidden overnight visitors, but I wasn’t sure how I’d bring it up in the conversation. I’d slept in the coach house myself but the sofa would be cramped for two. Worth thinking about, though.

  “I’ll call you later,” I said and idly looked up hotel prices in Central London—but even with my healthy finances it just wasn’t going to happen.

  It was only then that it occurred to me that less than two weeks ago she’d been the grieving lover of Cyrus Wilkinson, late of the very band my dad was rehearsing with that afternoon. All the more reason, I thought, for not inviting her along.

  JUST ABOUT every council estate I know has a set of communal rooms. There’s something about stacking people up in egg boxes that makes architects and town planners believe that having a set of communal rooms will compensate for not having a garden or, in some designs, enough room to swing a cat. Perhaps they fondly imagine that the denizens of the estate will spontaneously gather for colorful proletarian festivals and cat-swinging contests. In truth, the rooms generally get used for two things, children’s parties and tenant meetings, but that afternoon we were going to shake things up and have a jazz rehearsal instead.

  Since James was the drummer he was the one with a van, a suitably decrepit transit that we could have left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition and a sign on the front windshield saying TAKE ME, I’M YOURS, and have no fears about it still being there when we came back out again. As I helped him carry his drum kit from the van to the rehearsal room he told me that it was totally deliberate.

  “I’m from Glasgow,” he said. “So there’s bugger-all London’s got to teach me about personal safety.”

  We had to do three more trips for the amps and the speakers and it being school-home time we soon collected an audience of wannabe street urchins. Presumably the street urchins in Glasgow are bigger and tougher than the ones in London, because James paid them no mind. But I could see Daniel and Max were uncomfortable. Nobody does hostile curiosity like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who are putting off doing their homework. One skinny mixed-race girl cocked her head and asked whether we were in a band.

  “What’s it look like?” I asked

  “What kind of music do you play?” she asked. She had an entourage of little friends who giggled on cue. I’d gone to school with their elder brothers and sisters. They knew me but I was still fair game.

  “Jazz,” I said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Swing, Latin, or fusion?”

  The entourage duly laughed and pointed. I gave her the eye but she ignored me.

  “We did jazz last term in music,” she said.

  “I bet your mum’s looking for you,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Can we come and watch?”

  “No,” I said.

  “We’ll be quiet,” she said.

  “No you won’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can see into the future,” I said.

  “No you can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “ ’Cause that would be a violation of causticity,” she said.

  “I blame Doctor Who,” said James.

  “Causality,” I said.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Can we watch?”

  So I let them watch and they lasted two minutes into “Airegin”—which was longer than I’d expected them to.

  “That’s your dad, innit,” she said helpfully when my dad put in an appearance. “I didn’t know he could play.”

  It was weird watching my dad sit down and play keyboard with a bunch of musicians. I’d never seen him play live but my memories are full of black-and-white photographs and in those he always had his trumpet in his hand. Trying to hold it in the same way as Miles Davis had, like a weapon, like a rifle at parade rest. He could play the keyboard, though. Even I could tell that. But it still felt like the wrong instrument to me.

  It bothered me for the rest of the session, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  AFTER THE rehearsal I’d expected us to troop up Leverton Street for a pint at The Pineapple but my mum invited everyone back to the flat. As we headed up the stairs the mouthy girl from the rehearsal stopped me in the stairwell. This time without her posse.

  “I heard you can do magic,” she said.

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “I got my sources,” she said. “Is it true?”

  “Yeah,” I said, because sometimes the truth shuts up kids faster than a clip around the ear and has the added advantage of not being an assault on a minor in the eyes of the law. “I can do magic. What about it?”

  “Real magic,” she said. “Not like tricks and stuff.”

  “Real magic,” I said.

  “Teach me,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You get a GCSE in Latin and I’ll teach you magic.”

  “Deal,” she said and stuck out her hand.

  I shook, her palm small and dry in mine.

  “You promise on your mum’s life,” she said.

  I hesitated and she squeezed my hand as hard as she could.

  “On your mum’s life,” she said.

  “I don’t swear on my mum’s life,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “But a deal’s a deal—right?”

  “Right,” I said. But I was suspicious by that point. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Abigail,” she said. “I live up the road.”

  “You really going to learn Latin?”

  “Am now,” she said. “Laters.” And she went skipping up the road.

  I counted my fingers to make sure they were all there and I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me that I’d handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

  By the time I got upstairs to the flat, the musicians had gravitated into the bedroom where they were cooing over my dad’s record collection. My mum had obviously hit the snack freezer at Iceland pretty hard and there were bowls of mini sausage rolls, mini pizzas, and Hula Hoops on the coffee table. Coke, tea, coffee, and orange juice were available on demand. My mum was looking very pleased with herself.

  “Do you know Abigail?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “Her father is Adam Kamara.”

  I vaguely recognized the name as being one of several dozen relations loosely defined as cousins—a relationship that could range from being the offspring of one of my uncles to the white guy from the Peace Corps who wandered into my granddad’s compound in 1977 and never left.

  “Did you tell her I could do magic?”

  She shrugged. “She was here with her father, she may have heard things.”

  “So you talk about me when I’m not here?”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said.

  Yes I would, I thought, and helped myself to a handful of Hula Hoops.

  At my mother’s command I stuck my head around the bedroom door to ask the irregulars whether they wanted any snacks. My dad said they’d be out in a minute, no snacks allowed near the collection obviously, and continued his discussion with Daniel and Max about the transition from Stan Kenton to the Third Stream. James was sitting on the bed with an LP in his hands, and he was caught in the terrible dilemma of the serious vinyl aficionado—he wanted to borrow it, but he knew that if it was his he’d never let it out of the house. He really was close to tears.

  “I know it’s unfashionable,” said James, after going on about Don Cherry for a while. “But I’ve always had a
soft spot for the cornet.” Which was when, had I been a cartoon character, a little lightbulb would have gone ding over my head.

  I borrowed my dad’s iPod and thumbed through his selections looking for the track I wanted. I took it through the kitchen and out onto the balcony with its unparalleled vista of the flats opposite. I found it—“Body and Soul” off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands—Snakehips Johnson giving the tune such a danceable swing that Coleman Hawkins had to invent an entire new branch of jazz just to get it out of his head. It was also the version I’d heard in the Café de Paris while dancing with Simone.

  The vestigium left on the body of Mickey the Bone had sounded like a trombone. At Cyrus Wilkinson’s demise it had been an alto sax—the instruments the musicians had played in life. Henry Bellrush had played the cornet, but I hadn’t sensed a cornet at the Café de Paris.

  I’d sensed Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra who had all died there, in the Café de Paris, more than seventy years ago.

  That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  THE NEXT morning I talked myself out of practice and headed for Clerkenwell and the Metropolitan Archive. The Corporation of London is the organization dedicated to ensuring that the City—that’s the financial bit of London—is untainted by all this newfangled democracy that’s been rearing its ugly head in the last two hundred years or so. If an oligarchy was good enough for Dick Whittington, they argue, then it’s good enough for the heart of twenty-first-century London. After all, they say, it works in China.

  They are also in charge of old archives of the London County Council, which are kept in a workmanlike but still elegant art deco building with white walls and gray carpet. I flashed my warrant card at one of the librarians, and she quickly pulled up a list of documents and showed me how to order.

  She also suggested that she could check the digital archive to see if there were any images available. “Is this a cold case?” she asked.

  “A very cold case,” I said.

  First up from the storeroom was LCC/CE/4/7, a cardboard box full of manila folders tied up with dirty white ribbons. I was looking for item #39 report from March 8, 1941. The identification was handwritten in black ink and I untied the folder to find the report printed in purple type on pale yellow paper, a surefire sign, said the librarian, that it had been duplicated with a mimeograph. It was marked SECRET and dated March 9, 1941. SITUATION REPORT AS AT 0600 HOURS. It listed, in order of importance, damage to factories, railways, telecommunications, electricity supply, docks, roads, hospitals, and public buildings. St. Thomas’s Babies Hostel in Lambeth had been hit and, I was relieved to read, no casualties taken. Oddly relieved, given that it all happened half a century before I was born. I found what I was looking for halfway down the third page.

  2140, H.E. Café de Paris, Coventry Street. Casualties—

  34 killed, approximately 80 seriously injured.

  While I was waiting for the other files to be brought up, the librarian called me over to the information point to show me some of the pictures she’d found in the digital archive. Most of them came from the Daily Mail, which must have had a photographer on the scene almost as soon as the bombs fell. In monochrome everything looked curiously bloodless and it wasn’t until you recognized that the light gray tube poking out from under a table was a woman’s forearm that you realized you were looking at a charnel house. There were six more pictures of the interior of the nightclub and several of casualties arriving at Charing Cross Hospital, pale faces and stunned expressions among the blankets and primitive equipment of a wartime hospital.

  I almost missed it but some flicker of recognition made me click back one and check.

  The picture was confused and I couldn’t identify where it was taken, possibly the ambulance loading bay. A group of women were being led past the camera, all but one of them hunched over with blankets across their shoulders. One face was staring at the camera, the expression erased by shock into a smooth pale oval. A face that I recognized, and which I’d last seen in the green room at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died.

  She’d called herself Peggy. I wondered if that was her real name.

  THE CAFÉ de Paris had been built twenty feet below ground level and was considered safe by management and customers alike. Unless you took cover in the Underground system, no civilian shelter in London was built nearly as deep. Later it was determined that two bombs penetrated the building above the nightclub; one failed to detonate while the other dropped down an airshaft and exploded right in front of the band, killing the musicians and most of the dancers. Ken Johnson had his head blown clear off his shoulders and there were reports of customers killed where they sat, but remaining upright at their tables. Eyewitnesses remembered that there had been a great many Canadian nurses and servicemen in the club that night, but despite going down to the storage area with the librarian I couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled a casualty list. I found duplicates typed on paper as thin as tissue concerning an exchange of correspondence dealing with complaints that ambulances hadn’t arrived quickly enough to deal with the casualties, and a report on the shocking boldness of the looters who had steamed through the site nicking valuables.

  Nothing more on the mysterious Peggy who, if it was the same person, would have to be pushing ninety. A year ago I would have considered that unlikely, but these days I was working with a guy who was born in 1900 and he wasn’t even the oldest person I’d met. Oxley had been a medieval monk and his “father” dated back to the foundation of the City in the first century AD.

  Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and I was going to start with Peggy.

  The archive has a whitewashed room with lockers, two coffeemakers, and one of those machines that dispenses chocolate bars and stale snacks. I got a coffee and a Mars bar and called in a PNC check on Peggy, female, IC1, eighteen to twenty-five. The civilian operator laughed at me down the line and said she wasn’t even going to tell me how big a set of nominals that returned. I asked her to limit the area to Soho and go back as far as 1941. To her credit she didn’t ask me why.

  “Not everything from that far back is on the system,” the operator said. She had a Scouse accent so she managed to make it sound like this was personally my fault. She hummed something from the late 1990s chart under her breath while she checked. “I’ve got a load of nominals that fit those parameters,” she said. “Mostly prostitution and drug arrests.” But nothing that stood out. I asked her to forward the nominal list to the HOLMES case file I’d been building. She was impressed—most coppers don’t even know you can do that.

  Peggy had been at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died. She’d mentioned Cherry who was probably Cherie, Mickey’s bit of posh that his sister had talked about. In the old days I would have had to schlep back down to Cheam to show a picture to the sister, but all I had to do now was call her mobile and text it to her instead. I cropped the 1941 image until it was just the face and sent that.

  “She looks kind of familiar,” said Mickey’s sister. In the background I could hear voices and music muffled by a firmly closed door—the wake for her brother was continuing.

  “Do you have an address for Cherie?” I asked.

  “She lived up in town,” said Mickey’s sister. “I don’t know where.”

  I asked if she had any pictures of Cherie, she said she thought she might and promised to text them over if she found any. I thanked her and asked how she was coping.

  “Okay I guess,” she said.

  I told her to hang in there—what else could I say?

  Thanks to the magic of science I copied the rest of the pictures onto a flash drive, which, thanks to the science of magic, I’d tested and found they didn’t get messed up every time I did a spell. As far as I could determine, nearby use of magic only degraded chips that had power running through
them at the time, but it frustrated me that I didn’t even have a theory as to how magic actually worked. A little analytical voice in my head pointed out that any working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point—the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.

  I arranged for the bombing reports and the other documents to be copied and made sure to thank the librarian properly before heading for where I’d parked the Asbo that morning.

  When I got back to the Folly I found Dr. Walid in the atrium talking to Molly.

  “Ah good, Peter,” he said. “I’m glad you came back. Let’s have some tea, shall we?”

  Molly shot me a reproachful look and went gliding off toward the kitchen. Dr. Walid led me over to a collection of overstuffed red armchairs and mahogany occasional tables that nestled under the overhang of the eastern balcony. I noticed he had his medical bag with him, a modern ballistic plastic case covered in burgundy leather whose one concession to tradition was the stethoscope wound around the handle.

  “I’m concerned,” he said, “that Thomas has been pushing himself too hard.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s picked up an infection and he’s running a fever,” said Dr. Walid.

  “He was okay at breakfast,” I said.

  “Man could be dead on his feet before he’d admit to it,” said Dr. Walid. “I don’t want him disturbed for the next couple of days. He was shot through the chest, Peter, there’s tissue damage there that will never fully heal, and it will make him prone to chest infections like the one he’s got now. I’ve put him on a course of antibiotics, which I expect Molly to make sure he completes.”

  Molly arrived with the good Wedgwood tea set on a lacquered wooden tray. She poured for Dr. Walid with quick dainty movements and pointedly left without pouring mine. Obviously she blamed me for Nightingale’s relapse—perhaps she knew about the beer.

  Dr. Walid poured my tea and helped himself to a HobNob.