Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

The rain had slackened off to a light drizzle that, if you’re a Londoner, barely counts as rain at all. Even so, I splashed out on a black cab to take me back to the Folly where Molly served up steak-and-kidney pudding with roast potatoes, peas, and carrots.

  “She always does this when I’m ill,” said Nightingale. “It’ll be black pudding for breakfast tomorrow. Thickens the blood.”

  We were eating dinner in the so-called Private Dining Room, which adjoined the English library on the second floor. Since the main dining room could sit sixty, we never used it in case Molly got it into her head to lay all the tables. Nonetheless, Nightingale and I had dressed for dinner—we both have standards and one of us had been exerting himself that afternoon.

  I knew from experience that you didn’t dive into one of Molly’s steak-and-kidney puddings until some of the superheated steam had had a chance to dissipate and the interiors had ceased to be hot enough to fire pottery.

  Nightingale swallowed a couple of pills with some water and asked about the case.

  “Which one?” I asked.

  “The jazz musicians first,” he said.

  I filled him in on the Café de Paris bombing and my search for Peggy and possibly Cherie.

  “You think there’s more than one,” he paused. “What are you calling them?”

  “Jazz vampires,” I said. “But I don’t think they’re feeding on the music. I think that’s just a side effect, like the sound a generator makes when it’s turned on.”

  “Tactus disvitae,” said Nightingale. “Another species of vampire—Wolfe would be pleased.”

  The pudding was cool enough for me to dig in. An afternoon with Simone had left me starving and, according to Nightingale, Molly made her puddings with ox’s liver. Which he said was the proper old-fashioned recipe.

  “Why doesn’t Molly go out to buy stuff?” I asked.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because she’s different,” I said. “Like the jazz vampire and the Pale Lady. But, unlike them, we’ve had a chance to learn what makes her tick.”

  Nightingale finished a mouthful and wiped his lips on his napkin.

  “The Pale Lady?”

  “That’s what Ash called her,” I said.

  “Interesting name,” said Nightingale. “As to the food, as far as I know she has everything delivered.”

  “She shops on the Internet?”

  “Good God no,” said Nightingale. “There are still some establishments that do things the old-fashioned way, whose staff members are still capable of reading a handwritten note.”

  “Could she leave if she wanted to?” I asked.

  “She’s not a prisoner,” said Nightingale. “Or a slave if that’s what you’re alluding to.”

  “So, she could just walk out the door tomorrow?”

  “If she so desired,” said Nightingale.

  “What’s stopping her?”

  “Fear,” said Nightingale. “I believe she’s frightened of what’s out there.”

  “What is out there?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said Nightingale. “She won’t say.”

  “You must have a theory,” I said.

  Nightingale shrugged. “Other creatures like Molly,” he said.

  “Creatures?”

  “People, if you prefer,” said Nightingale. “People who, like Molly, are not the same as you or I or even the genii locorum. They were changed by magic, or they were born into lineages that have been changed. And as far as I know this leaves them—incomplete.”

  Nightingale, despite literally being a relic of a bygone age, had learned to modify his language around me because when I’d looked into the literature the most common terms started with un—unfit, unsuited, undesirable and behind them came the terms starting with sub. However, with a bit of running translation, it was clear that “incomplete” people like Molly were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their more powerful supernatural brethren and by practitioners with no moral scruples. Magicians, according to Nightingale, of the blackest hue.

  “Sorry. Ethically challenged practitioners,” said Nightingale. “My first ‘governor,’ Inspector Murville, had handled a notorious case in Limehouse in 1911. It involved a famous stage magician working under the name of Manchu the Magnificent who had collected some very strange ‘people’ and was using them to carry out his nefarious plans.”

  “And his nefarious plans were what, exactly?” I asked.

  “Nothing less than the overthrow of the British Empire itself. Apparently, Inspector Murville, as he set off on his crusade, had it on good authority that Manchu the Magnificent operated an opium den on the Limehouse Causeway. There the yellow devil sat like a fat spider at the center of a web of plots, white slavery being merely the start of it.”

  “What’s white slavery when it’s at home?” I asked.

  Nightingale had to think about it a bit but apparently when he was young white slavery mostly referred to the trafficking of white women and children for the purposes of prostitution. The inscrutable Chinese were supposedly behind this dastardly trade in lily-white female flesh. I wondered if part of the outrage came from a guilty conscience. I said as much.

  “There were established cases, Peter,” said Nightingale sharply. “Women and children were bought and sold in beastly circumstances and suffered real hardship. I doubt they found the historical irony much comfort.”

  Inspector Murville, convinced of the seriousness of the threat, organized a raid with half the available wizards in London and a mob of constables loaned to him by the commissioner. Cue a great deal of banging down doors and shouting of “Hold still, you Oriental devil” and then a certain amount of stunned silence.

  “The Great Manchu the Magnificent,” said Nightingale, “was revealed to be a Canadian by the name of Henry Speltz. Although he was married to a Chinese woman with whom he had five daughters, all of whom had acted as his beautiful assistant ‘Li Ping’ at one time or other.”

  Nothing was found at the house except for a strange young European girl who lived in the household and worked as a maid. Under caution Speltz told Inspector Murville that the girl, whom nobody in the household had thought to name, had been found cowering in one of his disappearing cabinets at the end of a matinee performance at the Hackney Empire.

  I mopped up the last of the onion gravy with the last bit of bread in the basket. Nightingale had left half his pudding untouched. “Are you going to finish that?” I asked.

  “Help yourself,” said Nightingale, and I did while he finished the story.

  Some things never change and a senior police officer doesn’t organize a costly raid and admit to failure, or violating the Magna Carta, until he’s done his best to convict someone of something. Had Speltz actually been Chinese, things might have gone very hard for him. But in the end he was formally charged with disturbing the peace and let go with a police caution.

  “The girl was taken into protective custody,” said Nightingale. “Even old Murville could sense there was something not quite right about her.” He looked quickly toward the doors. “Have you finished?” he asked.

  I said I had, and Nightingale grabbed the now empty plate and put it back in front of himself just in time for Molly to come drifting into the dining room, pushing the sweets cart. As she cleared the plates, she gave Nightingale a distinctly suspicious look. But she couldn’t prove anything.

  She scowled at us and we smiled back.

  “Very nice,” I said.

  Molly laid out a custard tart and, with one last suspicious look aimed at me, silently left the dining room.

  “What happened to the girl?” I asked as I served up the tart.

  “She was brought here and examined,” said Nightingale. “And found to be too abnormal to be fostered …”

  “Or put into a workhouse,” I said. Under a thick layer of nutmeg, the custard was just as good as that of the Patisserie Valerie. I wondered if I could smuggle some out for Simone. Or, better yet, smuggle her in
for dinner.

  “It may put your mind at rest to know that we had an agreement with Corum’s Foundling Hospital,” said Nightingale. “She would have been placed there but for the unfortunate fact that once allowed into the Folly, she would not allow herself to be taken out.”

  From under the table I could hear Toby looking for the last of the leftovers.

  “This is Molly we’re talking about,” I said.

  “So she slept in the scullery and was raised by the staff,” he said.

  I helped myself to another piece of tart.

  “Postmartin was right,” said Nightingale. “I let myself get too comfortable. And while I lived here with Molly the world continued on without me.”

  I WAS stuffed, but I forced myself over to the coach house to do some data entry. Once there I was irresistibly drawn to the sofa and Arsenal v. Tottenham. It was going badly for Spurs when my phone rang and a strange voice said, “Hello, Peter.”

  I checked the caller ID. “Is that you, Leslie?”

  I heard a rasping breathy sound. “No,” said Leslie. “It’s Darth Vader.”

  I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “It’s better than Stephen Hawking,” she said. It sounded like she was trying to talk with a plastic bottle in her mouth, and I got the strong impression that it was painful to do.

  “You were in London for an operation,” I said. “You could have told me.”

  “They didn’t know if it would work,” she said.

  “Did it?”

  “I’m talking, aren’t I,” said Leslie. “It bloody hurts, though.”

  “Want to go back to text?”

  “No,” she said. “Sick of typing. Have you checked your cases on HOLMES yet?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’ve been doing door-to-door.”

  “I went through the records that you sent over and Professor Geoffrey Wheatcroft didn’t ever formally teach Jason Dunlop but Dunlop did dedicate his first novel ‘For master Geoffrey from whom I gained my true education.’ Isn’t that what you trainee wizards call your teachers?”

  Not this apprentice. But master doesn’t mean the same thing to white boys at Oxford. Given the books in Dunlop’s flat it had to mean, barring a really bizarre set of coincidences, that Geoffrey Wheatcroft had taught Dunlop formal Newtonian magic.

  I said as much to Leslie.

  “Thought so,” she said. “Question is, was he the only one? And if he wasn’t how do we find out.”

  “We need to check the Murder Team’s files and see if known associates or nominals track back to Magdalen College around the time he was there.”

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a real copper.”

  “Do you think you can do that?” I asked.

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything better to do. When are you coming up to see me?”

  “Soon as I get a chance,” I said—lying.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk too much.”

  “You take care,” I said.

  “You too,” she said and hung up.

  How many apprentices could one master teach? You needed a trained wizard to act as what Nightingale called an exemplar, to demonstrate the form. But I didn’t see why you couldn’t do that with more than one person at a time. It would depend on how motivated your students were. At somewhere like Nightingale’s old school you’d be dealing with your usual range of talent and enthusiasm. But university students learning magic for fun? Nightingale said it took ten years to be a proper wizard, but I’d managed to do quite a lot of damage within three months of starting training—I didn’t think Jason Dunlop, or any fellow students, would be any different.

  I fired up the HOLMES terminal and started looking for connections to Oxford University that had lasted beyond his time there. That got me a list of twenty-plus names, mostly former students, whose paths had crossed professionally or, as far as the Murder Team could tell, socially with Jason Dunlop.

  In a major inquiry a person who comes to the attention of the police as part of that inquiry is listed on HOLMES as a nominal. Any task that an investigating officer decides needs doing is called an action. Actions are prioritized and put on a list and officers are assigned to carry them out. Actions lead to more nominals and more actions and the whole investigation quickly becomes a whirling vortex of information from which there seems no escape. HOLMES lets you do word searches and comparison tests, but half the time that just leads to more actions and more nominals and more items of information. Deal with this for any length of time and you start to get nostalgic for the good old days when you just found a suspect you thought looked a bit tasty and beat out a confession with a phone book.

  Background checks on the Oxford University names had a low priority, so I started with the Police National Computer to at least see if any of them had criminal records and to nab likenesses from their driver’s licenses. This was not a quick process but at least it meant I was still awake and dressed when Stephanopoulis called me at one in the morning.

  “Grab your overnight bag,” she said. “I’ll be picking you up in ten minutes.”

  I didn’t have an overnight bag, so I grabbed my gym bag and hoped that nobody asked me to a formal dinner while I was away. I bunged a spare airwave in with my backup laptop just to be on the safe side. To save time, I went out the side door and walked up Bedford Place to Russell Square. It was drizzling and the moisture put yellow halos around the streetlamps.

  Stephanopoulis wouldn’t have called me out of hours for anything less than another murder, and the overnight bag said it was out of London.

  I heard it coming before I saw it, a black Jaguar XJ with twenty-inch wheels and, unmistakably from the sound, a supercharged V8 engine. From the way it pulled up it was obvious that the driver had been on all the courses I hadn’t been on and was clearly authorized to drive insanely fast.

  The back passenger door opened and I slipped into the smell of newly liveried leather seats to find Stephanopoulis waiting for me. The car took off as soon as the door closed and I found myself slipping around on the backseat until I managed to wrestle my seat belt into place.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Norwich,” said Stephanopoulis. “Our friend’s been grazing again.”

  “Dead?”

  “Oh yes,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “Quite dead.” Stephanopoulis introduced him as Detective Chief Inspector Zachary Thompson.

  “People call me Zack,” he said as he shook my hand.

  And I shall call you Chief Inspector is what I didn’t say. Thompson was a tall man with a narrow face and an enormous beaklike nose. He had to be tougher than he sounded to get through life with a nose like that.

  “Zack,” said Stephanopoulis, “is the SIO on this case.”

  “I’m her beard,” he said cheerfully.

  Now, I’m not part of the Met’s famous canteen culture. I do not mourn the good old days when coppers were real coppers, not least because that spares me from what would have been almost continuous racist abuse. But even I get nervous when senior officers tell me to call them by their first name—no good can come of that sort of thing.

  “Is there anything unusual about this one?” I asked. “I mean more unusual than usual.”

  “He’s ex-Job,” said Stephanopoulis. “Detective Chief Inspector Jerry Johnson, retired from the Met in 1979.”

  “Is there a connection to Jason Dunlop?”

  “There’s a notation in Dunlop’s diary from March,” said DCI Thompson. “Meet J. J. Norwich. His credit card trace shows that he bought a return ticket from Liverpool Street to Norwich on that day. We think Johnson might have been a source for a story that Dunlop was working on.”

  “If it’s the same J. J.,” I said.

  “You let us worry about that,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re there to check for signs of black magic.”

/>   To my amazement, we fell in behind a pair of motorcycle outriders and by the time we hit the M11 we were doing over 120 mph.

  MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness. It is, says my dad, the poor man’s alternative to Australia now that South Africa has gone all multicultural.

  Jerry Johnson was one of the later type of non-Londoner, born in Finchley in 1940 by the grace of God and died in a bungalow on the outskirts of Norwich with his penis bitten off. That last detail explaining why me and the scariest police officer in the Met, her beard, and two motorcycle outriders were doing a steady ton plus change up the M11. It was two in the morning as we came off the motorway so we filtered onto the A-road almost without slowing down. We reached the crime scene in under ninety minutes, which was impressive, only to find the Norfolk Constabulary had already taken the body away, which was not. Stephanopoulis stamped off with DCI Thompson to bite chunks out of the local plod, which left me to sidle up to the crime scene on my own.

  “No sign of forced entry,” said DC Trollope.

  Contrary to my dad’s prejudices the local plod were neither stupid nor noticeably inbred. If the kissing cousins of Norwich were getting it on then at least their offspring weren’t joining the police. Instead DC David Trollope was the kind of sober fit young man that would warm the heart of any backseat home secretary in the land.

  “Do you think he let his assailant in?” I asked.

  “It seems that way,” he said. “What do you think?” Police officers, like African matrons at a wedding, are acutely aware of the subtle and all-but-invisible gradations in status. We were the same rank and about the same age but the disadvantage I suffered from being on his patch had to be balanced against the fact that I’d arrived in a Jaguar XJ V8 that was blatantly borrowed from Diplomatic Protection. We settled for a kind of uneasy bonhomie and, like the African matrons, providing nobody had spiked the punch bowl, we’d probably get through the encounter without an embarrassing incident.