Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “There’s a possibility there may be booby traps,” he said. “If the rope goes slack, then you use it to haul me out. But under no circumstances are you to follow me in. Anything that is too much for me to handle will utterly destroy you—is that clear?”

  “Crystal,” I said.

  “There’s also a small chance that something other than me might try to escape out through here,” he said. “It may look somewhat like me, it may even be wearing my body, but I’m counting on you to know the difference. Understand?”

  “And if that happens?”

  “I’m counting on you to hold it back long enough for the others”—he nodded at the forensics team and other officers—“to escape. Hit it with everything you’ve got, but your best hope will probably be to try to bring the ceiling down on top of it.”

  “Down on you, you mean.”

  “It won’t be me,” said Nightingale. “So you needn’t worry about hurting my feelings.”

  “That’s reassuring,” I said. “Assuming I survive my heroic rearguard action, what then?”

  Nightingale gave me a delighted grin. “Remember the vampire nest in Purley?”

  We’d bunged a couple of white phosphorous grenades into the basement where the vampires had been living, or undeading, or whatever it was they did. “How could I forget?”

  “A similar procedure to that,” said Nightingale. “Only on a larger scale.”

  “And after that?”

  “That really won’t be my problem,” he said cheerfully. “Though you should go and see Postmartin as soon as you can.”

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” I asked. “If you have a relapse Dr. Walid will kill me.”

  Just then the portable floods kicked in and filled the foyer with harsh light. Larry the Lark’s face was bleached as white as bone and the red stockings on the woman’s legs became the color of blood. Nightingale took a deep breath.

  I turned to the people waiting by the floods. “Ladies and gentlemen, I strongly advise that you shut down any laptops, iPads, iPhones, airwave handsets—in fact anything that has a microprocessor. Shut it down and take the battery out.”

  The forensics techs looked at me blankly. One of them asked why. It was a good question and I really didn’t have time to answer it. “We think there may be an experimental EMP device rigged farther in,” I said. “So just to be on the safe side …”

  They weren’t really convinced, but there were probably enough weird rumors about Nightingale to make them all comply.

  “What’s an EMP?” asked Nightingale.

  “It’s complicated, sir,” I said.

  “Tell me later then,” he said. “Everybody ready?”

  Everybody was. Or at least said they were.

  “Remember,” said Nightingale, “you’ll hardly be in a position to haul me to safety if you allow yourself to be caught by whatever caught me.” He turned, hefted his cane in his right hand, and stepped forward. I paid out the rope as he gave the Cabinet of Larry a wide berth and headed for the curtained archway.

  Somali ninja girl sidled over. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Want to help?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “You can take notes,” I said.

  She pulled a face.

  “I’m serious,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said and pulled out her notebook and pen.

  Through a gap in the curtains I saw Nightingale stop and kneel down by the woman’s legs. “I’ve got a female cadaver here,” he called back and Somali ninja girl started writing. “Naked, midtwenties, Caucasian, no visible injuries or rigor. What looks like a silver pin has been pushed into her right temple; the skin seems to have healed around the wound so I’m guessing this is either a decorative piercing or possibly a thaumatological device.”

  Somali ninja girl paused in her writing and looked at me.

  “Put magical,” I whispered. “Magical device.”

  Nightingale stood up and moved forward. Judging from the rope passing through my hands he went another ten feet before stopping.

  “This area has been extensively modified quite recently,” said Nightingale, his voice surprisingly clear. “Metal cages have been fitted into what I can only assume were seating alcoves. Four on the left-hand side and four on my right. First cage on the left is empty, second contains the cadaver of … a monkey of some description, or ape, or possibly an adult male. The third cage contains what looks like the remains of a big cat, black fur, a panther or leopard at a guess. The last cage on the left is empty. I’m going to look at the right-hand cages now.”

  I shifted position to the left so as to keep the rope in a straight line while Nightingale moved to the right.

  “First cage on the right contains the cadaver of a Caucasian female with some degree of hybridization or surgical modification. The body is clothed in a tiger-striped leotard that has been altered to allow room for a tail—I can’t tell whether it’s a prosthetic or natural.”

  Cat-girls, I thought queasily. Real cat-girls.

  “Cages two and three are empty,” said Nightingale. “Thank God.”

  He moved again and another couple of yards of rope played out through my hands.

  “I’ve found a booby trap.” This time Nightingale had to raise his voice for it to reach us. “It looks like an improvised demon trap.”

  I glanced at Somali ninja girl, who paused before writing the words demon trap.

  “It’s of a German type,” shouted Nightingale. “But judging from the components it was manufactured quite recently. I’m going to attempt to disarm it, so Peter, I’d like you to stand by just in case.”

  I shouted that I was ready.

  The vestigium that came before the blast was exactly like the sensation you get when cresting the highest rise on a roller coaster, the moment of terror and excitement before the plunge. And then a confused jumble of sensations, the feel of velvet on my cheek, the stink of formaldehyde, and a sudden panting surge of sexual desire.

  Then the physical blast wave hit us, a rolling wall of overpressure that was like having someone slap me in the ears from behind and made me and everyone stagger backward. I heard the Somali ninja girl say something short and Coptic and someone else behind me wanted to know what the fuck that was.

  “Demon trap,” I said trying to sound knowledgeable and just in time for all the floodlights to blow out simultaneously. Suddenly in the dark Larry the Lark’s cabinet lit up with a gay sparkle of small colored bulbs, the bladders filled with air, and he opened his mouth and shouted—“At last!” And with a choking rattle the bladders of air emptied themselves for the last time. Then silence and then a clonk as Larry’s jaw fell off his face and hit the base of the cabinet.

  I fumbled in the dark for my torch, turned it on, and quickly got it trained on the foyer. Other beams of light stabbed out of the darkness. Everyone else was as keen as I was to make sure that whatever came back through the foyer was somebody we knew.

  The rope was slack in my hands.

  “Inspector,” I called. “Are you okay?”

  The rope went taut suddenly and I had to brace not to be pulled over.

  “I’m quite all right,” said Nightingale. “Thank you for asking.”

  I coiled up the rope as he returned. His face was pale in the torchlight. I asked him if he was all right again, but he just gave me a strange grimace as if remembering some serious pain. Then he unclipped the rope and went over to talk to the head forensics guy. Whatever he said, the forensics guy wasn’t happy. When Nightingale had finished, the man called over two of the younger-looking techs and told them something in a low voice.

  One of the techs, a young man with Trotsky specs and an emo fringe, protested. But his boss shut him down and sent him and his mate packing up the stairs.

  Nightingale came over and asked the Somali ninja girl to run upstairs and tell Stephanopoulis that the building was secure, but that we hadn’t found any suspects.

&nb
sp; “A demon trap?” I asked.

  “That’s just a nickname,” said Nightingale. “It’s a booby trap. I suppose you could call it a magical land mine. I haven’t seen one of those since 1946.”

  “Shouldn’t I know about these things?” I said.

  “The list of things you need to know about, Peter, is extraordinarily long,” said Nightingale. “And I have no doubt that even you will eventually cover them all. But there’s no point learning about demon traps until you’ve studied basic enchantment.” He held up his cane to show that the silver top was blackened and melted in places. Enchantment, I knew from my reading, was the process by which inanimate objects are imbued with magical qualities.

  Nightingale examined the cane ruefully. “Although I may be demonstrating how it’s done in the next couple of months,” he said. “That being the case, we may as well provide you with a training staff while we’re at it.”

  “The demon trap,” I said. “Did you recognize the signature?”

  “The signare?” he asked. “Not the individual, but I think I know who trained the vicious little so-and-so.”

  “Geoffrey Wheatcroft?” I asked.

  “The very same.”

  “Could he have been the original magician?”

  “That’s something we’re going to have to look into,” said Nightingale.

  “He’d have to have schlepped back and forth between here and Oxford,” I said. “If he was doing that, then he must have had an assistant.”

  “One of his pupils?”

  “Who might have gone on to be our new magician,” I said.

  “This is all terribly speculative,” he said. “We need to find the assistant.”

  “We should start interviewing all the people who had contact with Geoffrey Wheatcroft or Jason Dunlop.”

  There was an ironic cheer as one of the portable floodlights was restarted.

  “That’s an ambitious list of suspects,” said Nightingale.

  “Then we start with the ones who knew both of them,” I said. “We can do it under the pretext of investigating Jason Dunlop’s murder.”

  “First,” said Nightingale, “I want you to go and secure Smith’s office.”

  “You don’t need me here then?” I asked.

  “I’d rather you didn’t see what’s in there,” said Nightingale.

  For a moment I thought I’d misheard him. “What is in there?” I asked.

  “Some very beastly things,” said Nightingale. “Dr. Walid has people coming in who’ve handled this sort of situation before.”

  “What sort of situation?” I said. “What sort of people?”

  “Forensic pathologists,” he said. “People who’ve worked in Bosnia, Rwanda—that sort of situation.”

  “Are we talking mass graves here?”

  “Among other things,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t I—”

  “No,” said Nightingale. “There’s nothing in there that it would profit you to see. Trust me in this, Peter, as master to apprentice, as a man who’s sworn to protect and nurture you. I don’t want you going in there.”

  And I thought—do I really want to go in there?

  “I can see whether No-Neck Tony knows anything while I’m at it,” I said.

  Nightingale looked relieved. “That is an excellent idea.”

  Stephanopoulis lent me the Somali ninja girl whose name was Sahra Guleed and who turned out to be from Gospel Oak, which is just up the road from where I grew up—different school, though. When two ethnic officers meet for the first time the first question you ask can be about anything but the second question you ask is always, “Why did you join?”

  “Are you kidding?” said Guleed. “You get to legally rough people up.”

  The answer is nearly always a lie—I knew an idealist when I saw one. Despite the drizzle, the Saturday-night crowds were thick on Old Compton Street and we had to dodge our fair share of drunks. I spotted my old mate PC Purdy loading a dazed-looking middle-aged man into the back of an IRV. The man was dressed in a pink tutu and I was sure that I knew him from somewhere. Purdy spotted me and gave me a cheery wave as he climbed into the front of the car—that was him out of the rain for the next couple of hours.

  Since, with a bit of persuasion earlier, Alexander Smith had given permission for us to search his office, I had his keys. But when we got to the door on Greek Street it was ajar. I looked at Guleed, who flicked out her extendable baton and gestured for me to take the lead.

  “Ladies first,” I said.

  “Age before beauty,” she said.

  “I thought you liked roughing people up.”

  “This is your case,” she said.

  I extended my own baton and went up the stairs first. Guleed waited and then came padding up a few feet behind me. When there’s just two of you it’s always wise to maintain a decent interval. That way should anything happen to the copper in front, the copper behind has time to react in a calm and rational manner. Or, more likely, run for help. When I got to the first landing, I found that the interior door to Smith’s office was open and the cheap plywood around the lock was splintered. I waited until Guleed had caught up and then gently pushed the door open with my left hand.

  The office had been ransacked. Every drawer had been pulled out, every box folder emptied. The framed posters had been yanked off the walls and the backs slashed open. It looked messy, but very thorough and systematic. This being Soho it’s possible to make a lot of noise before somebody dials 999 but I did wonder where No-Neck had been while the office was getting trashed. I found out when I stepped on his leg. Stepping on some poor bastard has got to be about the worst way to discover a body—I backed off.

  No-Neck had been half buried under a pile of papers and glossy magazines. All I could see was the leg I’d stepped on and enough of his face to make the identification.

  “Oh dear,” said Guleed when she saw the body. “Is he dead?”

  Carefully, so as not disturb the crime scene, I squatted down and felt for a pulse where on somebody normal-shaped there’d be a neck—there was nothing. While Guleed called Stephanopoulis, I pulled on my gloves and checked to see if there was an obvious cause of death. There was. Two entry wounds on his chest, hard to spot because of the black T-shirt; they’d gone in just after the Z and the second P in ZEPPELIN. The wounds showed what might have been powder burns from a close-range discharge. But since this was my first possible gunshot victim, what did I know?

  According to Guleed, the first thing we needed to do was get out of the office and stop contaminating the crime scene. Since she was a fully paid-up member of a Murder Team I did what she said.

  “We have to check upstairs,” she said. “In case any suspects are still in the building.”

  “Just the two of us?” I asked.

  Guleed bit her lip. “Good point,” she said. “Let’s stay where we are. That way we stop anyone trying to leave or get into the crime scene.”

  “What if there’s a fire escape at the back?”

  “You just had to say that, didn’t you?” She tapped her baton against her thigh and gave me a disgusted look. “Okay,” she said. “You go secure the fire escape and I’ll stay here and guard the scene.”

  “On my own?” I asked. “What if there isn’t a fire escape?”

  “You’re taking the piss, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am.”

  Her airwave squelched. It was Stephanopoulis. “Yes, boss,” said Guleed.

  “I’m coming up Greek Street,” said Stephanopoulis. “Just the one body then?”

  “So far,” I said.

  “So far,” said Guleed into the airwave.

  “Tell Grant that I’m going to ban him from Westminster,” said Stephanopoulis. “I really don’t need the overtime this badly. Whereabouts in the building are you?”

  “We’re on the second-floor landing.”

  “Why isn’t one of you covering the fire escape?” asked Stephanopoulis. “I
f there is a fire escape.”

  Me and Guleed engaged in one of those silent, pointing arguments that you have when you’re trying to sort something out without alerting someone on the other end of the phone. I’d just emphatically mouthed I’ll go at Guleed when we heard the front door being pushed open.

  “Don’t bother,” said Stephanopoulis. “I’m already here.”

  She stamped up the steps, pushed past us, and had a look around from the doorway.

  “What his name?” asked Stephanopoulis.

  I had to admit that all I knew was that his first name was Tony and that he worked for Alexander Smith as muscle and that he had no neck. Subtle clues in her manner told me that Stephanopoulis was less than impressed with my police work.

  “You idiot, Peter,” she said. “How could you not get his name. Everything, Peter, you have to nail down everything.”

  I could hear Guleed not sniggering behind me—so could Stephanopoulis.

  “I want you”—Stephanopoulis jabbed a finger at me—“to go back to West End Central and reinterview Smith about who this guy is and what he knows about him.”

  “Shall I tell him he’s dead?”

  “Do me a favor,” said Stephanopoulis wearily. “Once he finds out about this he’s going to shut the fuck right up and I don’t blame him.”

  “Yes, guv,” I said.

  Guleed asked if Stephanopoulis wanted her to go with me.

  “Christ no,” she said. “I don’t want you picking up any more bad habits from him.” She looked at me again. “Are you still here?”

  * * *

  IT’S A truism that in a secure building like a police station, once you’re past the perimeter security you walk around unchallenged by adopting a purposeful stride and holding a clipboard. I don’t recommend testing this for two reasons: For one thing there’s nothing worth nicking from a police station that you can’t get easier from somewhere else, usually by bribing a police officer. And for another, it’s full of police officers who are often suspicious to the point of clinical paranoia. Even an acclaimed uniform hanger and all-around waste of space like PC Phillip Purdy. This evening he made a spectacular bid to get his name inscribed in the police book of remembrance. As events were reconstructed later Purdy, having successfully navigated his tutu-wearing prisoner into the custody suite, was on his way to the canteen to do his “paperwork” when he spotted an IC1 female walking up a side staircase in the direction of the CID interview rooms. On the CCTV footage from the stairwell he’s clearly seen calling after her and, when she fails to respond, following her up the stairs.