Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “You know,” he said, “when I first saw you I thought you were with the Thames girls, or a new sort of fae or something really outlandish like a witch doctor or an American.”

  The man popped the fireball like a soap bubble and rubbed his thumb and finger under his nose. “Who trained you?” he asked. “Not Jeffers, that’s for certain. Not that he was without skill, but you’ve got spirit. Was it Gripper? He’s just the kind to bleat about what he’s doing. Have you noticed that about journalists—all they really want to talk about is themselves.”

  Gripper was obviously Jason Dunlop. Dunlop tires, grip, Gripper—which gives you an indication of the lively wit promoted by our elite educational institutions. And Gripper obviously wasn’t the only one who wanted to talk. It’s no fun looking down on people if you can’t let them know you’re above them.

  Come on, you bastard, I thought. Drop a few more names.

  “You talk too little,” he said. “I don’t trust you.”

  And suddenly the world was flooded with light and the massive downdraft from a helicopter blew dust and rubbish around our faces. He threw a fireball at me. I threw a chimney stack at him—that’s the London way.

  I’d been working on loosening the chimney stack with what I call impello vibrato, but Nightingale called will you stop messing about and pay attention, while Faceless had been chatting. When the Nightsun searchlight from the police helicopter hit him in the face I created as pure an impello form as Nightingale could wish for and aimed it straight at the bastard. I knew he’d try to zap me, so I threw myself to the right and his fireball sizzled past my shoulder. I was hoping his gaze would automatically track me and not spot the quarter ton of brick and terra-cotta coming at him from the other direction, but he must have glimpsed it from the corner of his eye because he flung up his hand and the chimney stack disintegrated a foot short of his palm.

  I didn’t get much more than a fleeting look as bits of brick, cement dust, and sand flowed around him, as if sliding across an invisible sphere, because I was too busy closing the distance between us. If we stuck to magic it was obvious he was going to bounce me around the rooftops, so I ran at him in the hope of getting close enough to smack him in the face.

  I was close too, less than a yard away, but the fucker turned and stuck his palm at me and I ran smack into whatever it was he had used on the chimney. It wasn’t like hitting a Perspex wall. Instead it was slippery, like the wobbly sliding feeling you get when you try to push two magnets together. I went spinning onto my back and he strode toward me. I didn’t wait to find out whether he was planning to gloat or just kill me. Instead I reached out with impello to grab the cheap plastic garden table behind Faceless and slammed it into the back of his legs. He pitched forward and met both of my feet coming the other way.

  “Fuck!” he yelled, loud enough to be heard over the helicopter.

  I was up now and managed to get in one good punch to the face before something snarling and covered in fur barreled into me from the right. It was Tiger-Boy, who’d evidently kicked his way out through the roof door to reach us. We slammed into the parapet railing and it was only because I got a solid lock on a bar with my right hand that I didn’t go over and fall to my death. I rocked myself back onto the safety of the roof and looked up to see Tiger-Boy drawing back one heavily muscled arm ready to strike. He had claws on the ends of his fingers—what are you supposed to do against somebody with claws?

  What with the noise of the helicopter, and my own fear, I didn’t hear the shot. I saw Tiger-Boy’s head jerk backward and behind him a spray of red was caught in the glare of the helicopter searchlight.

  The cavalry had arrived, although I couldn’t tell whether it was Caffrey and his ex-paratroopers or a sniper from CO19, the armed wing of the Metropolitan Police. I made a pistol shape with my hand and jabbed it in the direction of Faceless. I hoped that the sniper was one of Caffrey’s mob because a CO19 officer probably wouldn’t shoot an apparently unarmed civilian at my mimed suggestion without proper authorization. Nine times out of ten anyway.

  Faceless wasn’t stupid. He could see the odds had shifted. He threw one more fireball and I ducked—but it wasn’t aimed at me. It went up and a moment later the searchlight went out. I made a lunge for Faceless’s last known position but he was no longer there and by the time my eyes readjusted to the gloom I saw he was gone from the roof. Above me, the helicopter made a stuttering, clanking noise. It’s not the sort of sound you want to hear a helicopter making, especially when it’s right over your head.

  I watched it as it lurched sideways over the street, wobbling while the pilot fought to get it under control. I should have been getting off the roof but I couldn’t take my eyes off it—Soho is as high-density urban as you can get. If it came down here the death toll would be in the hundreds. I heard the engine change pitch as the pilot pushed up the throttle and fought to gain altitude. There were screams and yells from the street below as people saw what was happening. There would be lots of phone-camera footage on the news that night from people with more media-savvy than brains.

  I decided that the lack of brains included me when the helicopter lurched back toward me and I realized that my face was level with the landing skids. I ducked as they swept over my head in a blast of downwash that brought the smell of overheated oil. I could see where flying debris had dinged the paintwork on the underside of the fuselage and where cape-wearing boy had blown a hole the size of my fist through the housing of the sensor bubble on the nose. Then, with a clattering roar, the helicopter labored upward and away as the pilot went looking for somewhere safe to put down.

  Apart from the approaching police sirens, it was suddenly much quieter. I sat down on what I still liked to think of as Simone’s and my mattress, caught my breath, and waited for more trouble to arrive.

  First through the roof door was Thomas “Tiger Tank” Nightingale. He saw me and gestured at his eyes and then the blind spot behind the stairwell. I shook my head, pointed at the body of Tiger-Boy, and then made a walking motion with my fingers. Nightingale looked puzzled.

  “He ran away,” I shouted.

  Nightingale stepped out of cover and did a 360 just to be on the safe side. Frank Caffrey and a couple of mates followed him out. I’d expected the paras to be dressed in full-on ninja-commando rigs but of course they were still in their street clothes. If they hadn’t been armed with their service rifles I wouldn’t have given them a second look.

  Two peeled off to check on Tiger-Boy, who stayed stubbornly dead even when one of them kicked him in the ribs.

  Once Nightingale was sure that the roof was secure, he came over and I got up to meet him—after all, no one likes to get bollocked sitting down.

  “Was that him?” asked Nightingale.

  “That was the Faceless One,” I said. “Although I noticed he was wearing a mask.”

  “It’s part of the spell,” said Nightingale. “Are you hurt?”

  I checked. “Just bruises and twisted my knee.”

  Nightingale pointed at the remains of the chimney stack. “Did you do that?”

  “That was me. Didn’t work, though. He had sort of a force field thing going on.”

  The police sirens reached the street outside and we heard the thump-thump of police officers slamming their car doors.

  Nightingale turned to Caffrey. “Frank, you and your lads better pull back to the van,” he said. “We’ll join you once we’ve sorted out the locals.”

  The paras loped off across the roofs toward the fire escape down to Duck Lane. I hoped that Simone and her sisters had been sensible enough to keep moving after they’d escaped.

  “A full shield,” said Nightingale, returning to our earlier discussion.

  “And he caught my fireball,” I said. “Did I mention that? Just plucked it out of the air.”

  “This man has been trained by a master,” said Nightingale. “Have you any idea how many years it takes to practice at that level? The dedication and self-di
scipline he would have needed? You’ve just met one of the most dangerous men in the world.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “And you’re still alive. Now, that’s impressive.”

  For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.

  From deep inside the house we heard the distinctive rumble of police feet running up the stairs.

  I pointed at the late Tiger-Boy. “What do I tell them about him?”

  “You don’t know who shot him,” said Nightingale. “You thought it might have been a police sniper. Isn’t that right?”

  I nodded. It’s always better to tell a half-truth than a half-lie. This is London, guv, we don’t have no paramilitary-style death squads here. “We need to talk about this,” I said. “Before we do anything else.”

  “Yes,” said Nightingale grimly. “I believe we do.”

  Nightingale strode over to the door and called down that he was in charge and that the roof was a crime scene and that unless they were members of Murder Team they had better stay clear if they knew what was good for them.

  “I am the bloody Murder Team,” shouted Stephanopoulis from below. Four flights of stairs hadn’t done much to improve her mood and she emerged onto the roof like an overdue tax demand. She glared at Nightingale and then, stepping carefully so as to preserve the scene, walked over to where Tiger-Boy lay sprawled on the flagstones. Blood had pooled under his head, slick and black in the reflected streetlight.

  Stephanopoulis looked over at the body and then back at me. “Not another one,” she said wearily. “You want to watch it, son. At the rate you’re going the Department of Professional Standards is going to have your number on speed dial.” She narrowed her eyes at Nightingale. “What’s your opinion, sir?” she asked.

  Nightingale indicated the body with his cane. “Clearly shot by person or persons unknown, Sergeant.” He shifted the cane to point across the road. “I’d say the shots were fired from the roof or top floor of that building over there.”

  Stephanopoulis didn’t even bother to look. “Any idea who he is?”

  “None whatsoever, I’m afraid,” said Nightingale. “But I doubt he has any friends or family.”

  Which meant no one to raise a fuss at the inquest, no one to claim the body. Which meant, if I was to guess, that a fairly large percentage of him would end up in Dr. Walid’s freezer.

  It took me an hour to get off that roof and once again I had to surrender my top layer of clothes to forensics, who now had, I calculated, more pairs of my shoes than I did. They swabbed Nightingale’s and my hands for gunshot residue and we both went downstairs to separate cars to give preliminary statements. It was three in the morning by the time Stephanopoulis released us on our own recognizance and by that time even Soho was feeling jaded.

  Caffrey and the paratroopers had holed up in a side road off Broadwick Street. I’d been right about the Transit van, which was white and fitted with patently false license plates. “We don’t like paying the congestion charge,” Caffrey said when I asked about them. “The van’s kosher though—belongs to the brother-in-law.” Among them, the paras managed to furnish me with a pair of black jeans, a charcoal-gray hoodie with AGRO stenciled across the front, and a pair of generic sneakers so I could get out of the noddy suit forensics had given me. I caught a whiff of gun oil lingering in the fabric of the jeans and I had a strong suspicion that they and the sweatshirt had been in the gun bags to muffle the clank of the rifles.

  Nightingale waited patiently in the drizzle while I got dressed. Before I could join him, Caffrey stopped me with his hand on my arm. “We don’t want to be here when it gets light,” he said.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

  Nightingale looked gaunt and colorless under the sodium lights; there were smudges under his eyes, and while he tried to hide it I saw the occasional shiver. He kept his expression bland.

  “Would you like to go first, sir?” I said.

  He nodded, but gave me a long cool look before finally he sighed. “When I took you on as my apprentice, I thought I could protect you from having to make certain ‘choices.’ I see now that I was wrong, and for that I apologize. That said, what the hell did you think you were trying to achieve?”

  “I was trying to do my duty as a sworn constable under the Human Rights Act,” I said. “To wit, the right to life under article two, which mandates that any use of force must be absolutely necessary and that any poor bastard we kill had better have it coming good and proper.”

  “Assuming that you expand the definition of human being to vampires and chimeras,” said Nightingale.

  “Then let’s get a judgment from the courts or better still have Parliament clarify the law,” I said. “But it’s not our place to make that decision, sir—is it? We’re just coppers.”

  “If they were ugly, Peter, would you care half so much?” asked Nightingale. “There are some hideous things out there that can talk and reason and I wonder if you would be quite so quick to rush to their defense.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “But that just makes me shallow, it doesn’t make me wrong.”

  “I estimate that among them Simone and her sisters have killed or mutilated almost two hundred and twenty people since 1941,” said Nightingale. “These people also had their human rights.”

  “I’m saying that we just can’t pretend that the law doesn’t exist,” I said.

  “Very well,” said Nightingale. “Let’s assume that we arrest them and, God knows how, try to convict them for …”

  “Manslaughter by gross negligence, sir,” I said. “I think it would have been reasonable to expect them, after twenty years or so, to notice that they weren’t getting any older and that their boyfriends were regularly kicking the bucket.”

  “They’re going to say they didn’t remember,” said Nightingale.

  “I believe them, sir,” I said. “Which means they are suffering from a mental disorder as defined by the Mental Health Act of 1983 and since they are an obvious threat to members of the public we can detain them under section one thirty-five of the aforesaid act and remove them to a place of safety for care and evaluation.”

  “And when they get hungry?” he asked. “Do you think starving them to death is more humane?”

  “We don’t know they’d die,” I said. “Perhaps their metabolism will revert and if all else fails we can feed them. They were taking less than a victim a year—they can’t need that much.”

  “And you want to spend the rest of your life doing that?”

  “You can’t just off someone because it’s more convenient,” I said. “What did all your friends die for, all those names on the wall, what did they die for if not for that?”

  He recoiled. “I don’t know what they died for,” he said. “I didn’t know then and I still don’t know now.”

  “Well, I do,” I said. “Even if you’ve forgotten. They died because they thought there was a better way of doing things, even if they were still arguing about what it was.”

  I saw it in his eyes—he wanted so badly to believe.

  “It’s nothing that we can’t handle,” I said. “Are you really telling me that among you, me, and Dr. Walid we can’t work something out? Maybe I can find a way to feed them pocket calculators and mobile phones. Maybe if we can fix them, we can fix the others. Wouldn’t that be better than just dropping a phosphorous grenade on them—really? Besides, Molly might like the company.”

  “You want to keep them in the Folly?”

  “Initially,” I said. “Until we can figure out how far they can be trusted. Once we’ve got them stabilized we could set up a halfway house. Preferably somewhere where there’s no jazz scene.”

  “This is mad,” said Nightingale.

  “And they could take Toby for walks,” I said.

  “Oh, well in that case, why don’t we throw our doors open to all and sundry,” he said, and I knew
I had him.

  “I don’t know, sir,” I said. “Wouldn’t a pilot project be more sensible in the first instance?”

  “We still don’t know where they’ve gone,” he said.

  “I know where they’ve gone.”

  WE MOVED the Transit van to Great Windmill Street, parked next to the McDonald’s, and left the private army inside while we went to check out the staff entrance to the Café de Paris. “Why don’t we send Frank home?” I asked.

  “We may need him if that bastard black magician turns up again,” he said.

  “Are you saying you can’t take him?”

  “Fortune favors the prepared,” said Nightingale.

  The entrance door was ajar, which not only meant that Simone was probably inside but also that we had reasonable cause to enter the premises without a search warrant under section 17 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984). There was broken glass in the kitchen. They’d evidently helped themselves to a midnight snack. The door to the champagne cooler had been left open and the hum of its compressor followed us back out into the service corridor.

  “They must be in the ballroom,” I said and Nightingale nodded. “Give me five minutes to calm them down and then come in.”

  He nodded again. “Be careful,” he said.

  The service corridor doglegged and ended in a door that led me out onto the landing that overlooked the length of the ballroom. Unlike the last time I’d visited, the tables had been laid out in an oval around the dance floor and covered in crisp white cloths.

  I knew as soon as I saw them sitting at their old table, surprisingly small and situated at half past one in relation to the band. There was a trio of bottles arrayed on it—one each. I had a pit in my chest and a ringing in my ears but I made myself go down the stairs to check. They were still in the clothes they’d been wearing when they’d left, but they’d done their best with lipstick and mascara to make themselves look presentable. Later tests by Dr. Walid indicated that they’d done the deed with alcohol and phenobarbital, the formulation matching the empty tablet strips found neatly stowed in Peggy’s handbag.