Suicides are rarely pretty, but the sisters had managed to avoid slumping or lolling or dribbling vomit down their fronts. I think they would have been satisfied with the tableau they created—three bright young things caught just on the cusp of their futures. I was so angry I had to force myself to stop and breathe deeply before I could carry on.
Simone’s eyes were open. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and I had to brush it back so I could put my fingers on her throat. Her skin was only slightly cool, and the time of death was later determined to have been approximately twenty minutes before I’d arrived—about when I was discussing comparative ethics with Nightingale. This close to her, I could smell honeysuckle and brick dust. But the music, which I only now realized had been there all the time, had gone.
I didn’t kiss her or anything like that.
I didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene.
THIS IS how you get out of bed the next day. You push off your duvet, rotate your body, put your feet on the floor, and stand up. Then it’s have a wee, have a bath, get dressed, go downstairs, eat breakfast, talk to your boss, practice your forma, eat lunch, smack the shit out of the punching bag in the gym, shower, get dressed, get in the Ford Asbo, and head into town to make sure that your face is being seen. You do this because it is your job, because it’s necessary, and because, if you’re honest, you love it. Repeat this process until the bad dreams stop or you just get used to them—whichever comes first.
There was a coroner’s report on their deaths, which ruled that they had committed suicide and so the sisters won a brief moment of fame as a suicide pact. But nobody in the media was so interested that they did any investigation beyond that. Nightingale handled the follow-up inquiry with the aid of a couple of detective constables on loan from Westminster CID, one of them my favorite Somali ninja girl. They couldn’t be told that the victims were immortal jazz vampires, so it was down to me to take the story back to the war.
Simone Fitzwilliam, Cherie Mensier, and Margaret “Peggy” Brown were reported missing by their parents in 1941, and although the police carried out an investigation it had been cursory at best—and why not? The city was in flames at the time. I considered tracking down their closest relatives but what would I tell them? That some half-forgotten great-aunt had died in the famous bombing at the Café de Paris but managed to have a pretty enjoyable afterlife all the same? Right up until I came along and got her killed. Again.
I did track down their teacher, Miss Patternost, who had crossed the Atlantic after the war and had moved in with one Sadie Weintroub, a production secretary at Warner Bros., at her rather nice ranch-style bungalow in Glendale.
I found people who grew up in Soho after the war, and they remembered the three girls who lived on Berwick Street. Some thought they were tarts, others that they were dykes, but the majority paid them no real attention—Soho was like that back in the day.
I found enough evidence to tie them into fifteen other deaths, all jazz musicians, as well as another ninety-six cases where they probably contributed to chronic ill health and career collapse, my dad being one of them. Nothing I’ve discovered has convinced me that Simone and her “sisters” had the faintest idea of the pain and suffering they left behind. Dr. Walid made a half-arsed attempt to persuade me that it was possible that Simone had been entirely cognizant of her actions and that I had fallen for the clumsy deception of a diseased sociopathic monster. But I knew he was just trying to make me feel better.
I wrote out the narrative of the case with footnotes, printed it, appended the supporting documentation, put it in a box file, and put the lot in the secure filing section of the mundane library. I then erased everything off my computer and modified the case identification number on HOLMES and the PNC so that it would raise a flag if anyone came looking for it. It’s possible that some particularly gifted investigative journalist might notice that there are a number of disparate coroners’ verdicts with the same Metropolitan Police case reference tags, but given that no soccer players, pop stars, or royals were involved it’s not something I worry about.
I do worry about the Faceless One, the man in the mask, who could catch fireballs and deflect chimney stacks. The only thing that worried me more than the idea of a fully trained wizard with a deranged taste for experimenting on human beings was the thought that Geoffrey Wheatcroft probably trained more than one at his little magic club. How many Little Crocodiles were out there, I wondered, and how many of them were evil fuckers like the Faceless One? I know Nightingale worries about this too, because we spend way more time on the firing range than we used to.
On the first Monday in October my dad and the Irregulars played their first official gig under their new name. It was at the Round Midnight on the Chapel Market in Islington. My dad sailed through a two-hour set without faltering once and there was a moment, during the famous solo in “Love for Sale,” when the look on his face was so transcendent that I wondered whether there was a connection between music and magic, that perhaps jazz really was life.
He was knackered after the gig, for all that he tried to hide it, so I put him and Mum in a cab and tipped the driver and flashed my warrant card to ensure a bit of due diligence at the other end of the journey. Then I went back for a celebratory drink with Max, Daniel, and James, but the Round Midnight’s a bit pricey so we slunk off up the road to the Alma where the beer was cheaper and they had soccer on pay-per-view.
“They’ve asked us back,” said James.
“That’s because we drive their customers to drink,” said Max. “It’s good for business.”
“Music is always good for business,” said James.
“Congratulations,” I said. “You guys are a proper band and strange people will actually pay money to see you play.”
“Thanks to your dad,” said Max.
“And Cyrus,” said Daniel.
“To Cyrus,” said Max, and we drank a solemn toast.
“Did you ever find out what happened?” asked James. “To Cyrus I mean.”
“No, mate,” I said. “The investigation was ‘inconclusive.’ ”
“Here’s to the unsolved mysteries of the Jazz Constabulary,” he said.
We toasted that.
“And Lord Grant’s Irregulars,” I said and we toasted that.
We toasted our way through three rounds, then we went for a curry, and then we went home.
I don’t really have nightmares. I sleep quite well, considering, but I do have memories as vivid as vestigia. The smell of honeysuckle, the snorting sound she made when she laughed, the roundness of her when she lay in my arms. Sometimes they keep me awake into the early hours of the morning.
So I’d been sleeping with a jazz vampire. It made a kind of weird sense. Goddess of a small river in South London, Soho jazz vampire, what was next? A Chelsea werewolf, a succubus from Sydenham? I decided to invent some rules just so I could add a new rule to the rules: Never diss somebody’s mum, never play chess with the Kurdish mafia, and never lie down with a woman who’s more magical than you are.
IT WAS a cold miserable day in October when I headed out of London. As I crawled out of town in the rush-hour traffic I had time to watch people heading into work, coats on, shoulders hunched, heads down—summer was over and the promising center forward was on a plane to Rio with a beautician from Malaga.
But London didn’t care, she never does when you leave her because she knows for every one that leaves another two arrive. Besides, she was too busy painting on her neon lipstick and dolling herself up in red and gold. Don’t you know, darling, soccer stars are so last season. The theater’s where the action is now. She was looking for a Hollywood star out to prove his acting chops in the West End.
I bypassed Colchester again and this time I phoned ahead so that Leslie would know I was coming. As I approached the iron-gray horizon, Brightlingsea accumulated around my car like granite pack ice under an overcast sky. When I drew up outside her dad’s house Leslie was waiting for
me under the carriage lamp. In deference to the weather she was in a blue waterproof hoodie and had ditched the rock-star scarf and sunglasses for an NHS-issue face mask of pink hypoallergenic plastic. When she spoke it was still with somebody else’s voice.
“I’ve got something to show you,” she said.
On the way through the slick streets we met a couple of locals who had a cheery wave for Leslie and a suspicious look for me.
“Advantage of living in a small town,” she said. “Everyone knows, nobody’s shocked.”
“I don’t think they like me,” I said.
“They can tell you’re from the wicked city of sin,” she said.
We went down through the car park full of dinghies, tarpaulined up for the winter, the cold wind singing in their rigging, and out onto the esplanade with the long line of beach huts and the concrete swimming pool. Leslie led me back into the brick shelter with its mural of improbably blue skies and white beaches.
“I’m going to take my mask off now,” said Leslie. “Think you can handle it?”
“No,” I said. “But I’ll give it a go.”
Leslie fumbled with the fastenings on the side. “These are really fiddly,” she said. “I’ve got one that’s Velcro and it’s even worse—there.”
And before I had a chance to prepare, the mask was off.
It was worse than I had imagined. So bad that my mind couldn’t accept that it was a face at all. The chin was gone. Instead, the skin below a grotesquely full lower lip slid away in a series of uneven lumps until it reached the smooth undamaged skin of her throat. The nose was shapeless, flat, a twisted knob of pink flesh that sat at the center of a series of ridged white scars that crawled across cheek and forehead. I flinched. If I hadn’t been holding myself rigid I would have recoiled across the breadth of the shelter.
“Can I open my eyes now,” she said. “Have you finished?”
I said something—I can’t remember what.
She opened her eyes. They were still blue. They were still Leslie’s eyes. I tried to stay focused on those eyes.
“What do you think?” she said.
“I’ve seen worse,” I said.
“Liar,” she said. “Like who?”
“Your dad,” I said.
It wasn’t funny but I could see she appreciated the effort.
“Do you think you’ll get used to it?”
“Get used to what?”
“My face,” she said.
“You’re always talking about your face, you know,” I said. “You’re just too vain. You need to think about other people instead of yourself all the time.”
“Who should I be thinking about?”
It was really ugly the way the skin below her mouth rippled when she talked. “Well, me for example,” I said. “When you were dragging me past all those boats I stubbed my toe on the curb.”
“Yeah?”
“It really bloody hurts. I mean, I bet my toe’s swollen right up,” I said. “Want to see?”
“I do not want to see your toe.”
“Sure?”
“I’m fairly certain,” she said and started to put her mask back on.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I don’t like it when the children run away,” she said.
I tried not to show how relieved I was when the mask hid her face once more.
“Are there more operations?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “But I want to show you something else now.”
“Okay,” I said. “What it is it?”
She stretched out her hand, and above it formed a globe of light with a beautiful opalescent sheen—it was much prettier than any werelight I’d ever produced.
“Fuck me,” I said. “You can do magic.”
HISTORICAL NOTE
KEN “SNAKEHIPS” Johnson was indeed killed on March 8, 1941, while performing at the Café de Paris. The eyewitnesses are clear that he was playing “Oh Johnny” when the bomb hit but I’ve taken the liberty of changing that detail since, frankly, “Body and Soul” is a much better chapter title.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Body and Soul
Chapter 2 - The Spice of Life
Chapter 3 - A Long Drink of the Blues
Chapter 4 - One-Tenth of My Ashes
Chapter 5 - The Night Gate
Chapter 6 - The Empress of Pleasure
Chapter 7 - Almost Like Being in Love
Chapter 8 - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Chapter 9 - The Forcing House
Chapter 10 - Funland
Chapter 11 - These Foolish Things
Chapter 12 - It Don’t Mean a Thing
Chapter 13 - Autumn Leaves
Chapter 14 - I Woke up this Morning
Historical Note
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter 1 - Body and Soul
Chapter 2 - The Spice of Life
Chapter 3 - A Long Drink of the Blues
Chapter 4 - One-Tenth of My Ashes
Chapter 5 - The Night Gate
Chapter 6 - The Empress of Pleasure
Chapter 7 - Almost Like Being in Love
Chapter 8 - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Chapter 9 - The Forcing House
Chapter 10 - Funland
Chapter 11 - These Foolish Things
Chapter 12 - It Don’t Mean a Thing
Chapter 13 - Autumn Leaves
Chapter 14 - I Woke up this Morning
Historical Note
Moon Over Soho Page 30