Moon Over Soho (15 page)

“She’s heading for the door,” said Ash.

“Is she with anyone?”

“She’s taking some feller out with her,” said Ash.

Shit, shit, shit—so much for keeping it in the family. Nightingale was way ahead of me. He pulled an airwave set
out of the glove box and punched in a number—impressive, given that I’d taught him how to do that only a week ago.

“Follow her,” I said. “But stay on the phone and don’t take any risks.”

I risked waiting until Marble Arch to turn east—Oxford Street is restricted to buses and taxis only and I was counting on it being quicker to go straight down it than to plow through the weird one-way systems around Bond Street.

“Stephanopoulis is on her way,” said Nightingale.

I asked Ash where he was.

“I’m just coming out of the club,” he said. “She’s fifteen feet in front of me.”

“Heading which way?”

“Toward Piccadilly,” he said.

I worked out the location in my head. “Sherwood Street,” I told Nightingale, who relayed it to Stephanopoulis. “Going south.”

“What do I do if she starts in on her boyfriend?” asked Ash.

I swerved around a bus stalled in the road with its emergency lights flashing. My spinner blued the faces of the downstairs passengers as they watched me slide past.

“Stay away from her,” I said. “Wait for us.”

“Too late,” said Ash. “I think she saw me.”

The instructors at the advanced driving school would not have been happy with the way I put the Jag through the lights at Oxford Circus and skidded into a right turn that had me going down Regent Street with blue smoke coming from my wheels.

“Steady on,” said Nightingale.

“The good news,” said Ash, “is that she’s let the poor guy go.”

“They’re almost on Denham Street,” said Nightingale, meaning local plod. “Stephanopoulis is telling them to secure a perimeter.”

I almost screamed when an obviously deaf and blind driver in a Ford Mondeo decided to pull out in front of me. What I shouted at him was fortunately lost in the sound of my siren.

“The bad news,” said Ash, “is she’s coming toward me.”

I told him to run.

“Too late,” he said.

I heard a hiss, a yell, and the distinctive noise a mobile phone makes when it’s hurled against a hard surface and breaks.

I did half a bootleg turn into Glasshouse Street, which I swear got me applause from the pedestrians and a startled yelp from Toby as he slammed into the passenger door. There was a reason the Jaguar Mk II was the favored getaway car for blaggers and the Flying Squad, and Nightingale’s Jag had definitely been modified for pursuit. Which is why once her backside had stopped swinging I could put my foot down and be doing sixty before I was level with the Leicester Arms on the corner.

Then what I thought was the reflection of our spinner turned out to be the emergency lights on an ambulance and we all learned just how good the upgraded four-wheel disk brakes really were—the answer being good enough. If there’d been one installed I’d have been eating the air bag. Instead I had a savage bruise across my chest from the seat belt, but I didn’t even notice that until later because I was out the door and running across the junction and up Sherwood Street fast enough to keep pace with the ambulance. It stopped, I didn’t.

One side of Sherwood Street has an arcade in the rather sad 1950s ceramic-tiled fashion that, having been designed to resemble a public convenience, was perhaps justifiably used by half-cut members of the public who got caught short late at night. As far as the Murder Team could reconstruct it later, it looked like the penis eater had been planning to take her latest victim into the shadows for an impromptu snog and vasectomy.

I found Ash prostrate in the center of a circle of concerned citizens, two of whom were trying to comfort him while he writhed around on the pavement. There was blood on him, on the concerned citizens, and on half a yard of iron spike that was stuck through his shoulder.

I got myself some room by shouting “Police!” at people and tried to get him into recovery position.

“Ash,” I said. “I told you to stay away from her.”

Ash stopped thrashing long enough to get a good look at me.

“Peter,” he said. “The bitch stuck me with a railing.”

T
HE MEN
and women of the London Ambulance Service are not prone to hysterics, given that they spend their days scraping up the victims of fatal car accidents, suicide attempts both successful and botched, and members of the public who’ve “fallen” in front of a train. Those are called “one-unders,” incidentally. I once asked whether a couple under a train would be a “two-under” but apparently that’s a “two one-under.” Anyway, a daily routine consisting of pain and misfortune tends to breed steady and pragmatic personalities. In short, just the kind of person you want staffing your ambulance in the middle of the night. The paramedic in the ambulance who picked up Ash was a middle-aged woman with short practical hair and a New Zealand accent. But a couple of minutes into the ride I could see that her composure was beginning to slip.

“The bitch,” yelled Ash. “The bitch stabbed me with a railing.”

About two feet torn from a rather nice bit of Victorian wrought-ironwork, judging by the precisely milled orthogonal cross section. To my untrained eye it looked as if it had gone right through his heart. That hadn’t stopped Ash from thrashing around and yelling.

“Hold him down,” shouted the paramedic.

I grabbed Ash’s arm and tried to pin it to the gurney. “Can’t you give him something?” I asked.

The paramedic gave me a wild look. “Give him something?” she said. “He should be dead.”

Ash tore his arm from my grip and grabbed at the railing.

“Get it out!” screamed Ash. “It’s cold iron, get it out!”

“Can we pull it out?” I asked.

That was the last straw for the paramedic. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“Cold iron,” he said. “Killing me.”

“We’ll take it out at the hospital,” I said.

“No hospital,” said Ash. “I need the River.”

“Dr. Walid will be there,” I said.

Ash stopped thrashing and grabbed my hand, pulled me closer.

“Please, Peter,” he said. “The River.”

Polidori talks about cold iron having a
deleterious effect upon the fae and their many cousins
but I assumed he was making it up or stating the bleeding obvious. Cold iron has a deleterious effect on anyone if you shove it right through their body.

“Please,” said Ash.

“I’m going to pull this out of him,” I said.

The paramedic expressed her opinion that she felt this would be a poor course of action and that, for even contemplating it, I was an anatomically incomplete person of low intelligence and with a penchant for self-abuse.

I got both hands on the railing. It was slippery with blood. Ash saw what I was doing and held himself rigid. It wasn’t the ripping sound it made when it came out that bothered me; that was masked by Ash’s screaming. It was feeling the vibrations as the bone scraped along the rough edge of the iron that I won’t forget.

A jet of blood smacked me in the face. I smelled copper and, weirdly, a mixture of greasepaint and ozone. The paramedic shoved me out of the way and I fell backward as the ambulance took a corner. She started slapping dressings on entry and exit wounds and taping them in place. The dressings were soaked red before she’d even finished. As she worked she swore under her breath.

Ash had stopped thrashing and gone silent. His face was
pale and slack. I stumbled forward in the ambulance until I could stick my head into the driver’s cab. We were heading up Tottenham Court Road—less than five minutes from the hospital.

The driver was my age, white, skinny, and wore a skull-and-crossbones stud in his ear.

I told him to turn around and he told me to fuck off.

“We can’t take him to the hospital,” I said. “He’s booby-trapped.”

“What?” yelled the driver.

“He may be attached to a bomb,” I said.

He hit the brakes and I was thrown headfirst into the cab. I heard the paramedic in the back scream with frustration and I looked up to find the driver’s-side door open and the driver legging it down the road.

It was a really good illustration of why you shouldn’t use the first lie that pops into your head. I climbed into his seat, closed the door, put the ambulance into gear, and off we went.

The London Ambulance Service uses a fleet of Mercedes Sprinter vans, which are just like your standard Sprinter but with about two tons of stuff in the back and the kind of soft suspension designed to avoid killing a patient every time you go over a speed bump.

It’s also got a pile of extra LCD screens, buttons, and switches that I, in the interest of simplicity, just ignored. Which was why we were still doing blues and twos as we sailed past the entrance to the UCH ambulance bay and headed down Gower Street toward the river.

It was about this time, according to the EOC call log, that the paramedic used her airwave to report that her ambulance had been hijacked by an escaped mental patient masquerading as a police officer.

There’s nothing quite like driving an emergency vehicle with a strip of spinners on its roof and a full-sized siren designed to cut through the iPod, car stereo cocoon that most drivers live in and scare random pedestrians back onto the pavements. Moses parting the Red Sea would have felt like I did as I plowed across the junction with High Holborn into
Endell Street with a brief moment of déjà vu as I shot down Bow Street and past the scaffolding that marked where they were still repairing the damage done to the Royal Opera House.

It’s easy to get messed up trying to go south from Covent Garden. The roads have all been bollarded and blocked to stop them from becoming traffic rat runs, but I’d spent two years patrolling out of Charing Cross nick so I knew where they were. I did a sharp right into Exeter Street and a sharp left down Burleigh Street, which caused the paramedic in the back to start screaming at me again. Which was uncalled for, since I felt I was finally getting on top of the ambulance’s tricky handling.

“How’s he doing?” I yelled over my shoulder.

“He’s bleeding to death,” she yelled back.

I merged briefly with the cars on the Strand before cutting across the oncoming traffic and into Savoy Street, a narrow lane that runs straight down to the river just west of Waterloo Bridge. Parking spaces are hard to find in Central London and people tend to pack their cars onto streets with no thought that a vehicle of some width and heft might be driven past by someone with less-than-full confidence in his control. All told, the actual total damages came in a tad less than twenty thousand pounds, mostly scraped paint, wing mirrors, side panels, and a pair of racing bikes that should never have been left secured to a roof rack in the first place. That’s not counting the damage to the ambulance, which I’m sure was entirely superficial.

I bounced off the bottom of the street and out into the Embankment, swerved right, and ran the ambulance up onto the pavement in front of the Savoy Pier. I scrambled out of the driver’s seat and into the back of the ambulance, where the paramedic stared at me with stunned hatred.

Ash was barely breathing and the dressing on his chest was completely soaked through with blood. When I asked the paramedic to open the door I thought for a moment she was going to hit me, but she released the latches and threw them open. She wouldn’t help me take Ash out and I didn’t have time to figure out how to work the lift at the back, so I
pulled him over my shoulder and staggered out into the drizzle.

I’d actually chosen the Savoy Pier for two reasons. It wasn’t in use, so I wouldn’t have to clamber over a boat to get to the river, and it had a nice gentle access ramp that would have been perfect to roll the gurney down had I managed to get the damn thing out of the ambulance. Instead I had to first lumber up the ramp to the gate with Ash in a fireman’s lift. He was a big healthy guy and I suspected I was going to be an inch shorter by the time I reached the Thames. There’s a thing like an open telephone booth at the top end of the ramp, designed to stop tourists, drunks, and the merely criminal from running out onto the pier.

I paused for breath and realized that over the yodel of the ambulance’s own siren I could hear other sirens approaching. I looked up and down the Embankment and saw flashing blue lights coming from both directions. A glance over the parapet revealed that the tide was out and jumping down there would be a ten-foot drop onto stones and mud. I looked at the booth. It had the metal lock I remembered. I had been planning something subtle, but since I didn’t have time I blew the whole thing off its hinges.

As I ran down the ramp, I heard the Incident Response Vehicles skidding to a halt behind me and the medley of grunts, shouts, and radio chatter that announces that the Old Bill is here to sort you out. As I ran across the width of the pier something whacked me hard across the thighs. The safety railing I realized too late, and I went headfirst into the Thames.

The Goddess of the River will proudly tell you that the Thames is officially the cleanest industrial river in Europe, but it is not so clean that you want to drink it. I came up spitting with a metallic taste in my mouth.