Moon Over Soho (20 page)

“Are you going through my things?” asked Simone from the kitchen.

I asked how her and her sisters managed to get along with such a small bathroom.

“We all went to boarding school, darling,” said Simone. “Survive that and you can handle anything.”

When I came out she asked me if I wanted tea. I said why not and we had a full English tea—on a tray with blue-and-gold Wedgwood crockery, blackberry jam, and heavily buttered crumpets.

I liked looking at her naked, reclining on the bed like something out of the National Gallery with a cup of tea in one hand and a crumpet in the other. Given that we’d just had quite a good summer her skin was very pale, translucent almost. When I lifted my hand from her thigh a pink outline remained.

“Yes,” she said. “Some of us don’t tan very well—thank you for reminding me.”

I kissed the spot better by way of apology and then the curve of her belly by way of invitation. She giggled and pushed me away.

“I’m ticklish,” she said. “Finish your tea first, you savage. Have you no manners?”

I took up the willow-pattern teacup and sipped the tea. It tasted different, exotic. A posh blend I suspected, from another Fortnum & Mason hamper. She fed me some crumpet and I asked her why she didn’t have a TV.

“We didn’t have television when we were growing up,” she said. “So we never got into the habit of watching. There’s a radio somewhere for listening to
The Archers
. We never miss an episode of
The Archers
. Although I must admit I can’t always keep all the characters straight, they do seem to be always getting married, having secret love affairs, and as soon as I’ve grown familiar with them they die or leave Ambridge.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Not a follower of
The Archers
, are you?”

“Not really,” I said.

“We must seem like such bohemians to you,” she said finishing her tea. “Living all higgledy-piggledy in one room, no television, in among the fleshpots of Soho.” She placed teacup and tray on the floor by the bed before reaching out to pluck the empty cup from my fingers.

“I think you worry too much about what I think,” I said.

Simone put the teacup safely off the bed and kissed me on the knee.

“Do I?” she asked and grabbed me with her hand.

“Definitely,” I said trying not to squeak as she kissed her way up my thigh.

Two hours later she threw me out of bed, but in the nicest possible way.

“My sisters will be back soon,” she said. “We have rules. No men in the bed past ten o’clock.”

“There have been other men?” I said while looking for my boxers.

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re my first.”

Simone was pulling on random items that she’d found on the floor including a pair of satin knickers that fit her like a second skin. Watching them go on was almost as sexy as watching them come off would be. She caught me panting and wagged her finger at me.

“No,” she said. “If we start again we’ll never stop.”

I could have lived with that but a gentleman knows when to give in gracefully and depart the scene. Not without some serious snogging in the doorway first, though.

I walked back through Soho with the scent of honeysuckle in my nostrils and, according to subsequent records, helped officers from Charing Cross and West End Central break up two fights, a domestic and a hen party that had ended with an attempted sexual assault on a male stripper. But I don’t remember any of that.

Y
OU PRACTICE
scindere
by levitating an apple with
impello
and then fixing it in place while your teacher tries to dislodge it with a cricket bat. The next morning I put up three in a row and they didn’t so much as wobble when Nightingale smacked them. He hit them hard enough to pulp them, of course, but the bits just hung about like a food accident on a space station.

The first time Nightingale demonstrated the
forma
I’d asked how long the apples would stay fixed in place. He’d said that it depended on how much magic the apple had been imbued with. For most apprentices that meant anything up to half an hour. Which vagueness neatly summed up Nightingale’s attitude to empiricism. I on the other hand was prepared this time. I’d brought a stopwatch, an antique clockwork one with a face as big as my palm, my notebook, and the transcript of Colin Sandbrow’s interview from the
vagina dentata
case notes. While Nightingale headed back upstairs I sat down at a work desk and started in on the file.

Colin Sandbrow, aged twenty-one, in from Ilford for a night on the town. Met what he thought was a Goth who didn’t talk much but seemed amenable to a bit of outdoor knee-trembling action. Looks-wise Sandbrow was at least young and fit, but his face had a sort of routine sandy
plainness—as if his creator had been working on him at the end of the day and was looking to make up a quota. This probably explained why he had been just as keen to leave the club.

“Didn’t you think it was a little suspicious that she was so enthusiastic?” Stephanopoulis had asked.

Sandbrow indicated that he hadn’t been inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth although in the future he would take a more cautious approach when dealing with members of the opposite sex.

It started raining apple pulp sixteen minutes and thirty-four seconds after I’d done the spell. I put aside the interview and made a note of the time. I’d taken the opportunity to put plastic bags underneath, so I didn’t have to do much cleaning up. Both my textbooks and Nightingale were a bit vague about where the power that was holding the apple was coming from. If the magic was still being sucked out of my head, how many could I put up simultaneously before my brain shriveled? And if it wasn’t coming from me, where was the power coming from? I’m an old-fashioned copper—I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

I finished up my notes and headed up and out to the coach house and the rudiments of twenty-first-century comfort—wide-screen TV, broadband, and HOLMES. Which is how I came to catch Nightingale making himself comfortable on the sofa with a can of Nigerian Star Beer in one hand and the rugby on the TV. He had the grace to look embarrassed.

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” he said. “There’s two more crates of this stuff in the corner.”

“Overspill,” I said. “From when I propitiated Mama Thames with a semi full of booze.”

“That clarifies a great deal,” he said and waved his can. “Don’t tell Molly about the beer. She’s become a tad over-protective.”

I told him that his secret was safe with me. “Who’s playing?” I asked.

“Harlequins and Wasps,” he said.

I let him get on with it. I like a bit of soccer and a legitimate boxing match, but unlike my mum who will watch anything
involving a ball, even golf, I’ve never been that into rugby. So I sat down at my desk and fired up my second-best laptop, which I use as a HOLMES terminal, and got stuck back into the case.

Stephanopoulis’s people were very thorough. They’d spoken to all Sandbrow’s friends and any random customers they could track down. The club bouncers were adamant that they hadn’t seen the suspect enter despite the fact that the CCTV footage clearly showed her walking right past them. The whole attack reminded me much more of the incident with St. John Giles back in the summer than it did of the murder of Jason Dunlop—I was about to put a note pointing that out on the file when I noticed that Stephanopoulis had already spotted it.

I wondered how Leslie was doing. She hadn’t answered any of my texts or emails so I called her house and got one of her sisters.

“She’s in London,” she said. “Had an appointment with her specialist.”

“She never said.”

“Well she wouldn’t, would she,” said her sister.

“Can you tell me what hospital?”

“Nope,” she said. “If she wanted you to know she was in town she’d have told you.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

Nightingale’s rugby finished and he thanked me for the beer and left. I switched over to the news to see whether a certain hijacked ambulance was still rotating around the twenty-four-hour news cycle but it had been knocked off by some serious flooding around Marlow. Lots of nice pictures of cars hydroplaning down rural roads and pensioners being ferried about by the fire brigade. For a moment I had a horrible suspicion that the floods might have been a reaction by Father Thames to Ash being injured but when I Googled for the details, I found that it had all kicked off during the following night when I’d been cavorting on the roof with Simone.

That was a relief. I was in enough trouble already without inadvertently flooding part of the Thames Valley.

A woman from the Environment Agency was asked why they hadn’t issued a flood warning and she explained the Thames had a complex watershed made even more complicated by the interaction of human development.

“Sometimes the river can just surprise you,” she said. There’d been a second unexpected surge late the night before and she was refusing to rule out a repeat later that day. Like most Londoners, my attitude was that only rich people could afford to live next to a river, so I could withstand their discomfort with fortitude.

I finished up on HOLMES and shut everything down. Stephanopoulis had found no connections among our two and a half victims. Worse, St. John Giles and Sandbrow had visited the clubs where they met our mysterious killer on impulse. In her notes attached to the nominal reports Stephanopoulis argued, and I agreed, that two young men had been targeted at random, but that the attack on Jason Dunlop felt more like a hit. If only because the Pale Lady, as I now thought of her, had made contact with her victim in a public place and in front of potential witnesses. Maybe it was a work–life balance thing. Maybe the two nightclub boys were recreational and Jason Dunlop was work.

Mum phoned me and reminded me that I was supposed to be introducing Dad to the irregulars that afternoon. I pointed out that this was her third phone call to remind me, but as is usual with my mum she didn’t take a blind bit of notice. I assured her I would be there. I considered calling Simone and inviting her along, but I decided that I was onto far too much of a good thing to want to risk having her meet the family—especially my mum.

I called her anyway and she assured me that she was languishing without me. I heard female laughter in the background and some comments pitched too low for me to hear. Her sisters, I suspected.

“Definitely languishing,” she said. “I don’t suppose you could pop around later and ravish me at your convenience.”

“What happened to no men in the bed past ten?” I asked.

“I don’t suppose you have a bed”—More laughter in the background.—“that you don’t have to share.”

I wondered if I could sneak her into the Folly. Nightingale had never actually forbidden overnight visitors, but I wasn’t sure how I’d bring it up in the conversation. I’d slept in the coach house myself but the sofa would be cramped for two. Worth thinking about, though.

“I’ll call you later,” I said and idly looked up hotel prices in Central London—but even with my healthy finances it just wasn’t going to happen.

It was only then that it occurred to me that less than two weeks ago she’d been the grieving lover of Cyrus Wilkinson, late of the very band my dad was rehearsing with that afternoon. All the more reason, I thought, for not inviting her along.

J
UST ABOUT
every council estate I know has a set of communal rooms. There’s something about stacking people up in egg boxes that makes architects and town planners believe that having a set of communal rooms will compensate for not having a garden or, in some designs, enough room to swing a cat. Perhaps they fondly imagine that the denizens of the estate will spontaneously gather for colorful proletarian festivals and cat-swinging contests. In truth, the rooms generally get used for two things, children’s parties and tenant meetings, but that afternoon we were going to shake things up and have a jazz rehearsal instead.

Since James was the drummer he was the one with a van, a suitably decrepit transit that we could have left unlocked, with the keys in the ignition and a sign on the front windshield saying
TAKE ME, I’M YOURS
, and have no fears about it still being there when we came back out again. As I helped him carry his drum kit from the van to the rehearsal room he told me that it was totally deliberate.

“I’m from Glasgow,” he said. “So there’s bugger-all London’s got to teach me about personal safety.”

We had to do three more trips for the amps and the speakers and it being school-home time we soon collected an audience of wannabe street urchins. Presumably the street urchins in Glasgow are bigger and tougher than the ones in London, because James paid them no mind. But I could see
Daniel and Max were uncomfortable. Nobody does hostile curiosity like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds who are putting off doing their homework. One skinny mixed-race girl cocked her head and asked whether we were in a band.

“What’s it look like?” I asked

“What kind of music do you play?” she asked. She had an entourage of little friends who giggled on cue. I’d gone to school with their elder brothers and sisters. They knew me but I was still fair game.

“Jazz,” I said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Swing, Latin, or fusion?”

The entourage duly laughed and pointed. I gave her the eye but she ignored me.

“We did jazz last term in music,” she said.

“I bet your mum’s looking for you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Can we come and watch?”

“No,” I said.

“We’ll be quiet,” she said.

“No you won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see into the future,” I said.

“No you can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“ ’Cause that would be a violation of causticity,” she said.

“I blame
Doctor Who
,” said James.

“Causality,” I said.

“Whatever,” she said. “Can we watch?”

So I let them watch and they lasted two minutes into “Airegin”—which was longer than I’d expected them to.

“That’s your dad, innit,” she said helpfully when my dad put in an appearance. “I didn’t know he could play.”