Moon Over Soho

Chapter 8 Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

THE CAFÉ de Paris had been built twenty feet below ground level and was considered safe by management and customers alike. Unless you took cover in the Underground system, no civilian shelter in London was built nearly as deep. Later it was determined that two bombs penetrated the building above the nightclub; one failed to detonate while the other dropped down an airshaft and exploded right in front of the band, killing the musicians and most of the dancers. Ken Johnson had his head blown clear off his shoulders and there were reports of customers killed where they sat, but remaining upright at their tables. Eyewitnesses remembered that there had been a great many Canadian nurses and servicemen in the club that night, but despite going down to the storage area with the librarian I couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled a casualty list. I found duplicates typed on paper as thin as tissue concerning an exchange of correspondence dealing with complaints that ambulances hadn’t arrived quickly enough to deal with the casualties, and a report on the shocking boldness of the looters who had steamed through the site nicking valuables.

Nothing more on the mysterious Peggy who, if it was the same person, would have to be pushing ninety. A year ago I would have considered that unlikely, but these days I was working with a guy who was born in 1900 and he wasn’t even the oldest person I’d met. Oxley had been a medieval monk and his “father” dated back to the foundation of the City in the first century AD.

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and I was going to start with Peggy.

The archive has a whitewashed room with lockers, two coffeemakers, and one of those machines that dispenses chocolate bars and stale snacks. I got a coffee and a Mars bar and called in a PNC check on Peggy, female, IC1, eighteen to twenty-five. The civilian operator laughed at me down the line and said she wasn’t even going to tell me how big a set of nominals that returned. I asked her to limit the area to Soho and go back as far as 1941. To her credit she didn’t ask me why.

“Not everything from that far back is on the system,” the operator said. She had a Scouse accent so she managed to make it sound like this was personally my fault. She hummed something from the late 1990s chart under her breath while she checked. “I’ve got a load of nominals that fit those parameters,” she said. “Mostly prostitution and drug arrests.” But nothing that stood out. I asked her to forward the nominal list to the HOLMES case file I’d been building. She was impressed — most coppers don’t even know you can do that.

Peggy had been at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died. She’d mentioned Cherry who was probably Cherie, Mickey’s bit of posh that his sister had talked about. In the old days I would have had to schlep back down to Cheam to show a picture to the sister, but all I had to do now was call her mobile and text it to her instead. I cropped the 1941 image until it was just the face and sent that.

“She looks kind of familiar,” said Mickey’s sister. In the background I could hear voices and music muffled by a firmly closed door — the wake for her brother was continuing.

“Do you have an address for Cherie?” I asked.

“She lived up in town,” said Mickey’s sister. “I don’t know where.”

I asked if she had any pictures of Cherie, she said she thought she might and promised to text them over if she found any. I thanked her and asked how she was coping.

“Okay I guess,” she said.

I told her to hang in there — what else could I say?

Thanks to the magic of science I copied the rest of the pictures onto a flash drive, which, thanks to the science of magic, I’d tested and found they didn’t get messed up every time I did a spell. As far as I could determine, nearby use of magic only degraded chips that had power running through them at the time, but it frustrated me that I didn’t even have a theory as to how magic actually worked. A little analytical voice in my head pointed out that any working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point — the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.

I arranged for the bombing reports and the other documents to be copied and made sure to thank the librarian properly before heading for where I’d parked the Asbo that morning.

When I got back to the Folly I found Dr. Walid in the atrium talking to Molly.

“Ah good, Peter,” he said. “I’m glad you came back. Let’s have some tea, shall we?”

Molly shot me a reproachful look and went gliding off toward the kitchen. Dr. Walid led me over to a collection of overstuffed red armchairs and mahogany occasional tables that nestled under the overhang of the eastern balcony. I noticed he had his medical bag with him, a modern ballistic plastic case covered in burgundy leather whose one concession to tradition was the stethoscope wound around the handle.

“I’m concerned,” he said, “that Thomas has been pushing himself too hard.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s picked up an infection and he’s running a fever,” said Dr. Walid.

“He was okay at breakfast,” I said.

“Man could be dead on his feet before he’d admit to it,” said Dr. Walid. “I don’t want him disturbed for the next couple of days. He was shot through the chest, Peter, there’s tissue damage there that will never fully heal, and it will make him prone to chest infections like the one he’s got now. I’ve put him on a course of antibiotics, which I expect Molly to make sure he completes.”

Molly arrived with the good Wedgwood tea set on a lacquered wooden tray. She poured for Dr. Walid with quick dainty movements and pointedly left without pouring mine. Obviously she blamed me for Nightingale’s relapse — perhaps she knew about the beer.

Dr. Walid poured my tea and helped himself to a HobNob.

“I heard Leslie is in town for an operation,” I said.

“She’s going to be fine,” said Dr. Walid. “You just need to make sure that when she asks for your help, you’re ready to give it. How do you feel about her injuries?”

“It didn’t happen to me,” I said. “It happened to Leslie and Dr. Framline and that poor Hari Krishna sod and the others.”

“Do you feel guilty?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t do it to them and I did my best to stop it. But I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty, if that helps.”

“Not all my patients start off dead,” said Dr. Walid. “Not in my medical practice anyway. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the outcomes can be less than optimal. It’s not whether you feel responsible, it’s whether you don’t shy away when she needs you.”

“The thought of her face scares me to death,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Not as much as it scares her,” he said and patted my arm. “Not as much as the thought that you might reject her scares her. Make sure you are there when she needs you — that’s your responsibility in this — your part of the job, if you like.”

We were way over our daily quota of emo so I changed the subject.

“Do you know about the nest of vampires in Purley?” I asked.

“That was a nasty business.”

“Nightingale called what I felt there the tactus disvitae, antilife,” I said. “He implied that the vampires sucked ‘life’ from their environment.”

“As I understand it,” he said.

“Have you ever had a chance to section the brain of one of their victims?”

“Usually they’re in an advanced state of desiccation when we get them,” said Dr. Walid. “But one or two of them have been fresh enough to get some useful results. I think I know where you’re going with this.”

“Did the brain sections show signs of hyperthaumic degradation?”

“It’s hyperthaumaturgical degradation,” said Dr. Walid. “And yes, they showed terminal levels of HTD, damage to at least ninety percent of the brain.”

“Is it possible that ‘life’ energy and magic are essentially the same thing?” I asked.

“That wouldn’t contradict anything I’ve observed,” he said.

I told him about the experiments I’d run with pocket calculators and about how the damage done to their microprocessors had resembled the damage done to the human brain by HTD.

“That would mean that magic was affecting biological and nonbiological constructions,” said Dr. Walid. “Which means it might be possible to develop some form of nonsubjective instrumentality.” Clearly Dr. Walid was just as frustrated as I was with the Toby the Dog method of magic detection. “We have to replicate your experiments. This has to be documented.”

“We can do that later,” I said. “But what I need to know now is about the effect this might have on life extension.”

Dr. Walid gave me a sharp look. “You’re talking about Thomas,” he said.

“I’m talking about the vampires,” I said. “I checked in Wolfe and he lists at least three cases where it was confirmed that the vampires were at least two hundred years old.”

Dr. Walid was too good a scientist to just accept the word of a natural philosopher from the early nineteenth century but he conceded that the evidence indicated it was a possibility. Really, you’d expect a cryptopathologist to be a bit more credulous. Still, I wasn’t going to let a little bit of skepticism get in the way of a perfectly good theory.

“Let’s say for the moment that I’m right,” I said. “Is it possible that all the creatures with extended lives, the genii locorum, Nightingale, Molly, the vampires — isn’t it possible that they’re all drawing magic from the environment to keep themselves from aging?”

“Life protects itself,” said Dr. Walid. “As far as we know, vampires are the only creatures that can take life — magic, whatever — directly from people.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Let’s forget about the gods, Molly, and the other weirdos for a moment and concentrate on the vampires. Would it be possible for there to be a vampire-like creature that fed off musicians — that the act of making music made them uniquely vulnerable?”

“You think there are vampires that feed off jazz?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Jazz vampires?”

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …,” I said.

“Why jazz?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My dad would’ve had an answer. He would have said it had to be jazz because that was the only proper music there was. “I suppose we could line up different kinds of musicians, expose them to our vampire, and see which ones suffer brain damage.”

“I’m not sure that would meet the BMA’s ethical guidelines on human experimentation,” he said. “Not to mention the difficulty of finding volunteers to be guinea pigs.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Musicians? If you offered them money. Free beer, even.”

“So this is your hypothesis for what happened to Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I think I may have stumbled upon a sort of trigger event.” I explained about Peggy and Snakehips Johnson and the Café de Paris and it all sounded thinner and thinner even as I was laying it out.

Dr. Walid finished his tea as I wound down.

“We need to find this Peggy,” I said.

“That much is certain,” said Dr. Walid.

I DIDN’T feel like doing data entry and I still couldn’t get Leslie on the phone. So I cropped a high-resolution image of Peggy in 1941 and printed out a dozen copies on the laser printer. Armed with those, I headed into Soho to see if I could find anyone who remembered her. Starting with Alexander Smith. After all, Peggy and Henry Bellrush were one of his top acts.

When he wasn’t paying women to take off their clothes in an ironic postmodernist way, Alexander Smith operated out of a small office above a sex-shop-turned-coffee-bar on Greek Street. I buzzed the intercom and a voice asked who I was.

“PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

“PC Grant,” I said.

“What?”

“Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

Or maybe not.

“I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

“Busy,” said No-Neck.

There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness — “I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside” — while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have them deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.

“Look, I’m the police,” I said. “And we could … you know … do the whole thing, but you’d get arrested and blah blah blah and stuff, whereas I just want a chat … so what’s the point of all … this?”

No-neck thought about this for a moment, before grunting and shifting enough to let me squeeze past. That’s how real men settle their differences. Through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.

Alexander Smith’s office was surprisingly neat. A pair of self-assembly desks, two walls lined with bracket shelves covered with magazines, books, papers, overstuffed box files, and DVDs. The windows had dusty cream venetian blinds, one of which had obviously gotten stuck halfway up sometime around the turn of the century and hadn’t been touched since. Smith had been working on a PowerBook but ostentatiously closed it when I walked in. He was still a dandy in a lemon-yellow blazer and crimson ascot, but outside of the club he seemed smaller and meaner.

“Hello, Alexander,” I said and threw myself into his visitor’s chair. “How’s tricks?”

“Constable Grant,” he said and I noticed that he’d picked up an involuntary leg tremor. He noticed me noticing and put his hand on his knee to stop it. “What can I do you for?”

Definitely nervous about something. And even though it probably had nothing to do with my case, a little extra leverage never hurts.

“Have you got something you need to be doing?”

“Just the usual,” he said.

I asked him if his girls were all right and he visibly relaxed. This was not the source of his nerves.

Bollocks, I thought. Now he knows I don’t know.

To prove it, he offered me a cup of instant coffee, which I declined.

“Are you expecting company?” I asked.

“Eh?”

“What’s with the gorilla on the door?”

“Oh,” said Smith. “That’s Tony. I inherited him from my brother. I mean, I couldn’t get rid of him. He’s practically a family retainer.”

“Isn’t he expensive to feed?”

“The girls like to have him around,” said Smith. “Is there anything particular that I can do for you?”

I pulled out one of my 1941 prints and handed it to Smith. “Is that Peggy?”

“Looks like her,” he said. “What about it?”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“Not since the gig at the Café de Paris,” he said. “Which was spectacular. Did I tell you that. Fucking spectacular.”

And weirdly coincidental but I wasn’t going to tell Smith that.

“Do you have a home address?” I asked.

“No,” said Smith. “This is a bit of a cash-only business. What the Revenue don’t see, the Revenue don’t worry about.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m pay-as-you-earn myself.”

“That could change,” said Smith. “Anything else you’re interested in? Only some of us don’t get paid by the hour.”

“You go back, don’t you?” I asked.

“We all go back,” he said. “Some of us go back farther than others.”

“Was she around then?”

“Who?”

“Peggy,” I said. “Was she dancing back in the 1990s?”

“I generally get nervous when they’re still at infant school,” he said.

“How about in the 1980s?”

“Now I know you’re mucking me about,” he said, but hesitated just a little bit too long.

“Maybe not her then,” I said. “Maybe it was her mum — same sort of look.”

“Sorry. I was abroad for most of the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “Although there was one bird used to do one of them fan dances at the Windmill Theatre, but that was 1962 — that would be a bit far back even for Peggy’s mum.”

“Why’d you have to leave the country?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “But this place was a shit hole so I got out.”

“You came back, though.”

“I missed the jellied eels,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

I wasn’t going to get anything else useful, but I made a note to look up Smith on the PNC once I got back to the tech-cave. I gave No-Neck Tony a friendly pat on the shoulder as I squeezed past.

“You’re a living treasure, my son,” I said.

He grunted and I was satisfied, as I went down the stairs, that we’d made a connection.

Anyway, confirmation — either Peggy’s grandmother bore an uncanny resemblance to her granddaughter, or Peggy had been around since 1941 feeding on jazz musicians. So far all my confirmed sightings of Peggy and all the recent deaths had taken place around Soho. So that seemed the place to start. It would also be useful to pin down some “known associates,” particularly Cherry or Cherie — Mickey the Bone’s girlfriend. This is the point when somebody working on a proper investigation asks his governor for some bodies to do a door-to-door canvass, but there was only me. So I started at one end of Old Compton Street and worked my way down.

They didn’t know her in the Spice of Life or Ed’s Diner, or the other food places at the east end of the street. One of the ticket staff at GAY said she looked familiar but that was it; a woman working in a corner newsagent/mini supermarket said that she thought she’d seen Peggy come in and buy cigarettes. I didn’t get anything at the Admiral Duncan except a couple of offers to take me out to dinner. They knew her in Trashy Lingerie as “that posh bird who comes in every so often and turns her nose up at our stock.” I was thinking it might be worth heading up to A Glimpse of Stocking when a madwoman ran out of Patisserie Valerie calling my name.

It was Simone, high heels skidding on the pavement as she swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian. She was wearing a pair of faded stretch jeans and a burgundy cardigan that gaped open to reveal nothing but a crimson lace bra underneath — front catch, I noticed. She was waving and yelling and I saw there was a smear of cream on her cheek.

Once she saw that I’d spotted her, she stopped shouting and self-consciously pulled the cardigan closed across her chest.

“Hello, Peter,” she said as I walked over. “Fancy running into you like this.” She touched her face, found the cream, grimaced, and tried to rub it off with her sleeve. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled my face down for a kiss.

“You must think me perfectly demented,” she said as we broke.

“Pretty demented,” I said.

She pulled my head down again and asked me in a whisper whether I was free that afternoon. “You left me alone all yesterday,” she said. “I think you owe me an afternoon of carnal pursuits at the very least.”

Given that it was that or several hours of door-to-door canvassing, I didn’t really have to work that hard. Simone laughed, slipped her arm through mine, and led me up the street. I waved a hand at the Patisserie Valerie. “What about your bill?” I asked.

“You mustn’t worry about the patisserie,” she said. “I have an account.”

IT STARTED raining sometime after lunch. I woke up in Simone’s big bed to find the room filled with gray light and rain drumming against the window. Simone was pressed warmly up against me, her cheek against my shoulder, one arm flung possessively across my chest. After some maneuvering I managed to check my watch and found that it was past two o’clock. Simone’s arm tightened around me, her eyes opened, and she gave me a sly look before kissing the hollow of my neck. I decided that it was too wet for doing door-to-door anyway, and that I would compensate by doing all that boring data entry as soon as I got back to the Folly. My schedule suitably modified, I rolled Simone over on her back and set to seeing how worked up I could get her without using my hands. She sighed as my lips found her nipple, which wasn’t the effect I was going for, and gently stroked my head.

“Come up here,” she said and tugged at my shoulders, pulling me up and between her legs so that I slipped in without even trying and then, when she had me arranged to her satisfaction, she held me there, a look of contentment on her face.

My hips twitched.

“Wait,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” I said.

“If you could just restrain yourself a moment,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

We stayed locked together. I felt a strange vibration in my chest and belly, which I realized was Simone humming deep in her diaphragm, or whatever it is singers use. I couldn’t quite make out the tune, but it made me think of smoky cafés and women in padded jackets and pillbox hats.

“Nobody makes me feel like you,” she said.

“I thought I was the first,” I said.

“Hypothetically,” she said. “If there had been others, none of them would have made me feel the way you do.”

I twitched again but this time she lifted her hips to meet me.

Afterward, we dozed again, sweaty and content and lying in each other’s arms. I would have stayed there forever if I hadn’t been driven out of bed by my bladder, and a guilty sense that there were things that I needed to be getting on with — important things.

Simone lay sprawled naked and inviting across the bed and watched me getting dressed under deliberately heavy-lidded eyes.

“Come back to bed,” she said and let her fingers drift idly around one erect nipple, then the other.

“I’m afraid the mighty army of justice that is the Metropolitan Police never sleeps,” I said.

“I don’t want the mighty army of justice to sleep,” she said. “On the contrary I expect it to be most diligent in its dealings with me. I’m a bad girl and I need to be held accountable for my actions.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“At least take me to your father’s concert,” she said.

I’d told her about Dad’s upcoming gig, but I hadn’t told her that Cyrus Wilkinson’s old band would be playing with him.

“I want to meet your mum and your dad and your friends,” she said. “I’ll be good.”

I knelt down by the bed and kissed her. She clutched at my arms and I thought, Sod it — they’re going to find out sooner or later. I told her she could come.

She finished our kiss and threw herself back on the bed.

“That is all I wanted,” she said and waved her hand in a regal fashion. “You may go about your duties, Constable, and I shall languish here until we meet again.”

The rain had slackened off to a light drizzle that, if you’re a Londoner, barely counts as rain at all. Even so, I splashed out on a black cab to take me back to the Folly where Molly served up steak-and-kidney pudding with roast potatoes, peas, and carrots.

“She always does this when I’m ill,” said Nightingale. “It’ll be black pudding for breakfast tomorrow. Thickens the blood.”

We were eating dinner in the so-called Private Dining Room, which adjoined the English library on the second floor. Since the main dining room could sit sixty, we never used it in case Molly got it into her head to lay all the tables. Nonetheless, Nightingale and I had dressed for dinner — we both have standards and one of us had been exerting himself that afternoon.

I knew from experience that you didn’t dive into one of Molly’s steak-and-kidney puddings until some of the superheated steam had had a chance to dissipate and the interiors had ceased to be hot enough to fire pottery.

Nightingale swallowed a couple of pills with some water and asked about the case.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The jazz musicians first,” he said.

I filled him in on the Café de Paris bombing and my search for Peggy and possibly Cherie.

“You think there’s more than one,” he paused. “What are you calling them?”

“Jazz vampires,” I said. “But I don’t think they’re feeding on the music. I think that’s just a side effect, like the sound a generator makes when it’s turned on.”

“Tactus disvitae,” said Nightingale. “Another species of vampire — Wolfe would be pleased.”

The pudding was cool enough for me to dig in. An afternoon with Simone had left me starving and, according to Nightingale, Molly made her puddings with ox’s liver. Which he said was the proper old-fashioned recipe.

“Why doesn’t Molly go out to buy stuff?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because she’s different,” I said. “Like the jazz vampire and the Pale Lady. But, unlike them, we’ve had a chance to learn what makes her tick.”

Nightingale finished a mouthful and wiped his lips on his napkin.

“The Pale Lady?”

“That’s what Ash called her,” I said.

“Interesting name,” said Nightingale. “As to the food, as far as I know she has everything delivered.”

“She shops on the Internet?”

“Good God no,” said Nightingale. “There are still some establishments that do things the old-fashioned way, whose staff members are still capable of reading a handwritten note.”

“Could she leave if she wanted to?” I asked.

“She’s not a prisoner,” said Nightingale. “Or a slave if that’s what you’re alluding to.”

“So, she could just walk out the door tomorrow?”

“If she so desired,” said Nightingale.

“What’s stopping her?”

“Fear,” said Nightingale. “I believe she’s frightened of what’s out there.”

“What is out there?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Nightingale. “She won’t say.”

“You must have a theory,” I said.

Nightingale shrugged. “Other creatures like Molly,” he said.

“Creatures?”

“People, if you prefer,” said Nightingale. “People who, like Molly, are not the same as you or I or even the genii locorum. They were changed by magic, or they were born into lineages that have been changed. And as far as I know this leaves them — incomplete.”

Nightingale, despite literally being a relic of a bygone age, had learned to modify his language around me because when I’d looked into the literature the most common terms started with un — unfit, unsuited, undesirable and behind them came the terms starting with sub. However, with a bit of running translation, it was clear that “incomplete” people like Molly were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their more powerful supernatural brethren and by practitioners with no moral scruples. Magicians, according to Nightingale, of the blackest hue.

“Sorry. Ethically challenged practitioners,” said Nightingale. “My first ‘governor,’ Inspector Murville, had handled a notorious case in Limehouse in 1911. It involved a famous stage magician working under the name of Manchu the Magnificent who had collected some very strange ‘people’ and was using them to carry out his nefarious plans.”

“And his nefarious plans were what, exactly?” I asked.

“Nothing less than the overthrow of the British Empire itself. Apparently, Inspector Murville, as he set off on his crusade, had it on good authority that Manchu the Magnificent operated an opium den on the Limehouse Causeway. There the yellow devil sat like a fat spider at the center of a web of plots, white slavery being merely the start of it.”

“What’s white slavery when it’s at home?” I asked.

Nightingale had to think about it a bit but apparently when he was young white slavery mostly referred to the trafficking of white women and children for the purposes of prostitution. The inscrutable Chinese were supposedly behind this dastardly trade in lily-white female flesh. I wondered if part of the outrage came from a guilty conscience. I said as much.

“There were established cases, Peter,” said Nightingale sharply. “Women and children were bought and sold in beastly circumstances and suffered real hardship. I doubt they found the historical irony much comfort.”

Inspector Murville, convinced of the seriousness of the threat, organized a raid with half the available wizards in London and a mob of constables loaned to him by the commissioner. Cue a great deal of banging down doors and shouting of “Hold still, you Oriental devil” and then a certain amount of stunned silence.

“The Great Manchu the Magnificent,” said Nightingale, “was revealed to be a Canadian by the name of Henry Speltz. Although he was married to a Chinese woman with whom he had five daughters, all of whom had acted as his beautiful assistant ‘Li Ping’ at one time or other.”

Nothing was found at the house except for a strange young European girl who lived in the household and worked as a maid. Under caution Speltz told Inspector Murville that the girl, whom nobody in the household had thought to name, had been found cowering in one of his disappearing cabinets at the end of a matinee performance at the Hackney Empire.

I mopped up the last of the onion gravy with the last bit of bread in the basket. Nightingale had left half his pudding untouched. “Are you going to finish that?” I asked.

“Help yourself,” said Nightingale, and I did while he finished the story.

Some things never change and a senior police officer doesn’t organize a costly raid and admit to failure, or violating the Magna Carta, until he’s done his best to convict someone of something. Had Speltz actually been Chinese, things might have gone very hard for him. But in the end he was formally charged with disturbing the peace and let go with a police caution.

“The girl was taken into protective custody,” said Nightingale. “Even old Murville could sense there was something not quite right about her.” He looked quickly toward the doors. “Have you finished?” he asked.

I said I had, and Nightingale grabbed the now empty plate and put it back in front of himself just in time for Molly to come drifting into the dining room, pushing the sweets cart. As she cleared the plates, she gave Nightingale a distinctly suspicious look. But she couldn’t prove anything.

She scowled at us and we smiled back.

“Very nice,” I said.

Molly laid out a custard tart and, with one last suspicious look aimed at me, silently left the dining room.

“What happened to the girl?” I asked as I served up the tart.

“She was brought here and examined,” said Nightingale. “And found to be too abnormal to be fostered …”

“Or put into a workhouse,” I said. Under a thick layer of nutmeg, the custard was just as good as that of the Patisserie Valerie. I wondered if I could smuggle some out for Simone. Or, better yet, smuggle her in for dinner.

“It may put your mind at rest to know that we had an agreement with Corum’s Foundling Hospital,” said Nightingale. “She would have been placed there but for the unfortunate fact that once allowed into the Folly, she would not allow herself to be taken out.”

From under the table I could hear Toby looking for the last of the leftovers.

“This is Molly we’re talking about,” I said.

“So she slept in the scullery and was raised by the staff,” he said.

I helped myself to another piece of tart.

“Postmartin was right,” said Nightingale. “I let myself get too comfortable. And while I lived here with Molly the world continued on without me.”

I WAS stuffed, but I forced myself over to the coach house to do some data entry. Once there I was irresistibly drawn to the sofa and Arsenal v. Tottenham. It was going badly for Spurs when my phone rang and a strange voice said, “Hello, Peter.”

I checked the caller ID. “Is that you, Leslie?”

I heard a rasping breathy sound. “No,” said Leslie. “It’s Darth Vader.”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself.

“It’s better than Stephen Hawking,” she said. It sounded like she was trying to talk with a plastic bottle in her mouth, and I got the strong impression that it was painful to do.

“You were in London for an operation,” I said. “You could have told me.”

“They didn’t know if it would work,” she said.

“Did it?”

“I’m talking, aren’t I,” said Leslie. “It bloody hurts, though.”

“Want to go back to text?”

“No,” she said. “Sick of typing. Have you checked your cases on HOLMES yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve been doing door-to-door.”

“I went through the records that you sent over and Professor Geoffrey Wheatcroft didn’t ever formally teach Jason Dunlop but Dunlop did dedicate his first novel ‘For master Geoffrey from whom I gained my true education.’ Isn’t that what you trainee wizards call your teachers?”

Not this apprentice. But master doesn’t mean the same thing to white boys at Oxford. Given the books in Dunlop’s flat it had to mean, barring a really bizarre set of coincidences, that Geoffrey Wheatcroft had taught Dunlop formal Newtonian magic.

I said as much to Leslie.

“Thought so,” she said. “Question is, was he the only one? And if he wasn’t how do we find out.”

“We need to check the Murder Team’s files and see if known associates or nominals track back to Magdalen College around the time he was there.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a real copper.”

“Do you think you can do that?” I asked.

“Why not?” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything better to do. When are you coming up to see me?”

“Soon as I get a chance,” I said — lying.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk too much.”

“You take care,” I said.

“You too,” she said and hung up.

How many apprentices could one master teach? You needed a trained wizard to act as what Nightingale called an exemplar, to demonstrate the form. But I didn’t see why you couldn’t do that with more than one person at a time. It would depend on how motivated your students were. At somewhere like Nightingale’s old school you’d be dealing with your usual range of talent and enthusiasm. But university students learning magic for fun? Nightingale said it took ten years to be a proper wizard, but I’d managed to do quite a lot of damage within three months of starting training — I didn’t think Jason Dunlop, or any fellow students, would be any different.

I fired up the HOLMES terminal and started looking for connections to Oxford University that had lasted beyond his time there. That got me a list of twenty-plus names, mostly former students, whose paths had crossed professionally or, as far as the Murder Team could tell, socially with Jason Dunlop.

In a major inquiry a person who comes to the attention of the police as part of that inquiry is listed on HOLMES as a nominal. Any task that an investigating officer decides needs doing is called an action. Actions are prioritized and put on a list and officers are assigned to carry them out. Actions lead to more nominals and more actions and the whole investigation quickly becomes a whirling vortex of information from which there seems no escape. HOLMES lets you do word searches and comparison tests, but half the time that just leads to more actions and more nominals and more items of information. Deal with this for any length of time and you start to get nostalgic for the good old days when you just found a suspect you thought looked a bit tasty and beat out a confession with a phone book.

Background checks on the Oxford University names had a low priority, so I started with the Police National Computer to at least see if any of them had criminal records and to nab likenesses from their driver’s licenses. This was not a quick process but at least it meant I was still awake and dressed when Stephanopoulis called me at one in the morning.

“Grab your overnight bag,” she said. “I’ll be picking you up in ten minutes.”

I didn’t have an overnight bag, so I grabbed my gym bag and hoped that nobody asked me to a formal dinner while I was away. I bunged a spare airwave in with my backup laptop just to be on the safe side. To save time, I went out the side door and walked up Bedford Place to Russell Square. It was drizzling and the moisture put yellow halos around the streetlamps.

Stephanopoulis wouldn’t have called me out of hours for anything less than another murder, and the overnight bag said it was out of London.

I heard it coming before I saw it, a black Jaguar XJ with twenty-inch wheels and, unmistakably from the sound, a supercharged V8 engine. From the way it pulled up it was obvious that the driver had been on all the courses I hadn’t been on and was clearly authorized to drive insanely fast.

The back passenger door opened and I slipped into the smell of newly liveried leather seats to find Stephanopoulis waiting for me. The car took off as soon as the door closed and I found myself slipping around on the backseat until I managed to wrestle my seat belt into place.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Norwich,” said Stephanopoulis. “Our friend’s been grazing again.”

“Dead?”

“Oh yes,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “Quite dead.” Stephanopoulis introduced him as Detective Chief Inspector Zachary Thompson.

“People call me Zack,” he said as he shook my hand.

And I shall call you Chief Inspector is what I didn’t say. Thompson was a tall man with a narrow face and an enormous beaklike nose. He had to be tougher than he sounded to get through life with a nose like that.

“Zack,” said Stephanopoulis, “is the SIO on this case.”

“I’m her beard,” he said cheerfully.

Now, I’m not part of the Met’s famous canteen culture. I do not mourn the good old days when coppers were real coppers, not least because that spares me from what would have been almost continuous racist abuse. But even I get nervous when senior officers tell me to call them by their first name — no good can come of that sort of thing.

“Is there anything unusual about this one?” I asked. “I mean more unusual than usual.”

“He’s ex-Job,” said Stephanopoulis. “Detective Chief Inspector Jerry Johnson, retired from the Met in 1979.”

“Is there a connection to Jason Dunlop?”

“There’s a notation in Dunlop’s diary from March,” said DCI Thompson. “Meet J. J. Norwich. His credit card trace shows that he bought a return ticket from Liverpool Street to Norwich on that day. We think Johnson might have been a source for a story that Dunlop was working on.”

“If it’s the same J. J.,” I said.

“You let us worry about that,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re there to check for signs of black magic.”

To my amazement, we fell in behind a pair of motorcycle outriders and by the time we hit the M11 we were doing over 120 mph.