Moon Over Soho

Chapter 3 A Long Drink of the Blues

THE BAND weren’t that hard to find — the Spice of Life had their contact details and they all agreed to meet me at French House on Dean Street, but it had to be in the evening because they all had day jobs. That suited me because I was still behind on my Latin vocab. I trolled over to Soho just after six and found them all waiting for me, propping up a wall peppered with pictures of people who had been famous just at the time my dad hadn’t.

The Spice of Life playbill listed my lot as the Better Quartet, but they didn’t really look much like jazzmen to me. Bassists are famously steady but Max — really Derek — Harwood was an average-looking white guy in his mid-thirties. He was even wearing a diamond-patterned Marks & Spencer V-neck sweater under his jacket.

“We already had a Derek in the band before last,” said Max. “So I went by Max to avoid confusion.” He took a subdued sip from his beer. I’d bought the first round and was feeling suitably gouged. Max was an integrated systems specialist for the London Underground — something to do with signaling systems, apparently.

The pianist, Daniel Hossack, was a classically trained music teacher at Westminster School for the terminally privileged. He had receding blond hair, round Trotsky glasses, and the sort of sensible kindness that probably led to him being savagely lampooned by the spotty wits of the lower sixth — that’s year 12 in the new money.

“How did you guys meet?” I asked.

“I don’t think we met as such,” said James Lochrane, the drummer. Short, Scottish, belligerent, and taught seventeenth-century French history at Queen Mary’s College. “It would be more accurate to say that we coalesced — about two years ago …”

“More like three,” said Max. “At the Selkirk Pub. They have jazz on Sunday afternoons. Cy lives down there so it’s sort of his local.”

Daniel nervously tapped his fingers on his glass. “We were all watching this terrible band who were making a fist of …” He stared off in the direction of the last decade. “I can’t remember what it was.”

“ ‘Body and Soul’?” I asked.

“No,” said James. “It was Saint Thomas.”

“Which they were murdering,” said Daniel. “And Cy said, loud enough for everyone, including the band, to hear: ‘I bet any of us could play better than this.’ ”

“Which is not the done thing,” said Max. All three shared a sly smile at the transgression. “The next thing I knew we were sharing a table, ordering rounds and talking jazz.”

“As I said,” said James. “We coalesced.”

“Hence our name,” said Daniel. “The Better Quartet.”

“Were you better?” I asked.

“Not noticeably,” said Max.

“Worse, in fact,” said Daniel.

“We did get better,” said Max and laughed. “We practiced at Cy’s place.”

“Practiced a lot,” said Daniel and drained his glass. “Right, who wants what?”

They don’t do pints at the French House so James and Max split a bottle of the house red. I asked for half a bitter — it had been a long day and there’s nothing like Latin declension to give a man a thirst.

“Two maybe three times a week,” said Max.

“So you were ambitious?” I asked.

“None of us was that serious really,” said James. “It’s not like we were kids and desperate to make it big.”

“That’s still a lot of practice,” I said.

“Oh, we wanted to be better musicians,” said James.

“We’re wannabe jazzmen,” said Max. “You play the music to play the music, know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Do you think he’s gone across the river for those drinks?” asked James.

We craned our necks and looked over at the bar. Daniel was bobbing among the crush, his hand raised with an optimistic twenty slipped between his fingers. On Saturday night in Soho going across the river might have been quicker.

“How serious was Cyrus?” I asked.

“He wasn’t any more serious than we were,” said James.

“He was good, though,” said Max and made fingering motions. “He had that whole sax-player thing going.”

“Hence the women,” said James.

Max sighed.

“Melinda Abbot?” I asked.

“Oh, Melinda,” said Max.

“Melinda was just the one at home,” said James.

“Sally, Viv, Tolene,” said Max.

“Daria,” said James. “Remember Daria?”

“Like I said,” said Max. “The whole saxophone vibe.”

I spotted Daniel struggling back with the drinks and got up to help him ferry them to the table. He gave me an appraising look and I guessed that he didn’t share Max’s and James’s envy for the women. I gave him a politically correct grin and plonked the drinks down on the table. Max and James said cheers and we all clinked glasses.

They’d obviously forgotten that I was a policeman, which was handy, so I phrased my next question with considerable care. “So Melinda didn’t mind?”

“Oh, Melinda minded all right,” said James. “But it didn’t help that she never came to any of the gigs.”

“She wasn’t a fan,” said Daniel.

“You know how it is with women,” said James. “They don’t like you to be doing anything they can’t relate back to themselves.”

“She was into that New Age stuff, crystals and homeopathy,” said Max.

“She was always nice enough to us,” said Daniel. “Made us coffee when we were rehearsing.”

“And biscuits,” said Max nostalgically.

“None of the other girls was serious,” said James. “I’m not even sure there was ever any hanky-panky as such. At least not until Simone anyway. Trouble with a capital T.”

Simone had been the first woman to come back to Cyrus’s house to watch the rehearsals.

“She was so quiet that after a while you forgot she was there,” said Daniel.

Melinda Abbot didn’t forget Simone Fitzwilliam was there and I didn’t blame her. I tried to imagine what would have happened had my dad brought a woman home to watch him rehearse. It wouldn’t have ended well I can tell you that. Tears would have just been the start of it.

Melinda, who obviously subscribed to notions of gentility unknown to my mother, did at least wait until everyone left the house before metaphorically rolling up her sleeves and reaching for the rolling pin.

“After that we were in a lockup that Max blagged off Transport for London,” said James. “It was drafty but a lot more relaxed.”

“Though terribly cold,” said Daniel.

“Then suddenly we’re all back at Cy’s place,” said James. “Only it’s not Melinda serving the coffee and biscuits anymore, it’s the gorgeous Simone.”

“When did this happen?”

“April, May, around that time,” said Max. “Spring.”

“How did Melinda take it?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said James. “We never saw that much of her even when she was around.”

“I met her a couple of times,” said Daniel.

The others stared at him. “You never said,” said James.

“She called me, said she wanted to talk — she was upset.”

“What did she say?” asked Max.

“I don’t like to say,” said Daniel. “It was private.”

And so it stayed. I managed to steer the conversation back around to Melinda Abbot’s “mystical” hobbies but the band hadn’t really been paying attention. The French House began to get seriously crowded and despite the prohibition on piped music I was having to shout to make myself heard. I suggested food.

“Is the Met going to be picking up the bill?” asked James.

“I think we could stretch to some expenses,” I said. “As long as we don’t go mad.”

The band all nodded their heads. Of course they did, when you’re a musician free is a magic number.

We ended up in Wong Kei on Wardour Street where the food is reliable, the service is brusque, and you can get a table at eleven thirty on a Saturday night — if you don’t mind sharing. I showed four fingers to the guy at the door and he waved us upstairs where a stern-looking young woman in a red T-shirt directed us to one of the big round tables.

A pair of pale American students, who up till then had had the table to themselves, visibly cowered as we plonked ourselves down.

“Good evening,” said Daniel. “Don’t worry, we’re perfectly harmless.”

Both American students were wearing neat red Adidas sweatshirts with MNU PIONEERS embroidered across the chest. They nodded nervously. “Hi,” one of them said. “We’re from Kansas.”

We waited politely for them to elaborate but neither said another word to us for the ten minutes it took to finish their food, pay, and bolt for the door.

“What’s an MNU anyway?” asked Max.

“Now he asks,” said James.

The waitress arrived and started slapping down the main course. I had shredded duck with fried ho fun, Daniel and Max split egg fried rice, chicken with cashews, and sweet-and-sour pork, James had beef noodles. The band ordered another round of Tsingtao beers but I stuck to the free green tea, which came in a simple white ceramic teapot. I asked the band whether they played the Spice of Life often, which made them laugh.

“We’ve played there a couple of times,” said Max. “Usually the lunch spot on Monday.”

“Get much of a crowd?” I asked.

“We were getting there,” said James. “We had gigs at the Bull’s Head, the National Theatre foyer, and Merlin’s Cave in Chalfont Saint Giles.”

“Last Friday was the first evening slot that we’d scored,” said Max.

“So what was next?” I asked. “Record deal?”

“Cyrus would have left,” said Daniel.

Everybody stared at him for a moment.

“Come on, guys, you know that’s what would have happened,” said Daniel. “We’d have done a few more gigs, somebody would have spotted him, and it would be It’s been fun, guys, let’s not lose touch.”

“Was he that good?” I asked.

James scowled down at his noodles, then stabbed them a few times with his chopsticks in obvious frustration. Then he chuckled. “He was that good,” he said. “And getting better.”

James raised his bottle of beer. “To Cyrus the Sax,” he said. “Because talent will out.”

We clinked our glasses.

“You know,” said James. “Once we’re done here, let’s go find some jazz.”

SOHO ON a warm summer evening is alive with conversation and tobacco smoke. Every pub spills out into the street, every café has its customers outside at tables perched on pavements that were originally built just wide enough to keep pedestrians out of the horse shit. On Old Compton Street fit young men in tight white T-shirts and spray-on jeans admired one another and their reflections in the shop windows. I caught Daniel pinging his radar off a couple of tasty young men checking themselves out outside the Admiral Duncan but they just ignored him. It was Friday night and after all that gym time they weren’t getting into bed for anything less than a ten.

A tangle of young women with regulation-length hair, desert tans, and regional accents slid past — female squaddies heading for Chinatown and the clubs around Leicester Square.

The band and I didn’t so much proceed up Old Compton as ricochet from one clique to the next. James nearly fell over as a pair of white girls ticked past in stilettos and pink knit mini dresses. “Fuck me,” he said as he recovered.

“Not going to happen,” said one of the girls as they walked away. But there was no malice in it.

James said he knew a place on Bateman Street, a little basement club in the grand tradition of the legendary Flamingo. “Or Ronnie Scott’s,” he said. “Before it was Ronnie Scott’s.”

It wasn’t that long since I’d been patrolling these streets in uniform and I had a horrible feeling I knew where he was going. My dad’s been known to wax lyrical about a youth misspent in smoky basement bars full of sweat, music, and girls in tight sweaters. He said that in the Flamingo you basically had to pick a spot where you were prepared to spend the night ’cause once things kicked off it was impossible to move. The Mysterioso had been designed as a deliberate re-creation of those days by a pair of likely lads who would have been the quintessential cheeky, cockney barrow-boy entrepreneurs if they hadn’t both been from Guildford. Their names were Don Blackwood and Stanley Gibbs but they called themselves the Management. It had been a rare weekend shift when me and Leslie didn’t end up on a shout to the street outside.

The trouble was never inside the club, though, because the Management hired the roughest bouncers they could find, strapped them into sharp suits, and gave them carte blanche on the door entry policy. They were famously arbitrary in their exercise of power and even at eleven forty-five there was a queue of hopefuls down the street.

There’s always been a tradition of po-faced seriousness about the British jazz scene and a kind of chin-stroking “yes I see” roll-necked sweaterness to the fans — my current company being a case in point. Judging from the punters in the queue, old tradition was not the Management’s target demographic. This was Armani-suit, dress-to-impress, bling-wearing, switchblade-carrying jazz and I didn’t think it likely that me and the band were going to make the cut.

Well, definitely not the band anyway. And to be honest that suited me because whereas the band had grown on me, a night of semiprofessional jazz has never been my idea of a good time. If it had been, my dad would have been a happier man.

Still James, in the grand tradition of belligerent Scotsmen down the ages, was not prepared to give up without a struggle, so ignoring the queue he went immediately on the offensive.

“We’re jazzmen,” he said to the bouncer. “That’s got to count for something.”

The bouncer, a side of meat that I knew for a fact had done time in Wandsworth for various crimes that started with the word aggravated, at least gave this some serious consideration. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.

“Maybe maybe,” said James. “But we are all part of the same community of spirit — yes? The same brotherhood of music.” Behind his back Daniel and Max exchanged looks and shuffled back a foot or two.

I stepped forward to head off the inevitable violence and as I did I caught a flash of “Body and Soul.” The vestigium was subtle but against the Soho ambience it stood out like a cool breeze on a hot night. And it was definitely coming from the club.

“Are you his friend?” asked the bouncer.

I could have shown my warrant card but once that’s out in the open all the useful witnesses have a tendency to melt away into the darkness and develop impressively detailed alibis.

“Go and tell Stan and Don that Lord Grant’s son is waiting outside,” I said.

The bouncer scrutinized my face. “Do I know you?” he asked.

No, I thought, but you might remember me from such Saturday-night hits as “Would you please put that punter down I’d like to arrest him,” “You can stop kicking him now, the ambulance has arrived,” and the classic “If you don’t back off right now I’m going to nick you as well.”

“Lord Grant’s son,” I repeated.

I heard James whisper behind me, “What the fuck did he say?”

When my dad was twelve his music teacher gave him a secondhand trumpet and paid, out of his own pocket, for Dad to have lessons. By the time he was fifteen he’d left school, gotten himself a job as a delivery boy in Soho, and was spending his spare time hungrily looking for gigs. When he was eighteen Ray Charles heard him playing at the Flamingo and said — loud enough for anyone who was important enough to hear — “Lord but that boy can play.” Tubby Hayes called my dad Lord Grant as a joke and the nickname stuck from then on.

The bouncer tapped his Bluetooth and asked to speak to Stan and told him what I said. When he got a reply I was impressed by the way his expression didn’t change as he stepped aside and ushered us in.

“You never said your dad was Lord Grant,” said James.

“It’s not the sort of thing you just drop into a conversation, is it?”

“I don’t know,” said James. “If my dad was a jazz legend I think I’d at least bring it up just a wee bit.”

“We’re not worthy,” said Max as we descended into the club.

“You remember that,” I said.

If the Spice of Life was old wood and polished brass, the Mysterioso was cement floors and the kind of flocked wallpaper that curry houses stripped off their walls in the late 1990s. As advertised, it was dark, crowded, and surprisingly smoky. The Management in its quest for authenticity was obviously turning a blind eye to the smoking of tobacco contrary to the provisions of the Health Act (2006). Not just tobacco either, judging by the fruity tang drifting over the bobbing heads of the punters — my dad would have loved this place even though the acoustics were rubbish. All it needed was an animatronic Charlie Parker shooting up in the corner and it would be a perfect theme-park re-creation.

James and the boys, in the grand tradition of musicians everywhere, headed straight for the bar. I let them go and moved closer to the band who — according to the front of the bass drum — were called the Funk Mechanics. True to their name they were playing jazz funk on a stage that was barely raised above the floor. It was two white guys with a black guy on bass and a redheaded drummer with a pound of silver attached to various parts of her face. As I worked my way toward the stage I realized that they were doing a funked-up version of “Get Out of Town,” but they’d given it a completely spurious Latin rhythm that pissed me off. Which struck me as strange even then.

There were booths, upholstered in tatty red velvet, lining the walls, and people staring out onto the dance floor. Bottles crowded the tables and faces, mostly pale, nodded in time to the Funk Mechanics’ butchering of a classic. There was a white couple snogging in a booth at the end. The man’s hand was shoved down the front of the woman’s dress, the outline of his fingers squeezing obscenely through the material. The sight made me feel sick and outraged and that’s when I realized that these emotions had nothing to do with me.

I’ve seen much worse in my travels and I quite like jazz funk. I must have just walked through a lacuna, a hot spot of residual magic. I’d been right: Something was going down.

Leslie always complained that I was too easily distracted to be a good copper, but then she would have walked right through the lacuna without giving it a second thought.

James and the band pushed through the crowd to surprise me with a bottle of beer. I took a swig and it was good. I checked the label and saw it was an expensive bottle of Schneider Weisse. I looked over at the band, who held up their own bottles.

“It was on the house,” shouted Max, a bit excitedly.

I could feel James wanting to talk about my dad but fortunately it was too loud and crowded for him to start.

“So this is the modern style,” shouted Daniel.

“So I’ve heard,” shouted James.

And then I had it, the vestigium, cool and distant among the heat of the dancing bodies. I realized that it was different from the residue of magic that had clung to Cyrus Wilkinson. This was fresher, crisper, and behind the solo there was a woman’s voice singing — My heart is sad and lonely. Again the smell of dust and burned and broken wood.

And something else. The vestigia that clung to Cyrus had manifested itself like a saxophone, but what I was getting now was definitely a trombone. My dad was always sniffy about the ’bone. He said that it was all right in a brass section but you could count the number of decent trombone soloists on the fingers of one foot. It’s a difficult instrument to take seriously but even my dad admitted that a man who could solo on a slide trombone had to be something special. Then he’d talk about Kai Winding or J. J. Johnson. But the guys on stage were trumpet, electric bass, and drums — no trombone.

I had a horrible feeling I’d turned up two coupons short of the pop-up toaster.

I let the vestigium lead me through the crowd. There was a door to the left of the stage half hidden behind the speaker stacks with STAFF ONLY crookedly stenciled on it, yellow paint on black. It wasn’t until I reached the door that I realized that the band had followed me over like lost sheep. I told them to stay outside — so of course they followed me in.

The door opened straight into the green room/changing room/storage area, a long narrow space that looked to me like a converted coal bunker. The walls were plastered with ancient yellowing posters for bands and gigs. An old-fashioned theatrical dressing table with a horseshoe of bare bulbs was sandwiched between an American-sized fridge and a trestle table covered by a disposable tablecloth in Christmas green and red. A forest of beer bottles covered a coffee table and a white woman in her early twenties was asleep on one of the two green leather sofas that filled the rest of the room.

“So this is how the other half lives,” said Daniel.

“Makes all those years of rehearsing seem almost worthwhile,” said Max.

The woman on the sofa sat up and stared at us. She was wearing dungarees that were loose to the waist and a yellow T-shirt with I SAID NO SO FUCK OFF printed across the chest.

“Can I help you?” she said. She was wearing dark purple lipstick that had gotten smeared across one cheek.

“I’m looking for the band,” I said.

“Aren’t we all,” she said and held out her hand. “My name’s Peggy.”

“The band?” I asked, ignoring her hand.

Peggy sighed and rolled the kinks out of her shoulders, which pushed out her chest and got everyone’s attention — except for Daniel’s of course. “Aren’t they onstage?” she asked.

“The band before them,” I said.

“They’ve gone?” said Peggy. “Oh that bitch, she said she’d wake me up after the set. This really is too much.”

“What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

Peggy rolled off the sofa and started looking for her shoes. “Honestly,” she said. “I don’t remember. They were Cherry’s band.”

“Did they have a trombone player?” I asked. “A good one.”

Max found her shoes behind the other sofa — four-inch stiletto open-toed strap sandals which I didn’t really think went with the dungarees. “I’ll say so,” she said. “That’ll be Mickey. He’s one in a million.”

“Do you know where they were going after the gig?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just going with the groove.” In her heels she was almost as tall as I was. The dungarees gaped at the sides to reveal a strip of pale skin and a frilly line of scarlet silk knickers. I turned away — I’d lost the vestigium when I entered the room and Peggy wasn’t helping my concentration. I got flashes of other stuff: the smell of lavender, of a car bonnet left out in the sun, and a ringing sound like the silence that comes after a loud noise.

“Who are you?” asked Peggy.

“We’re the jazz police,” said James.

“ ’He’s the jazz police,” said Max, meaning me I suppose. “We’re more like the Old Compton Street irregulars.”

That made me laugh, which shows how drunk I still was.

“Is Mickey in trouble?” asked Peggy.

“Only if he’s been dripping his spit valve on someone’s shoulder,” said Max.

I didn’t have any more time for banter. There was a second door in the room, marked as a fire exit, so I headed for that. On the other side there was another short, bare, gray brick corridor half blocked with stacked furniture, crates, and black plastic bags in spectacular contravention of Health and Safety Regulations. Another fire door, this one with push-bars, led to a staircase up to street level. The push-bars on the door at the top of the stairs were illegally fastened with a bicycle lock.

Nightingale has this spell which can pop a lock right out of its socket but apparently I’m at least a year away from learning it — I had to improvise. I stopped a safe distance away and dropped one of my unsuccessful light bombs on the lock. What they lack in finesse they make up for in ferocity. I had to take a step back because of the heat and, squinting, I could see the lock sag within the little rippling globe. When I figured the lock was good and soft, I let go of the spell and the globe popped like a soap bubble. Then I made nice basic impello forma in my mind. It was the second forma I ever learned so it’s something I know I’m good at. Impello moves things about, in this case the center line of the double doors. It smacked the doors open, breaking the lock and slamming them hard enough to knock one off its hinges.

It was impressive stuff, even if I say so myself. And certainly the irregulars, who’d come up the stairs behind me, thought so.

“What the fuck was that?” asked James.

“Thermite chewing gum,” I said hopefully.

The fire alarm in the club went off — it was time to move on. Me and the irregulars did the fifty-yard nonchalant stroll around the corner onto Frith Street in Olympic-qualifying time. It was late enough by then for the tourists to have gone back to their hotels and the streets were noisy with lads and ladettes.

James got in front of me and made me stop walking.

“This has something to do with Cy’s death, doesn’t it?”

I was too knackered to argue. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

“Did someone do something to Cyrus?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “If you’d just finished a gig where would you go?”

James looked confused. “What?”

“Help me out, James. I’m trying to find this trombone player — where you would go?”

“The Potemkin has a late license,” said Max.

That made sense. You could get food there, and more important, alcohol, up until five o’clock in the morning. I headed down Frith Street with the irregulars in tow. They wanted to know what was going on — and so did I. James in particular was proving dangerously canny.

“Are you worried the same thing is going to happen to this trombone player?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

We turned into Old Compton Street and as soon as I saw the flashing blue light on the ambulance I knew I was too late. It was parked outside a club, the back doors were open, and judging by the leisurely way the paramedics were moving about the victim was either unharmed or very dead. I wasn’t betting on unharmed. A desultory crowd of onlookers had gathered under the wary eye of a couple of PCSOs and a PC I recognized from my time at Charing Cross nick.

“Purdy,” I shouted and he looked over. “What’s the griff?”

Purdy lumbered over. When you’re wearing a stab vest, equipment belt, extendable baton, nipple-shaped helmet, shoulder harness, airwave radio, cuffs, pepper spray, notebook, and emergency Mars bar, lumbering is what you do. Phillip Purdy had a bit of a reputation as a “uniform carrier,” which is a copper who’s not good for anything but wearing the uniform. But that was all to the good — right now I didn’t want effective. Effective coppers ask too many questions.

“Ambulance pickup,” said Purdy. “Guy just dropped dead in the middle of the street.”

“Let’s have a look?” I made it a question. It pays to be polite.

“Are you working?”

“I don’t know until I have a look,” I said.

Purdy grunted and let me past.

The paramedics were just lifting the victim onto their gurney. He was younger than me, dark-skinned and African-featured — Nigerian or Ghanian if I had to guess, or more likely had a parent from one of those places. He was dressed smart, khaki chinos, custom suit jacket. The paramedics had ripped open an expensive-looking white cotton shirt in order to use the defibrillator. His eyes were open, dark brown, and empty. I didn’t need to get any closer. If he’d been playing “Body and Soul” any louder I could have roped off the street and sold tickets.

I asked the paramedics for a cause of death, but they shrugged and said heart failure.

“Is he dead?” I heard Max say behind me.

“No, he’s just having a wee lie-down,” said James.

I asked Purdy if he had any identification and he held up a ziplock bag with a wallet in it. “This your shout?” he asked.

I nodded, took the bag, and signed the paperwork to carefully ensure the chain of custody against any future legal proceedings before stuffing the whole lot in my trouser pocket.

“Was there anyone with him?”

Purdy shook his head. “Nobody that I saw.”

“Who made the 999 call?”

“Dunno,” said Purdy. “Mobile probably.”

It’s officers like Purdy that give the Metropolitan Police the reputation for sterling customer service that makes us the envy of the civilized world.

As they loaded the gurney into the ambulance I heard Max being noisily sick.

Purdy eyed Max with the particular interest of a copper who’s facing a long Saturday-night shift and who could easily make dropping a drunk and disorderly off at the cells last at least a couple of hours. Paperwork to be done in the canteen with a cup of tea and a sandwich — curse this bureaucratic red tape that keeps good police officers away from the front lines where the action is. I disappointed Purdy by saying I’d take care of it.

The paramedics said they wanted to be off, but I told them to wait. I didn’t want to risk the body going astray before Dr. Walid had a chance to look at it but I needed to know whether this guy had been playing at the Mysterioso. Of the irregulars, Daniel looked the most upright.

“Daniel,” I said. “Are you sober?”

“Yes,” he said. “And getting soberer with every passing second.”

“I’ve got to go with the ambulance. Can you nip back to the club and get a copy of the playlist?” I gave him my card. “Call me on the mobile when you’ve got it.”

“You think the same thing happened to him?” he said. “As Cyrus, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “As soon as I know something I’ll call you guys.”

The paramedics called over, “You coming or what?”

“You all right with this?”

Daniel gave me a grin. “Jazzman, remember,” he said. I held up my fist and after a moment of incomprehension Daniel knocked knuckles with me.

I climbed into the ambulance, and the paramedic pulled the door closed behind us.

“Are we going to UCH?” I asked.

“That’s the general idea,” he said.

We didn’t bother with the blues and twos.

YOU CAN’T just deposit a body at the morgue. For a start it has to be certified by a bona fide doctor. It doesn’t matter how many bits the body is in; until your actual fully accredited member of the BMA says it’s dead, it occupies, bureaucratically speaking, an indeterminate state just like an electron, an atomic cat-in-a-box, and my authority to conduct what was tantamount to a murder investigation on my own recognizance.

Early Sunday morning in casualty is always a joy, what with the blood and the screaming and the recriminations as the booze wears off and the pain kicks in. Any police officer who’s feeling public-spirited enough to show his face can get himself involved in half a dozen exciting altercations often involving Ken and his best mate Ron and it weren’t like we were doing anything, Officer, honest, it was like totally unprovoked. So I stayed in the treatment cubicle with my nice quiet dead body, thank you very much. I borrowed a pair of surgical gloves from a box in a drawer and went through his wallet.

Mickey the Bone’s full name was, according to his driver’s license, Michael Adjayi. So a Nigerian family then, and according to his date of birth Michael had just turned nineteen.

You’re mum’s going to be really pissed with you, I thought sadly.

He had a slew of cards, Visa, MasterCard, bank card, and one for the Musicians Union. There were a couple of business cards including one from an agent — I jotted the details down in my notebook. Then I carefully returned everything to the evidence bag.

It wasn’t until quarter to three that a junior doctor turned up and finally pronounced Michael Adjayi definitively dead. It took another two hours, once I’d declared the body a crime scene, to get the doctor’s particulars, obtain copies of the relevant documentation, the paramedic’s and the doctor’s notes, and get the body downstairs and safely into the mortuary there to await Dr. Walid’s tender ministrations. That just left me with the joyful last part where I contact the victim’s loved ones and break the news to them. These days the easiest way to do that is to grab someone’s mobile and see what comes up on the call log. Predictably Mickey had had an iPhone. I found it in his jacket pocket, but the screen was blank and I didn’t need to open it up to know that the chip would be trashed. I put it in a second evidence bag but I didn’t bother labeling — it would be going back to the Folly with me. Once I was sure that nobody was going to interfere with the body, I called Dr. Walid. I didn’t see any reason to wake him so I rang his office number and left a message for him to get in the morning.

If Mickey really was a second victim then it meant that the magic jazzman killer, and I was going to have to think of a better name for him than that, had struck twice less than four days apart.

I wondered if there’d been a similar cluster among Dr. Walid’s lists of deaths. I’d have to check when I got back to the tech-cave at the Folly. I was just debating whether to go home or fall asleep in the mortuary staff room when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello.” I said.

“This is Stephanopoulis,” said Detective Sergeant Stephanopoulis. “Your particular services are required.”

“Where?”

“Dean Street,” she said. Soho again. Of course, why not?

“Can I ask what the case is?”

“Murder most horrid,” she said. “Bring a spare pair of shoes.”

Past a certain point, black coffee only gets you so far and if it hadn’t been for the nasty smell of the air freshener my surly Latvian driver used I might have fallen asleep in the back of his mini cab.

Dean Street was sealed off from the corner with Old Compton to where it met Meard Street. I counted at least two unmarked Sprinter vans and a bevy of silver Vauxhall Astras, which is a sure sign that a Major Investigation Team is on the scene.

A DC I recognized from the Belgravia Murder Team was waiting for me at the tape. A short way up Dean Street a forensics tent had been pitched over the entrance of the Groucho Club — it looked as inviting as something from a biological warfare exercise.

Stephanopoulis was waiting for me inside. She was a short terrifying woman whose legendary capacity for revenge had earned her the title of the lesbian officer least likely to have a flippant remark made about her sexual orientation. She was stocky and had a square face that wasn’t helped by a Sheena Easton flattop that you might have called ironic postmodern dyke chic but only if you really craved suffering.

She was already wearing her blue disposable forensics overalls, and a face mask hung around her neck. Someone had liberated a pair of folding chairs from somewhere and laid out a forensics suit for me. We call them noddy suits and you sweat like anything when you wear them. I noticed there were smears of blood around Stephanopoulis’s ankles on the plastic-bag thingies that you cover your shoes with.

“How’s your governor?” asked DS Stephanopoulis as I sat and started pulling on the suit.

“Fine,” I said. “Yours?”

“Fine,” she said. “He’s back on duty next month.” Stephanopoulis knew the truth about the Folly. A surprisingly large number of senior police officers did; it just wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about in polite conversation.

“Are you SIO on this, ma’am?” I asked. The senior investigating officer on a serious crime was usually at the very least a detective inspector, not a sergeant.

“Of course not,” said Stephanopoulis. “We have a DCI on loan from Havering CID but he’s adopted a loose collaborative management approach in which experienced officers undertake a lead role in areas where they have greatest expertise.”

In other words he’d locked himself in his office and let Stephanopoulis get on with it.

“It’s always gratifying to see senior officers adopt a forward-looking posture in their vertical relationships,” I said and was rewarded by something that was almost a smile.

“You ready?”

I pulled the hood over my head and tightened the drawstring. Stephanopoulis handed me a face mask and I followed her into the club. The lobby had a white tile floor that, despite the obvious care taken, had smears of blood trailing through a pair of wooden trellis doors.

“The body’s downstairs in the gents’,” said Stephanopoulis.

The stairs down to the scene were so narrow that we had to wait for a herd of forensics types to come up before we could go down. There’s no such thing as a full-service forensics team. It’s very expensive, so you order bits of it up from the Home Office like a Chinese takeout. Judging by the number of noddy suits filing past us Stephanopoulis had gone for the super-deluxe meal for six with extra egg fried rice. I was, I guessed, the fortune cookie.

Like most toilets in the West End of London, the ones in the Groucho were cramped and low-ceilinged from being retrofitted into the basement of a town house. The management had lined them with alternating panels of brushed steel and cherry-red Perspex — it was like a particularly creepy level of System Shock 2. Not helped by the bloody footsteps leading out.

“The cleaner found him,” said Stephanopoulis, which explained the footsteps.

On the left were square porcelain washbasins, in front a line of bog-standard urinals, and tucked away on the right, raised up a couple of steps, was the one and only toilet stall. The door was being held open with a couple of strips of masking tape. I didn’t need to be told what was inside.

It’s funny how the mind processes a crime scene. For the first few seconds your eye just slides away from the horror and fixes on the mundane. He was a middle-aged white guy and he was sitting on the loo. His shoulders were slumped and his chin was resting on his chest, making it hard to see his face, but he had brown hair and the start of a bald patch at the crown of his head. He was wearing an expensive but worn tweed jacket that had been half pulled down his shoulders to reveal a rather nice blue-and-white pin-striped shirt. His trousers and underwear were around his ankles, his thighs were pale and hairy. His hands hung limply between his legs, I guessed he’d been clutching his groin right up until the point he’d lost consciousness. His palms were sticky with blood, the cuffs of his jacket and shirt soaked in it. I made myself look at the wound.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said.

Blood had poured into the toilet bowl and I really didn’t want to be the poor forensics sod who had to go fishing around in it later. Something had excised the man’s penis, right at the root just above his bollocks, and unless I was mistaken left him clutching what was left until he bled out.

It was horrible, but I doubted that Stephanopoulis had dragged me down here for a crash course in scene-of-crime theory. There had to be something more, so I made myself look at the wound again and this time I saw the connection. I’m no expert but judging by the ragged edge of the wound I didn’t think it had been done with a knife.

I stood up and Stephanopoulis gave me an approving look. Presumably because I hadn’t immediately clutched my groin and run whimpering from the scene.

“Does this look familiar to you?” she asked.