Moon Over Soho

Chapter 7 Almost Like Being in Love

SIR ROBERT Mark was commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1972 to 1977 and is famous for two things — the Goodyear tire adverts where he said the words “I believe this to be a major contribution to road safety,” and “Operation Countryman,” an investigation into corruption within his own force. Back in what the Daily Mail calls the good old days a conscientious copper could triple his income just by sticking his hand out at the right moment, and an armed blagger could walk away from a collar for just a modest consideration. Though to be fair they always tried to make sure that someone was charged with the offense so at least justice was seen to be done and that’s the main thing. Commissioner Mark, who took a dim view of this, initiated the most sweeping anticorruption drive the Met had ever seen, which is why he’s the figure that police parents use to keep their little baby police officers in line. Behave or nasty Sir Robert Mark will come around and boot you off the force. This is probably why the current commissioner had a portrait of Mark hanging in the atrium of his office strategically placed so that he faced the row of uncomfortable fake green leather seats that Nightingale and I were forced to wait on.

When you’re a lowly constable nothing good can come of getting this close to the big man himself. Last time I’d been there I’d been sworn in as an apprentice wizard. This time I suspected it was going to be mostly swearing. Next to me Nightingale seemed relaxed enough, reading the Telegraph in a tan lightweight Davies & Son suit that was either brand-new or, more likely, coming back into style from some earlier epoch. I was in my uniform because when confronted with authority a uniform is a constable’s friend, especially when it has been ironed to razor-sharpness by Molly, who apparently regarded a trouser crease as a conveniently located offensive weapon.

A secretary opened the door for us. “The commissioner will see you now,” she said and we stood up and trooped off to face the music.

The commissioner’s office is not that impressive, and while the carpet isn’t that budget-conscious no amount of wood paneling could disguise the dull gray mid-1960s concrete bones of the New Scotland Yard building. But the Metropolitan Police has over fifty thousand personnel and a working budget of four and a half billion quid and is responsible for everything from antisocial behavior in Kingston to antiterrorism in Whitehall, so the commissioner’s office doesn’t really need to try that hard.

The commissioner sat waiting for us. He was wearing his uniform cap and that was when I truly knew we were in deep shit. We stopped in front of the desk and Nightingale actually twitched as if suppressing the impulse to salute. The commissioner stayed in his chair. No handshakes were offered and we were not invited to sit.

“Chief Inspector Nightingale,” he said. “I trust you’ve had a chance to acquaint yourself with the reports pertaining to the events of last Monday night.”

“Yes sir,” said Nightingale.

“You are aware of the accusations levied by members of London Ambulance Service and the preliminary report by the DPS?”

“Yes sir,” said Nightingale.

I flinched. The DPS is the Directorate of Professional Standards, fiends in human form that walk among us to keep the rank and file in fear and despondency. Should you feel the cold damp breath of the DPS on your collar, as I did then, the next thing you need to know is which bit is doing the breathing. I didn’t think it would be the ACC, the Anti-Corruption Command, or the IIC, the Internal Investigations Command, because hijacking an ambulance would best be categorized as criminally stupid rather than stupidly criminal. Or at least I was hoping that’s the way they would see it, and that I’d be done by the MCAV, the Misconduct Civil Actions and Vetting Command, whose job it was to deal with those officers who have laid the Met open to being sued in the courts — by traumatized paramedics for example.

“Do you stand by your assessment of Constable Grant’s actions that night?”

“Yes sir,” said Nightingale. “I believe that Constable Grant, faced with difficult circumstances, evaluated the situation correctly and took swift and decisive action to prevent the death of the individual known as Ash Thames. Had he not removed the cold iron from the wound or, having removed it, not transported Ash to the river, I have no doubt that the victim would have died — from loss of blood at the very least.”

The commissioner looked directly at me and I actually found myself holding my breath until he looked back at Nightingale.

“You were left in a supervisory position despite your medical condition because I was assured that you remain the only officer qualified to handle ‘special’ cases,” he said. “Was this a mistake on my part?”

“No sir,” said Nightingale. “Until such time as Constable Grant is fully trained I remain the only suitably qualified officer currently serving in the Metropolitan Police. Believe me, sir, I am as alarmed at this prospect as you are.”

The commissioner nodded. “Since it appears that Grant had no choice but to act as he did, I am willing to chalk this up to a failure of supervision on your part. This will be considered a verbal reprimand and a note will be entered into your record.” He turned to me, and I kept my eye on a nice safe patch of the wall an inch to the left of his head.

“While I accept that you are inexperienced and being forced to use your own judgment in circumstances that lie — ” The commissioner paused to choose his words. “ — outside of conventional police work, I would like to remind you that you swore an oath both as a constable and as an apprentice. And you were warned when you did so that extraordinary things were expected of you. At this point no disciplinary action will be taken and no note will be appended to your record. However, in the future I wish to see you exercise more tact, more discretion, and to try to keep the property damage to a bare minimum. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“The property damage,” said the commissioner, turning back to Nightingale, “including that to the ambulance, will be paid for out of the Folly’s budget, not the Met’s general contingency fund. As will any legal costs and damages that arise out of civil litigation taken against the Metropolitan Police. Is that understood?”

We both said yes sir.

I was sweating with relief. The only reason that I wasn’t facing a serious disciplinary hearing was because the commissioner probably didn’t want to explain to the Metropolitan Police Authority why a lowly constable was currently de facto head of an Operational Command Unit. Any advocate I called in from the Police Federation would have had a field day with my lack of effective supervision by a senior officer — Nightingale being on sick leave, remember. Not to mention the health and safety implications of being forced to jump into the Thames in the middle of the night.

I thought it was all over but it wasn’t. The commissioner touched his intercom. “You can send them in now, please.”

I recognized the guests. The first was a short, rangy middle-aged white man looking surprisingly dapper in an M&S ready-to-wear blue pin-striped suit. No tie, I noticed, and his hair was as resolutely comb-resistant as a hedgerow. Oxley Thames, wisest of the sons of Father Thames, his chief counselor, media guru, and hatchet man. He gave me a wry look as he took the seat offered by the commissioner to the right of his desk. The second was a handsome fair-skinned woman with a sharp nose and slanted eyes. She wore a black Chanel skirt suit that, had it been a car, would have done zero to sixty in less than 3.8 seconds. Lady Ty, Mama Thames’s favorite daughter, Oxford graduate and ambitious fixer, she seemed pleased to see me — which didn’t bode well. As she joined Oxley I realized that the bollocking wasn’t over, and this was to be The Bollocking 2: This Time It’s Personal.

“I believe you know Oxley and Lady Tyburn,” said the commissioner. “They’ve been asked by their ‘principals’ to clarify their position with regard to Ash Thames.” He turned to Oxley and Ty and asked who wanted to go first.

Ty turned to the commissioner. “I have a question for Constable Grant. If I may?” she asked.

The commissioner made a gesture that suggested that I was all hers.

“At any point,” she said, “did it cross your mind what would have happened to my sister had Ash been killed?”

“No ma’am,” I said.

“Which is an interesting admission given that you helped negotiate that agreement,” she said. “Were you unaware of the exact nature of an exchange of hostages perhaps? Or did you just forget that should death befall Ash while he was in our care, my sister’s life would have been forfeit? You do know what the word forfeit means?”

I went cold, because I hadn’t given it a thought, not when recruiting Ash for the surveillance job or even when I was sailing down the Thames with him. If he’d been killed then, Beverley Brook, Lady Ty’s sister, would have faced the ultimate forfeit. Which meant I’d nearly killed two people that night.

I glanced at Nightingale, who frowned and nodded for me to reply.

“I do know what the word forfeit means,” I said. “And in my defense, I’d like to say that I never expected Ash to put himself in harm’s way. I considered him a sober reliable figure, like all his brothers.”

Oxley snorted, which earned him a glare from Lady Ty.

“I hadn’t counted on him being quite so brave or quick-witted,” I said and got a look from Oxley that conveyed the notion that there’s such a thing as laying the blarney on too thick. It didn’t matter, because the reason you don’t fight with Lady Ty is she just waits for you to finish dancing about and then gives you a smack.

“While I’m of course aware of the role played by Inspector Nightingale and Constable Grant in facilitating a conciliation framework,” said Lady Ty, “I think it would be better, in light of recent events, if they took a less proactive stance with regard to matters relating to riverine diplomacy.”

I was moved almost to applause. The commissioner nodded, which just proved that the fix was in — probably with the Greater London Police Authority and the Mayor’s Office. He probably felt he had enough on his plate without us dishing out any more. He turned to Oxley and asked whether he had anything to add.

“Ash is a young man,” said Oxley. “And it’s well known that boys will be boys. Still, I don’t think it would hurt if Constable Grant were to exercise a hair more responsibility when dealing with him.”

We waited a moment for more but Oxley just looked bland. Lady Ty didn’t look happy so maybe the fix wasn’t as firmly in place as she would like. I gave her my secretive little boy smirk, the one that I’ve been using to drive my mum berserk since I was eight. Her lips thinned, but she was obviously made of sterner stuff than my mum.

“That seems reasonable,” said Nightingale. “As long as all parties stay within the agreement and the law, I’m sure we can agree to a hands-off approach.”

“Good,” said the commissioner. “And while I’m always glad to have these little chats, let’s try to keep them out of my office in the future.”

And with that we were dismissed.

“That could have been worse,” I said as we walked past the eternal flame of remembrance that burns in the New Scotland Yard foyer. It’s there to remember those brave men and women who have fallen while doing their duty and to remind us, the living, to be bloody careful.

“Tyburn’s dangerous,” said Nightingale as we headed for the underground car park. “She thinks she can define her role in the city through bureaucratic maneuvering and office politics. Sooner or later she’ll come into conflict with her own mother.”

“And if that happens?”

“The consequences could well be mythic,” said Nightingale. “I think it would be in your interests not to be standing between them when that happens.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Or anywhere within the Thames Valley for that matter.”

Nightingale was due for a checkup at the UCH so he dropped me off in Leicester Square and I called Simone.

“Give me an hour to clean up,” she said. “And then come over.”

I was still in my uniform, which would have made drinking in a pub a bit of a problem, so I grabbed a coffee in the Italian place on Frith Street before proceeding at a leisurely place up Old Compton Street. I was just thinking of picking up some cakes from the Patisserie Valerie when my highly tuned copper’s senses were irresistibly drawn, like those of a big-game hunter, by the subtle clues that something was amiss in Dean Street.

And also the police tape, the forensics tent, and the uniformed bodies who’d been given the exciting task of guarding the crime scene. My professional curiosity got the better of me, so I sidled up to have a look.

I spotted Stephanopoulis talking to a couple of other DSs from the Murder Team. You don’t just step into someone else’s crime scene without permission so I paused at the tape and waited until I could catch Stephanopoulis’s eye. She stamped over a minute later and clocked the uniform.

“Back on patrol with us mere mortals, are you?” she said. “I think you got off lightly. The even money in the incident room was that you were going to be suspended with extreme prejudice.”

“Verbal warning,” I said.

Stephanopoulis looked incredulous. “For hijacking an ambulance?” she said. “You get a verbal warning? You’re not making any friends among the rank and file, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “Who’s dead?”

“Nothing to do with you,” said Stephanopoulis. “Construction foreman from Crossrail. Found this morning in one of his access shafts.” Although the bulk of the new Crossrail station was finished, the contractors still seemed intent on digging up the streets. “Might just be an accident anyway, health and safety on these sites is almost as bad as it is in the Met.”

Health and safety was the current obsession of the Police Federation. Last year it had been stab vests but lately they felt that police officers were taking unnecessary safety risks while pursuing suspects. They wanted better H&S guidelines to prevent injury and, presumably, remote-controlled drones to do the actual chases.

“Did it happen in the dark?”

“No, at eight o’clock this morning in full daylight,” said Stephanopoulis. “Which means he was probably pushed but, and this is the important bit as far as you’re concerned, there is definitely nothing remotely supernatural about the scene, thank God. So you can just bugger off.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said. “I shall do that.”

“Wait,” said Stephanopoulis. “I want you to check the follow-up interviews with Colin Sandbrow — they should be on the system by now.”

“Who’s Colin Sandbrow?”

“The man who would have been the next victim if your weirdo friend hadn’t gotten in the way,” she said. “If you think you can do that without generating more property damage.”

I laughed to show that I was a good sport, but cop humor being what it is I knew I’d be carrying that ambulance around for the rest of my career. I left Stephanopoulis to impose her will on the crime scene and slipped through St. Anne’s Court and D’Arblay Street to Berwick Street. Since I hadn’t been paying attention the night before, I had to stop and get my bearings before I spotted the door — sandwiched between a chemist’s and a record shop that specialized in vintage vinyl. The black paint on the door was peeling and the little cards on the entry phone were either smudged or missing entirely. It didn’t matter. I knew she was on the top floor.

“You wretch,” spluttered the entry phone. “I’m not ready.”

“I can go around the block again,” I said.

The lock buzzed and I pushed the door open. The stairs didn’t look any better in the daylight; the carpet was pale blue and worn through in places and the walls showed stains from where people had put their hands out to balance themselves. On each floor there were blind doors, which in Soho could lead anywhere from Strict Discipline at Reasonable Rates to a television production company. I paced myself so I wasn’t panting when I reached the top floor and knocked on the door.

When Simone opened it and saw me in my uniform she skipped back a step and clapped her hands. “Look at this,” she said. “It’s a strippergram.”

She’d been cleaning in a pair of gray tracksuit bottoms and a navy blue sweatshirt that looked like it had been cropped with a pair of nail scissors. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf in an English way that I’d only ever seen on Coronation Street. I stepped forward and grabbed her. She smelled of sweat and Domestos. It would have been straight onto the floor right then if she hadn’t gasped out that the door was still open. We broke long enough to close the door and stumble to the bed. Only one bed I noticed, but it was king-sized and we did our best to use every bit. At some point my uniform came off and we never did find what happened to her sweatshirt — she left the scarf on, though, because something about it turned me on.

An hour and a bit later I had a chance to look around the flat. The bed took up one whole corner of the main room and was, apart from one overstuffed leather armchair, the only thing to sit on. The only other furniture was a mismatched trio of wardrobes lining one wall and a solid oak chest of drawers that was so big, the only way to get it into the room must have been to winch it in through the window. There was no TV that I could see, or stereo, although a suitably small MP3 player might have vanished among the drifts of cloth that had colonized the room. I’m an only child, so I’ve only ever had to live with one woman at a time and wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of clothes that could be generated by three sisters sharing one flat. The shoes were particularly pervasive; serried ranks of, to me, almost identical open-toed sling-back stilettos. Tangles of sandals had been stuffed into random nooks while boxes of pumps filled the gaps between the wardrobes. Pairs of boots, from calf-length to thigh-high, hung from nails on the wall like the rows of swords in a castle.

Simone saw me eyeing a pair of fetish boots with three-inch spike heels and started to wriggle out of my arms. “Want me to try them on?” she said.

I pulled her back against my chest and kissed her neck — I didn’t want her going anywhere. She twisted in my arms and we kissed until she said she had to pee. Once your lover’s done you might as well get up and so I folded myself into the bathroom — a tiny cubbyhole with just enough room for a surprisingly modern power shower, a toilet, and the kind of small odd-shaped sink designed to fit into the space of last resort. While I was in there my copper’s instincts got the better of me and I had a rummage through their medicine cabinet. Simone and her sisters were clearly in favor of the long-term storage of dangerous chemicals because there were acetaminophen and prescription sleeping tablets that dated back ten years.

“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.

YOU 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.

JUST 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.”

It was weird watching my dad sit down and play keyboard with a bunch of musicians. I’d never seen him play live but my memories are full of black-and-white photographs and in those he always had his trumpet in his hand. Trying to hold it in the same way as Miles Davis had, like a weapon, like a rifle at parade rest. He could play the keyboard, though. Even I could tell that. But it still felt like the wrong instrument to me.

It bothered me for the rest of the session, but I couldn’t figure out why.

AFTER THE rehearsal I’d expected us to troop up Leverton Street for a pint at The Pineapple but my mum invited everyone back to the flat. As we headed up the stairs the mouthy girl from the rehearsal stopped me in the stairwell. This time without her posse.

“I heard you can do magic,” she said.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I got my sources,” she said. “Is it true?”

“Yeah,” I said, because sometimes the truth shuts up kids faster than a clip around the ear and has the added advantage of not being an assault on a minor in the eyes of the law. “I can do magic. What about it?”

“Real magic,” she said. “Not like tricks and stuff.”

“Real magic,” I said.

“Teach me,” she said.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “You get a GCSE in Latin and I’ll teach you magic.”

“Deal,” she said and stuck out her hand.

I shook, her palm small and dry in mine.

“You promise on your mum’s life,” she said.

I hesitated and she squeezed my hand as hard as she could.

“On your mum’s life,” she said.

“I don’t swear on my mum’s life,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “But a deal’s a deal — right?”

“Right,” I said. But I was suspicious by that point. “Who are you?”

“I’m Abigail,” she said. “I live up the road.”

“You really going to learn Latin?”

“Am now,” she said. “Laters.” And she went skipping up the road.

I counted my fingers to make sure they were all there and I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me that I’d handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

By the time I got upstairs to the flat, the musicians had gravitated into the bedroom where they were cooing over my dad’s record collection. My mum had obviously hit the snack freezer at Iceland pretty hard and there were bowls of mini sausage rolls, mini pizzas, and Hula Hoops on the coffee table. Coke, tea, coffee, and orange juice were available on demand. My mum was looking very pleased with herself.

“Do you know Abigail?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Her father is Adam Kamara.”

I vaguely recognized the name as being one of several dozen relations loosely defined as cousins — a relationship that could range from being the offspring of one of my uncles to the white guy from the Peace Corps who wandered into my granddad’s compound in 1977 and never left.

“Did you tell her I could do magic?”

She shrugged. “She was here with her father, she may have heard things.”

“So you talk about me when I’m not here?”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

Yes I would, I thought, and helped myself to a handful of Hula Hoops.

At my mother’s command I stuck my head around the bedroom door to ask the irregulars whether they wanted any snacks. My dad said they’d be out in a minute, no snacks allowed near the collection obviously, and continued his discussion with Daniel and Max about the transition from Stan Kenton to the Third Stream. James was sitting on the bed with an LP in his hands, and he was caught in the terrible dilemma of the serious vinyl aficionado — he wanted to borrow it, but he knew that if it was his he’d never let it out of the house. He really was close to tears.

“I know it’s unfashionable,” said James, after going on about Don Cherry for a while. “But I’ve always had a soft spot for the cornet.” Which was when, had I been a cartoon character, a little lightbulb would have gone ding over my head.

I borrowed my dad’s iPod and thumbed through his selections looking for the track I wanted. I took it through the kitchen and out onto the balcony with its unparalleled vista of the flats opposite. I found it — “Body and Soul” off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands — Snakehips Johnson giving the tune such a danceable swing that Coleman Hawkins had to invent an entire new branch of jazz just to get it out of his head. It was also the version I’d heard in the Café de Paris while dancing with Simone.

The vestigium left on the body of Mickey the Bone had sounded like a trombone. At Cyrus Wilkinson’s demise it had been an alto sax — the instruments the musicians had played in life. Henry Bellrush had played the cornet, but I hadn’t sensed a cornet at the Café de Paris.

I’d sensed Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra who had all died there, in the Café de Paris, more than seventy years ago.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

THE NEXT morning I talked myself out of practice and headed for Clerkenwell and the Metropolitan Archive. The Corporation of London is the organization dedicated to ensuring that the City — that’s the financial bit of London — is untainted by all this newfangled democracy that’s been rearing its ugly head in the last two hundred years or so. If an oligarchy was good enough for Dick Whittington, they argue, then it’s good enough for the heart of twenty-first-century London. After all, they say, it works in China.

They are also in charge of old archives of the London County Council, which are kept in a workmanlike but still elegant art deco building with white walls and gray carpet. I flashed my warrant card at one of the librarians, and she quickly pulled up a list of documents and showed me how to order.

She also suggested that she could check the digital archive to see if there were any images available. “Is this a cold case?” she asked.

“A very cold case,” I said.

First up from the storeroom was LCC/CE/4/7, a cardboard box full of manila folders tied up with dirty white ribbons. I was looking for item #39 report from March 8, 1941. The identification was handwritten in black ink and I untied the folder to find the report printed in purple type on pale yellow paper, a surefire sign, said the librarian, that it had been duplicated with a mimeograph. It was marked SECRET and dated March 9, 1941. SITUATION REPORT AS AT 0600 HOURS. It listed, in order of importance, damage to factories, railways, telecommunications, electricity supply, docks, roads, hospitals, and public buildings. St. Thomas’s Babies Hostel in Lambeth had been hit and, I was relieved to read, no casualties taken. Oddly relieved, given that it all happened half a century before I was born. I found what I was looking for halfway down the third page.

While I was waiting for the other files to be brought up, the librarian called me over to the information point to show me some of the pictures she’d found in the digital archive. Most of them came from the Daily Mail, which must have had a photographer on the scene almost as soon as the bombs fell. In monochrome everything looked curiously bloodless and it wasn’t until you recognized that the light gray tube poking out from under a table was a woman’s forearm that you realized you were looking at a charnel house. There were six more pictures of the interior of the nightclub and several of casualties arriving at Charing Cross Hospital, pale faces and stunned expressions among the blankets and primitive equipment of a wartime hospital.

I almost missed it but some flicker of recognition made me click back one and check.

The picture was confused and I couldn’t identify where it was taken, possibly the ambulance loading bay. A group of women were being led past the camera, all but one of them hunched over with blankets across their shoulders. One face was staring at the camera, the expression erased by shock into a smooth pale oval. A face that I recognized, and which I’d last seen in the green room at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died.

She’d called herself Peggy. I wondered if that was her real name.