Moon Over Soho

Chapter 9 The Forcing House

MY DAD says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness. It is, says my dad, the poor man’s alternative to Australia now that South Africa has gone all multicultural.

Jerry Johnson was one of the later type of non-Londoner, born in Finchley in 1940 by the grace of God and died in a bungalow on the outskirts of Norwich with his penis bitten off. That last detail explaining why me and the scariest police officer in the Met, her beard, and two motorcycle outriders were doing a steady ton plus change up the M11. It was two in the morning as we came off the motorway so we filtered onto the A-road almost without slowing down. We reached the crime scene in under ninety minutes, which was impressive, only to find the Norfolk Constabulary had already taken the body away, which was not. Stephanopoulis stamped off with DCI Thompson to bite chunks out of the local plod, which left me to sidle up to the crime scene on my own.

“No sign of forced entry,” said DC Trollope.

Contrary to my dad’s prejudices the local plod were neither stupid nor noticeably inbred. If the kissing cousins of Norwich were getting it on then at least their offspring weren’t joining the police. Instead DC David Trollope was the kind of sober fit young man that would warm the heart of any backseat home secretary in the land.

“Do you think he let his assailant in?” I asked.

“It seems that way,” he said. “What do you think?” Police officers, like African matrons at a wedding, are acutely aware of the subtle and all-but-invisible gradations in status. We were the same rank and about the same age but the disadvantage I suffered from being on his patch had to be balanced against the fact that I’d arrived in a Jaguar XJ V8 that was blatantly borrowed from Diplomatic Protection. We settled for a kind of uneasy bonhomie and, like the African matrons, providing nobody had spiked the punch bowl, we’d probably get through the encounter without an embarrassing incident.

“Did he have an alarm system?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Trollope. “A good one.”

The bungalow was a hideous redbrick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracey Emin instead. The interior was as characterless as the exterior, World of Leather sofa, generic flat-pack furniture, fitted kitchen. There were three separate bedrooms, which surprised me.

“Did he have a family?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notes. “Ex-wife, daughter, grandchildren — all living in Melbourne, Australia.”

The two spare bedrooms looked like they were last furnished in the 1980s and were neat, tidy, and unlived-in. Trollope said that Johnson had a Polish woman who “did” for him twice a week. “It was her that found the body,” he said.

In the master bedroom, which was still off-limits to people not wearing noddy suits, I stood in the doorway and examined the bed as best as I could. The forensics team had removed the sheets and pillows but the mattress was still in place with a reddish brown stain a third of the way up from the footboard. Too much blood had soaked in for it to dry out since the body had been removed, so I could still smell it as I walked away to check the other rooms. I’d brought my own gloves with me but I asked Trollope if he had a spare pair to give him something to feel superior about.

If Johnson had died in his bedroom then he’d spent most of his life in the living room. LCD wide-screen TV, DVD with the remotes still on the coffee table by a copy of the Radio Times. There was an antique fold-down writing desk that Trollope said hadn’t been dusted yet so we left it well alone. And a couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks. Penguins, Corgis, and Panthers from the 1960s and ’70s — Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop. The bookshelves were the type that came in two parts, the bottom section acting as a pedestal for the top and being slightly deeper and having opaque doors. Carefully, because they hadn’t been dusted either, I opened the bottom sections to find them both empty except for a couple of scraps of paper — I left those for forensics as well.

There were a couple of surprisingly good hunting prints on the wall as well as a framed photograph of his graduating class at Hendon. I couldn’t work out which shiny young uniform he was. Beside it was a photo of him being handed a commendation by a senior officer whom I later learned was Sir John Waldron, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1968–1972, no less. There were family photographs on the mantelpiece, a wedding complete with unfortunate sideburns and flares, a pair of children, boy and a girl, at various ages, toddler, infant school, on a pale yellow beach by a green ocean somewhere foreign. There were a couple taken outside the bungalow where the kids looked to be nine or ten — nothing after that. I did a quick mental calculation and guessed that the latest picture had been taken in the early 1980s. More than thirty years ago.

“The family in Australia are still alive, aren’t they?” I asked. “They weren’t all tragically killed in a car crash or something like that?”

“I’ll have to find out,” said Trollope. “Why?”

“Thirty years is a long time to go without any new photographs,” I said.

The last couple of pictures were in the second rank, half hidden by the wife and kids. More men in kipper ties, sideburns, and embarrassingly wide lapels, photographed in a bar that looked familiar and which I suddenly recognized as the French House in Soho. I also realized I was looking at the young Alexander Smith, the nightclub owner, looking like a dandy even back then in a crushed-velvet smoking jacket and ruffled shirt.

“You didn’t happen to get any details about his career, did you?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notebook again but I knew even before he said it where the bulk of DCSI Johnson’s career had been spent: in and around Soho.

“He was CID at West End Central and before that he was in something called the OPS,” he said. I asked the dates and he said 1967 to 1975.

The OPS was the Obscene Publications Squad, the single most corrupt specialist unit of the most corrupt division of the Metropolitan Police. And Johnson had been a member during the most corrupt decade since London Thief Takers stopped being paid by the collar.

No wonder Alexander Smith was in the photograph. The OPS had run a protection racket for porno shops and strip clubs. You paid them so much cash a day and they made sure you didn’t get raided. Or if you did, they made sure you’d get lots of warning, so you had a comfortable and civilized interval in which to move all hard-core stuff somewhere else. As an added bonus you could bung the boys in blue a “drink” and they’d go around and raid your competitors and then sell their confiscated stock to you out of the back of the evidence room at Holborn nick. It also explained how Johnson could afford to take early retirement and probably why he had to take it.

Which made me look at the three remote controls casually left on the coffee table.

I squatted down by the TV stand. It was your typical gray laminated chipboard cheap piece of rubbish and quite difficult, because of the tangle of wires at the back, to clean the dust off effectively.

“Give me a hand over here, would you?” I asked Trollope and explained what I wanted him to do. Carefully, so as not to disrupt any forensic evidence, we both took a side of the DVD player and lifted it up. Underneath, there was a clear rectangle of light gray where something had protected the laminated surface from years of dust, something with a smaller footprint than the DVD player. I nodded and we gingerly put the player back down.

“What?” asked Trollope.

“He had a VHS player,” I said and pointed at the remotes on the coffee table. One for the TV, one for the DVD, and …

“Bugger,” said Trollope.

“You need to tell your scene of crime guys that somebody’s stripped this house of VHS tapes,” I said.

“Why did he still have VHS?” asked Trollope. “Do you know anyone who still has a VHS?”

“It has to be something he couldn’t risk getting digitized,” I said.

“These days?” said Trollope. “It would have to be something really disgusting or illegal. Child porn, or snuff movies, or, I don’t know, kitten strangling.”

“The wife will have to be interviewed,” I said. “Maybe she knows something.”

“Maybe that’s why she left,” said Trollope. “Reckon there’s a trip to Australia in it?”

“Not for us,” I said. “They never send DCs abroad. It’s always ‘experienced officers’ who get the free trips.” We shared a moment of gloomy solidarity. “If you had a bunch of stuff that you were desperate to keep hidden,” I said, “where would you stash it?”

“Garden shed,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“That’s where my dad kept his grass,” said Trollope.

“Really?”

“Grow your own is a long tradition in these parts.”

“You ever been tempted to bust him for possession?”

“Only at Christmas,” he said.

Ideally we would have trooped out and had a look in the shed ourselves, but you don’t do that on a modern crime scene without checking with forensics first and they said we couldn’t go out until they’d checked the lawn for footprints. And they couldn’t do that until morning. Fair enough. So we went and reported unto Stephanopoulis who was mightily pleased with both of us and bestowed her munificence in the form of sandwiches and coffee. Which we had to go and eat out in the road so as not to get crumbs on the crime scene. It was surprisingly cold but the Norfolk Constabulary had parked a couple of Transit vans outside so we sheltered in one of them. Even this close to Norwich, the sky was amazingly wide and full of stars. Stephanopoulis noticed me noticing. “City boy,” she said.

I suggested that Johnson’s ex-wife be interviewed in Australia and she agreed although she felt the Victoria police were more than capable of handling that without the need to send a British officer over, senior or otherwise. Trollope snorted.

“Something funny, Constable?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“No ma’am,” he said.

The sandwiches were the kind that get stocked by the twenty-four-hour shops attached to petrol stations, which managed the trick of being both soggy and stale. I think mine was ham salad but I barely tasted it. Stephanopoulis put hers down after the first bite.

“We need to know what it was Johnson told Dunlop,” she said.

“I’ll bet it had to do with the Obscene Publication Squad,” I said. “What else would he have to talk about?”

“There’s more to people than the job,” said Stephanopoulis.

“Not this man,” I said. “If he had any special interests they were on the stolen tapes. I think he may have been killed, in part, in order to recover them.”

“I see it,” said Stephanopoulis. “OPS plus videotapes, plus story to a journalist, some juicy scandal from the 1960s? Maybe somebody wanted to shut him up. If we find out what the story was we’ll find out who has a motive.”

I told her about Alexander Smith’s presence in one of the photos on the mantelpiece.

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” she asked.

“Nightclub impresario,” I said. “Goes all the way back to the 1960s, had an extended vacation abroad in the ’70s and ’80s.”

“Is he a gangster?” asked Trollope.

“He’s dodgy, is what he is,” I said.

“How did he come to your attention?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“During the course of another inquiry,” I said and glanced at Trollope. I wasn’t sure how much Stephanopoulis would want me to say outside the Met.

“Do you think they’re related?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s definitely a place to start.”

Stephanopoulis nodded and pointed at me. “You get some sleep. I want you nice and fresh tomorrow,” she said and then looked at Trollope. “You — your boss has given you to me as my plaything so I need you to run some errands for me — all right?”

“Yes ma’am,” said Trollope.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” I asked.

“We’re going to have a nice long chat with one Alexander Smith,” she said.

I FOUND it surprisingly easy to sleep across the backseat of the Transit but I woke up to a clear and freezing morning and was really glad when DC Trollope turned up in an unmarked Mondeo to ferry me and Stephanopoulis to the train station. I swapped mobile numbers with Trollope because it never hurts to network and headed inside in search of coffee. Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead. Stephanopoulis didn’t approve.

“The chicken in that is embalmed, dried and pressed very flat, and then sprinkled with extra chemicals,” she said.

“Too hungry to care,” I said.

We caught the express to Liverpool Street and Stephanopoulis got us a warrant card upgrade to first class, which on a short route like that meant slightly bigger seats and slightly fewer plebs. This suited Stephanopoulis because she was asleep before the train left the station.

There was no WiFi on the train so I booted up a PDF of Latin for Dummies on my laptop and spent an hour and a half getting to grips with third-declension adjectives. We were twenty minutes out of Liverpool Street and the suburbs were a comforting rainy smear when Trollope called me.

“They let me into the shed,” he said. “I was right. The door was forced.” The entry method had everyone puzzled because the lock and small circle of the surrounding wood had been popped right out. “Nobody can work out how it was done,” he said.

I knew. It was a spell. In fact it was one I’d seen Nightingale use on a garden gate in Purley when we were dealing with the vampire nest. Either our black magician was getting careless, didn’t know that there was anyone capable of hunting him, or just didn’t care that we might be alerted to his presence.

According to Trollope, the shed had been the usual mess, gardening tools, flowerpots, hose, and bits of bicycle.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to find out if something was nicked or not,” he said. Forensics were dusting for fingerprints all the same. The details of that, the lock, along with the report on the two possible footprints found in the lawn, were being attached to the relevant nominal on HOLMES. I thanked Trollope and promised to let him know if anything exciting happened.

Stephanopoulis woke up with a snort just as we were pulling into the station and gave me the briefest look of confusion before she got oriented. I filled her in on the lock in the shed and she nodded.

“Should we get your governor in?” she asked.

Dr. Walid had been firm. “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see if I can’t get confirmation from Alexander Smith first, before we get him out of bed.”

“Oh yes, Smith,” said Stephanopoulis as the train came to a stop. “A villain of the old school. This should be a treat.”

Stephanopoulis decided to use West End Central for the interview. Built in the 1930s on Savile Row, it’s a big square office block that’s been clad in expensive Portland stone in the hope that it will disguise its essential dullness. Just across Regent Street from Soho proper, it’s the main base of operations for Clubs and Vice, and Stephanopoulis persuaded an old friend of hers who worked there to pick up Alexander Smith for us. The idea was to promote in his head that he was just a small fry caught in a great big impersonal grinding machine. We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are. We let him marinate in the interview room for an hour and a bit while me and Stephanopoulis sat in the canteen drinking the bloody awful coffee and sketching out our strategy for the coming interrogation. Well actually, Stephanopoulis did the sketching while I sat there and filed it all away under best practice.

Alexander Smith had been abroad in the 1970s and 1980s all right — living near Marbella in southern Spain on the notorious Costa del Crime along with a lot of tough middle-aged men who sounded like Ray Winstone and had all the moral fiber of damp tissue paper. He was a villain of the old school, but a smart one because he never got caught or prosecuted. He’d owned a club but his main income had been from acting as a middleman between bent coppers and the porn barons of Soho. He literally knew where the bodies were buried and would be expecting us to want to focus on that.

“But he’s scared,” said Stephanopoulis. “He hasn’t asked for a brief or even a phone call — he actually wants to be banged up.”

“Why not just ask for protection?”

“Villains like that don’t ask for protection,” said Stephanopoulis. “They don’t talk to the police at all unless they’re looking to buy you. But he’s scared of something and we need to find out what it is. When we do, we jam in the knife, give it a twist, and he’ll open up like a winkle.”

“Not an oyster then?” I asked.

“You follow my lead,” said Stephanopoulis.

“What if we start getting into my area of expertise?” I asked.

Stephanopoulis snorted. “In the event of us charting that small corner of a foreign field you get to ask the questions you need to ask,” she said. “But be sensible and be careful because I don’t like to kick people under the table — it’s unprofessional.”

We finished off our bloody awful coffee and had a brief discussion about stack size. It’s not unknown for police officers going into an interview to pad out their files with a few reams of fake paperwork, the better to convey the notion that we, the police, know everything already so you might as well just save time and tell us what you know. But Stephanopoulis felt that an old lag like Smith wasn’t going to fall for that. And besides we wanted to convey the idea that we weren’t that bothered.

“He wants something from us,” said Stephanopoulis. “He wants to be talked into giving it up. The more he thinks we don’t care, the keener he’ll be to talk.”

Smith was back in his blue blazer but the carefully matching button-down shirt was open at the collar and his face was gray and unshaven. We made a big production of putting the tapes in the machine, introducing ourselves, and advising him of his rights.

“You understand that you’re not under arrest and that you may terminate this interview at any point you wish.”

“No, really?” asked Smith.

“You’re also entitled to a lawyer or some other representative of your choice.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Smith. “Can we just get on with it.”

“So you don’t want a brief?” I asked.

“No I do not want a sodding brief,” said Smith.

“You seem in a hurry. You’ve got somewhere to go?” asked Stephanopoulis. “Somebody waiting for you perhaps?”

“What is it you want?” asked Smith.

“The thing is, we want to clarify your involvement in a number of crimes,” said Stephanopoulis.

“What crimes?” asked Smith. “I was a respectable businessman back then, I owned a club, that was it.”

“Back when?” I asked.

“The old days,” said Smith. “Isn’t that what you’re asking about? Because I was a respectable businessman.”

“But Smithy,” said Stephanopoulis. “I don’t believe in respectable businessmen. I’ve been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn’t think you’re respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat.”

That one caught me by surprise and the best I could manage was “Power to the people.”

Smith was staring at us as if we were both mad.

“So,” I said. “You were involved in a lot of crime back then, Smithy?”

“I wasn’t an angel,” he said. “And I’ll put my hand up to having to deal with some less-than-salubrious elements in my day. That’s one of the reasons I moved abroad — to get away from all that.”

“Why did you come back?” I asked.

“I got a yen for dear old Blighty,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “You told me that England was a shit hole.”

“Well, at least it’s an English-speaking shit hole,” said Smith.

“He ran out of money,” said Stephanopoulis. “Didn’t you, Smithy?”

“Do me a favor,” he said. “I could buy you and all the senior officers in this station and still have enough left over for a flat in Mayfair.”

“Make me an offer,” said Stephanopoulis. “I could get a new chicken run. And her indoors is always asking for an extension to the conservatory.”

Smith, who wasn’t about to say anything that could be misconstrued or digitally edited into an admission of guilt, gave us a suitably ironic smile.

“If it wasn’t the money,” I said, “why’d you come back?”

“I went to Marbella because I’d made my wedge,” he said. “I’d retired. Got myself a nice villa for me and the wife and I ain’t going to kid you life was sweet, away from the rain and all the shit. Everything was good until the fucking ’80s when the Russians started turning up. Once their snouts were in the trough there was shootings and kneecappings and a man wasn’t safe in his own home. I thought, if I’m going to put up with this bollocks I might as well do it back in London.”

“Marbella’s loss is London’s gain,” said Stephanopoulis. “Isn’t that so, Constable?”

“Definitely,” I said. “You bring much-needed folkloric color to the historic byways of London.”

We knew from reports that Stephanopoulis had wrangled out of the Serious and Organized Crime Agency that what had really brought Smith back to London was a series of drug deals that had gone bad. His product had been regularly confiscated in Spain and Amsterdam and when he finally got on the plane to Gatwick all he left behind was debts and his wife, who’d subsequently moved in with a Brazilian dentist. That must have hurt.

“Where you from?” he asked me.

“Where do you think?” I said, because the cardinal unbreakable law of the police interview is never give information away — especially about yourself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t seem to know shit anymore.”

“Do you know Jerry Johnson?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Who the fuck’s that?” he asked but he’d flinched and he knew we’d seen it.

“Detective Chief Inspector Johnson,” I said and pushed the photograph from Johnson’s house in front of Smith. He looked surprised to see it.

“This is about Greasy Johnson?” asked Smith. “That prick?”

“So you did know him?” I asked.

“He used to wander around Soho with his hand out,” said Smith. “Just like the rest of the filth. Just like they do now, in fact. How is old Greasy? I heard he got the boot.”

I had a nice crime scene photograph of Jerry Johnson lying naked on his bed minus his wedding tackle all ready to slide under Smith’s nose but Stephanopoulis tapped her finger once on the table, which meant for me to hold back. I looked closely at Smith and saw his leg had picked up the same tremor I’d seen in his office. We wanted him scared but we didn’t want him so scared that he clammed up or tried to do a runner.

“He was murdered yesterday,” said Stephanopoulis. “At his home in Norfolk.”

Smith’s shoulders relaxed. Relief, defeat, despair? I couldn’t tell.

“You knew about it in advance,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yesterday,” I said. “When I came calling — that’s why you had No-Neck on the door, that’s why you were sweating.”

“I’d heard some whispers,” said Smith.

“What kind of whispers?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“That somebody I thought was dead might not be,” he said.

“This dead bloke got a name?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Johnson was in with this strange bloke — like a magician, he was,” said Smith.

“Did card tricks, did he?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Not that kind of magician,” said Smith. “This was like real voodoo magic only it was a white geezer.”

“You said it was like voodoo?” I asked. “Did the man call on loas to possess him, did he carry out rituals and sacrifices?”

“I don’t know,” said Smith. “I steered well clear.”

“But you thought he could do real magic?” I asked.

“I don’t think,” he said. “I saw it.”

“Saw what?”

“At least I think I saw it,” said Smith and he seemed to shrink down into the collar of his shirt. “You’re not going to believe me.”

“I’m not going to believe you,” said Stephanopoulis. “But Constable Grant here is actually paid to believe in the unbelievable. He also has to believe in faeries and wizards and hobgoblins.”

“And hobbitses,” I said.

Smith bristled. “You think this is funny. Larry Piercingham, who they used to call Larry the Lark because he liked to do his rounds early. Remember him?”

“I’m not as old as I look,” said Stephanopoulis as I noted the name.

“I don’t know the details but he got on the wrong side of the magician …”

“Did he have a name?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Who?”

“This magician, what was his name?”

“Don’t know,” said Smith. “When we talked about him he was just the magician and mostly, all things being equal, we didn’t talk about him at all.”

“So what happened to Larry the Lark?” I asked.

“Larry was in with a hard mob from Somers Town, blaggers and handle men and the like. The sort of people that used to do proper scores back in the old days. These were not people that you disrespected — you understand?” asked Smith.

We did. Somers Town used to be a concentrated block of villainy sandwiched between Euston and St. Pancras stations. In the days before rottweilers it was the sort of place where people kept a sawed-off shotgun by the front door — in case of unwelcome guests or social workers.

Larry — who, when he wasn’t robbing security vans, worked as casual muscle for various porn brokers, pimps, and whatever — just went missing one day. His missus wandered around for a bit asking everyone whether they’d seen him but nobody had.

“Not that anyone was actually looking for him,” said Smith.

“A month later there’s a big sit-down celebration at the Acropolis on Frith Street. All the Somers Town gang are there plus selected guests from the cream of the Soho underworld.”

“What was it in aid of?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“I don’t fucking remember,” said Smith. “I don’t think anyone there remembers what it was in aid of originally.”

It was a Greek Cypriot place, lots of grilled meat and fish and olives.

“Proper Greek nosh,” said Smith. “None of that Kurdish stuff.”

“If this was proper villains,” said Stephanopoulis, “why were you there?”

“I had an interest in some of their enterprises,” said Smith. “But mainly I was there because they invited me and when people like that invited you somewhere you went.”

Smith didn’t notice anything unusual until about two hours in, when most of the food was gone. A pair of waiters came in with a large covered salver, cleared a space, and plonked it down in the middle of the table.

“What’s this then?” asked Michael “the Mick” McCullough who, if not the undisputed governor of the mob, was currently the least dead or banged-up. “It’s not my birthday.”

Somebody suggested that it might be the stripper.

“Bit of a midget stripper,” said McCullough, and he reached out and pulled the lid off. Underneath was the head of Larry the Lark as fresh-looking as the day it was cut off. Garnished with holly and mistletoe no less. I made a note of that in case it was important.

The Somers Town mob were, by definition, hard men and not averse to spilling a bit of claret themselves. They knew how to put the frighteners on people and they weren’t about to let themselves get discombobulated by something as routine as a head on a plate.

“That,” said McCullough, “has got to be the ugliest stripper I’ve ever seen.”

That got a laugh from the mob right up to the point where the head spoke.

“Help me,” it said.

The voice, according to Alexander Smith, sounded a bit like Larry the Lark’s but had a whistling quality as if his breath was being forced through a pipe. Well, this did put the frighteners on the Somers Town mob, who knocked over their chairs getting away from the table except for Michael McCullough, who wasn’t a superstitious man.

“It’s a trick, you stupid pillocks,” he’d shouted and, reaching out, flipped the salver over.

“I think he expected to find a hole in the table,” said Smith. “To be honest so did I, with Larry the Lark crouched down there having us on — having a laugh. Only there was no hole, no Larry, at least no Larry’s body.”

The head went bouncing across the table and onto the floor with all the hard men, all the blaggers and enforcers squealing like little girls and scrambling to get out of the way. Not McCullough, though, because one thing you could say about McCullough was that he was without fear. He stalks round the table and picks up the head by its hair and waves it at the rest of the guests.

“It’s a fucking trick,” he shouted. “I don’t believe it — what a bunch of pansies.”

“Mickey,” said the head of Larry the Lark. “For Christ’s sake help me.”

“What did McCullough say?” asked Stephanopoulis.

Smith’s heel rat-a-tatted on the tiled floor of the interview room.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Because like everyone else I got the fuck out of there. After that nobody talked about that night, nobody talked about Larry the Lark, and the restaurant closed. I kept my head down, made my money, and left the country.”

“What did the magician want from Detective Chief Inspector Johnson?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“The usual,” said Smith. “He wanted to be protected from any undue interference by the forces of law and order.”

I asked what it was needed protecting.

“A club,” he said. “On Brewer Street.”

“There’s no club on Brewer Street,” I said.

“It was very exclusive,” said Smith.

“What did Johnson get from the magician?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Greasy Johnson had needs,” said Smith. “He was a very needy boy, he had special needs.”

“Like what?” asked Stephanopoulis. “Drugs, gambling, booze, girls — what?”

“Sex,” said Smith.

“What kind of sex?” I asked. “Boys, girls, short socks, sheep?”

“The last one,” said Smith.

“Sheep,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re bloody kidding me.”

“I don’t know if it was sheep exactly,” said Smith. “But definitely animal-related. Do you know what a cat-girl is?”

“From manga,” I said. “Girls with cat ears and tails. They’re called Neko-chan, I think.”

“Thank God for the Japanese, eh?” said Smith. “Otherwise we wouldn’t have names for all this stuff. That’s what Greasy Johnson liked. Cat-girls.”

“You mean girls dressed up as cats,” said Stephanopoulis.

“Look,” said Smith. “I didn’t know about these things and I made a point of not ever finding out about them, but dressed up as cats? That’s not what I heard. Freaks of nature, that’s what I heard.”

“Was he still around?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Who?” asked Smith.

“The magician,” said Stephanopoulis. “Was he still here when you got homesick and came home?”

“No he wasn’t,” said Smith. “I made a special point of asking around — if he’d been here I’d have gone to Manchester instead.”

“Manchester,” I said. “Really?”

“Blackpool, if Manchester wasn’t far enough.”

“But he was gone?” I asked.

“Not a sniff,” he said.

Stephanopoulis took her cue. “So who killed Jerry Johnson then?”

“I don’t know,” he said. The leg tremor was back with a vengeance.

“Was it the magician?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Was it the fucking magician?”

Smith’s head twitched from side to side. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he said.

“We can protect you,” she said.

“What do you think you know about it, eh?” asked Smith. “You don’t know nothing.”

“Show him, Constable,” said Stephanopoulis.

I opened my hand a conjured up a werelight. I put a lot of red into it and some blur and flicker to make it look impressive.

Smith stared at it with a gratifying expression of stupefied surprise.

“We know what we’re talking about,” I said. I’d been practicing this variation as a low-energy demonstration piece in the hope that it would less likely blow out any local electronics. Even so I gave the tape recorder a worried glance and shut it down quickly just to be on the safe side.

Smith stared at me. “What’s this?” he asked. “We’ve got magic coppers now? Since when?”

“Since Bow Street,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Smith. “Where was you lot when Larry the Lark got himself topped?”

That was a good question and one I planned to ask Nightingale when I had a moment.

“That was the ’70s,” I said. “This is now.”

“Or you could always go back to Marbella,” added Stephanopoulis helpfully.

“Or Manchester,” I said.

“Or Blackpool,” said Stephanopoulis.

“Burlesque among the illuminations,” I said.

“There’s another bloke,” said Smith suddenly. “Another fucking magician, I don’t know where he came from. One minute he wasn’t there and the next minute he was.”

“When did he appear?” I asked.

“In the summer,” said Smith. “A couple of weeks after that fire at Covent Garden.”

“Did you see him?” I asked.

Smith shook his head. “I never saw nothing,” he said. “And nobody said nothing neither.”

“Then how did you know he was there?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“You modern coppers think you’ve got it all sussed,” said Smith. “This is Soho, this is my manor, this is my patch. I’m like a tiger. I know when something’s changed in my patch. Fuck, I can tell when someone’s opened a new Chinese takeout, so yeah, when something that evil creeps back in — I felt it.” He gave us a pitying look. “An old-style copper would have felt it too, even a tosser like Johnson would have known something was up.”

“And gone around looking for a bung,” said Stephanopoulis.

Smith shrugged. “What else are they for?” he asked.

“So why didn’t you scarper?” I asked.

“I don’t dabble in anything I’m not supposed to these days and I cater to a whole different set of punters now — I’m kosher,” he said. “So why worry? Besides, everything I’ve got is invested in my business.”

“So what changed?” I asked.

“I reckon it was you,” he said. “That first time, you were barely out the door when he comes waltzing in and sits down in the same chair.”

“Who did?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“That’s just it,” said Smith. “I don’t know. I can remember his voice, what he said, but I can’t remember his face.”

“How can you not remember his face?”

“You ever forget where you put your bleeding keys?” asked Smith. “It’s just like that, I know he was there, I know he sat in front me but, fuck me, I cannot remember what he looked like.”

“How do you know he was this new magician then?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“Are you deaf?” asked Smith. “Do you think I’m demented, that I’ve got mad cow disease? I don’t remember the man’s face — does that sound like a natural phenomenon to you?”

Stephanopoulis glanced at me but I could only shrug — magically speaking, this was getting way above my pay grade. I was also getting a cold feeling in my stomach about the way my two cases were beginning to merge.

“What did Mr. Forgettable want?” I asked.

“He was asking after the same bird you were,” he said.

“Peggy?” I said.

He nodded. “What did I know about her, what did I know about you, and hadn’t I been one of the people at Larry the Lark’s debut? That’s what he called it — his debut.”

Stephanopoulis tensed, she wanted to know who Peggy was, but the second cardinal rule of an interview is that the police must maintain a united front at all times. You certainly don’t ask each other questions in front of a suspect. Technically that’s actually a breach of rule one, never give away information, but we’re the police so we like to keep things simple.

“You’re sure this was not the same man as the old magician?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“What can I say,” said Smith. “He was young and he was posh — that’s all I know.”

“Where was the old magician’s club?” I asked.

“You really don’t want to know,” said Smith.

“Yeah, Smithy,” I said. “As it happens I absolutely do want to know.”

UNLESS THE wheels have come off big-time you don’t just stroll around to a location and kick in the door. Apart from anything else, it’s not that easy to kick in a door and the last time I tried to do it I broke a toe. Commercial premises are usually harder to get into than private homes, so we first made sure that the specialist entry team was available and then booked them for later that afternoon. That left us enough time to apply for a search warrant under section 8 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) using carefully selected highlights from Alexander Smith’s interview. I say “us,” but one of the advantages of working with a full Murder Team is that Stephanopoulis had lots of minions to do the paperwork for her. Meanwhile the two of us retired to the Burlington Arms for a stiff drink — we reckoned we’d earned it.

In the indifferent old days a proper coppers’ bar would have had a linoleum-covered floor, nicotine-stained wood paneling, and brass furnishings that were antique only by virtue of the fact that nobody could be bothered to replace them. But times had changed because now you could get a passable Cumberland sausage in onion gravy with chunky chips upstairs in the dining room, very nice with a Scrumpy Jack cider and just the thing after a hard morning’s interrogation. Stephanopoulis had the leek soup with a side order of rocket and a single-malt. I noticed a karaoke machine in the corner and asked whether it got a lot of use.

“You should be here for competition nights,” said Stephanopoulis. “Clubs and Vice versus Arts and Antiques gets very heated — they had to ban ‘I Will Survive’ after there was a fight. Tell me about your investigation.”

So I told her about the dead jazzmen and my efforts to track the person or persons unknown who seemed to be feeding off them.

“Jazz vampires,” said Stephanopoulis.

“I wish I hadn’t started calling them that,” I said.

“What do you think the magician wants with them?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “To study, to enslave — we need to know more.”

That was the cue for a minion, in the form of a rather sour-faced DC, to enter with the search warrant and present it to his boss. Stephanopoulis was careful to wait for him to leave before asking me how I thought we should handle the raid.

Unless you’re going to knock and ask nicely there are basically two ways to execute the search warrant. The first is the traditional rush: smash in the door and run in screaming “Police” and “Clear” and giving a swift kicking to anyone who doesn’t lie down on their face as soon as you tell them. The second has no formal name but involves sidling up to the front door in plainclothes, knocking it in, and diving in like a posse of really persistent door-to-door salesmen. I suggested the latter, considering that we didn’t know what we were blundering into.

“Keep some people on standby,” I said. “Just in case.”

“Easy for you to say,” she said. “It’s not your overtime budget.” She finished her scotch. “Who goes in first?”

“I do,” I said.

“Not going to happen,” she said.

In the end we compromised and both went first.

In the 1950s and ’60s property in Soho was cheap. After all, who wanted to live in the middle of smoky old London? The middle classes were all heading for the leafy suburbs and the working classes were being packed off to brand-new towns built in the wilds of Essex and Hertfordshire. They were called New Towns only because the term Bantustan hadn’t been invented yet. The Regency terraces that made up the bulk of the surviving housing stock were subdivided into flats and shopfronts, basements were expanded to form clubs and bars. As property prices started rising, developers snatched up bomb sites and derelict buildings and erected the shapeless concrete lumps that have made the ’70s the shining beacon of architectural splendor that it is. Unfortunately for the proponents of futurism, Soho was not to be overwhelmed so easily. A tangle of ownership, good old-fashioned stubbornness, and outright corruption held development at bay until the strange urge to turn the historic center of British cities into gigantic outdoor toilets had ebbed. Still, developers are a wily bunch and one scam, if you can afford it, is to leave the property vacant until it falls derelict and thus has to be demolished.

That’s what our target looked like — sandwiched between a Food City mini market and a Sex Shop on Brewer Street, it was down and neglected compared with its neighbors. Dirty windows, blackened walls, and peeling paint on the door frame. As part of the process of getting a search warrant, one of Stephanopoulis’s minions had done a property search that uncovered a typical company shell game with regard to ownership — we couldn’t wait for them to unpick it, so we got a warrant for the whole building.

We sat in an unmarked silver Astra and watched the place for an hour before going in, just to be on the safe side. Nobody went in or out, so after checking that all the teams were in position, Stephanopoulis gave the go order.

We all piled out of the cars and did the hundred-yard sidle to the side door where one of the entry team whipped out forty pounds of CQB ram and smacked it open with one practiced swing. His mate went in first holding a rectangular plastic shield ahead of him while a third entry-team guy stepped up behind him with a shotgun at the ready. The shotgun was in case the owner of the property had a dog, but we don’t like to talk about that because it upsets people.

Stephanopoulis and I went in behind them, which counts as first if you’re not the entry team in case you were wondering, wearing our stab vests under our jackets and extendable batons on our belts. Beyond the door was a windowless hallway with a closed internal door on the left and a double stairway going down on the right. When I tried the switch we were rewarded with a dim light from an unshaded forty-watt bulb. Ancient flocked wallpaper in gold and red covered the walls, peeling where it met the ceiling.

Stephanopoulis tapped one of the entry specialists on the shoulder and pointed at the door. The CQB swung again and the shield-and-shotgun team went up the stairs followed by a mixed half dozen from the Murder Team and the local Tactical Support Group. Their job would be to clear the top floors of the building while Stephanopoulis and I went downstairs.

I shone my torch down the shadowed depths of the staircase. They were carpeted with the kind of hard-wearing short-haired nylon carpet that you find in cinemas and primary schools. It was gold and red to match the flocked wallpaper. I got a strong sense of foreboding, which could have been vestigia or just a sensible reluctance to go down the creepy dark staircase.

We could hear the team working their way up through the building like a herd of baby elephants in a lumber yard. Stephanopoulis looked at me, I nodded, and we started down the stairs. We’d borrowed a pair of heavy-duty torches from the TSG, and their light illuminated a ticket office on the first landing. Beside it was an alcove with a counter and behind that was a yawning darkness that I hoped was just the cloakroom.

I went down cautiously, hugging the wall so I could get the earliest view around the corner — I seriously didn’t want anything springing out. The stairs doubled back, descending into more darkness and a door in the far side of the landing marked STAFF ONLY. I smelled mildew and rotting carpet, which was reassuring. I leaned over the cloakroom counter and shone my torch around the interior to reveal a shallow L-shaped room lined with rails and empty clothes hangers. I climbed over and checked inside. There were no coats or long-forgotten bags but there were bits of paper on the floor — I picked one up. It was a ticket stub. I walked around to the staff door and opened it to find Stephanopoulis staring warily down the stairs.

“Anything?” she asked. I shook my head.

She clicked her fingers and a couple of Murder Team detectives came padding down the stairs with gloves and evidence bags. Stephanopoulis pointed at the staff door and they dutifully trooped past me to do a more thorough search of the cloakroom. One of them was a young Somali woman in a leather biker jacket and an expensive black silk hijab. She caught me looking and smiled.

“Muslim ninja,” she whispered.

Normally the police like to make a lot of noise going into a building because, unless you’re dealing with a psycho, it’s better to give any potential arrests a chance to carefully think through their options before they do something stupid. We were being quiet in this case, not something that came naturally, so that I could feel for any vestigia as we went down the stairs. I’d tried explaining vestigia to Stephanopoulis but I don’t think she really got it, although she seemed keen enough to let me go first.

I saw the base of the cabinet first, mahogany and brass caught in the beam of my torch, more coming into view as I descended the steps. There was a double reflection from the front and back of a glass case and I realized I was looking at a fortune-telling machine parked incongruously in the center of the entrance to the club proper. I flashed my torch around the room behind and caught glimpses of a bar, chairs stacked on tables, the dark rectangles of doorways farther in.

The vestigia gave off a vivid flash of sunlight and cigarette smoke, petrol and expensive cologne, new leather seats and the Rolling Stones singing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. I took a couple of quick steps back and shone my torch at the cabinet.

The mannequin in the fortune machine wasn’t the usual head-and-shoulders model. Instead the head rested directly on a pole of clear glass reinforced with bands of brass. Protruding from the truncated neck were two leathery bladders looking unpleasantly like lungs. The head itself was wearing the obligatory pantomime turban but lacked the standard-issue spade-shaped beard and pencil mustache. The skin was waxy and the whole thing looked disturbingly real — because of course it was.

“Larry the Lark I presume,” I said.

Stephanopoulis joined me. “Oh my God,” she said. She pulled a mug shot out of her pocket — an artifact, I assumed, from Larry the Lark’s criminal career — and held it up for comparison.

“He looked better when he was alive,” I said.

I felt it just before it happened; it was weirdly like the sensation I got when Nightingale was demonstrating a forma or a spell. The same catching at the corner of my mind. But this was different. It whirred and clanked as if made of clockwork.

And the real clockwork started as with a dusty wheezing sound the bladders below Larry’s neck inflated and his mouth opened to reveal disconcertingly white teeth. I saw the muscles in his throat ripple and then he spoke.

“Welcome, one and all,” he said. “To the garden of unearthly delights. Where the weary pilgrim may cast off the cloak of puritanical reserve, unlace the corset of bourgeois morality, and gorge himself on all that life may offer.”

The mouth remained open as hidden machinery clanked and whirred to fill the bladders with air once more.

“Please for Christ’s sake kill me,” said Larry. “Please, kill me.”