Moon Over Soho

Chapter 11 These Foolish Things

THE CENTRAL atrium at the Trocadero Centre is four stories high with an open basement that added another story to the fall. The space is crisscrossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were integral parts of the shopping experience. I was told much later that the Pale Lady had bounced off the side of one of the escalators on her way down, that she may even have been angling to try to land on it but couldn’t quite make the distance. That impact broke her back in two places but she was still alive when she hit the basement floor headfirst.

Instantaneous, said Dr. Walid.

A hundred-foot drop at thirty-two feet per second per second I make that about two and a half seconds to watch the ground coming up to meet you — that’s not what I call instantaneous.

Backup was less then a minute away. They saw her fall. They were on hand to seal off the floor and take witness statements. I gave a brief statement to Stephanopoulis before Nightingale insisted that we go to casualty. The next thing I knew, we were in the A&E unit at UCH and Dr. Walid was hovering in the background and making the F2 junior doctor who was treating me nervous. Then Dr. Walid noticed that Nightingale was a bit pale and unsteady and forced him to lie down in an adjacent treatment cubicle. The junior doctor visibly relaxed and started chatting to me as he checked my various scrapes and bruises but I don’t remember what he was talking about. Then he bustled off to arrange some X-rays and left me with a redheaded Australian nurse whom I recognized from the Punchinello case. She winked at me as she cleaned the blood off my face and glued a cut on my cheek that I wasn’t even aware I had.

“May the blessings of the river be upon you,” said the nurse as they wheeled me off to X-ray and zapped me a couple of times before wheeling me back to my cubicle to lounge around in a drafty hospital gown for an hour or so. It may have been longer because I think I dozed off. Being Saturday night there was a lot of drunken shouting and moaning and the sound of my fellow members of the constabulary telling people to “calm down” or asking them what happened. Dr. Walid popped his head in to say that he was keeping Nightingale in overnight. I asked for some water; he felt my forehead and then vanished.

Somebody with a Scouse accent a couple of cubicles down said that he just wanted to go home. The doctor told him that they had to reset his leg first. The Scouser insisted that he felt fine and the doctor explained that they had to wait for the drink to wear off so they could anesthetize him.

“I want to go home,” said the Scouser.

“As soon as you’re fixed up,” said the doctor.

“Not home here,” said the Scouser mournfully. “I want to go back to Liverpool.”

I wanted the fluorescent lights to stop giving me a headache.

Dr. Walid came back with water and a couple of ibuprofen tablets. He couldn’t stay because he had a brand-new body to look at. After some more time the junior doctor came back.

“You can go home now,” he said. “Nothing is broken.”

I think I walked back to the Folly — it’s not that far.

I woke up the next morning to find that breakfast hadn’t been served. When I went down to the kitchen to find out why, I discovered Molly sitting on the table with her back to the door. Toby was sitting beside her but at least he looked up when I came in.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

She didn’t move. Toby whined.

“I’ll just go have breakfast out,” I said. “In the park.”

That seemed fine with Molly.

Toby jumped up and followed me out.

“You are so mercenary,” I told him.

He yapped. I guess from Toby’s point of view a sausage is a sausage.

The Folly sits on the south side of Russell Square, the center of which is occupied by a park with fixed gravel paths, big trees that I didn’t know the names of, a fountain that was specifically designed to get children and small dogs soaking wet, and on the north side a café that does a decent double sausage, bacon, black pudding, egg, and chips. It was actually quite sunny, so I sat on the terrace outside the café and mechanically shoveled the food into my face. It really didn’t taste of anything, and in the end I put my plate on the floor and let Toby finish it off.

I walked back to the Folly and in through the main door where there was a drift of junk mail. I scooped it up. It was mostly flyers for local pizza joints and kebab houses, although there was one crudely designed leaflet from a Ghanian fortune-teller who felt we could only benefit from his insight into future events. I dropped the lot into the magazine rack that Molly leaves in the atrium for that purpose.

I felt a bit queasy, so I went into the toilet and threw up my breakfast and then I climbed back into my bed and went back to sleep.

I woke up again in the late afternoon, feeling sticky and with the discombobulated feeling you get when you sleep through the day for no good reason. I went down the corridor and ran a bath in the claw-footed enamel monstrosity that we have instead of a proper shower. I got it as scalding as I could take, yelped when it lapped against the bruises on my thigh, and stayed in there until my muscles relaxed and I got bored of impersonating Louis Armstrong singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” I couldn’t shave because of the cut on my cheek, so I left my chin with manly stubble and went to look for some clean clothes.

When I was growing up, the only way to keep my mum out of my room would have been to install steel security doors and probably not even that would have helped. It did mean that I’ve never been precious about people coming into my bedroom, especially if all they’re going to do is clean it and do the laundry. I put on khaki chinos, the quality button-down shirt, and my good shoes. I looked in the mirror. Miles Davis would have been proud of me; all I needed was a trumpet. There’s only one thing you can do when you look that good, so I picked up my mobile and called Simone.

It didn’t work — I’d blown the chip when I used magic on the Pale Lady.

I took one of my backup phones from the drawer in my desk, a crappy two-year-old Nokia with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. It already had my standard numbers saved so I added Simone’s and called her.

“Hi, baby,” I said. “Want to go out?”

When she stopped laughing, she said that she’d be delighted to.

Only students and people from Basildon go clubbing on a Sunday so we went to the Renoir to see Spirit of the Escalator — un film de Dominique Baudis, which turned out, despite the subtitles, to be a romantic comedy. The Renoir is an art cinema that sits underneath the Brunswick Center, a cream-colored shopping center and housing development that reminded me of an Aztec pyramid turned inside out. It’s less than two minutes’ walk from the Folly, so it was convenient. It’s also still got the old-fashioned seats where you can snuggle up to your girlfriend without injuring yourself on a cup holder. She asked me about the cut on my cheek and I told her I’d been in a scuffle.

Afterward we had supper at YO! Sushi — which Simone had never eaten at before, despite there being a branch practically outside her front door.

“I’m terribly loyal to the Patisserie Valerie,” she said by way of explanation.

She loved the little colored bowls trundling around the conveyer belt and was soon piling empty ones up by her plate like so many mounds of skulls. She was actually quite a dainty eater, but steady and determined. I picked at a bowl of spicy salmon rice. My stomach still wasn’t really settled, but it was a pleasure to watch the obvious delight she got from each dish. Fortunately the YO! Sushi closed before she exceeded my credit card limit and we tumbled out of the Brunswick Centre and walked back along Bernard Street toward Russell Square tube station. It had rained while we were in the cinema and the streets were slick and fresh. Simone stopped walking and dragged my head down so she could kiss me. She tasted of soy sauce.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said.

“How about my place,” I said.

“Your place?”

“Sort of,” I said.

The coach house is not the perfect crash pad but I certainly didn’t want Simone meeting Molly when she was in one of her moods. Simone blew right past my two grand worth of consumer electronics and went straight to the studio under the skylight.

“Who’s this?” she asked. She’d found the portrait of Molly reclining nude while eating cherries.

“Somebody who used to work here years ago,” I said.

She gave me a sly look. “Turn around,” she said. “And close your eyes.”

I did as I was told. Behind me I heard the stealthy rustle of clothes, a suppressed curse followed by a zip unfastening, the thump of her boots hitting the floor, the whisper of silk as it slipped over her skin. There was a long pause and then I heard the creak of antique furniture as she made herself comfortable.

She made me wait a little bit longer.

“You can turn around now,” she said.

She was reclining, nude and beautiful, on the chaise longue. She didn’t have a bowl of cherries so she’d let her fingers drift down to twist in the brown curls of her hair. She was so delicious I didn’t know where to start.

Then I saw it, a blotch like a port-wine birthmark in the corner of her mouth. I thought it was a smear of something she’d been eating but then it ripped while I was staring at it. With a hideous crunch her jaw splintered as a crude triangle of skin peeled back from her face. I saw muscle, tendon, and bone stretch and pop, and her jaw hung slack like that of a cut puppet.

“What’s wrong?” asked Simone.

Nothing. Her face was back as it had been, wide, beautiful, the arc of her smile fading as I staggered backward.

“Peter?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened there.” I knelt down by the chaise longue and cupped her cheek in my hand — the bones beneath her skin were reassuringly solid. I kissed her, but after a moment she pushed my face away.

“Has something happened?”

“I was involved in an incident,” I said. “Somebody died.”

“Oh,” she said and put her arms around me. “What happened?”

“I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I said and slipped my hand down her hip in the hope that it would distract her.

“But if you could talk about it,” she said. “You’d talk about it with me?”

“Sure,” I said. But I was lying.

“Poor thing,” she said and kissed me.

I found that if I held her close I didn’t have any more nightmares. At one point in the proceedings the chaise longue shifted alarmingly and I heard the crack of splintering wood. We hurriedly separated just long enough for me to put a few cushions on the floor and throw a blanket over them. She pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and it all got wonderfully strenuous and sweaty until finally she flopped down on me as boneless and as slippery as a fish.

“It’s peculiar,” she said after she’d caught her breath. “I used to always want to go out. But with you I just want to stay in all the time.”

She rolled off and slid her hand down my stomach to cup my balls. “Do you know what I’d really like now?” she asked.

“There’s cakes in the fridge,” I said.

I was hard again and slipped her hand up to grab hold.

“You’re a terrible man,” she said. She gave me a quick shake as if judging my readiness and then, pausing briefly to kiss it on the head, got up and made her way to the fridge. “That Jap food’s all very well,” she said. “But I don’t think they know how to make a decent patisserie.”

Later, exhausted but unable to sleep, I lay with her under the skylight and watched the rain rippling down the panes. Simone again slept with her head on my shoulder, a leg slung possessively across my thighs, and her arm draped around my waist — as if making sure I couldn’t slink away in the middle of the night.

I’m not a player, but I’d never had a girlfriend who’d lasted more than three months. Leslie said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Leslie swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya — counting down to disaster. Leslie could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.

On the other hand, I thought as Simone snuggled up against me, even in the worst-case scenario there’s at least another two months left to run. Then of course that corner of my brain that is forever a policeman wanted to know whether I was sure Simone wasn’t involved in the case of the dying jazzmen. After all, she’d been living with Cyrus Wilkinson. But then Henry Bellrush was still living with his wife when he died. More tellingly, if Simone was really a creature of the night who seduced and then sucked the life out of jazz musicians, why was she sleeping with me — who had utterly failed to inherit his father’s talent or even his taste for music? Nor had her face appeared in any of the pictures from 1941.

You actually get a lecture on this during training, which I admit most of us snoozed through because it wasn’t associated with any tests or essay writing. I did remember the lecturer warning that a copper’s natural instincts could quickly spill over into unwarranted paranoia. Life is unbelievably messy, the lecturer said, and coincidences happen all the time. If you’re still suspicious in the morning, I told myself, you can check her alibi against suspicious deaths last year, because nothing builds a healthy relationship like the third degree over the breakfast table.

Having thought that just before I drifted off, I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen when I woke to find that Simone had slipped out at the crack of dawn and left me sleeping.

I was summoned that morning to the John Peel Center in Hendon, where I was “debriefed” by a couple of officers from the Directorate of Professional Standards. This took place in a conference room with tea, coffee, and Sainsbury’s value digestive biscuits, and it was all very civilized. After establishing that I had a legitimate reason to be on that floor of West End Central, they asked me about the chase to the Trocadero Centre and the consequent death of the suspect in a fall from the top balcony. Apparently the CCTV footage was very clear — I was nowhere near the suspect when she went over the railing, therefore I could not have pushed her over nor could I reasonably have been expected to reach her in time to stop the fall. They seemed satisfied that I should return to duty, although they warned me that this was just the start of their investigation.

“We may have more questions for you later,” they said.

I’m fairly certain they were supposed to offer me psychological counseling at that point, but they didn’t. Which was a pity, because I would have rather liked it. Sadly the rules are very clear. As a red-blooded police officer you can only accept counseling when it is foisted on you by Guardian-reading social-worker types. I don’t need it, you protest to your mates, but you know these touchy-feely jobsworth types. Then you down your pint and soldier on — dignity intact.

As well as the statement to the DPS, I had to generate my own reports for the files, which I did from the safety of the coach house, sending them off to be vetted by Leslie before I submitted them. She suggested I make a couple of deliberate mistakes because nothing says cover-up like perfectly consistent statements, so I pretended that I was a member of the public and misremembered some stuff. She also made it clear that rushing into the Trocadero Centre without backup had been foolish and, worse, unprofessional. She was sorry to say that I was clearly deteriorating badly without her there to curb my bad habits. I let her go on at me for some time, not least because she seemed to enjoy it so.

I promised to be more careful in the future.

Dr. Walid released Nightingale from the hospital that afternoon and he returned to the Folly long enough to change his clothes before heading back to supervise the forensic work at the club. I asked if he needed me but he said no and gave me a reading list, one of which was a gloss by Bartholomew that was in Latin. I think he was hoping I’d spend all day with the text in one hand and a dictionary in the other, but I just typed the relevant sections into an online Latin translator and then tried to interpret the gibberish that came out the other end.

I think Bartholomew was conjecturing that it might be possible to use magic to combine the characteristics of two creatures in violation of the great chain of being — that great hierarchy of creatures, slime at the bottom and angels at the top, ordained by God. Somebody had annotated my copy by writing in the margin in very small capitals something in Latin that my Web translator rendered as, “People are made nature and vice versa.”

Real cat-girls, I thought. The Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with something as sleek and furry as a tiger. Whoever was running the club would have a made a fortune. The old ethically challenged magic practitioner had Chief Inspector Johnson to help keep it quiet but the new guy, his possible apprentice, the Faceless One, how had he planned to keep it secret?

The next morning Nightingale took me for a tour of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. The landing and cloakroom area had been turned, appropriately enough, into a changing room for personnel to get in and out of their noddy suits. Dr. Walid was waiting for us and warned us to watch our feet. Lengths of cable had been run down the stairs and neatly secured against the walls with gaffer tape.

“We wanted to avoid activating any electrical circuits in the club itself,” said Dr. Walid. “Just in case.”

He led me down to the foyer, where I noticed that the Cabinet of Larry had been removed completely, as had the kicking legs. “I’ve had to lease extra space at the UCH,” said Dr. Walid. “I’ve never had this much material before.”

The curtains in the foyer had been taken down and we stepped through into the next room, which proved to be the club proper, where the dance floor and stage would have been if cages hadn’t been bolted into the floor. They looked brand-new and similar to the cages that labs keep their animals in.

“Exactly the same,” said Dr. Walid when I pointed this out. “Bollingtek Animal Containment Systems — we use them at the hospital. They were installed sometime this year.”

“Stephanopoulis has her people tracing the serial numbers,” said Nightingale.

The cages were empty, but I could smell the bitter tang of animal shit. I saw fingerprint powder dusted around the locks and any other surface that a keeper might have put a hand on while looking after the inmates.

“How many were there?” I asked.

“Five in cages,” said Dr. Walid. “I’m still doing tests but they all seem to be chimeras.”

That was a term I’d had to look up the night before when translating Bartholomew. A creature that has some cells with one set of DNA and other cells with another set of DNA. It’s vanishingly rare in mammals and usually happens when two eggs are fertilized by different sperm and then merge before going on to grow into a fetus. Not that Bartholomew knew what tetragametic chimerism was — the fathers of genetics, Crick and Watson, weren’t even a gleam in their grandfathers’ eyes when he’d been writing. Bartholomew had described chimeras as the degenerate product of unnatural unions created through the foulest and blackest magic. But I had a horrible feeling that both definitions might fit.

“Were any of them alive?” I asked.

Dr. Walid looked uncomfortably at Nightingale, who shook his head.

“One of them was still alive,” said Nightingale. “But it died after we moved it.”

“Did it say anything?” I asked.

“It never regained consciousness,” said Dr. Walid.

We agreed that, given the newness of the cages, they must have been the work of the New Magician rather than the Old. “Do we think the Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the Old Magician?” I asked.

“We don’t have any link between him and this place,” said Nightingale. “In addition, I find it somewhat unlikely that he could pursue an academic career and maintain a double life as a nightclub impresario.”

“But he definitely trained the New Magician?” I asked. “The Faceless One.”

“Oh, without doubt,” said Nightingale. “I’m quite certain of that.”

“I like ‘Faceless One,’ ” said Dr. Walid. “Did you come up with that?”

“He could have had accomplices,” I said. “Another practitioner who handled the London end. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Quite possible,” said Nightingale. “Good thinking.”

“Or more than one partner. There could be — what do you call a group of magicians?” I asked. “A gang, a coven?”

“An argument,” said Dr. Walid. “It’s an argument of wizards.”

We both looked at Dr. Walid, who shrugged.

“You both need to read more widely,” he said. This from a man who did peer review for the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

“A cabal,” said Nightingale. “It’s called a cabal of magicians.”

“Operating under our noses since the 1960s,” said Dr. Walid.

“Just to add salt to the wound,” said Nightingale.

“I should start running down the names that we got from Oxford and cross-referencing them with known associates of the Soho gangs,” I said.

“Not before I show you something else,” he said.

I actually went cold when he said that. I’d been very happy to find that everything had been cleaned out and I really wasn’t that keen to see anything else. Nightingale led me farther into the club. Beyond the cages there was another STAFF ONLY door that took us to a short corridor and a suite of rooms that might have once been offices or storage. They were all largely the same: grubby mattresses on the floor, a loose collection of clothes and shoes stuffed into cardboard boxes, a DVD player and an old-fashioned electron-gun TV, a few pathetic attempts to brighten up the walls, a picture of kittens and a Justin Timberlake poster. It was depressingly familiar to anyone who has ever helped raid a safe house used by human traffickers.

“How many?” I asked.

“We found plenty of DNA evidence,” said Dr. Walid. “Blood, semen, hair follicles. So far we’ve identified eight individuals — all chimeras.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“He must have another safe house,” said Nightingale. “But it could be anywhere.”

IT WASN’T all bad news. Leslie called later with a whole new way for me to dig myself into a hole. She’d discovered it while trawling through the records from Oxford University. She hadn’t found any obvious connections between Wheatcroft and Alexander Smith, but …

“Guess whose name I did come across?” she asked.

“Prince Harry?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Leslie. “Harry went to Sandhurst. No, a certain other undergraduate going by the name of Cecelia Tyburn Thames.”

“Lady Ty knew Wheatcroft?” I asked.

“No, you idiot,” said Leslie. “But — ” She broke off to cough some more. She moved the phone away from her mouth but I could hear her coughing and swearing. Then a pause as she drank some water.

I asked if she was okay and she said she was. There was going to be a second operation sometime toward the end of the year to see if they could restore greater functionality to her voice box.

“But,” she said, “the point is that Tyburn was at Oxford at roughly the same time as Jason Dunlop and you once told me that one of her sisters could smell the magic on you.”

“That was Brent,” I said. “She’s four years old.”

“That just means it’s a natural ability,” said Leslie.

I said it was unlikely that Tyburn, even if she had spotted any magic at Oxford, was going to tell me.

“You just don’t want to see Tyburn again,” said Leslie.

Damn right I didn’t want to go see Tyburn again. I’d humiliated her in front of her mother, which meant I could have whipped her naked down Kensington High Street and she would have been less pissed off with me. But I only ever argue with Leslie about two things and neither of those has anything to do with police work. It had to be worth a try.

I knew Tyburn had a house in Hampstead; I’d blown up a particularly rare fountain the last time I’d visited — although in my defense she had been trying to mind-control me at the time. But that was just the source of her river. I’d heard that she actually lived somewhere in Mayfair. The very rich and the very poor have one thing in common. They both generate a great deal of information — the rich in the media and the poor on the vast and unwieldy databases of the state. The rich, providing they avoid celebrity, can take steps to preserve their anonymity — Lady Ty’s Wikipedia page read like it was produced by a PR flack because no doubt Lady Ty had hired a PR flack to ensure it stayed the way she wanted it. Or more likely one of Lady Ty’s “people” had hired a PR company, which hired a freelancer, who’d knocked it out in half an hour the better to focus on the novel he was writing. It did reveal that Lady Ty was married, to a civil engineer no less, and they had two beautiful children one of whom, the boy, was eighteen years old. Old enough to drive but young enough to still be living at home.

The thing about being a policeman is you get to cheat. You get to look things up on the PNC, things that even the richest and most influential person has to provide accurate information about — in this case, driving tests. Stephen George McAllister-Thames passed his in January, and the address of record was Chesterfield Hill, Mayfair.

It was the kind of perfect Regency terrace with a rusticated façade and decorative ironwork that causes grown estate agents to break down and weep with joy. It was located less than a third of a mile to the west of the Trocadero Centre, on streets that would have been much nicer if all the character hadn’t been stripped off them by decades of money.

The door was opened by a tall mixed-race young man whom I recognized off the picture on his driver’s license. He’d inherited an unfortunate pair of ears and what my mum would have described as “better” hair from his dad but he had his grandmother’s cat-shaped eyes — and that wasn’t all he’d inherited.

“Mum,” he called back into the depths of the house. “There’s a wizard here to see you.” And then, just in case I hadn’t realized he was a teenager, he slouched off back to whatever it was he was doing before I so rudely interrupted him. His mother passed him in the hallway and came and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. She let me stew for a good ten seconds before asking what I wanted.

“I was wondering if you could help me with my inquiries,” I said.

She took me through into a kitchen furnished in French oak and cool green tile. She offered me tea, which just to be on the safe side I refused. She poured herself a white wine.

“What inquiries are these?” she asked.

I asked her to cast her mind back to her days as an undergraduate at Oxford University.

“Where I gained my double first,” she said. “Not that I think that was an achievement. Being less important than the mere act of being born within the sound of the Bow Bells.” She finished her glass and refilled.

“While you were at Oxford,” I said, “did you notice anyone practicing magic, perhaps clandestinely?”

“Does this have something to do with the altercation at the Trocadero Centre?” she asked.

“It’s related, yes,” I said. “And to the attack on Ash.”

“I’m curious,” she said. “What makes you think I should tell you?”

“So you were aware of magic being practiced,” I said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because you think you have something to withhold,” I said.

“I’ll admit it’s a trifle irrational, but I still find myself minded to tell you to piss off,” she said. “Why should I help you?”

“If you tell me what you know I promise I’ll go away,” I said.

“Tempting,” she said.

“And because we think there’s an evil magician operating in London and we think he may have been at Oxford — at the same time you were.” I looked at her. “You may even know him.”

“No. I would have smelled him,” she said. “Even as I can smell you now.”

“So what do I smell like?”

“Ambition, vanity, pride.” She shrugged. “Fried plantain and honeysuckle. Don’t ask me why.”

“Who were they?” I asked. “The practitioners at Oxford — I know you know.”

She tried to stop herself but in the end there are some varieties of information that are only fun if you tell them to someone else.

“There was a dining club. Do you know what that is?” she asked.

An excuse for students to gather together and get pissed, as far as I knew. The membership criteria were set at variable levels of exclusivity and expense. I doubted Tyburn had joined one and, had I gone to Oxford, I’m not sure I could have joined one if I’d wanted to.

It was called the Little Crocodiles, she told me. And it was boys only, and while it wasn’t exclusive to any one college it was mostly a Magdalen crowd. They were considered to be very dull, not aristocratic enough for the social climbers and not riotous enough for the aristos.

“Not my cup of tea,” said Tyburn. “But I remember running into a couple of members once at a party and catching that whiff.” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Like I said, ambition, sweaty, like somebody who’s working too hard.”

“Do you remember their names?” I asked.

She did, because remembering who was who was part of who she was. She also had half a dozen other names of possible Little Crocodiles.

“And you’re sure the dining club were actively training?” I asked.

“I made a point of getting close enough to smell any member I could find,” she said. “I thought they were somehow related to Professor Postmartin and your boss. I assumed that this was their attempt to expand the influence of the Folly.”

She shook her wine bottle and poured the remaining half measure into her glass.

I judged that now would be an opportune moment to depart, so I thanked her, put away my notebook, and stood up.

“For fifty years they do nothing and then suddenly there’s you,” she said. “How did that happen?”

“You know what you smell like to me, Ty?” I said. “Brandy and cigars and old rope.”

“They hung Jonathan Wild at Tyburn,” she said. “For all that he thought himself the Thief Taker General of Great Britain.”

I didn’t answer that one because I felt getting out the front door intact was more important.

I TOLD Nightingale what I’d learned over breakfast the next morning and he insisted we go down to the firing range in the basement and blow the shit out of some targets. To be fair, I think he’d been planning a training session for some time. He also didn’t swear.

Several months of random fire by me had depleted our stock of World War II vintage silhouettes so I’d bought some 1960s NATO standard-issue targets off the Internet. Gone were the coal scuttle helmets and rampaging Hun, to be replaced by snarling figures carefully stripped of any national or ethnic identity. NATO, these figures implied, was ready to take on paper soldiers from anywhere.

Nightingale put three fireballs in the center mass of the left-hand target.

“What made you think Ty would tell you?” asked Nightingale.

“She couldn’t help herself,” I said. “First law of gossip — there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it. Besides, I think she has such a low opinion of us that she thinks it’s only a matter of time until we … mess up and she can sweep in like the cavalry.”

“Given our track record so far,” said Nightingale, “that’s hardly prescient.”

“A Ministry of Magic,” I said. “Is that what she really wants?”

“Deep breath,” said Nightingale. “And loose!”

The trick behind an effective fireball is that it becomes an ingrained forma. A spell that you don’t have to think about to perform. I loosed a trio of fireballs that I could see moving, which was bad, but at least I hit the target — or a target at any rate. I also forgot to release them immediately, which meant that they sat there and fizzed a bit before exploding.

“Have you been practicing at all?” asked Nightingale.

“Of course I have, boss. Watch this,” I said and threw a skinny grenade down the range, which stuck right in the center mass of the target.

“Your aim is getting better,” said Nightingale. “It’s a pity about the release …”

The grenade detonated and cut the target in half.

“And what was that?” asked Nightingale. He didn’t always approve of me departing from the strict forms he laid down for spells. His motto was that bad habits now could get you killed later.

“Skinny grenade,” I said. “You use scindere like you do with lux impello scindere except instead of a light in a fixed place you get a bomb.”

“Skinny grenade?”

“From scindere,” I said. Nightingale shook his head.

“How are you managing the timing?” he asked.

“That’s a bit hit and miss,” I admitted. “I did some tests and it’s anywhere between ten seconds and five minutes.”

“So you don’t know when it’s going to explode?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Is there anything I could say that would stop you from doing all this unauthorized experimentation?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Probably not.”

“I have to ask,” he said. “Why did you use impello at the Trocadero Centre — why not a fireball?

“I didn’t want to kill her,” I said. “And I’m still more confident with impello than I am with anything else.”

“You realize she was just a diversion,” said Nightingale. “Alexander Smith was shot in the chest with a couple of narrow-gauge fireballs.”

“I thought it was gunshots,” I said.

“That’s why he used a narrow-gauge fireball to disguise the wound.”

“Forensic countermeasure,” I said. “This guy is way too fucking clever.”

“He probably walked out the back while you were chasing the Pale Lady out the front.”

I cut a target in half with my next fireball.

“That’s much better,” said Nightingale. “They need to go faster. If the enemy can see them coming, you might as well just carry a gun and shoot them with that instead.”

“Why don’t we just carry guns?” I asked. “I know you’ve got a roomful of them.”

“Well, for one thing,” said Nightingale, “the paperwork has become very tiresome, then there’s care, maintenance, and trying to ensure one doesn’t leave it on the Underground by mistake. Plus a fireball is more versatile and can pack more of a punch than any caliber pistol I’d be happy to carry.”

“Really?” I asked. “More than a .44 magnum?”

“Indubitably,” he said.

“What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?” I asked.

“That would be a tiger,” said Nightingale.

“Well, don’t tell Greenpeace,” I said. “They’re an endangered species.”

“Not that sort of tiger,” said Nightingale. “A Panzerkampfwagen sechs Ausf E.”

I stared at him. “You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?”

“Actually I knocked out two,” said Nightingale. “I have to admit that the first one took three shots — one to disable the tracks, one through the driver’s eye slot, and one down the commander’s hatch — brewed up rather nicely.”

“And the second Tiger?”

“I didn’t have time to be so clever with that one,” said Nightingale. “Straight frontal shot into the weak spot where the turret meets the hull. Must have caught the ammo store because it brewed up like a firework factory. The turret blew right off.”

“This was at Ettersberg, wasn’t it?”

“This was the final act at Ettersberg,” he said. “We were trying to pull out when this platoon of Tigers just came crawling out of the tree line. We didn’t expect the Germans to have anything but rear-echelon troops, so it caught us on the hop, I can tell you. I was the rear guard, so I had to deal with them.”

“Lucky you,” I said. But my brain was still trying to get around the idea that Nightingale could put a hole in four inches of steel armor when I still sometimes had trouble getting through the paper of the targets.

“Practice and training,” said Nightingale. “Not luck.”

We kept it up until lunch and after that there was exciting paperwork including a surprisingly long form in which I explained how I’d managed to lose an expensive X26 taser pistol and reduce the working insides of an airwave handset to sand. Coming up with a plausible explanation for both kept me busy until late afternoon when Simone phoned.

“I’ve found us a hotel room,” she said and gave me an address off Argyle Square.

“When shall we meet?” I asked.

“I’m already there,” she said. “Naked and decorated with whipped cream.”

“Really?”

“Actually,” she said, “I’ve eaten the whipped cream, but it’s the thought that counts.”

Argyle Square is about a fifteen-minute walk from the Folly. Twenty if you stop off at the mini market to pick up a couple of cans of aerosol whipped cream — it always pays to be prepared.

It was only a two-star hotel but the sheets were clean, the bed was sturdy, and it had a tiny en suite toilet and shower. The walls were a bit thin but we only found that out when next door banged on the wall for us to be quiet. We did our best that one last time — which, and I’m guessing here, lasted a couple of hours and resulted in both of us walking funny the next morning.

Then we got to stay in our sturdy yet comfortable bed and fall asleep to the London lullaby of police sirens, shunting trains, and catfights.

“Peter,” she said. “You haven’t changed your mind about tomorrow, have you?”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Your dad’s gig,” she said. “You said I could come, you promised.”

“You can meet me there,” I said.

“Good,” she said and fell asleep in my arms.

THE IMPORTANT thing about Camden Market is that nobody planned it. Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery, and gonorrhea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex. In the early nineteenth century men in frock coats and serious muttonchop sideburns built the eastward branch of Regents Canal just to the north of the coaching inn. I say they built it, but the actual work was done by a couple of thousand strapping Irish fellers who came to be known, because of their canal work, as inland navigators or navvies. They and the navvies who came after them would go on to the build the three main phases of infrastructure development that characterize the history of the industrial revolution: the canals, the railways, and the motorways. I know this because I built a model of the area in junior school and got a gold star, a commendation, and the enduring hatred of Barry Sedgeworth, playground bully and poor loser. A couple of serious canal locks were built next to the Chalk Farm Road, from whence the market gets its name — Camden Lock. There were extensive warehouses along the canal and a large timber merchant.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. The planning blight caused by these schemes meant that what should have been lucrative land to be developed into multistory car parks or municipal rabbit hutches was instead leased to a trio of London wide-boys dressed in Afghan coats. These likely lads set up craft workshops in the old timber yard and on the weekends held a market where the products could be sold. By the mid-1980s the market had spread up Chalk Farm Road and down to the Electric Ballroom, and Camden Council finally stopped trying to put it out of business. It’s currently the second most visited tourist attraction in London and home to the Arches Jazz Club where my dad was going to make his comeback gig with the irregulars.

The irregulars were surprisingly nervous but my dad was remarkably unfazed.

“I’ve played bigger gigs,” he said. “I once played with Joe Harriott in a basement in Catford. After having to go on with him I never got stage fright again.”

The Arches Jazz Club had, in the early days of Camden Lock, been a disreputable dive located in a former lockup under a brick railway arch — hence the name. As the market prospered, the club had moved to one of the units in the west yard just short of the horse bridge, so that while waiting for a gig a punter could sit outside at a café table and have a drink while enjoying the view across the lock basin. These days, my dad assured me, you almost never found dead dogs floating in the canal.

Lord Grant and the Irregulars were due to go on first in support of the main act. On the stage Daniel and Max were setting up the instruments and doing sound checks. There weren’t that many punters in yet. They were mostly outside having a crafty fag or sneaking a drink. I asked where James was.

“Throwing up in the toilet,” said Daniel. “He’s that nervous.”

I looked over to where my mum was standing in her Sunday best nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She gave me a little wave and I indicated that I was going outside to wait for Simone. She nodded and followed me out.

That late in September it was getting dark before seven, but the clouds had held off and the last of the sunshine painted the brick front of the lock a golden orange. I saw Simone step down from Chalk Farm Road, wave happily, and then sashay over on a pair of high-heeled sling-backs, the sort that my mum buys occasionally but never wears. It was obviously ’80s night because her hair was piled under a broad-brimmed hat and the transparent top she was wearing was only street-legal because she had her jacket buttoned up.

I turned to my mum. “Mum, this is Simone.”

She said nothing, which wasn’t what I expected. Then she balled her fists and strode past me.

“Get away, you bitch,” she screamed.

Simone skittered to a halt, stared at Mum bearing down at her and then at me. Before I could move, my mum reached her and fetched Simone such a tremendous open-hand slap that she went reeling backward.

“Get away,” shouted my mum.

Simone stepped back, shock and outrage on her face, a pale hand covering the cheek where she’d been struck. I rushed forward to stop Mum, but before I could reach her she’d grabbed Simone’s hair with her left hand and was yanking at her jacket with her right. Simone was screaming and flailing, trying to get away as my mum shredded the gauze top with her fingers.

You don’t just hit your mum, even when she’s attacking your girlfriend. And you don’t rugby-tackle her, knock her to the floor, put her in an armlock, or any of the various techniques I was trained to use on violent suspects. I settled for grabbing her by the wrists and yelling “Stop” in her ear as loud as I could.

She let go of Simone, who staggered to safety, and whirled to face me.

“What are you doing?” my mum demanded and shook my hands free of her wrists. Then she reached up and slapped me around the face. “I said what are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” I asked. “What the fuck are you doing?”

That got me another slap, but this one was perfunctory and didn’t make my ears ring. “How dare you bring that witch here,” she said.

I looked around but Simone had sensibly scarpered by that point.

“Mum,” I shouted. “Mum, what’s going on?”

She spat something in Krio, using words that I’d certainly never heard before. Then she drew herself up and spat on the ground. “Stay away from her,” she said. “She is a witch. She was after your father and now she is after you.”

“What do you mean, after my father?” I asked. “After Dad — what?”

My mum gave me the same look she always gives me when I ask what she considers a blindingly obvious question. Now that Simone was out of sight Mum seemed to be calming down.

“She was after your father when I met him,” she said.

“Met him where?”

“When I met him,” she said slowly. “Before you were a baby.”

“Mum,” I said. “She’s the same age as I am. How could she possibly be around when you met Dad.”

“This is what I am trying to tell you,” said my mum matter-of-factly. “She is an evil witch.”