Moon Over Soho

Chapter 12 It Don't Mean a Thing

I FOUND her sitting on the pavement outside the piercing shop that’s next to the KFC. She must have seen me coming, because she leapt to her feet, hesitated for a moment, then spun and started walking away. In those heels it wasn’t hard for me to catch up. I called her name.

“Stop looking at me,” she said.

“I can’t stop myself.”

She halted and, before she could protest, I put my arms around her. She hugged me back and pressed her face against my chest. She sobbed once, caught herself, and took a deep breath.

“What on earth was all that about?” she asked.

“That was my mum,” I said. “She can get a little bit excitable.”

She pulled back and looked up at me. “But the things she said — I don’t understand how she could think I was — what did she think I was doing?”

“She’s on medication,” I said.

“I don’t understand,” said Simone. “What does that mean?”

“She’s not well,” I said.

“Are you saying she’s mad?” she asked.

I looked appropriately stricken. “Oh,” said Simone. “Poor thing, poor you. I don’t suppose we can go back.”

I realized that people were watching us from inside the KFC. Perhaps they thought we were street theater.

“And I was so looking forward to hearing your dad play,” she said.

“There’ll be other gigs,” I said. “Let me offer you an evening’s entertainment chez Peter.”

“Not the chaise longue again,” she said. “I’ve still got a crick in my back.”

“I laid in some cake.”

“That’s suspicious,” she said. “Almost as if you were expecting company after the gig. Who were you planning to take home?”

I kept my arm around her shoulders and guided her down the road toward Camden Town. “I don’t care for your tone, young lady,” I said.

“Where did you get the cake?” she asked. “Tesco?”

“Marks & Spencer,” I said.

She sighed and her arm tightened around my waist. “You know me so well.”

I hailed a black cab to take us back to the Folly. It seemed the safest thing to do.

When we got back to the coach house she took a moment to fix her face in my emergency shaving mirror.

“Do I look frightful?” she said. “I simply can’t tell with this teeny-weeny mirror.”

I said she looked beautiful, which she did. The imprint of my mother’s hand, which had still been a livid red on her cheek in the cab, was beginning to fade and she’d reapplied her lipstick. There was enough left of the transparent top she was wearing to make me want to tear off the rest and my desire was making me hot and queasy. I concentrated on queueing up the right playlist on my iPod and making sure that it was plugged into the speakers.

“I promised you cake,” I said as she advanced on me.

Simone wasn’t to be distracted that easily. “Cake later,” she said and slipped her arms around my waist, one hand sliding under my shirt. I reached out and pressed play on the iPod.

“What’s this?” she asked as the music began to play.

“Coleman Hawkins,” I said. “ ‘Body and Soul.’ ” It was the wrong first track. It was supposed to be Billie Holiday.

“Is it?” she asked. “You see, it just doesn’t sound real when it’s recorded.”

I slipped my hand under her jacket and pulled her against me. The skin of her back felt feverish under my palm. “This is better,” she said and then she leaned forward and bit the top button right off the front of my shirt.

“Hey,” I said.

“Fair’s fair,” she said.

“Did you ever hear him play?” I asked. “Coleman?”

“Oh yes,” she breathed. “People always wanted this song — it used to make him quite cross.” She pinged off another button and kissed my bared chest. I felt her tongue trace a line down my breastbone.

I smelled it then. The scent of honeysuckle, and behind that, broken brick and smashed wood. How could I have ever thought it was her perfume?

“Did Cyrus play ‘Body and Soul’?” I asked.

“Who’s Cyrus?” she said and bit off a third button. I was running out of buttons.

“You used to go out with him,” I said. “You used to live at his house.”

“Did I? It seems so long ago,” she said and kissed my chest. “I used to love watching them play.”

“Who are they?”

“All my lovely jazzmen,” she said. “I was happiest when they were playing, I liked the sex and the company but I was really happiest when they were playing.”

I groaned as the next track on the iPod turned out to be the John Coltrane. Had I put it on shuffle by accident? It’s impossible to slow-dance to his version of “Body and Soul” — for a start he never actually stays with the melody for more than three notes, and after a couple of bars he goes to the wild musical place that only people like my dad can follow. I steered us over to the fridge so I could surreptitiously press the next-track button on the iPod. It was Nina Simone, thank God, a young Nina with a voice that could melt an ice sculpture at a Scottish bankers’ convention.

“What about Lord Grant?” I had to ask.

“The one that got away,” she said. “They said he was going to be an English Clifford Brown but he kept on leaving the scene. Cherie was so cross. You see, she had rather set her cap for him. She claimed once that she’d caught him, but then he got away.” She smiled at the memory. “I rather think I was more his type, and who knows what might have happened except that he had this fearsome wife.”

“How fearsome?”

“Oh, terrifying,” she said. “But you should know, she’s your — ” Simone froze in my arms and frowned up at me but I rocked her back into the dance. In her eyes I could actually see the memory slipping away.

“Did you always love jazz?” I asked.

“Always,” she said.

“Even when you were at school?”

“We had the strangest music mistress at school,” said Simone. “Her name was Miss Patternost. She used to have her favorites around for tea — there she would play us records and encourage us to ‘commune’ with the music.”

“Were you one of her favorites?”

“Of course I was,” she said and slipped her hand inside my shirt again. “I was everybody’s favorite. Am I not your favorite as well?”

“Definitely,” I said. “Were Cherie and Peggy favorites too?”

“Yes, they were,” said Simone. “We used to practically live in Patternost’s room.”

“So you and your sisters all went to the same school?”

“They’re not really my sisters,” she said. “They’re like my sisters, like the sisters I never had. We met at school.”

“What was the name of the school?” If I had the school then I could probably track all three of their identities.

“Cosgrove Hall,” said Simone. “It was just outside Hastings.”

“Nice school?”

“It was perfectly all right, I suppose,” said Simone. “The masters weren’t too beastly to us and it had its own riding stable and Miss Patternost — I mustn’t forget her. She was very taken with Elisabeth Welch. ‘Stormy Weather,’ that was her favorite. She used to make us lie on the carpet — she had a lovely Oriental carpet, from Persia I think — and make pictures in our minds.”

I asked what kind of records and Simone said that it was nearly always jazz, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and of course Billie Holiday. Miss Patternost told the girls that jazz was the Negro’s great contribution to world culture and that as far as she was concerned they could eat as many missionaries as they wanted, as long as they continued to produce such beautiful music. After all, said Miss Patternost, the various societies were churning out hundreds of missionaries every week but there was only one Louis Armstrong.

I knew from my own dad’s collection that some of those disks would have been hard to get on the right side of the pond. When I asked where they came from, Simone told me about Sadie, Miss Patternost’s woman friend.

“Did she have a surname?”

Simone stopped pulling my shirt out of my trousers. “Why do you want to know?” she asked.

“I’m a policeman,” I said. “We’re born curious.”

Simone said that as far as she and any of the other girls knew, Miss Patternost’s friend Sadie was always just called “Sadie.”

“That’s how Miss Patternost used to introduce her,” she said.

It was never divulged what it was Sadie did, but the girls deduced from hints dropped in conversation that she worked in the movies in Hollywood and that she and Miss Patternost had been engaged in a passionate correspondence for over fifteen years. Every month or so, in addition to the almost daily letters, a package would arrive wrapped in brown paper and strong twine and marked HANDLE WITH CARE. These were the precious records on Vocalion, Okeh, and Gennett. Once a year Sadie would arrive, always just before the Easter hols, and ensconce herself in Miss Patternost’s rooms, and there would be much playing of jazz records until the wee small hours of the morning. It was a scandal, said the girls of the lower sixth. But Simone, Peggy, and Cherie didn’t care.

“Crushed beetles,” said Simone suddenly.

“What about them?” I asked. I was wishing I hadn’t blown out my iPhone because the recording app would have come in very handy right now.

“The icing on my birthday cake,” said Simone. It seemed that the big treat on a girl’s birthday at Cosgrove Hall was that you got to choose the color of the icing on your cake. It was a matter of honor that the birthday girl would try to come up with most unlikely color of icing she could think of, violet and orange being popular, with blue spots. The kitchen always managed to provide the color and the girls were convinced that they did it by grinding up beetles as coloring.

Back in the days before E numbers and food technologists, I thought. Which was, as it happened, about where I wanted to be. Luckily the iPod chose that moment to play the last track on the playlist — Ken “Snakehips” Johnson’s very own version of “Body and Soul.” I don’t care what purists like my dad think. If you want to dance you can’t beat a touch of swing. Simone certainly thought so because she stopped trying to strip me and instead started to pull me around the coach house in tight little circles. She was leading but I didn’t mind — that was all part of the plan.

“Did you ever hear him play live,” I asked as casually as I could. “Ken Johnson?”

“Just the once,” said Simone.

In March 1941 of course.

“It was our last day of freedom,” she said. “We’d all joined up as soon as we were old enough.” She told me that Cherie joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and Peggy was a Wren in the Women’s Royal Naval Service. But Simone had chosen the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force because somebody had said there was a chance she might fly.

“Or at least meet a handsome pilot who’d take me up in his crate,” she said. It was Peggy’s Canadian uncle who got them into the Café de Paris and Cherie had said that they’d be fine, money-wise, providing they didn’t order any food or have more than one drink.

Simone pressed her cheek against my chest and I stroked her hair.

“Our table could have been better, perhaps,” said Simone. “It was surprisingly small and not at all conveniently placed.

“If the band were at six o’clock we were sort of half past one.”

The club was full of handsome Canadian officers, one of whom sent over a bottle of champagne to their table, sparking a spirited discussion about how appropriate it would be for them to accept it, which ended only when Peggy downed her glass in one gulp. This led to another discussion about whether they could get a second bottle out of the Canadians and what, Cherie asked darkly, might they expect in return?

Peggy said that as far as she was concerned, the Canadians could have whatever they liked. In fact she was of the opinion that it was their patriotic duty to make the brave soldiers of Commonwealth welcome and she was perfectly prepared to do her duty and think of England.

But they never got their second bottle of champagne and the Canadians didn’t get their just deserts. Because at that point the band struck up “Body and Soul” and the girls only had eyes for Ken Johnson.

“Nobody had ever told me,” said Simone, “that a colored man could be so beautiful. And the way he moved — no wonder they called him Snakehips.” She frowned up at me. “You haven’t kissed me for ever such a long time.”

She pouted, so I kissed her. It was the single most stupid thing I’ve ever done, and that includes running into a tower block thirty seconds before it was due to be demolished.

Vestigium is usually hard to spot. It’s the uneasy feeling you have in a graveyard, the half memory of children laughing in a playground, or a familiar face in the corner of your eye. What I got from that kiss was a full-on high-definition reproduction of the last moments of Ken Johnson and forty-odd others at Café de Paris. I didn’t get to enjoy the ambience much. Laughter, uniforms, a live swing orchestra at the height of its power, and then — silence.

During the Renaissance, when there was a flowering of art, culture, and almost continuous bloody warfare, some particularly foolhardy engineers would break sieges by rushing up to the castle and attaching a primitive-shaped charge to the gate. Sometimes, because fuses were more of an art than a science in those days, the charge would go off before the luckless engineer had gotten clear and he would be blown, or “hoisted,” through the air — often in bits. The French, with that subtle rapier wit that has made them famous, nicknamed the bombs “petards” or farts. People still use the phrase hoisted by his own petard to refer to a situation where one is damaged by one’s own scheme. Which is what happened to me when I guided Simone back into her memories, and she proceeded to suck my brains out.

You don’t experience a bomb blast so much as remember it afterward. It’s like a bad edit or a record jumping a groove. On one side of the moment there is music and laughter and romance and on the other — not pain, that comes later, but a stunned incomprehension. A tangle of dust and splintered wood, a splash of white and red that becomes a man’s dress shirt, tables overturned to reveal bodiless legs and headless bodies, a trombone minus its slide standing upright on a table as if left there by a musician while two men in khaki uniforms stared blindly at it — killed by the blast wave.

And then noise and shouting and the taste of blood in Simone’s mouth.

My blood, I realized — I’d bitten my lip.

It was Simone who pushed me away.

“How old am I?” she asked.

“I make it a shade short of ninety,” I said, because there’s just no stopping my mouth sometimes.

“Your mother was right,” she said. “I am a witch.”

I found I was swaying and my hand was shaking. I held it up in front of my face.

“She was right,” she said. “I’m not a person, I’m a creature, an abomination.”

I tried to tell her that she was definitely a human being and that some of my best friends were functionally immortal. I wanted to say that we could work it out, but it came out as a series of wah sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to go and talk to my sisters.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Only they’re not my sisters, are they? I’m Lucy, we’re all Lucy Western.”

She turned and ran out of the coach house. I heard her heels clanging down the spiral staircase. I tried to follow but toppled slowly onto my face instead.

“THAT WAS not the most intelligent thing you’ve ever done,” said Nightingale as Dr. Walid shone a light in my eyes to make sure my brains were intact. I’m not sure how long I’d flopped around on the floor of the coach house, but as soon as I’d gotten enough muscle control to use a phone, I’d called Dr. Walid. He was calling it an atonic seizure because, even if he didn’t know why it had happened, it was important to give it a cool name. I’d been hoping that I’d have a chance to come up with a plausible explanation before Nightingale arrived, but he came in just behind Dr. Walid.

“I had to be sure she was related to the Café de Paris case and not the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau,” I said. “I mean, she’s not a chimera like the Pale Lady. In fact, I think she’s an accident.” I explained about Miss Patternost and her musical shapes.

“You think that their ‘shapes’ acted like forma?” asked Nightingale.

“Why not?” I asked. “I used to make shapes when I was going to sleep when I was a kid, or listening to music. Everyone does it and among billions of people, no matter how unlikely something is, if you repeat the action enough times there’s a result — there’s magic. How else could Newton stumble onto the principle in the first place. They were the wrong girls doing the wrong thing in the wrong place and …”

“And what?” asked Dr. Walid.

“I think they survived the blast at the Café de Paris because they channeled magic, or life energy, or whatever this stuff is, through the forma in their minds. We know that magic can be released at the point of death — hence sacrifices.”

“Hence vampires,” said Nightingale.

“Not vampires,” I said. I’d been studying my Wolfe. “Tactus disvitae, the antilife, is the mark of the vampire. This is more like alcohol or drug dependency; the damage is an unintended consequence, like cirrhosis of the liver or gout.”

“Human beings are not bottles of brandy,” said Nightingale. “And Wolfe always was too keen on categorizing and subcategorizing everything. A rose by any other name and all that. Still — where would she have gone?”

“Most likely the flat on Berwick Street,” I said.

“Back to the nest,” said Nightingale. And I didn’t like the way he said it.

Dr. Walid handed me a couple of painkillers and half a bottle of Diet Pepsi he must have found in the fridge. There was no fizz when I unscrewed the top and it tasted flat when I swallowed the tablets — it must have been in there for ages.

He sat down next to me on the sofa and put his hand on my arm. “If your father really did have a close encounter with Simone at some point in the past we may be able to find evidence of that. So I want you to bring your father to the UCH tomorrow at eleven,” he said and then pointed at Nightingale. “You I want in bed in the next half hour with a hot milk and a sleeping tablet.”

“There’s — ” said Nightingale but Dr. Walid didn’t give him a chance to start, let alone finish.

“If you don’t follow my instructions, I swear on my father’s life that I’ll have you both put on medical leave,” he said. “Do you both ken me on this?” We nodded obediently.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Later, while we were wrangling hot drinks out of Molly in her kitchen, Nightingale asked me if I thought Dr. Walid actually had the authority to carry out his threat. “I think so,” I said. “He’s down on paper as our OCU’s registered medical adviser. If we had any cells here he’d be the one we called in if our prisoners needed medical attention. Do we have any cells?”

“Not anymore,” said Nightingale. “They were all bricked up after the war.”

“In any case,” I said, “I vote we don’t push to find out how far his authority extends.”

Molly reverentially handed a mug of hot chocolate to Nightingale. “Thank you,” he said.

“What about mine?” I asked.

Molly held up Toby’s lead and wagged it at me.

“Not me again?”

“I’m on bed rest,” said Nightingale. “Doctor’s orders.”

I looked down at Toby, who was crouched half hidden behind Molly’s skirts. He gave me an experimental yap.

“You’re not making any friends around here, you know,” I said.

DR. WALID let me watch while he fed my father into the MRI scanner at UCH. He said it was a 3.0 Tesla machine, which was good, but that really the hospital could do with another one to cope with the demand.

There’s a microphone inside the tube so you can hear if the patient’s in distress — I could hear my dad humming.

“What’s that sound?” asked Dr. Walid.

“Dad,” I said. “He’s singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’ ”

Dr. Walid sat down at a control desk complicated enough to launch a satellite into low earth orbit or mix a top-twenty hit. The magnetic drum in the scanner started to rotate with the sort of banging sound that makes you drive your car into the nearest garage. It didn’t seem to bother my dad, who carried on humming, although I noticed he did shift his rhythm to match the machine.

The scans went on for a long time, and after a while the microphone picked up my dad’s gentle snoring.

Dr. Walid looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

“If you can go to sleep while my mum’s on the phone,” I said, “you can pretty much sleep through anything.”

When they’d finished with my dad, Dr. Walid turned to me and told me to strip off and get in the machine myself.

“What?”

“Simone was probably feeding off you too,” he said.

“But I don’t play jazz,” I said. “I don’t even like it that much.”

“You’re making assumptions, Peter. The whole jazz aspect may just be a boundary effect. If your lady friend is an uncharacterized category of thaumovore then we can’t know what the mechanism is. We need more data, so I need you to stick your head in the MRI machine.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s for science,” he said.

There’s something uniquely claustrophobic about sliding into an MRI scanner. The rotating magnets are on an industrial scale and generate a magnetic field sixty thousand times that of the earth. And they feed you into it wearing nothing but a hospital gown that lets a breeze flap around your privates.

At least Dr. Walid didn’t make me wait around for the results.

“This is your dad’s,” he said. He pointed to a couple of dark gray smudges. “Those look like minor lesions, probably hyperthaumaturgical degradation. I’ll have to refine the image further and make some comparisons to be sure. This is your brain, which is not only pristine and unsullied by thought, but also showing no sign of any lesions.”

“So she wasn’t feeding off me. Then why did I pass out?”

“I’d bet she was feeding off you,” he said. “Just not enough yet for it to damage your brain.”

“She was doing it while we were having sex,” I said. “She practically told me that herself. Do we know what she’s actually feeding off exactly?”

“The damage I’m looking at is consistent with the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.”

“She’s a vampire,” I said. “A jazz vampire.”

“Jazz may just be the flavoring,” said Dr. Walid. “What’s being consumed is magic.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“We don’t know, as well you know,” he said and sent me off to get changed.

“Is it brain cancer then?” asked my dad as we got dressed.

“No, they just wanted to record your empty head for posterity,” I said.

“You’ve never been very lucky with birds, have you?” he said. It’s weird watching an elderly parent when he’s half naked. You find yourself staring in fascination at the slack skin, the wrinkles, and the liver spots, and thinking — one day all that will be yours. Or at least it will be if you can avoid getting killed or falling in love with vampires.

“Apart from the thing with Mum, how did the gig go?”

“Not bad at all,” he said. “We could have done with a bit more rehearsal, but then you always can.”

Even with sterile needles supplied by the NHS my dad had still collapsed the veins on his arms and I’d assumed he’d been injecting into his legs. But looking now I couldn’t see any tracks.

“When was the last time you had your medicine?” I asked.

“I’m temporarily off the gear,” he said.

“Since when?” I asked.

“Since the summer,” he said. “I thought your mum told you.”

“She said you’d quit smoking,” I said.

“And the rest.” My dad slipped into his rifle-green shirt with the button-down collar and shook his arm in the approved cockney geezer manner. “Got off both horses,” he said. “And to be honest giving up the fags was the harder of the two.”

I offered to take him home, but he said that not only was he all right but he was looking forward to a bit of peace and quiet. Still the sun was going down so I waited with him at the stop until his bus came and then I walked back to Russell Square.

I’m used to having the Folly to myself, so it was a bit of a shock to wander into the atrium and find half a dozen guys making themselves comfortable in the armchairs. I recognized one of them, a stocky man with a broken nose, as Frank Caffrey, our contact in the fire brigade and reservist for the parachute regiment. He stood up and shook my hand.

“These are me mates,” he said.

I gave them a nod. They were all fit-looking middle-aged men with short haircuts and while they were dressed in a variety of civvies their manner suggested that uniforms were a very real possibility. Molly had supplied them with afternoon tea, but slung under the occasional tables and stacked beside their armchairs the men had sturdy black nylon carryalls. The ones with the reinforced straps and handles allowing you to carry small, heavy metal objects around in safety and relative comfort.

I asked where Nightingale was.

“On the phone to the commissioner,” he said. “We’re just waiting for the word.”

The “word” made me cold and sweaty. I doubted this word was to extend Simone and her sisters an invitation to tea. I managed to keep the fear off my face, gave Caffrey’s mates a cheery wave, and headed through the back door and across the yard and out the coach house gate. I reckoned that I had at least ten minutes before Nightingale figured out I’d gone, twenty if I left the car in the garage. He knew me well enough to know what I was going to do next. He’d probably thought he was trying to protect me from myself, which was ironic because I thought I was trying to protect him from himself.

Twenty minutes to notice I was gone, ten minutes to tool up and pile into whatever nondescript van the paras had brought with them, ten minutes to reach Berwick Street. Forty minutes, tops.

A black cab was turning the corner as I stepped out on the pavement and shouted “Taxi.” I stuck my hand out, but the bastard pretended he hadn’t seen and cruised right past me. I swore and memorized his license plate in case an opportunity for petty but deeply satisfying vengeance came along later. Fortunately a second cab came around the corner immediately and dropped off some tourists outside one of the hotels on Southampton Row and I slipped in before the driver could experience any problems with his night vision. He had the cropped hair of a man too proud to cover his bald patch with a comb-over. Just to make his day I showed my warrant card.

“Get me to Berwick Street in under ten minutes and I’ll give you a free pass for the rest of the year,” I said.

“And the wife’s car?” he asked.

“Same deal,” I said and gave him my card.

“Done,” he said and demonstrated the amazing turning circle of the London black cab by doing an illegal U-turn that threw me into the side door, then accelerated down Bedford Place. Either he was insane or his wife really needed help with the traffic tickets, because we did it in less than five minutes. I was so impressed I even paid him the fare as well.

Friday night on Berwick Street and the punters were quietly slipping in and out of the sex shops on the corner with Peter Street. The market had closed but the pubs and the record shops were still open and a steady stream of media workers were threading their way home through the tourists. I took some time to check the front of Simone’s house — up on the top floor the light was on.

I didn’t like the idea of Simone and her sisters just disappearing at the hands of Caffrey and his lads. I believe in the rule of law and this was, however weird, a police matter and I was a sworn constable who was about to exercise his discretion to resolve a breach of the Queen’s Peace.

Or as Leslie would have it — I was out of my fucking mind.

I pressed random buttons on the intercom until someone answered.

“Come to read the meter, love,” I said and they buzzed me in. I made a mental note to pass the number of the building to West End Central’s crime prevention team for a stern lecture and started up the stairs.

They hadn’t gotten any less steep. No wonder Simone and her sisters had to suck the life force out of people.

I was just catching a breather in front of their door when somebody grabbed me from behind and held a knife to my throat.

“It’s him,” she hissed. “Open the door.”

Because of the height difference she had to reach up under my armpit to get her blade, an old kitchen knife I thought, against my neck. She would really have been better off threatening my back or stomach. If I’d been desperate I could have chopped down with my arm and forced her hand away. It would have depended on how fast she was and how willing to kill.

The door opened and Simone looked out.

“Hello, Simone,” I said. “We need to have a chat.”

She looked stricken to see me.

The woman with the knife pushed me and I edged carefully into the room. Peggy was in there too, still dressed in dungarees, hair still spiky, face pale and scared. That meant Cherie was the one with the knife. Simone closed the door behind us.

“Get his handcuffs,” said Cherie.

Peggy groped me around the waist. “He hasn’t got any.”

“Why haven’t you brought your handcuffs?” said Simone. “I told them you’d have handcuffs.”

“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” I said.

“We know,” hissed Cherie. “You’re here to kill us.”

“What, just me on my own?” I asked, but I was thinking of Caffrey and his posse drinking tea back at the Folly. Only by now they’d have finished their tea and were probably in a van, a nondescript Ford Transit most likely, doing last-minute checks on their weapons and night-vision equipment.

“I’m not here to kill anyone,” I said.

“Liar,” said Cherie. “He said you’d disappear us.”

“Perhaps we should let them,” said Peggy.

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” said Cherie and her knife nicked my throat by accident — thank God it wasn’t sharp.

“Yes, we have,” said Simone. There were tears on her face, and when she saw me looking at her she turned away.

“Who said we would kill you?” I asked.

“This man,” said Cherie.

“Did you meet him in a pub?” I asked. “What man? Can you remember what he looked like?”

Cherie hesitated and that’s when I knew.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “It’s not important what he looks like. He said that you worked for the government and all the government was interested in was eliminating anybody who isn’t normal.”

What could I say? I was pretty much here to tell them the same thing.

“What color were his eyes?” I asked. “Was he white, black, something else?”

“Why do you care?” shouted Cherie.

“Why can’t you remember?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cherie and relaxed her grip.

I didn’t wait for her to remember she was supposed to be holding me hostage. I grabbed her wrist and twisted her knife hand up and away. The rule for fighting a person with a knife is to start off by making it point away from you and then ensure that it hurts too much to hold on to. I felt something crack under my grip, Cherie screamed and dropped the knife. Peggy tried to hit me but I was already twisting away and she ended up smacking Cherie in the face.

“Stop it,” yelled Simone.

I shoved Cherie over toward her sisters. She stumbled into Peggy and they both tripped on the edge of the mattress and went down. Peggy came up spitting like a cat.

“Wait up,” I said. “I’m trying to do you a favor here. There’s a real evil man out there that you don’t want to be messing with.”

“You should know,” spat Peggy. “You work for him.”

“It’s not our fault,” said Cherie dejectedly. Simone sat down beside her and put her arm around her sister.

“I get that,” I said. “I really do. But whatever you think about my governor there’s another total evil bastard out there and by the way — why the fuck are you still here? Everyone knows where you live.”

I figured I might just have another ten minutes before Nightingale and Caffrey turned up to demonstrate the military version of the hard target entry, followed by a unique close-up view of their search-and-destroy procedures.

“He’s right,” said Peggy. “We can’t stay here.”

“Where can we go?” asked Cherie.

“I’ll get you into a hotel,” I said. “We can talk about what to do next then.” I concentrated on Simone, who was looking at me with a kind of sick longing. “Simone, we don’t have much time.”

She nodded. “I think we should leave immediately and never return.”

“But what about my things?” wailed Cherie.

“We’ll get you more things,” said Peggy, hauling Cherie to her feet.

“I’ll check the coast is clear,” I said. I stepped out onto the landing and pressed the pop-in switch thingy that turned on the miserly forty-watt bulb.

There was a crash downstairs, the distinctive double bang of a heavy door being smashed open and the rebound off a side wall. It’s no joke, that rebound. There have been plenty of instances where the first bastard through the door has been knocked right back out on his arse.

I was too late. I didn’t know if it was Nightingale with Caffrey in support or a CO19 armed response team sent in by Stephanopoulis. Either way I had to de-escalate the situation before they reached the top of the house. I told Simone and the others to stay in the room.

“Officer on the scene,” I shouted. “No weapons, no hostages. I repeat, no weapons, no hostages.”

I paused to listen. From down below I thought I heard someone sniggering and then a deep voice with a lisp said — “Excellent.” Then I definitely heard feet running up the lower staircases. I held up my hands at chest level, palm out to show I was unarmed. It wasn’t an easy thing to do — one of the reasons why the Met has to train its officers in conflict resolution is to overcome our natural London urge to get our retaliation in first.

The push-in light switch popped out and it suddenly went dark. I frantically slapped at the switch to get it on again — anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark.

The footsteps reached the landing below me and a figure came bounding around the corner and up the stairs.

And that’s when my brain let me down. Whatever you’ve been told, seeing is not believing. Your brain does a great deal of interpretation before it deigns to let your consciousness know what the hell is going on. If we’re suddenly exposed to something unfamiliar, a damaged human face, a car flying through the air toward us, something that looks almost but not quite human, it can take time, sometimes even seconds, for our minds to react. And those seconds can be crucial.

As when a chimera is racing up the staircase to reach you.

He was male, muscular, stripped to the waist to reveal that he was covered in short russet fur. His hair was black and cut long and shaggy. His nose was all wrong, as black and glossy as a healthy cat’s. As he bounded up the stairs toward me his mouth opened too wide to reveal sharp white teeth and a lolling pink tongue. None of this registered until he was almost on top of me and I didn’t have time to do anything but scramble back and lash out with my foot.

Doc Martens, patented acid-resistant-soled, reinforced leather shoes, as recommended by police officers and skinheads everywhere — when you absolutely, positively have to kick someone down the stairs.

Predictably Tiger-Boy landed like a cat, twisting his spine as he dropped to fall into a crouch on the landing below.

“Get up on the roof,” I shouted through the door.

Tiger-Boy took a moment to shake his head and give me a big feline grin. His eyes were quite beautiful, amber-colored, slotted like a cat’s, and obviously adapted for hunting at night.

I heard the door open and Peggy and Simone dragging a still-whimpering Cherie out of the room and onto the stairs up to the roof. I didn’t dare take my eyes off Tiger-Boy; he was just waiting for me to lose concentration.

“Who the hell is that?” asked Simone.

“Nobody you want to know,” I said.

Tiger-Boy hissed. I saw his tail twitch and found myself wondering whether he’d cut a hole in the back of his Y-fronts to let it out.

“Little mousy,” lisped the Tiger-Boy. “Why don’t you jump about? It’s more fun when you jump about.”

The pop-in light switch popped out, it went dark, and Tiger-Boy leapt toward me.

I put a werelight in his face.

I’d been practicing and had managed to produce one that burned as brightly as a magnesium flare. I’d closed my eyes and it still lit up the inside of my eyelids, so it must have hit Tiger-Boy right in his specially low-light-adapted eyes.

He howled, I jumped and this time managed to get both size elevens in contact with his body. He probably outweighed me but Isaac Newton was on my side and we went down the stairs together, only he was hitting all the steps and I was surfing down on him. At least that was the theory.

We hit the landing harder and faster than I expected. I heard a snap under my feet and there was stabbing pain in my left knee. I yelled and he yowled.

“You’re right,” I said. “It is more fun when you jump about.”

I didn’t have any cuffs or rope to secure him, so I settled for scrambling back up the stairs, ignoring the shooting pain in my knee as I went. Behind me Tiger-Boy wailed pathetically and, more important, stayed where he was. I ran through the roof door, ducked under a clumsy swing by Peggy, and slammed it shut behind me.

“I beg your pardon,” said Peggy. “I thought you were him.”

I looked at the three women. They were clutching one another for support and had the dazed unfocused look that people get after bombing incidents and motorway pileups.

I pointed to the north. “Climb over the railing, go that way across the roof,” I said. “Go to the right. There’s a fire escape down to Duck Lane.” I’d spotted it during my night of passion with Simone as a possible access point for burglars. Which proves, if nothing else, that a police constable is never off duty even when he’s not wearing his underpants.

They didn’t move — it was strange they were acting so slow and dull. As if they were drugged or distracted.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Will you be quiet,” said Peggy. “We’re talking to someone.”

I turned around to find that an evil magician had been standing behind me.