Moon Over Soho

Chapter 1 Body and Soul

IT’S A sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind. If you drive northeast up the A12 you eventually come to Colchester, Britain’s first Roman capital and the first city to be burned down by that redheaded chavette from Norfolk known as Boudicca. I knew all this because I’d been reading the Annals of Tacitus as part of my Latin training. He’s surprisingly sympathetic to the revolting Brits and scathing about the unpreparedness of the Roman generals who thought more of what was agreeable than expedient. The classically educated chinless wonders who run the British army obviously took this admonition to heart because Colchester is now the home of their toughest soldiers — the parachute regiment. Having spent many a Saturday night as a probationary PC wrestling squaddie in Leicester Square, I made sure I stayed on the main road and bypassed the city altogether.

Beyond Colchester I turned south and, with the help of the GPS on my phone, got myself onto the B1029 heading down the wedged-shaped bit of dry ground jammed between the River Colne and Flag Creek. At the end of the road lay Brightlingsea–lining the coast, so Leslie had always told me, like a collection of rubbish stranded at the high-water mark. Actually I didn’t think it was that bad. It had been raining in London but after Colchester I’d driven into clear blue skies and the sun lit up the rows of well-kept Victorian terraces that ran down to the sea.

Chez May was easy to spot, a 1970s brick-built fake Edwardian cottage that had been carriage-lamped and pebble-dashed within an inch of its life. The front door was flanked on one side by a hanging basket full of blue flowers and on the other by the house number inscribed on a ceramic plate in the shape of a sailing yacht. I paused and checked the garden; there were gnomes loitering near the ornamental birdbath. I took a breath and rang the doorbell.

There was an immediate chorus of female yelling from inside. Through the reproduction stained-glass window in the front door I could just make out blurry figures running back and forth at the far end of the hall. Somebody yelled, “It’s your boyfriend!” which earned a shush and a sotto voce reprimand from someone else. A white blur marched up the hallway until it filled the view through the window from side to side. I took a step backward and the door opened. It was Henry May — Leslie’s father.

He was a large man, and driving big trucks and hauling heavy gear had given him broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. Too many transport café breakfasts and standing his round at the pub had put a tire around his waist. He had a square face and had dealt with a receding hairline by shaving his hair down to a brown fuzz. His eyes were blue and clever. Leslie had gotten her eyes from her dad.

Having four daughters meant that he had parental looming down to a fine art, and I fought the urge to ask whether Leslie could come out and play.

“Hello, Peter,” he said.

“Mr. May,” I said.

He made no effort to unblock the doorway; nor did he invite me in.

“Leslie will be out in a minute,” he said.

“She all right?” I asked. It was a stupid question and Leslie’s dad didn’t embarrass either of us by trying to answer it. I heard someone coming down the stairs and braced myself.

There’d been severe damage to the maxilla, nasal spine, ramus, and mandible, Dr. Walid had said. And although much of the underlying muscle and tendons had survived, the surgeons at UCH had been unable to save much of the skin surface. They’d put in a temporary scaffold to allow her to breathe and ingest food, and there was a chance that she might benefit from a partial face transplant — if they could find a suitable donor. Given that what was left of her jaw was currently held together by a filigree of hypoallergenic metal, talking was out of the question. Dr. Walid had said that once the bones were sufficiently fused, they might be able to restore enough functionality to the jaw to allow for speech. But it all sounded a bit conditional to me. Whatever you see, he’d said, take as long a look as you need to get used to it, to accept it, and then move on as if nothing has changed.

“Here she is,” said Leslie’s dad and turned sideways to allow a slim figure to squeeze past him. She wore a blue-and-white-striped hoodie with the hood up, drawstring pulled tight so that it hid her forehead and chin. The lower face was covered by a matching blue-and-white-patterned scarf and her eyes by a pair of unfashionably large sunglasses I suspected had been looted from her mum’s forgotten-clothes drawer. I stared but there was nothing to see.

“You should have said we were going out robbing,” I said. “I’d have brought a balaclava.”

She gave me a disgusted look — I recognized it from the tilt of her head and the way she held her shoulders. I felt a stutter in my chest and took a deep breath.

“Fancy a walk then?” I asked.

She nodded to her dad, took me firmly by the arm, and led me away from the house.

I felt her dad’s eyes on my back as we walked off.

If you don’t count the boatbuilding and the light engineering, Brightlingsea is not a noisy town even in the summer. Now, two weeks after the end of the school holidays, it was almost silent, just the occasional car and the sound of the gulls. I stayed quiet until we’d crossed the high street where Leslie pulled her police-issue notebook out of her bag, flipped it open to the last page, and showed it to me.

What have you been up to? was written in black Biro across the page.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

She made it clear through hand gestures that yeah, she did want to know.

So I told her about the guy that had had his dick bitten off by a woman with teeth in her vagina, which seemed to amuse Leslie, and about the rumors that DCI Seawoll was being investigated by the IPCC about his conduct during the Covent Garden riots, which did not. I also didn’t tell her that Terrence Pottsley, the only other victim to survive the magic that had damaged Leslie’s face, had topped himself as soon as his family’s backs were turned.

We didn’t go straight to the shore. Instead Leslie led me the back way down Oyster Tank Road and through a grassy car park where rows of dinghies were parked on their trailers. A brisk wind from the sea moaned through the rigging and clonked the metal fittings together like cowbells. Hand in hand, we picked our way through the boats and out onto the windswept concrete esplanade. On one side cement steps led down to a beach carved into narrow strips by rotting breakwaters; on the other stood a line of brightly colored huts. Most were closed up tight but I did see one family determined to stretch the summer as far as it would go, the parents drinking tea in the shelter of their doorway while the kids kicked a soccer ball on the beach.

Between the end of the beach huts and the open-air swimming pool was a strip of grass and a shelter where we finally got to sit down. Constructed in the 1930s when people had realistic expectations of the British climate, it was brick-built and solid enough to serve as a tank trap. We sat down out of the wind on the bench that ran along the back of the alcove. The inside had been decorated with a mural of the seafront, blue sky, white clouds, red sails. Some total wanker had graffitied BMX across the sky and there was a list of names crudely painted down the side wall — BROOKE T., EMILY B., and LESLIE M. They were just in the right location to have been painted by a bored teenager slumped on the corner of the bench. You didn’t need to be a copper to see that this was where the yoofs of Brightlingsea came to hang out in that difficult gap between the age of criminal responsibility and that of legal drinking.

Leslie pulled an iPad clone out of her bag and fired it up. She typed in keyboard mode and the iPad spoke — somebody in her family must have installed a speech synthesizer. It was a basic model with an American accent that made Leslie sound like an autistic surfer dude, but at least we could have an almost normal conversation.

She didn’t bother with small talk.

“Can magic fix?” she asked.

“I thought Dr. Walid had talked to you about that.” I’d been dreading this question.

“Want you say,” she said.

“What?”

Leslie leaned over her pad and stabbed deliberately at the screen with her finger. She typed several separate lines before hitting return.

“I want to hear it from you,” said the iPad.

“Why?”

“Because I trust you.”

I took a breath. A pair of old-age pensioners raced past the shelter on mobility scooters.

“As far as I can tell magic works within the same framework of physical laws as everything else,” I said.

“What magic do,” said the iPad, “magic can undo.”

“If you burn your hand on fire or electricity it’s still a burn — you fix it with bandages and cream and stuff like that. You don’t use more electricity or more fire. You …”

Had the skin and muscles of your face been pulled out of shape by a fucking malevolent spirit — your jaw was all smashed up and the whole thing was held together with magic and when that ran out your face fell off. Your beautiful face. I was there, I watched it happen. And there was nothing I could do.

“Can’t just wish it away,” I said.

“Know everything?” asked the iPad.

“No,” I said. “And I don’t think Nightingale does either.”

She sat silent and unmoving for a long while. I wanted to put my arm around her but I didn’t know how she’d react. I was just about to reach out when she nodded to herself and picked up the iPad again.

“Show me,” said the iPad.

“Leslie …”

“Show me.” She hit the repeat button several times. “Show me, show me, show me …”

“Wait,” I said and reached for her iPad, but she pulled it out of my reach.

“I have to take the battery out,” I said. “Or the magic will blow the chips.”

Leslie flipped the iPad, cracked it open, and pulled the battery. After going through five phones in a row I’d retrofitted my latest Samsung with a hardware cutoff that kept it safe but meant that the case was held together with elastic bands. Leslie shuddered when she saw it and made a snorting sound that I suspected was laughter.

I made the shape of the appropriate forma in my mind, opened my hand, and brought forth a werelight. Not a big one but enough to cast a pale light that was reflected in Leslie’s sunglasses. She stopped laughing. I closed my hand and the light went out.

Leslie stared at my hand for a moment and then made the same gesture, repeating it twice, slowly and methodically. When nothing happened she looked up at me and I knew, underneath the glasses and scarf, that she was frowning.

“It’s not that easy,” I said. “I practiced every morning for four hours for a month and a half before I could do that and that’s just the first thing you have to learn. Have I told you about the Latin, the Greek …?”

We sat in silence for a moment, then she poked me in the arm. I sighed and produced another werelight. I could practically do it in my sleep by then. She copied the gesture and got nothing. I’m not joking about how long it takes to learn.

The OAPs returned, drag racing past on the esplanade. I put the light out but Leslie carried on making the gesture, the movements becoming more impatient with every try. I stood it as long as I could before I took her hand in mine and made her stop.

We walked back to her house soon afterward. When we reached her porch she patted me on the arm, stepped inside, and shut the door in my face. Through the stained glass I watched her blurry shape retreat quickly down the hallway. Then she was gone.

I was about to turn away when the door opened and Leslie’s father stepped out.

“Peter,” he said. Embarrassment doesn’t come easily to men like Henry May, so they don’t hide it well. “I thought we might get a cup of tea — there’s a café on the high street.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But I’ve got to get back to London.”

“Oh,” he said and stepped closer. “She doesn’t want you to see her with the mask off …” He waved his hands vaguely in the direction of the house. “She knows if you come inside she’s going to have to take it off and she doesn’t want you to see her. You can understand that, right?”

I nodded.

“She don’t want you to see how bad it is,” he said.

“How bad is it?”

“About as bad as it could be,” said Henry.

“I’m sorry.”

Henry shrugged. “I just wanted you to know that you weren’t being sent away,” he said. “You weren’t being punished or something.”

But I was being sent away, so I said good-bye, climbed back into the Jag and drove back to London.

I’d just managed to find my way back onto the A12 when Dr. Walid called me and said he had a body he wanted me to look at. I put my foot down. It was work and I was grateful to get it.

EVERY HOSPITAL I’ve ever been to has had the same smell, that whiff of disinfectant, vomit, and mortality. The UCH was brand new, less than ten years old, but the smell was already beginning to creep in at the edges except, ironically, downstairs in the basement where they kept the dead people. Down there the paint on the walls was still crisp and the pale blue lino still squeaky underfoot.

The mortuary entrance was halfway down a long corridor hung with framed pictures of the old Middlesex Hospital from back in the days when doctors washing their hands between patients was the cutting edge of medical science. It was guarded by a pair of electronically locked fire doors with a sign saying — NO UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS; STOP; MORTUARY STAFF ONLY. Another sign ordered me to press the buzzer on the entry phone, which I did. The speaker gave a squawk and on the off chance that this was a question I told them that it was Constable Peter Grant to see Dr. Walid. It squawked again, I waited, and Dr. Abdul Haqq Walid, world-renowned gastroenterologist, cryptopathologist, and practicing Scot, opened the door.

“Peter,” he said. “How was Leslie?”

“All right, I suppose,” I said.

Inside the mortuary was much the same as the rest of the hospital only with fewer people complaining about the state of the National Health Service. Dr. Walid walked me past the security at reception and introduced me to today’s dead body.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Cyrus Wilkinson,” he said. “He collapsed in a pub in Cambridge Circus day before yesterday, was ambulanced to A&E, pronounced dead on arrival, and sent down here for a routine postmortem.”

Poor old Cyrus Wilkinson didn’t look that bad apart from, of course, the Y-shaped incision that split him from chest to crotch. Thankfully Dr. Walid had finished rummaging around in his organs and zipped him up before I’d gotten there. He was a white guy in what looked like a well-preserved midforties, bit of a beer belly but still some definition on his arms and legs — he looked like a jogger to me.

“And he’s down here because?”

“Well, there’s evidence of gastritis, pancreatitis, and cirrhosis of the liver,” said Dr. Walid. The last one I recognized.

“He was a drinker?” I asked.

“Among other things,” said Dr. Walid. “He was severely anemic, which might have been related to his liver problems, but it looks more like what I’d associate with a B₁₂ deficiency.”

I glanced down at the body again for a moment. “He’s got good muscle tone,” I said.

“He used to be fit,” said Dr. Walid. “But recently he seems to have let himself go.”

“Drugs?”

“I’ve done all the quick checks and nothing,” said Dr. Walid. “It’ll be a couple of days before I get the results on the hair samples.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“Heart failure. I found indications of dilated cardiomyopathy,” said Dr. Walid. “That’s when the heart becomes enlarged and can’t do its job properly — but I think what did for him last night was an acute myocardial infarction.”

Another term I recognized from the what-to-do-if-your-suspect-keels-over-in-custody classes I’d taken at Hendon. In other words, a heart attack.

“Natural causes?” I asked.

“Superficially, yes,” said Dr. Walid. “But he really wasn’t sick enough to just drop dead the way he did. Not that people don’t just drop dead all the time, of course.”

“So how do you know this is one of ours?”

Dr. Walid patted the corpse’s shoulder and winked at me. “You’re going to have to get closer to find out.”

I don’t really like getting close to corpses, even ones as unassuming as Cyrus Wilkinson, so I asked Dr. Walid for a filter mask and some eye protectors. Once there was no chance of me touching the corpse by accident, I cautiously bent down until my face was close to his.

Vestigium is the imprint magic leaves on physical objects. It’s a lot like a sense impression, like the memory of a smell or sound you once heard. You’ve probably felt it a hundred times a day but it gets mixed up with memories, daydreams, and even smells you’re smelling and sounds you’re hearing. Some things, stones for example, sop up everything that happens around them even when it’s barely magical at all — that’s what gives an old house its character. Other things, like the human body, are terrible at retaining vestigia — it takes the magical equivalent of a grenade going off to imprint anything on a corpse.

Which was why I was a little bit surprised to hear the body of Cyrus Wilkinson playing a saxophone solo. The melody floated in from a time when all the radios were made out of Bakelite and blown glass and with it came a builder’s-yard smell of cut wood and cement dust. I stayed there long enough to be sure I could identify the tune and then I stepped away.

“How did you spot this?” I asked.

“I check all the sudden deaths,” said Dr. Walid. “Just on the off chance. I thought it sounded like jazz.”

“Did you recognize the tune?”

“Not me. I’m strictly prog rock and the nineteenth-century romantics,” said Dr. Walid. “Did you?”

“It’s ‘Body and Soul,’ ” I said. “It’s from the 1930s.”

“Who played it?”

“Just about everybody,” I said. “It’s one of the great jazz classics.”

“You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?”

I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.”

Jazz had certainly done its best for my father.

YOU DON’T get vestigia on a body like that without some serious magic, which meant either somebody did something magical to Cyrus Wilkinson or he was a user himself. Nightingale called civilians who used magic practitioners; according to him practitioners, even amateurs, frequently leave evidence of their “practice” at their homes, so I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr. Wilkinson’s driver’s license to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.

His house was a two-story Edwardian terrace on the “right” side of Tooting Bec Road. This was VW Golf country with a couple of Audis and a BMW to raise the tone a little. I parked on a yellow line and walked up the street. A fluorescent orange Honda Civic caught my eye — not only did it have the sad little 1.4 VTEC engine but there was a woman in the driver’s seat watching the address. I made a mental note of the car’s index before I opened the cast-iron gate, walked up the short path, and rang the doorbell. For a moment I smelled broken wood and cement dust but then the door opened and I lost interest in anything else.

She was unfashionably curved, plump and sexy in a baggy sky blue Shetland sweater. She had a pale pretty face and a mess of brown hair that would have fallen halfway down her back if it hadn’t been tied up in a crude bundle at the back of her head. Her eyes were chocolate brown and her mouth was big, full-lipped, and turned down at the corners. She asked me who I was and I identified myself.

“And what can I do for you, Constable?” she asked. Her accent was cut glass almost to the point of parody. When she spoke I expected a Spitfire to go zooming over our heads.

“Is this Cyrus Wilkinson’s house?” I asked.

“I’m rather afraid it was, Constable,” she said.

I asked who she was — politely.

“Simone Fitzwilliam,” she said and stuck out her hand. I took it automatically; her palm was soft, warm. I smelled honeysuckle. I asked if I could come in, and she stood aside to let me enter.

The house had been built for the aspirational lower middle class so the hallway was narrow but well proportioned. It still had its original black-and-white tiles, though, and a scruffy but antique oak hall cupboard. Simone led me into the living room. I noticed that she had sturdy but well-shaped legs under the black leggings she wore. The house had undergone the standard gentrification package, front room knocked through into the dining room, original oak floorboards sanded down, varnished, and covered in rugs. The furniture looked John Lewis, expensive, comfortable, and unimaginative. The plasma TV was conventionally large and hooked up to Sky and a Blu-ray player; the nearest shelves held DVDs, not books. A reproduction Monet hung over where the fireplace would have been if it hadn’t been ripped out sometime in the last hundred years.

“What was your relationship with Mr. Wilkinson?” I asked.

“He was my lover,” she said.

The stereo was a boring high-end Hitachi, strictly CD and solid state — no turntable at all. There were a couple of racks of CDs, Wes Montgomery, Dewey Redman, Stan Getz; the rest were a random selection of hits from the 1990s.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if I can.”

“Is that entirely necessary, Constable?” she asked.

“We often investigate cases where the circumstances surrounding the death are unclear,” I said. Actually we, that is the police, don’t investigate unless foul play is bleeding obvious or if the Home Office has recently issued a directive insisting that we prioritize whatever the crime du jour was for the duration of the current news cycle.

“Are they unclear?” asked Simone. “I understood poor Cyrus had a heart attack.” She sat down on a pastel blue sofa and gestured for me to take my place on the matching armchair. “Isn’t that what they call natural causes?” Her eyes glistened and she rubbed at them with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Constable,” she said.

I told her to call me Peter, which you are just not supposed to do at this stage of an inquiry — I could practically hear Leslie yelling at me all the way from the Essex coast. She still didn’t offer me a cup of tea, though — I guess it just wasn’t my day.

Simone smiled. “Thank you, Peter. You can ask your questions.”

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

“Modal, bebop, or mainstream?” I asked, showing off.

“West Coast cool,” she said. “Although he wasn’t averse to a bit of hard bop when the occasion called for it.”

“Do you play?”

“Lord no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly inflict my ghastly lack of talent upon an audience. One needs to know one’s limitations. I am a keen listener, though — Cyrus appreciated that.”

“Were you listening that night?”

“Of course,” she said. “Front-row seat, although that isn’t hard in a tiny little place like the Spice of Life. They were playing ‘Midnight Sun,’ Cyrus finished his solo and just sat down on the monitor, I did think he was a bit flushed, and then he fell over on his side and that’s when we all realized that something was wrong.”

She stopped and looked away from me, her hands balling into fists. I waited a bit and asked some dull routine questions to center her again — did she know what time he’d collapsed, who’d called the ambulance, and did she stay with him the whole time? I jotted down the answers in my notebook.

“I wanted to go in the ambulance, I really did, but before I knew it they’d whisked him away. Jimmy gave me a lift to the hospital but by the time I got there it was too late.”

“Jimmy?” I asked.

“Jimmy’s the drummer, very nice man, Scottish I think.”

“Can you give me his full name?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can,” said Simone. “Isn’t that awful. I’ve just always thought of him as Jimmy the drummer.”

I asked who else was in the band but she could only remember them as Max the bass and Danny the piano.

“You must think I’m an awful person,” she said. “I’m certain I must know their names but I just can’t seem to recall them. Perhaps it’s Cyrus dying like that, perhaps it’s like shell shock.”

I asked whether Cyrus had suffered from any recent illnesses or health conditions. Simone said not. Nor did she know the name of his GP, although she assured me that she could dig it out of his papers if it was important. I made a note to ask Dr. Walid to track it down for me.

I felt I’d asked enough questions to cover the real reason for the visit and asked, as innocuously as I could, if I might have a quick look around the rest of the house. Normally the mere presence of a policeman is enough to make the most law-abiding citizen feel vaguely guilty and therefore reluctant to let you clomp your size elevens around their home, so it was a bit of a surprise when Simone just waved at the hallway and told me to help myself.

Upstairs was pretty much what I’d expected, master bedroom at the front, second bedroom at the back that was being used, judging from the cleared floor and the music stands lined up against the wall, as a music room. They’d sacrificed the usual half bedroom to expand the bathroom to allow for a tub, shower, bidet and toilet combo, tiled with pale blue ceramics with an embossed fleur de lys pattern. The bathroom cupboard was the standard one-quarter male, three-quarters female ratio; he favored double-bladed disposables and aftershave gel, she did a lot of depilation and shopped at Superdrug. Nothing indicated that either of them were dabbling in the esoteric arts.

In the master bedroom both fitted wardrobes were wide open and a trail of half-folded clothes led from there to where two suitcases lay open on the bed. Grief, like cancer, hits people at different rates, but even so I thought it was a bit early for her to be packing up her beloved Cyrus’s things. Then I spotted a pair of hipsters that no self-respecting jazz man would wear and I realized that Simone was packing her own things, which I found equally suspicious. I listened to make sure she wasn’t coming up the stairs and had a poke through the underwear drawers but got nothing except a vague sense of being really unprofessional.

The music room at least had more character. There were framed posters of Miles Davis and Art Pepper on the walls and shelves stuffed with sheet music. I’d saved the music room for last because I wanted a sense of what Nightingale called the house’s sensis illic, and what I called background vestigium, before I entered what was clearly Cyrus Wilkinson’s inner sanctum. I did get a flash of “Body and Soul” and, mingled with Simone’s honeysuckle perfume, the smell of dust and cut wood again, but it was muted and elusive. Unlike the rest of the house, the music room had bookshelves holding more than photographs and amusingly expensive mementos of foreign holidays. I figured that anyone looking to become a practitioner outside official channels would have to work their way through a lot of occult rubbish before they stumbled on proper magic — if such a thing was possible. At least some of those books should have been on the shelves but Cyrus had nothing like that on his, not even Aleister Crowley’s Book of Lies, which is always good for a laugh if nothing else. In fact they looked a lot like my dad’s bookshelves: mainly jazz biographies, Straight Life, Bird Lives, with a few early Dick Francis novels thrown in for variety.

“Have you found something?” Simone was in the doorway.

“Not yet,” I said. I’d been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk-dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I’d like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.

“I don’t wish to hurry you,” said Simone. “Only I’d already ordered a taxi before you came and you know how these chaps hate to be kept waiting.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just to stay with my sisters,” she said. “Until I find my feet.”

I asked for her address and wrote it down when she told me. Surprisingly it was in Soho, on Berwick Street. “I know,” she said when she saw my expression. “They’re rather bohemian.”

“Did Cyrus have any other properties, a lockup, a garden maybe?”

“Not that I know of,” she said and then she laughed. “Cyrus digging a garden — what an extraordinary notion.”

I thanked her for her time, and she saw me to the door.

“Thank you for everything, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been most kind.”

There was enough of a reflection in the side window for me to see that the Honda Civic was still parked opposite the house and the woman driver was staring right at us. When I turned away from the door, she jerked her face around and pretended to be reading the stickers on the back of the car in front. She risked a glance back, only to find me bearing down on her from across the street. I saw her panic in her embarrassment and vacillate between starting the engine and getting out. When I knocked on the window she flinched. I showed her my warrant card, and she stared at it in confusion. You get that about half the time, mainly because most members of the public have never seen a warrant card close up and have no idea what the hell it is. Eventually she twigged and buzzed down her window.

“Could you step out of the car please, madam,” I asked.

She nodded and got out. She was short, slender, and well dressed in an off-the-rack but good-quality turquoise skirt suit. An estate agent, I thought, or something customer facing like PR or big-ticket retail. When dealing with the police most people lean against their cars for moral support, but she didn’t, although she did fiddle with the ring on her left hand and push her hair back behind her ears.

“I was just waiting in the car,” she said. “Is there a problem?”

I asked for her driver’s license and she surrendered it meekly. If you ask a random member of the public for their name and address, not only do they frequently lie to you, but they don’t even have to give it unless you report them for an offense and you have to fill in a receipt to prove that you’re not unfairly singling out blond estate agents. If, however, you make them think it’s a traffic stop, then they cheerfully hand over their driver’s license, which lists their name, including any embarrassing middle names, their address and their date of birth — all of which I noted down. Her name was Melinda Abbott, she was born in 1980, and her address was the one I’d just left.

“Is this your current address?” I asked as I handed her license back.

“Sort of,” she said. “It was and as it happens I’m just waiting to get it back now. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s part of an ongoing investigation,” I said. “Do you happen to know a man called Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“He’s my fiancé,” she said and gave me a hard look. “Has something happened to Cyrus?”

There are ACPo-approved guidelines for breaking the news to loved ones and they don’t include blurting it out in the middle of the street. I asked if she’d like to sit in the car with me, but she wasn’t having any of it.

“You’d better tell me now,” she said.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” I said.

Anybody who’s ever watched The Bill or Casualty knows what that means. Melinda started back then caught herself. She nearly lost it, but then I saw it all being sucked back behind the mask of her face.

“When?” she asked.

“Two nights ago,” I said. “It was a heart attack.”

She looked at me stupidly. “A heart attack?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She nodded. “Why are you here?” she asked.

I was saved from having to lie because a mini cab pulled up outside the house and honked its horn. Melinda turned, stared at the front door, and was rewarded when Simone emerged carrying her two suitcases. The driver, showing an uncharacteristic level of chivalry, rushed smartly over to take the cases from her and loaded them into the back of his cab while she locked the front door — both the Yale and the Chubb, I noticed.

“You bitch,” shouted Melinda.

Simone ignored her and headed for the cab, which had exactly the effect on Melinda that I expected it to have. “Yes you,” she shouted. “He’s dead, you bitch. And you couldn’t even be fucking bothered to tell me. That’s my house, you fat slag.”

Simone looked up at that, and at first I didn’t think she’d recognized who Melinda was, but then she nodded to herself and absently threw the house keys in our general direction. They landed at Melinda’s feet.

I know ballistic when I see it coming and so I already had my hand around her upper arm before she could rush across the street and try to kick the shit out of Simone. Maintaining the Queen’s Peace — that’s what it’s all about. For a skinny little thing Melinda wasn’t half strong and I ended up having to use both hands as she screamed abuse over my shoulder, making my ears ring.

“Would you like me to arrest you?” I asked. That’s an old police trick: If you just warn people they often just ignore you, but if you ask them a question then they have to think about it. Once they start to think about the consequences they almost always calm down, unless they’re drunk of course, or stoned, or aged between fourteen and twenty-one, or Glaswegian.

Fortunately it had the desired effect on Melinda, who paused in her screaming long enough for the mini cab to drive away. Once I was sure she wasn’t going to attack me out of frustration, an occupational hazard if you’re the police, I bent down, retrieved the keys, and put them in her hands.

“Is there someone you can call?” I asked. “Someone who’ll come around and stay with you for a bit?”

She shook her head. “I’m just going to wait in my car,” she said. “Thank you.”

Don’t thank me, ma’am, I didn’t say, I’m just doing … Who knew what I was doing? I doubted I could get anything useful from her that evening so I left well enough alone.

SOMETIMES AFTER a hard day’s work nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it — no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule. One side of the embankment had suffered from an outbreak of modernism in the 1960s but I kept my back to their dull concrete façades and instead watched the sun setting fire to the tops of Millbank Tower and the Palace of Westminster. The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

Officially I belong to ESC9, which stands for Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, otherwise known as the Folly, also known as the unit that nice well-brought-up coppers don’t talk about in polite company. There’s no point trying to remember ESC9 because the Metropolitan Police has a reorganization once every four years and all the names change. That’s why the Commercial Robberies Unit of the Serious and Organized Crime Group has been called the Flying Squad since its introduction in 1920 or the Sweeney if you want to establish your cockney geezer credentials. That’s Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad in case you were wondering.

Unlike the Sweeney, the Folly is easy to overlook: partly because we do stuff nobody likes to talk about, but mostly because we have no discernible budget. No budget means no bureaucratic scrutiny and therefore no paper trail. It also helps that up until January this year it had a personnel complement of one: a certain Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Despite doubling the staffing levels when I joined and catching up on a good ten years of unprocessed paperwork, we maintain a stealthy presence within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police. Thus we pass among the other coppers in a mysterious way, our duties to perform.

One of our duties is the investigation of unsanctioned wizards and other magical practitioners, but I didn’t think that Cyrus Wilkinson had been a practitioner of anything except a superior saxophone. I also doubted he’d killed himself with the traditional jazz cocktail of drugs and drink, but confirmation would have to wait for the tox screen. Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it — at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

Across the river a catamaran pulled away from the Millbank Pier in a roar of diesel. I bundled up the kebab paper and dumped it in a rubbish bin. I climbed back into the Jag, started her up, and pulled out into the twilight.

At some point I was going to have to hit the library back at the Folly and look for historical cases. Polidori was usually good for lurid stuff involving drink and debauchery. Probably from all the time he spent off his head with Byron and the Shelleys by Lake Geneva. If anyone knew about untimely and unnatural deaths it was Polidori, who literally wrote the book on the subject just before drinking cyanide — it’s called An Investigation into Unnatural Deaths in London in the Years 1768–1810 and it weighs over two pounds — I just hoped that reading it didn’t drive me to suicide too.

It was late evening by the time I reached the Folly and parked up the Jag in the coach house. Toby started barking as soon as I opened the back door and he came skittering across the marble floor of the atrium to hurl himself at my shins. Molly glided in from the direction of the kitchens like the winner of the world all-comers creepy gothic Lolita contest. I ignored Toby’s yapping and asked whether Nightingale was awake. Molly gave me the slight head tilt that meant “no” and then an inquiring look.

Molly served as the Folly’s housekeeper, cook, and rodent exterminator. She never speaks, has too many teeth and a taste for raw meat, but I try never to hold that against her or let her get between me and the exit.

“I’m knackered — I’m going straight to bed,” I said.

Molly glanced at Toby and then at me.

“I’ve been working all day,” I said.

Molly gave me the head tilt that meant “I don’t care, if you don’t take the smelly little thing out for his walk you can be the one who cleans up after him.”

Toby paused in his barking long enough to give me a hopeful look.

“Where’s his lead?” I asked.