Moon Over Soho

Chapter 2 The Spice of Life

THE GENERAL public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you’ve generated some sort of urgent lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life — like drinking and sleeping and, if you’re lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice. And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn’t also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England. Which meant I spent my spare time learning magic, studying dead languages, and reading books like Essays on the Metaphysical by John “never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like” Cartwright.

And learning magic, of course — which is what makes the whole thing worthwhile.

This is a spell: Lux iactus scindere — say it quietly, say it loudly, say it with conviction in the middle of a thunderstorm while striking a dramatic pose — nothing will happen. That’s because the words are just labels for the forma that you make in your mind; lux to make the light and scindere to fix it in place. If you do this particular spell right it creates a light source in a fixed position. If you do it wrong it can burn a hole through a lab table.

“You know,” said Nightingale, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before.”

I gave the bench a last squirt with the CO₂ extinguisher and bent down to see whether the floor under the table was still intact. There was a burn mark but luckily no crater.

“It keeps getting away from me,” I said.

Nightingale stood up out of his wheelchair and had a look for himself. He moved carefully and favored his right side. If he was still wearing bandages on his shoulder they were hidden under a crisp lilac shirt that had last been fashionable during the abdication crisis. Molly was busily feeding him up, but to me he still looked pale and thin. He caught me staring,

“I wish you and Molly would stop watching me like that,” he said. “I’m well on the road to recovery. I’ve been shot before, so I know what I’m talking about.”

“Shall I give it another go?”

“No,” said Nightingale. “The problem is obviously with scindere. I thought you’d progressed through that too swiftly. Tomorrow we’re going to start to relearn that forma and then once I’m certain of your mastery we’ll return to this spell.”

“Oh joy,” I said.

“This isn’t unusual.” Nightingale’s voice was low and reassuring. “You have to get the foundations of the art right or everything you build on top will be crooked, not to mention unstable. There are no shortcuts in wizardry, Peter. If there were, everyone would be doing it.”

Probably on Britain’s Got Talent, I thought, but you don’t say these things to Nightingale because he doesn’t have a sense of humor about the art and only used the telly for watching rugby.

I assumed the attentive look of the dutiful apprentice but Nightingale wasn’t fooled.

“Tell me about your dead musician,” he said.

I laid out the facts with emphasis on the intensity of the vestigia Dr. Walid and I had felt around the body.

“Did he feel it as strongly as you did?” asked Nightingale.

I shrugged. “It’s vestigia, boss,” I said. “It was strong enough for both of us to hear a melody. That’s got to be suspicious.”

“It’s suspicious,” he said and settled back down in his wheelchair with a frown. “But is it a crime?”

“The statute only says that you have to unlawfully kill someone under the Queen’s Peace with malice aforethought. It doesn’t say anything about how you do it.” I’d checked in Blackstone’s Police Manual before coming down for breakfast that morning.

“I’ll be interested to see the Crown Prosecution Service argue that in front of a jury,” he said. “In the first instance you’ll need to prove that he was killed by magic and then find out who was capable of doing it and making it look like natural causes.”

“Could you do it?” I asked.

Nightingale had to think about that. “I think so,” he said. “I’d have to spend a while in the library first. It would be a very powerful spell, and it’s possible that the music you’re hearing is a practitioner’s signare — his involuntary signature.” Because, just as the old telegraph operators could identify one another from the way each one tapped their key, so every practitioner casts a spell in a style unique to themselves.

“Do I have a signature?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Nightingale. “When you practice, things have an alarming tendency to catch fire.”

“Seriously, boss.”

“It’s too early for you to have a signare but another practitioner would certainly know that you were my apprentice,” said Nightingale. “Assuming he’d ever seen my work, of course.”

“Are there other practitioners out there?” I asked.

Nightingale shifted in his wheelchair. “There are some survivors from the prewar mob,” he said. “But apart from them, you and I are the last of the classically trained wizards. Or at least you will be if you ever concentrate long enough to be trained.”

“Could it have been one of these survivors?”

“Not if jazz was part of the signare.”

And therefore probably not one of their apprentices either — if they had apprentices.

“If it wasn’t one of your mob …”

“Our mob,” said Nightingale. “You swore an oath, that makes you one of us.”

“If it wasn’t one of our mob, who else could do it?”

Nightingale smiled. “One of your riverine friends would have the power,” he said.

That made me pause. There were two gods of the River Thames and both of them had their own fractious children, one for each tributary. They certainly had power — I’d personally witnessed Beverley Brook flooding out Covent Garden, incidentally saving my life and that of a family of German tourists in the process.

“But Father Thames wouldn’t operate below Teddington Lock,” said Nightingale. “And Mama Thames wouldn’t risk the agreement with us. If Tyburn wanted you dead she’d do it through the courts. While Fleet would humiliate you to death in the media. And Brent is too young. Finally, leaving aside that Soho is on the wrong side of the river, if Effra was going to kill you with music it wouldn’t be with jazz.”

Not when she’s practically the patron saint of UK Grime, I thought. “Are there other people?” I asked. “Other things?”

“It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But I’d concentrate on determining how before I worried too much about whom.”

“Any advice?”

“You could start,” said Nightingale, “by visiting the scene of the crime.”

MUCH TO the frustration of the ruling class, who like their cities to be clean, ordered, and to have good lines of fire, London has never responded well to grandiose planning projects. Not even after it was razed to the ground in 1666. Mind you this hasn’t stopped people from trying, and in the 1880s the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to facilitate better communications both north and south and east and west. That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in the process, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous. Where the avenue and the road crossed became Cambridge Circus and on the west side today stands the Palace Theatre, in all its late-Victorian gingerbread glory. Next to that, and built in the same style, stands what was once the George and Dragon Public House but was now named the Spice of Life. According to its own publicity — London’s premier spot for jazz.

Back when my old man was on the scene the Spice of Life wasn’t a happening place for jazz. It was, according to him, strictly for geezers in roll-necked sweaters and goatees reading poetry and listening to folk music. Bob Dylan played there a couple of times in the 1960s and so did Mick Jagger. But none of that meant anything to my dad, who always said that rock and roll was all right for those who needed help following a beat.

Up until that lunchtime I’d never so much as been inside the Spice of Life. Before I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I drank in, and after I was a copper it wasn’t the kind of pub I arrested people in.

I’d timed my visit to avoid the lunchtime rush, which meant the crowds milling around the circus were mainly tourists and the inside of the pub was pleasantly cool, dim, and empty, with just a whiff of cleaning products fighting with years of spilled beer. I wanted to get a feel for the place and I decided the most natural way to do that was to stand at the bar and have a beer, but because I was on duty I kept it to a half. Unlike a lot of London pubs the Spice of Life had managed to hang on to its brass-and-polished-wood interior without slipping into kitsch. I stood at the bar to drink my half and as I took my first sip I flashed on horse sweat and the sound of hammers ringing on an anvil, shouting and laughter, a distant woman’s scream and the smell of tobacco — pretty standard for a Central London pub.

The sons of Mūsā ibn Shākir were bright and bold and if they hadn’t been Muslims would have probably gone on to be the patron saints of techno-geeks. They’re famous for their ninth-century Baghdad bestseller, a compendium of ingenious mechanical devices that they imaginatively titled Kitab al-Hiyal — The Book of Ingenious Devices. In it they describe what is possibly the first practical device for measuring differential pressure, and that’s where the problem really starts. In 1593 Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promulgating heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833 Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionizing radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop. The story of how we measure the physical universe is the history of science itself.

And what do Nightingale and I have to measure vestigia with? Sod all, and it’s not even as if we know what we’re trying to measure in the first place. No wonder the heirs of Isaac Newton kept magic safely under their periwigs. I had jokingly developed my own scale for vestigia based on the amount of noise Toby made when he interacted with any residual magic. I called it a yap, one yap being enough vestigia to be apparent even when I wasn’t looking for it.

The yap would be an SI unit, of course, and thus the standard background ambience of a Central London pub was 0.2 of a yap (0.2Y) or 200 milliyaps (200mY). Having established that to my satisfaction I finished the half-pint and headed downstairs to the basement, where they kept the jazz.

A set of creaky stairs led down to the Backstage Bar, a roughly octagonal room, low-ceilinged and punctuated with stout cream-colored columns that had to be load bearing because they certainly didn’t add to the sight lines. As I stood in the doorway and tried to get a feel for any magical ambience, I realized that my own childhood was about to interfere with my investigation.

In 1986 Courtney Pine released Journey to the Urge Within and suddenly jazz was back in fashion and with it came my dad’s third and last brush with fame and fortune. I never went to gigs, but during the school holidays he used to take me with him on visits to clubs and recording studios. Some things linger even from before conscious memory — old beer, tobacco smoke, the sound a trumpet makes when its player is just getting it warmed up. You could have two hundred kiloyaps of vestigia in that basement and I wouldn’t have been able to separate them from my own memories.

I should have brought Toby. He would have been more use. I stepped over to the stage in the hope that proximity might help.

My dad always said that a trumpet player likes to aim his weapon at the audience, but a sax man likes to cut a good profile and that he always has a favorite side. It being an article of faith with my dad that you don’t even pick up a reed instrument unless you’re vain about the shape your face makes when you’re blowing down it. I stood on the stage and adopted some classic sax-player stances, and as I did I began to feel something, stage front and right, a little tingle and the melody line of “Body and Soul” played far away, piercing and bittersweet.

“Got you,” I said.

Since all I had to go on was the magical echo of one particular jazz tune, I figured it was time to find out precisely which of several hundred cover versions of “Body and Soul” it was. What I needed was a jazz expert so obsessed that the subject had consumed him to the point where he neglected his health, his marriage, and his own children.

It was time to go see my old man.

MUCH AS I love the Jag, it’s too conspicuous for everyday police work. So that day I was driving a battered silver ex–Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stakeouts and wet dog. I had it stashed up Romilly Street with my magic police business talisman in the window to ward off traffic wardens. I’d taken the Asbo to a friend of mine who’d tuned up its Volvo engine and gotten me a satisfactory bit of zip, which came in handy dodging the bendy buses on Tottenham Court Road as I drove north for Kentish Town.

Every Londoner has their manor — a collection of bits of the city where they feel comfortable. Where you live, or went to college, where you work or your sports club, that particular bit of the West End where you go drinking or, if you’re the police, the patrol area around your nick. If you’re a native-born Londoner — and contrary to what you’ve heard, we are the majority — then the strongest bit of your manor is where you grew up. There’s a particular kind of safety that comes from being on the streets where you went to school, had your first snog, or drink, or threw up your first chicken vindaloo. I grew up in Kentish Town, which as an area would count as a leafy suburb if it was leafier and more suburban. And if it had fewer council estates. One such is the Peckwater Estate, my ancestral seat, which had been built just as architects were coming to terms with the idea that proles might enjoy indoor plumbing and the occasional bath but before they realized that said proles might like to have more than one child per family. Perhaps they thought three bedrooms would only encourage breeding among the working class.

One advantage it did have was a courtyard that had been turned over to parking. There I found a clear bay between a Toyota Aygo and a battered secondhand Mercedes with a criminally mismatched side panel. I pulled in, got out, beeped the lock behind me, and walked away secure in the knowledge that because they knew me around here they weren’t going to jack my car. That’s what being on your manor is all about. Although, to be honest, I suspect the local roughnecks were much more scared of my mum than they were of me. The worst I could do was arrest them.

Strangely, I heard music when I opened the front door to my parents’ flat — “The Way You Look Tonight,” played solo on a keyboard, coming from the main bedroom. My mum was lying on the good sofa in the living room. Her eyes were closed and she was still in her work clothes — jeans, gray sweatshirt, paisley headscarf. I was shocked to see that the stereo was silent and even the TV was switched off. The TV in my parents’ house is never switched off — not even for funerals. Especially not for funerals.

“Mum?”

Without opening her eyes, she put her finger to her lips and then pointed toward the bedroom.

“Is that Dad?” I asked.

My mum’s lips curved up into a slow blissful smile that was familiar to me only from old photographs. My dad’s third and last revival in the early 1990s had ended when he’d lost his lip just before a live appearance on BBC Two, after which I didn’t hear Mum speak more than two words to my dad for a year and a half. I think she took it personally. The only time I’ve seen her more upset was Princess Diana’s funeral, but I think she sort of enjoyed that more — in a cathartic way.

The music continued, searching and heartfelt. I remember my mum, inspired by a repeat viewing of The Buena Vista Social Club, buying Dad a keyboard, but I didn’t remember him learning to play it.

I went into the narrow slot of a kitchen and made us a cup of tea as the tune concluded. I heard my mum shift on the sofa and sigh. I don’t actually like jazz that much, but I spent enough of my childhood as my dad’s vinyl wallah, ferrying disks from his collection to his turntable when he wasn’t well, to know the good stuff when I hear it. Dad was playing the good stuff — “All Blues” now — but not doing anything too smart arse with it, just letting the melancholy beauty shine through. I went back through and put my mum’s tea down on the simulated walnut coffee table, then sat down to watch her listen to my dad’s playing while it lasted.

It didn’t last forever, or even remotely long enough. How could it? We heard Dad slip off the line and then crash to a halt. Mum sighed and sat up.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’ve come to see Dad,” I said.

“Good.” She took a sip of her tea. “This is cold,” she said and thrust the mug in my direction. “Make me another.”

My dad emerged while I was in the kitchen. I heard him greet Mum and then a strange sucking sound that I realized with a start was the sound of them kissing. I almost spilled the tea.

“Stop it,” I heard my mum whisper. “Peter is here.”

My dad stuck his head into the kitchen. “This can’t be good,” he said. “Any chance of a cuppa too?”

I showed him that I already had another mug out.

“Outstanding,” he said.

When I had them both supplied with tea Dad asked me why I’d come around. They had reason to be a bit cautious, since the last time I’d turned up unexpectedly I’d just burned down Covent Garden Market — sort of.

“I’ve got some jazz stuff I need your help with,” I said.

My dad gave me a pleased smile. “Step into my office,” he said. “The jazz doctor is in.”

If the living room belonged to my mum and her extended family, then the main bedroom belonged to my dad and his record collection. Family legend said that the walls had once been painted a creamy light brown but now every inch had been colonized by Dad’s steel-bracketed stripped-pine shelves. Every shelf was filled with vinyl records all carefully stored in vertical ranks out of the sunlight. Since I’d moved out, my mum’s sprawling BHS wardrobe had migrated into my old room along with the bulk of her shoe collection. This left just enough room for the queen-sized bed, a full-sized electric keyboard, and my dad’s stereo.

I told him what I was looking for and he started pulling out records. We began, as I knew we would, with Coleman Hawkins’s famous 1938 take for Bluebird. It was a waste of time, of course, because Hawkins barely goes near the actual melody. But I let my dad enjoy it all the way through before I pointed this out.

“It was old-school, Dad. The one I heard. It had a proper melody and everything.”

Dad grunted and dipped into a cardboard box full of 78s to pull out a plain brown cardboard sleeve repaired at three edges with masking tape, containing the Benny Goodman Trio on shellac, with a Victor black-and-gold label. He has a Garrard turntable that has a 78 setting but you have to swap out the cartridge first — I laboriously removed the Ortofon and went looking for the Stanton. It was still kept where I remembered it, on the one clear bit of shelf behind the stereo, lying on its back to protect the stylus. While I fiddled with the tiny screwdriver and got the cartridge mounted, Dad carefully slipped the disk out and inspected it with a happy smile. He passed it to me. It had the surprising heft of a 78, much heavier than an LP; anyone weaned exclusively on CDs probably wouldn’t have been able to lift it. I took the edges of the heavy black disk between my palms and placed it carefully on the turntable.

It hissed and popped as soon as the needle hit the groove and through that I heard Goodman make his intro on the clarinet. Then Teddy Wilson soloed on piano, then Benny on clarinet again. Luckily, Krupa on drums kept a low profile. This was much closer to the tune poor dead Mr. Wilkinson was playing.

“Later than that,” I said.

“That won’t be difficult,” said Dad. “This was only recorded five years after it was written.”

We sampled a couple more on 78 including a 1940 Billie Holiday take that we left on just because Lady Day is one of the few things Dad and I truly have in common. It was beautiful and sad, and that helped me realize what I was missing.

“It’s got to be more upbeat,” I said. “It was a bigger combo and it had more swing.”

“Swing?” asked my dad. “This is ‘Body and Soul’ we’re talking about, it’s never been noted for its swing.”

“Come on, Dad, someone must have done a more swinging version — if only for the white folks,” I said.

“Less of that, you cheeky bastard,” said Dad. “Still, I think I know what we might be looking for.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a rectangle of plastic and glass.

“You’ve got an iPhone,” I said.

“iPod touch actually,” he said. “It’s not a bad sound.” This from a man who ran a fifty-year-old Quad amp because it had valves rather than transistors. He passed me the earpieces and slid his finger around the screen like he’d been using a touch control all his life. “Listen to this,” he said.

There it was, digitally remastered but still with enough hiss and pop to keep the purists happy. “Body and Soul,” clear melody and just enough swing to make it danceable. If it wasn’t what I’d heard off the body then it was definitely played by the same band.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Ken Johnson,” said Dad. “Old Snakehips himself. This is off Blitzkrieg Babies and Bands, some nice transfers from shellac. The liner notes say that it’s ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson on trumpet. But it’s obviously Dave Wilkins, because the fingering’s all different.”

“When was it recorded?”

“The original seventy-eight was cut in 1939 at the Decca Studios in West Hampstead,” said Dad. He looked at me keenly. “Is this part of a case? Last time you came over you weren’t half going on about some strange stuff.”

I wasn’t going down that road. “What’s with the keyboard?”

“I’m revitalizing my career,” he said. “I plan to be the next Oscar Peterson.”

“Really?” That was unexpectedly cocky — even for my dad.

“Really,” he said and shifted around on the bed until he could reach the keyboard. He played a couple of bars of “Body and Soul,” stating the melody before vamping and then taking the line in a direction that I’ve never been able to follow or appreciate. He looked disappointed at my reaction — he keeps hoping that I’ll grow into it one day. On the other hand my dad had an iPod so who knows what might happen.

“What happened to Ken Johnson?”

“He was killed in the Blitz,” said Dad. “Like Al Bowlly and Lorna Savage. Ted Heath told me that sometimes they thought Göring had it in for the jazzmen. Said he felt safer during the war doing tours in North Africa than he did playing gigs in London.”

I doubted I was searching for the vengeful spirit of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, but it wouldn’t hurt to check just in case.

Mum turfed us out of the bedroom so she could change. I made more tea and we sat in the living room.

“Next thing I know,” said Dad, “I’ll be looking for gigs.”

“With you on keyboard?”

“The line is the line,” said Dad. “The instrument is just the instrument.”

The jazzman lives to play.

My mum came out of the bedroom in a sleeveless yellow sundress and no headscarf. She had her hair quartered and twisted into the big plaits that made my dad grin. When I was a kid, Mum used to relax her hair every six weeks like clockwork. In fact, every weekend saw someone — an aunt, a cousin, a girl from down the road — sitting in the living room and chemically burning her hair straight. If I hadn’t gotten off at the year-ten disco with Maggie Porter, whose dad was a dread and whose mum sold car insurance, and who wore her hair in locks, I might have reached adulthood thinking that a black girl’s hair naturally smelled of potassium hydroxide. Now, personally I’m like my dad — I fancy it au naturel or in braids — but the first rule about a black woman’s hair is you don’t talk about a black woman’s hair. And the second rule is you don’t ever touch a black woman’s hair without getting written permission first. And that includes after sex, marriage, or death for that matter. This courtesy is not reciprocated.

“You need a haircut,” said Mum. And by haircut she meant, of course, shaved short enough for my scalp to tan. I promised her that I’d take care of it, and she stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.

“I was a war baby,” said Dad. “Your nan was evacuated before she had me and that’s why my birth certificate says Cardiff. Luckily for you she unevacuated us back to Stepney before the end of the war.” Or we might have been Welsh, in my dad’s eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

He said that growing up in the London of the late 1940s it was like the war was still going on in people’s heads, what with the bomb sites, the rationing, and the patronizing voices of the BBC Home Service. “Minus the high explosives of course,” said Dad. “In them days people still talked about Bowlly getting blown up on Jermyn Street or Glen Miller’s plane going missing in ’44. Did you know he was a proper American air force major?” said Dad. “To this day he’s still listed as Missing in Action.”

But to be young and talented in the 1950s was to live on the cusp of change. “First time I heard ‘Body and Soul’ was at the Flamingo Club,” Dad said. “It was being played by Ronnie Scott just when he was becoming Ronnie Scott. The Flamingo Club in the late ’50s was a magnet for black airmen down from Lakenheath and other U.S. bases.

“They wanted our women,” said Dad. “And we wanted their records. They always had the latest stuff. It was a match made in heaven.”

Mum came in with dinner. We were always a two-pot family, one for Mum and a considerably less spicy pot for Dad. He also likes slices of white bread and marge rather than rice, which would be just asking for heart trouble if he weren’t as skinny as a rake to start with. I was a two-pot child, both rice and white bread, which explains my chiseled good looks and manly physique.

Mum’s pot was cassava leaf while Dad had lamb casserole. I opted for the lamb that evening because I’ve never liked cassava leaf, especially when Mum drowns it in palm oil. She uses so much pepper that her soup turns red and I swear it’s only a matter of time before one of her dinner guests spontaneously combusts. We ate off the big glass coffee table in the middle of the living room with a plastic bottle of Highland Spring at its center. There were pink paper napkins and bread sticks in cellophane wrappers that Mum had swiped from her latest cleaning job. I marged up some bread for Dad.

As we ate I caught my mum looking at me. “What?” I asked.

“Why can’t you play like your father?” she asked.

“Because I can sing like my mother,” I said. “But fortunately I cook like Jamie Oliver.”

She gave me a smack on the leg. “You’re not so big I can’t beat you,” she said.

“Yeah, but I’m so much faster than I used to be,” I said.

I actually don’t remember the last time I sat down with Mum and Dad for a meal, at least not without half a dozen relatives present. I’m not even sure it happened that much when I was a kid. There was always an auntie, an uncle, or an evil LEGO-stealing younger cousin, not that I’m bitter, in the house.

When I brought this up, Mum pointed out that said LEGO-stealing cousin had just commenced an engineering degree at Sussex. Good, I thought, she can jack somebody else’s LEGO. I pointed out that I was officially a detective constable now and working for a hush-hush branch of the Metropolitan Police.

“What do you do there?” she asked.

“It’s secret, Mum,” I said. “If I tell you I have to kill you.”

“He does magic,” said my dad.

“You shouldn’t keep secrets from your mum,” she said.

“You don’t believe in magic, do you, Mum?”

“You shouldn’t make jokes about these things,” she said. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.”

“It’s got all the best questions, though,” I said.

“You are not doing these witchcraft things, are you?” Suddenly she was serious. “I worry about you enough as it is.”

“I promise I am not consorting with any evil spirits or any other kind of supernatural entity,” I said. Not least because the supernatural entity I’d have most liked to consort with was currently living in exile up the river at the court of Father Thames. It was one of those tragic relationships: I’m a junior policeman, she’s the goddess of a suburban river in South London — it was never going to work out.

Once we were finished, I volunteered for the washing up. While I was using half a bottle of Sainsbury’s own brand washing-up liquid to scrub off the palm oil, I could hear my parents talking in the next room. The TV was still off and my mum hadn’t spoken to anyone on the phone for over three hours — it was beginning to get a little bit Fringe. When I finished, I stepped out to find them sitting side by side on the sofa holding hands. I asked if they wanted more tea, but they said no and gave me strange identical, slightly distant smiles. I realized with a start that they were dying for me to leave so they could go to bed. I quickly grabbed my coat, kissed my mum good-bye, and practically ran out of the house. There are some things a young man does not want to think about.

I was in the lift when I got a call from Dr. Walid.

“Have you seen my email yet?” he asked.

I told him I’d been at my mum’s house.

“I’ve been collating mortality statistics for jazz musicians in the London area,” he said. “You’ll want to have a look as soon as you can — phone me tomorrow once you’ve done that.”

“Is there something I should know now?”

The lift doors opened and I stepped out into the tiled lobby. The evening was warm enough to allow a couple of kids to loiter by the main doors. One of them tried to give me the eye but I gave it right back and he looked away. Like I said, it’s my manor. And besides, I used to be that boy.

“From the figures I have, I believe that two to three jazz musicians have died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area in the last year.”

“I take it that’s statistically significant?”

“It’s all in the email,” said Dr. Walid.

We hung up just as I reached the Asbo.

To the tech-cave, I thought.

THE FOLLY, according to Nightingale, is protected by an interlocking series of magical protections. They were last renewed in 1940 to allow the post office to run in a then-cutting-edge coaxial telephone cable to the main building and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass-and-mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish.

Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and adds that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the Dark Ages.

Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency-style when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house, so that the horses and the smellier servants could be housed downwind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once housed servants and later served as a party space for the young bucks back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least more than one. The magical “protections” — Nightingale was not happy when I called them “force fields” — used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century.

The coach house attic has a studio skylight at one end, an Ottoman couch, a chaise longue, a plasma TV, and an IKEA kitchen table that once took me and Molly three bloody hours to assemble. I’d used the Folly’s status as an Operational Command Unit to get the Directorate of Information to cough up half a dozen airwave handsets with charging rack and a dedicated HOLMES 2 terminal. I also had my laptop and my backup laptop and my PlayStation — which I hadn’t had a chance to get out of the box yet. Because of this there is a big sign on the front door that says NO MAGIC ON PAIN OF PAIN. This is what I call the tech-cave.

The first thing I got when I booted up was an email from Leslie with the header Bored! so I sent her Dr. Walid’s autopsy report to keep her occupied. Then I opened up Police National Computer Xpress and ran a DVLA check on Melinda Abbot’s license plate and found that the listed information matched that on her driver’s license. I ran Simone Fitzwilliam as well, but evidently she’d never applied for a license or owned a car. Nor had she committed, been the victim of, or reported a crime within the United Kingdom. Or possibly all that information had been lost, inaccurately entered into the databases, or she’d just changed her name recently. Information technology only gets you so far, which is why coppers still go around knocking on doors and writing things down in little black notebooks. I Googled them both for good measure. Melinda Abbot had a Facebook page as did a couple of people with the same name, but Simone Fitzwilliam had no obvious Internet presence at all.

I worked my way through Dr. Walid’s list of dead jazz musicians — all men, I noticed — in much the same way. They’re always doing clever cross-referencing stuff on the TV, and it’s all perfectly possible, but what they never show is how sodding long it takes. It was pushing midnight by the time I got to the end of the list and I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

I took a Red Stripe from the fridge, opened the can, and had a swig.

Definite fact number one: Each year for the last five, two or three jazz musicians had died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area. In each case the coroner had ruled the death either “accidental” by way of substance abuse or by natural causes — mostly heart attacks with a couple of aneurysms thrown in for a bit of variety.

Dr. Walid had included a supplemental file recording every person who’d listed their profession as musician and had died over the same period. Definite fact number two: While other musicians dropped dead from “natural causes” with depressing frequency, they didn’t seem to regularly die just after gigs the way the jazzmen did.

Definite fact number three: Cyrus Wilkinson hadn’t even listed his occupation as musician but as an accountant. You never claim to be a freelance or artistic anything unless you want a personal credit rating lower than an Icelandic bank’s. Which led to definite fact number four: My statistical analysis was pretty much worthless.

And yet three jazz musicians a year — I didn’t believe it was a coincidence.

But Nightingale wasn’t going to go for anything that flimsy. And he was still going to expect me to perfect scindere starting the next morning. I shut everything down and turned it all off at the plugs. That’s good for the environment and more important stops all my expensive gear from getting randomly fried by a surge in magic.

I let myself into the Folly through the kitchen. The waning moon lit the atrium through the skylight so I left the lights off as I climbed the stairs to my floor. On the balcony opposite I glimpsed a pale figure silently gliding among the muffled shadows of the west reading room. It was just Molly, restlessly doing whatever it is she restlessly does at night. When I reached my landing the musty carpet smell told me that Toby had once again fallen asleep against my door. The little dog lay on his back, his thin ribs rising and falling under his fur. He snuffled and kicked in his sleep, hind legs pawing the air, indicating at least five hundred milliyaps of background magic. I let myself into my bedroom and carefully closed the door so as not to wake him.

I climbed into bed and before I turned out the side lamp I texted Leslie — WTF DO NOW?

The next morning I got a text back. It read: GO TLK BAND — IDIOT!