Moon Over Soho

Chapter 4 One-Tenth of My Ashes

THE GROUCHO Club, the name being taken from his famous quote, was established around the same time I was born, to cater to the kind of artists and media professionals who could afford to buy into their ironic postmodernism. It generally went under the police radar because however trendily antiestablishment its patrons were, they generally didn’t get into it on the street come Friday night. Or least not unless there was a chance of it making the papers the next day. Enough rehab-worthy celebrities went there to support a niche ecology of paparazzi on the pavement opposite the entrance. That explained why Stephanopoulis had sealed off the street. I imagined the photographers were as vexed as five-year-olds by now.

“You’re thinking of Saint John Giles?” I asked.

“The MO’s pretty distinctive,” said Stephanopoulis.

St. John Giles was a putative Saturday-night date rapist whose career had been, literally, cut short in a club a few months previously when a woman, or at least something that looked like a woman, bit his penis off — with her vagina. Vagina dentata it’s called and no medically verified cases have ever been recorded. I know because Dr. Walid and I trawled all the way back to the seventeenth century looking for one.

“Did you make any progress with the case?” asked Stephanopoulis.

“No,” I said. “We have his description, his friend’s descriptions, and some fuzzy CCTV footage and that’s it.”

“At least we can start with a comparative victimology. I want you to call Belgravia, get the case number, and port your nominals to our inquiry,” she said.

A “nominal” is a person who has come to the attention of the investigation and been entered into the HOLMES major inquiry system. Witness statements, forensic evidence, a detective’s notes on an interview, even CCTV footage are all grist for the inquiry’s computerized mill. The original system was developed as a direct result of the Byford inquiry into the Yorkshire Ripper case. The Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was interviewed several times before he was caught, by accident, at a routine traffic stop. The police can live with looking corrupt, bullying, or tyrannical, but looking stupid is intolerable. It has a tendency to undermine public faith in the forces of Law and is deleterious to public order. Lacking any convenient scapegoats, the police were forced to professionalize a culture that had, up until then, prided itself on being composed of untalented amateurs. HOLMES was part of that process.

In order for the data to be useful it had to be input in the right format and checked to make sure any relevant details had been highlighted and indexed. Needless to say, I hadn’t done any of this on the St. John Giles case yet. I was tempted to explain that I worked for a two-man department, one of whom had only just gotten the hang of cable TV, but of course Stephanopoulis already knew this.

“Yes, boss,” I said. “What’s this victim’s name?”

“This is Jason Dunlop. Club member, freelance journalist. He was booked into one of the bedrooms upstairs. Last seen heading that way just after twelve and found here just after three by one of the late-night cleaning staff.”

“What was the time of death?” I asked.

“Between quarter to one and half two, give or take your usual margin of error.”

Until the pathologist opened him up, the margin of error could be anything up to an hour each way.

“Is there anything special about him?” she asked.

I didn’t need to ask what she meant. I sighed. I wasn’t really that keen to get close again but I squatted down and used it as an opportunity to have a good look. His face was slack but his mouth was held closed because of the way his chin rested on his chest. There wasn’t any expression that I recognized and I wondered how long he’d sat there clutching his groin before he’d died. At first I thought there was no vestigium but then, very faintly in the hundred-milliyap range, I caught the impression of port wine, treacle, the taste of suet, and the smell of candles.

“Well?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “If he was attacked by magic it wasn’t directly.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” said Stephanopoulis. “Couldn’t we call it ‘other means.’ ”

“If you like, boss,” I said. “It’s possible this attack had nothing to do with ‘other means.’ ”

“No? A woman with teeth in her fanny? I’d have to say that was pretty ‘other,’ wouldn’t you?”

Me and Nightingale had discussed this after the first attack. “It’s possible she was wearing a prosthetic, you know, like a set of dentures only inserted … vertically. If a woman did that, don’t you think she could …” I realized that I was making snapping movements with my hand and stopped it.

“Well, I couldn’t do that,” said Stephanopoulis. “But thank you, Constable, for that fascinating bit of speculation. It’s definitely going to keep me awake at night.”

“Not as badly as the men, boss,” I said and really wished I hadn’t.

Stephanopoulis gave me a strange look. “You’re a cheeky bugger, aren’t you?” she said.

“Sorry, boss,” I said.

“Do you know what I like, Grant? A good Friday-night stabbing, some poor sod getting knifed because he looks funny at some other drunk bastard,” she said. “It’s a motive I can relate to.”

We both stood for a moment and contemplated the hazy far-off days of yesterday evening.

“You’re not officially part of this investigation,” said Stephanopoulis. “Consider yourself a consultant only. I’m the acting senior investigating officer and if I think I need you, I’ll give you a shout. Understood?”

“Yes, boss,” I said. “There’s some leads I can follow, ‘other means’ of pursuing the investigation.”

“Fair enough,” said Stephanopoulis. “But any actions that you generate you’re to clear through me first. Any normal leads you feed back through HOLMES and in return I’ll make sure any creepy stuff involves you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, guv,” I said.

“Good boy,” she said. I could tell she’d liked the “guv.” “Now fuck off and let’s hope I don’t have to see you again.”

I walked back up the forensics tent and stripped off my noddy suit, but carefully, to make sure I didn’t get any blood on my clothes.

Stephanopoulis wanted my involvement to be low-profile. Given that the Covent Garden riots had put forty people in the hospital, had seen the arrests of two hundred more, including most of the cast of Billy Budd, put a deputy assistant commissioner in the hospital and then on disciplinary suspension and Stephanopoulis’s own governor on medical leave after I’d stuck him with a syringe full of elephant tranquilizer (in my defense he had been trying to hang me at the time), and that was before the Royal Opera House was trashed and the market burned down — low-profile was fine with me.

I ARRIVED back at the Folly to find Nightingale in the breakfast room helping himself to kedgeree from one of the silver salvers that Molly insists on laying out on the buffet table every single morning. I lifted the lids on one of the others to reveal Cumberland sausage and poached eggs — sometimes when you’ve been up all night you can substitute a good fry-up for sleep. It worked long enough for me to brief Nightingale on the body in the Groucho Club, although I steered clear of the Cumberland sausage for some reason. Toby sat on his haunches by the table and gave me the alert stare of a dog who was ready for any meaty comestible that life might throw him.

When the sadly penis-less St. John Giles came to our attention we’d drafted in a forensic dentist to confirm that teeth had done the damage rather than a knife or a miniature bear trap or something. The dentist had run up a best-guess reconstruction of the configuration of the teeth. It looked remarkably like a human mouth only shallower and with a vertical orientation. In his opinion, the canine and incisors were broadly similar to those in the human mouth but the premolars and molars were unusually thin and sharp. “More suggestive of a carnivore than an omnivore,” the dentist had said. He was a nice man and very professional but I got the distinct impression he thought we were having him on.

This had led to a bizarre debate about the process of human digestion, which wasn’t settled until I went out and bought some school biology textbooks and talked Nightingale through the stomach, the intestines, the small intestines, and what they were for. When I asked him whether they had covered this at his old school he said that they might have but he hadn’t been paying attention. When I asked him what had kept his attention he said rugby and spells.

“Spells?” I’d asked. “Are you saying you went to Hogwarts?”

Which led to me having to explain the Harry Potter books, after which he said that, yes, he had been to a school for the sons of certain families with strong magical traditions but it really hadn’t been much like the school in the books. Although he did like the idea of quidditch, they’d mostly played rugby, and using magic on the playing field was strictly outlawed.

“We did play our own version of squash,” he’d said, “using the movement forms. That could get a bit lively.”

The school itself had been requisitioned during World War II by the military and by the time it was released back to civilian use in the early 1950s there hadn’t been enough children to make it worthwhile. “Or enough teachers,” Nightingale had said and then fallen silent for a long while. I made a point of not bringing up the subject again.

We did spend quite a lot of time going through the library looking for references to vagina dentata, which led me to Wolfe’s Exotica. What Polidori was to macabre death, Samuel Erasmus Wolfe was to weird fauna and what Dr. Walid calls “legitimate cryptozoology.” He was a contemporary of Huxley and Wilberforce and bang up to date with the then-latest theories of evolution. In his introduction to The Role of Magic in Inducing Pseudo Lamarckian Inheritance he argues that exposure to magic could induce changes in an organism, which could then be inherited by its offspring. Among modern biologists this sort of thing is known as soft inheritance and, if espoused, causes them to point and laugh. It sounded plausible, but unfortunately before he could complete the part of his book where he proved his theory, Wolfe was killed by a shark while taking the waters off Sidmouth.

I thought that, as a theory, it could explain the “evolution” of many of the creatures detailed in the Exotica. Wolfe had avoided mention in his theory of the genii locorum, the local gods, who most definitely existed. But I could see that if a person were to come under the influence of the vast and subtle magic that seemed to permeate certain localities, then perhaps they could be physically shaped by that magic. For example, Father Thames, Mama Thames, and even Beverley Brook, whom I’d kissed at Seven Dials.

Inherited by the offspring, I thought. Perhaps it was a good thing that Beverley Brook was safely out of temptation’s reach.

“Assuming the forensic dentistry confirms that it’s the same ‘creature,’ ” I said, “can we assume that she’s not natural? I mean, she’s got to be magical in some way — right? Which means she must be leaving a trail of vestigium wherever she goes?”

Nightingale poured more tea. “You haven’t picked up anything so far.”

“True,” I said. “But if she’s got a gaff, a nest where she spends most of her time, then the vestigia will have had a chance to build up. That should make it easier to spot, and since both attacks were in Soho, the chances are that’s where her lair is.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” he said.

“It’s a start,” I said and flicked a sausage at Toby, who executed a neat standing jump to catch it. “What we need is something that has a proven track record of hunting supernatural things.”

We both looked at Toby, who swallowed his sausage in a single gulp.

“Not Toby,” I said. “Someone who owes me a favor.”

WHEN I brokered a peace between the two halves of the River Thames, part of the deal involved an exchange of hostages. All very medieval, but the best I could come up with at the time. From the court of Mama Thames, the London contingent, I chose Beverley Brook, she of the dark brown eyes and cheeky face, and in exchange I got Ash, all film-star good looks and the greasy blond charisma of a traveling funfair. After a fairly disastrous stay at Mama Thames’s home in Wapping, the eldest daughters had stashed him at the Generator, a student hostel that existed on the boundary where roughneck King’s Cross became affluent Bloomsbury. It also put him just a short dash from the Folly in case of emergencies.

The hostel was based in a courtyard mews off Tavistock Place. On the outside it was strictly English Heritage vanilla Georgian but inside it was the kind of easy-to-clean primary colors that adorn the sets of children’s TV shows. Staff members were decked out in blue-and-green T-shirts, baseball caps, and mandatory happy smiles that slipped a bit when they saw me.

“I’m just here to pick him up,” I told them, and their smiles returned to the regulation intensity.

It wasn’t lost on me that despite the fact that I’d worked all night, had a nap and shower, and caught up on some paperwork, I still managed to arrive at Ash’s room to find him just getting up. He opened the door wrapped in a grubby olive bath towel.

“Petey,” he said. “Come in.”

The private rooms at the Generator are furnished with bunk beds in order to retain that crucial youth-hostel ambience. Technically, even when you rent a private room you’re required to share it with at least one other guest. Shortly after moving in, Ash, using an oxyacetylene torch liberated from God knows where, had reconfigured his bunk into a double bed. If anyone was going to be sharing a room with him it was going to be under the same duvet. When the management complained, Mother Thames sent her daughter Tyburn to sort things out. And when Lady Ty puts the fix in, things stay fixed. To be fair to Ash, he rarely spends a night alone. Ty hates him, but because — before Ash came along — I was at the top of her shit list, I regarded that as a bonus.

Last night’s young woman regarded me cautiously from the safety of the duvet. There wasn’t anywhere else to sit but at the end of the bed, so I perched there and gave her a reassuring smile. She looked nervously after Ash as he headed up the corridor toward the communal showers.

“Afternoon,” I said and she nodded back.

She was pretty in a calculated way, delicate cheekbones, olive skin, curly black hair that fell in ringlets on her shoulders. It wasn’t until she relaxed enough to sit up and the duvet fell away to reveal a smooth, hairless, and totally flat chest that I twigged that he wasn’t a she.

“Are you a guy?” I asked. Just to show that the sensitivity training at Hendon hadn’t been wasted.

“Only biologically,” he said. “How about you?”

I was saved from having to answer that by Ash, who swept back into the room and, stark naked, hunted out a pair of faded jeans and a Bra’ Anansi T-shirt that just had to have come from Effra. Pausing only to French-kiss the young man in the bed, he pulled on a pair of DM boots and out we went.

I waited until we were out of the hostel and heading for the Ford Asbo before asking about the guy in his bed.

Ash shrugged. “I didn’t know he was a guy until we got back to the room,” he said. “And I was having such a good time I thought, why not?”

For someone who’d never been in a built-up area larger than Cirencester all his life, Ash was turning out to be surprisingly metro.

“Where we going?” asked Ash as we got in the car.

“Your favorite part of town,” I said. “Soho.”

“You going to buy me breakfast?” he asked.

“Lunch,” I said. “Late lunch.”

We ended up eating fish-and-chips alfresco on Berwick Street, which has the offices of TV companies at one end, a street market in the middle, and a little furtive knot of sex shops at the other. It also has some world-famous record stores, strictly vinyl-only, the sort of places my dad would go to sell his collection — as if that were ever going to happen this side of him being dead.

I told him what I wanted him to do.

“You want me to hang out in Soho?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Going to pubs and clubs and meeting new people,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. “And keeping your eye out for a psychotic, possibly supernatural, killer female.”

“So, go to clubs and look for dangerous women,” he said. “What does she look like?”

“She looks like Molly but she may have changed her hair a bit,” I said. “I’m hoping she’ll stand out, you know, to you in particular, in a spiritual way.”

I saw Ash translate that one in his head. “Oh,” he said. “Got you. What do I do if I spot her?”

“You call me and you don’t get close,” I said. “This is strictly surveillance, is that clear?”

“Crystal,” said Ash. “What’s in it for me?”

“I bought you chips, didn’t I?”

“Tight arse,” he said. “Beer money?”

“I’ll reimburse you,” I said.

“You couldn’t front me?”

We found an ATM and I pulled a ton and a half for walking-around money and handed it over. “I want receipts,” I said. “Or I’m going to tell Tyburn what really happened that night in Mayfair.”

“It was just a cat,” said Ash.

“There are some things that shouldn’t happen to anybody,” I said. “Not even a cat.”

“It looked good shaved,” said Ash.

“I don’t think Tyburn saw it that way,” I said.

“I think I shall start my reconnaissance in the Endurance,” said Ash. “Care to join me?”

“Can’t, some of us have to work for a living,” I said.

“So have I,” said Ash. “I’m doing your job.”

“Just be careful,” I said.

“As if I were out poaching,” he said. “On a beautiful moonlit night.”

I watched him pinch an apple off a market stand as he sauntered away.

The thing about Soho is that that because it’s a bugger to drive through, and has no tube station or bus routes through it, you end up walking everywhere. And because you’re walking you run into people you might normally miss. I’d stashed the Asbo on Beak Street and so I turned down Broadwick, but before I could achieve Soho escape velocity I was intercepted on Lexington.

Despite the traffic I heard the heels before I heard the voice.

“Constable Grant, you lied to me.”

I turned to find Simone Fitzwilliam high-heeling down the pavement toward me. A red cardigan was falling off her shoulders like a stole over a peach-colored blouse with its buttons under strain and black leggings to show off all that leg power. As she came close I smelled honeysuckle, rose, and lavender, the scents of an English country garden.

“Miss Fitzwilliam,” I said trying to keep it formal.

“You lied to me,” she repeated, and her wide red mouth stretched into a smile. “Your father is Richard ‘Lord’ Grant. I can’t believe I didn’t see it in your face. No wonder you knew what you were talking about. Does he still play?”

“How are you feeling?” I asked and felt like a daytime TV presenter.

The smile wavered. “Some days are better than others,” she said. “You know what would cheer me up? Something scrumptious.”

Scrumptious was not a word that I’d ever heard used by a real person before.

“Where do want to go?” I asked.

The English have always brought out a strong missionary streak in the rest of the Continent and from time to time hardy individuals have braved the weather, the plumbing, and the sarcasm to bring the finer things in life to this poor benighted island. One such pioneer, according to Simone, was Madam Valerie who founded her patisserie on Frith Street and, after the Germans bombed it there, moved to Old Compton Street. I’d patrolled past it lots of times but since it didn’t serve alcohol I’d never been called to go in.

Simone grabbed my hand and practically dragged me inside, where the display cases glowed in the afternoon light. Ranks of confectionary were arrayed on cream-colored doilies, pink and yellow, red and chocolate, as gaudy as any model army.

Simone had a favorite table, by the stairs just the other side of the cake displays. From there, she pointed out, you could watch people coming and going and keep an eye on the cakes — just in case they tried to make a run for it. She seemed to know what she was doing, so I let her order. Hers was a deceptively compact sandwich of cream, pastry, and icing, mine was essentially a chocolate cake with chocolate flourishes and whipped cream sprinkled with chocolate. I wondered if I was being seduced or driven into a diabetic coma.

“You must tell me what you’ve discovered,” she said. “I heard you were at the Mysterioso last night with Jimmy and Max. Isn’t it a frightfully wicked place? I’m sure you had to positively restrain yourself from arresting miscreants left, right, and center.”

I agreed that I had, indeed, visited the club and that it was a den of iniquity but I didn’t tell her about Mickey the Bone who even as we spoke was waiting for Dr. Walid in the mortuary at UCH. Instead I gave her some flannel about ongoing inquiries and watched her eat her cake. She devoured it like an impatient but obedient child with quick dainty bites and still managed to get cream smeared around her lips. I watched as her tongue darted out to lick it off.

“You know who you should talk to,” she said once all the cream had gone. “You should talk to the Musicians Union. After all, isn’t it their job to look after their members? If anybody should know what’s going on, it should be them. Are you going to eat that?”

I offered her the rest of my cake and she looked to either side like a guilty schoolgirl before sliding the plate over to her side of the table. “I’ve never been very good curbing my appetite,” she said. “I suppose I’m compensating rather for when I was younger — we were terribly short of all sorts of things back then.”

“Back when?”

“Back when I was young and foolish,” she said. There was a dab of chocolate on her cheek and without thinking I wiped it off with my thumb. “Thank you,” she said. “You can never have enough cake.”

You certainly never have enough time. I paid the bill and she walked me back to where I’d parked the Asbo. I asked her what she did for a living.

“I’m a journalist,” she said.

“Who with?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m freelance,” she said. “Everybody is these days, apparently.”

“What do you write about?”

“Jazz of course,” she said. “The London scene, music, gossip, most of my work goes overseas. To the Japs mainly, very keen on jazz, the Japs are.” She explained that she suspected some sub-editor in Tokyo translated her work into Japanese — her name being one of the things that got lost in translation.

We reached the corner.

“I’m staying just up there on Berwick Street,” she said.

“With your sisters,” I said.

“You remembered,” she said. “Well of course you did, you’re a policeman. No doubt they train you to do such things. So if I tell you my address you’re sure to remember it.”

She told me her address and I pretended to memorize it — again.

“Au revoir,” she said. “Until we meet again.”

I watched her walk away on her high heels, jaunty hips swaying back and forth.

Leslie was so going to kill me.

BACK IN the old days my dad and his mates used to hang out on Archer Street, where the Musicians Union used to be, in the hope of getting work. I’d always imagined it as little knots of musicians dotted along the pavement. Then I saw a photograph that showed the street awash with men in porkpie hats and Burton suits toting their instruments around like unemployed Mafiosi. It got so crowded and competitive, my dad said, that bands would have secret hand gestures to communicate across the crowd, sliding fist for a trombonist, flat hand palm-down for a drummer, fluttering fingers for a cornet or a trumpet. That way you could stay friendly with your mates in the crowd even while undercutting them for a gig at the Savoy or the Café de Paris. My dad said you could have walked down Archer Street and assembled two full orchestras, a big band, and still have enough bodies left for a couple of quartets and a soloist to tinkle the ivories at Lyon’s Corner House.

These days the musicians text each other and arrange their gigs on the Internet and the Musicians Union has crossed the river to set up shop on the Clapham Road. It was a Sunday but on the basis that music, like crime, never sleeps I gave them a ring. A guy at the main office, once I’d convinced him this was a police matter, gave me the mobile number for Tista Ghosh, the Jazz Section’s welfare officer. I rang her and left a message identifying myself and giving an impression of urgency without actually saying anything concrete. Never record anything you wouldn’t want turning up on YouTube is my motto. Ms. Ghosh rang back just as I was reaching my car. She had the kind of precision-tooled middle-class accent that only comes from being taught English as a Second Language in the cradle. She asked me what I wanted and I told her that I wanted to talk about unexpected deaths among her members.

“Does it have to be this evening?” she asked. Behind her I could hear a band playing “Red Clay.”

I told her I’d try and keep the interview as short as possible. I love using the word interview because members of the public see it as the first step up the legal staircase that goes from “helping the police with their inquiries” to spending time at Her Majesty’s pleasure locked in a small cell with a large sweaty man who insists on calling you Susan.

I asked her where she was currently.

“At the Hub in Regent’s Park,” she said. “It’s the Jazz in the Open Air Festival.”

Actually, according to the poster I saw at the gate later, it was the LAST CHANCE FOR JAZZ IN THE OPEN AIR FESTIVAL sponsored by the company formerly known as Cadbury Schweppes.

Five hundred years ago the notoriously savvy Henry VIII discovered an elegant way to solve both his theological problems and his personal liquidity crisis — he dissolved the monasteries and nicked all their land. Since the principle of any rich person who wants to stay rich is, Never give anything away unless you absolutely have to, the land has stayed with the Crown ever since. Three hundred years later the prince regent hired Nash to build him a big palace on the site with some elegant terraces that could be rented out and thus cover the prince’s heroic attempt to debauch himself to death. The palace was never built but the terraces and debauchery remained — as did the park, which bears the prince regent’s title. One end of the park, the Northern Parklands, is given over to playing fields and sports facilities and at the center of those sits the Hub, a large artificial hillock with a pavilion and changing rooms built into it. It has three main entrances built in the manner of aircraft dispersal pens that make it look like the ground-floor entrance to the lair of a super-villain. On top is a circular café whose Perspex walls give a 360-degree panorama of the whole park where customers can sit, drink tea, and plot world domination.

It was still sunny but the air was taking on a warning chill. In August the crowd spread out in front of the temporary stage and lounging on the concrete apron that surrounded the café would have been half naked. But by mid-September sweatshirts had been unwrapped from around waists and sleeves pulled down. Still, there was enough golden sunlight to pretend, if only for another day, that London was a city of street cafés and jazz in the park.

The current band was playing something fusiony that even I wouldn’t classify as jazz, so I wasn’t surprised to find Tista Ghosh nursing a white wine beyond the refreshment tents where the noise would be muffled. I called her mobile and she guided me in.

“I hope you’re buying,” she said when I found her. “I can’t make this Aussie fizz last much longer.”

Why not, I thought. I’ve been getting them in all week, why stop now?

Ms. Ghosh was a slender light-skinned woman with a sharp nose who favored long dangly earrings and kept her long black hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore white slacks and a purple blouse and over that a gentrified biker’s leather jacket that was at least five sizes too big for her. Perhaps she’d borrowed it against the chill.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “What’s a nice desi girl like me doing in the jazz scene?” Actually I was thinking where the hell she’d got that leather jacket and should she, for religious reasons, be wearing a leather jacket in the first place.

“My parents were deeply into jazz,” she said. “They were from Calcutta and there was this famous club called Trinca’s on Park Street. You know I visited there last September — there was a wedding. It’s all changed now but there used to be this great jazz scene, that’s where they met. My parents, not the relatives who were getting married.”

The jacket had a line of crudely made badges down the left-hand lapel, the type you could stamp out with a hand press. I surreptitiously read them while Ms. Ghosh expounded upon the innovative jazz scene that flourished in India after the war. ROCK AGAINST RACISM, ANTI-NAZI LEAGUE, DON’T BLAME ME I DIDN’T VOTE TORY — slogans from the 1980s, most from before I was born.

Ms. Ghosh was just telling me about the time Duke Ellington played at the Winter Palace — the hotel in Calcutta, not the birthplace of the Russian revolution — when I decided that it was time to put the conversation back on track. I asked whether she was aware of any sudden deaths among her members, particularly during or just after a gig.

Ms. Ghosh gave me a long skeptical look.

“Are you having me on?” she asked.

“We’re looking into suspicious deaths among musicians,” I said. “This is just a preliminary inquiry. The deaths might have looked like the result of exhaustion or drug or alcohol abuse. Have you seen anything like that?”

“In jazz musicians,” she said. “Are you kidding? If they haven’t got at least one bad habit we don’t let them in the union.” She laughed, I didn’t, she noticed and stopped. “Are we talking murders here?”

“We don’t know at this stage,” I said. “We’re just acting on information received.”

“I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head,” she said. “I can look up my records tomorrow if you like.”

“That would be really helpful.” I gave her my card. “Could you do it first thing?”

“Sure,” she said. “Do you know those guys are staring at you?”

I turned to find the irregulars watching me from the eaves of the beer tent. Max gave me a wave.

“You don’t want to be talking to him, miss,” called James. “He’s the jazz police.”

I said good-bye to Ms. Ghosh and hoped that she still took me seriously enough to look up the information I wanted. To make it up to me the irregulars agreed to buy me a drink.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Where the jazzman sups there sup I,” said James.

“We were supposed to be playing the festival,” said Daniel. “But without Cyrus …” He shrugged.

“You couldn’t get anyone else?” I asked.

“Not without lowering our standards,” said James.

“Which admittedly were already pretty low,” said Max. “I don’t suppose you play.”

I shook my head.

“Pity,” he said. “We were going to play the Arches next week.”

“We were actually second from the bottom of the bill,” said Daniel.

I asked Daniel whether he played anything other than the piano.

“I do a mean Gibson electric,” he said.

“How would you like to play with a man who is almost a jazz legend?” I asked.

“How can you ‘almost’ be a jazz legend?” asked Max.

“Shut up, Max,” said James. “The man’s talking about his father. You are talking about your father?”

There was a pause — it was common knowledge that my dad had lost his lip. It was Daniel who put it together. “He’s switched instruments, hasn’t he?” he asked.

“Fender Rhodes,” I said.

“Is he any good?” asked Max.

“He’s going to be better than me,” said Daniel.

“Lord Grant,” said James. “How cool is that?”

“That’s pretty cool,” said Max. “Do you think he’ll agree?”

“I’ll find out,” I said. “I don’t see why not.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel.

“Don’t thank me, man,” I said. “Just doing my job.”

So, the jazz police to the rescue. If my dad said yes — which I thought he probably would. The Arches Club was in Camden Lock, just down the road from my flat, so logistics would be easy. I decided to let Mum organize the rehearsals — she might enjoy that.

It was only after I’d agreed to see what I could sort out that I realized I’d never heard my father play before an audience. The irregulars were so pleased that James was moved to offer to buy me a pint, several pints in fact, but I was driving so I stuck to just the one. It was just as well because ten minutes later Stephanopoulis called me.

“We’re turning over Jason Dunlop’s flat,” she said. “We’ve found some things I’d like you to take a look at.” She gave me an address in Islington.

“I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said.

JASON DUNLOP lived in the half-basement flat of a converted early-Victorian terrace on Barnsbury Road. In previous eras the servants’ quarters would be fully underground, but the Victorians, being the great social improvers they were, had decided that even the lowly should be able to see the feet of the people walking past the grand houses of their masters — hence the half basement. That and the increased daylight saved on candles, a penny saved is a penny earned and all that. The interior walls had been painted estate-agent white and were devoid of decoration, no framed photographs, no reproduction Manets, Klimts, or poker-playing dogs. The kitchen units were low-end and brand-new. I smelled buy-for-lease and recently too. Judging by the half-emptied packing cases in the living room, I didn’t think Jason had lived there long.

“A messy divorce,” said Stephanopoulis as she showed me around.

“Has she got an alibi?”

“So far,” said Stephanopoulis. The joys of dealing with the bereaved when they’re both victim and suspect — I was glad I wasn’t doing that bit of the investigation. The flat had only one bedroom, a pair of masculine suitcases pushed into the corner, a line of packing cases with fingerprint dust smeared on the lids. Stephanopoulis showed me where a pile of books had been carefully arranged on a plastic sheet by the bed.

“Have they been processed?” I asked.

Stephanopoulis said yes, but I put on gloves anyway. It’s good practice when handling evidence and I got a grunt of approval from the sergeant. I picked up the first book; it was old, a prewar hardback that had been carefully wrapped in white tissue paper. I opened it and read the title: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis by Isaac Newton. I had a copy of the same edition on my desk, with a much bigger Latin dictionary sitting next to it.

“We saw this,” said Stephanopoulis. “And we thought of you.”

“Are there any more?” I asked.

“We left the box for you,” she said. “Just in case it was cursed or something.”

I hoped she was being sarcastic.

I inspected the book. Its cover was worn at the edges and warped with age. The edges of the pages had dents and smears from being handled. Whoever had owned this book hadn’t left it on a shelf; this had been used. On a hunch I turned to page 27 and saw, just where I’d stuck in a Post-it note with a question mark on it, was the word, written in faded pencil, quis? Somebody else couldn’t work out what the hell Isaac was going on about in the middle part of the introduction.

If someone was really studying the craft then they’d need Cuthbertson’s A Modern Commentary on the Great Work. Written in 1897 in English, thank God, and no doubt welcomed with open arms by every frustrated student who’d ever tried to light his room with a werelight. I looked in the box and found a copy of Cuthbertson right under a huge modern desktop Latin dictionary and grammar — it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one who needed help. The Modern Commentary was, like the Principia, old and well used. I flicked through its pages and came across a faded stamp thirty pages in — an open book surrounded by three crowns and encircled by the words BIBLIOTHECA BODLEIANA. I checked the Principia and found a different stamp, an old-fashioned drawing compass surrounded by the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST QMS. I turned to the frontispiece and found a faint rectangular discoloration. My dad had books with that same pattern, ones that he’d jacked from his school library when he was young. The mark was from the glue that once held a folder into which a library card would have fit back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were the size of washing machines.

I carefully emptied the packing case. There were six more books that I recognized as being authentically related to magic, all of them with the BIBLIOTHECA BODLEIANA library stamp.

I assumed that stamp referred to the Bodleian Library, which I vaguely remembered was in Oxford, but while I didn’t recognize the second stamp I did recognize the motto. I dialed the Folly. The phone rang several times before being picked up. “It’s Peter,” I said. There was silence at the other end. “I need to speak to him right away.” I heard a clunk as the receiver was put down by the phone. As I waited I thought it was about time that I bought Nightingale a proper phone.

When Nightingale picked up I explained about the books. He made me list the titles and describe the stamps. Then he asked if Stephanopoulis was available.

I called her and offered her the phone. “My governor wants a word,” I said.

While they talked I started bagging the books and filling out the evidence tags.

“And you think this makes it more likely?” she asked. “Fair enough. I’ll send the boy over with the books. I expect you to maintain chain of custody.” Nightingale must have assured her that we would be as scrupulous as any Home Office lab because she nodded and handed the phone back to me.

“I think,” said Nightingale, “that we may be dealing with a black magician here.”