Moon Over Soho

Chapter 6 The Empress of Pleasure

THE MEN and women of the London Ambulance Service are not prone to hysterics, given that they spend their days scraping up the victims of fatal car accidents, suicide attempts both successful and botched, and members of the public who’ve “fallen” in front of a train. Those are called “one-unders,” incidentally. I once asked whether a couple under a train would be a “two-under” but apparently that’s a “two one-under.” Anyway, a daily routine consisting of pain and misfortune tends to breed steady and pragmatic personalities. In short, just the kind of person you want staffing your ambulance in the middle of the night. The paramedic in the ambulance who picked up Ash was a middle-aged woman with short practical hair and a New Zealand accent. But a couple of minutes into the ride I could see that her composure was beginning to slip.

“The bitch,” yelled Ash. “The bitch stabbed me with a railing.”

About two feet torn from a rather nice bit of Victorian wrought-ironwork, judging by the precisely milled orthogonal cross section. To my untrained eye it looked as if it had gone right through his heart. That hadn’t stopped Ash from thrashing around and yelling.

“Hold him down,” shouted the paramedic.

I grabbed Ash’s arm and tried to pin it to the gurney. “Can’t you give him something?” I asked.

The paramedic gave me a wild look. “Give him something?” she said. “He should be dead.”

Ash tore his arm from my grip and grabbed at the railing.

“Get it out!” screamed Ash. “It’s cold iron, get it out!”

“Can we pull it out?” I asked.

That was the last straw for the paramedic. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“Cold iron,” he said. “Killing me.”

“We’ll take it out at the hospital,” I said.

“No hospital,” said Ash. “I need the River.”

“Dr. Walid will be there,” I said.

Ash stopped thrashing and grabbed my hand, pulled me closer.

“Please, Peter,” he said. “The River.”

Polidori talks about cold iron having a deleterious effect upon the fae and their many cousins but I assumed he was making it up or stating the bleeding obvious. Cold iron has a deleterious effect on anyone if you shove it right through their body.

“Please,” said Ash.

“I’m going to pull this out of him,” I said.

The paramedic expressed her opinion that she felt this would be a poor course of action and that, for even contemplating it, I was an anatomically incomplete person of low intelligence and with a penchant for self-abuse.

I got both hands on the railing. It was slippery with blood. Ash saw what I was doing and held himself rigid. It wasn’t the ripping sound it made when it came out that bothered me; that was masked by Ash’s screaming. It was feeling the vibrations as the bone scraped along the rough edge of the iron that I won’t forget.

A jet of blood smacked me in the face. I smelled copper and, weirdly, a mixture of greasepaint and ozone. The paramedic shoved me out of the way and I fell backward as the ambulance took a corner. She started slapping dressings on entry and exit wounds and taping them in place. The dressings were soaked red before she’d even finished. As she worked she swore under her breath.

Ash had stopped thrashing and gone silent. His face was pale and slack. I stumbled forward in the ambulance until I could stick my head into the driver’s cab. We were heading up Tottenham Court Road — less than five minutes from the hospital.

The driver was my age, white, skinny, and wore a skull-and-crossbones stud in his ear.

I told him to turn around and he told me to fuck off.

“We can’t take him to the hospital,” I said. “He’s booby-trapped.”

“What?” yelled the driver.

“He may be attached to a bomb,” I said.

He hit the brakes and I was thrown headfirst into the cab. I heard the paramedic in the back scream with frustration and I looked up to find the driver’s-side door open and the driver legging it down the road.

It was a really good illustration of why you shouldn’t use the first lie that pops into your head. I climbed into his seat, closed the door, put the ambulance into gear, and off we went.

The London Ambulance Service uses a fleet of Mercedes Sprinter vans, which are just like your standard Sprinter but with about two tons of stuff in the back and the kind of soft suspension designed to avoid killing a patient every time you go over a speed bump.

It’s also got a pile of extra LCD screens, buttons, and switches that I, in the interest of simplicity, just ignored. Which was why we were still doing blues and twos as we sailed past the entrance to the UCH ambulance bay and headed down Gower Street toward the river.

It was about this time, according to the EOC call log, that the paramedic used her airwave to report that her ambulance had been hijacked by an escaped mental patient masquerading as a police officer.

There’s nothing quite like driving an emergency vehicle with a strip of spinners on its roof and a full-sized siren designed to cut through the iPod, car stereo cocoon that most drivers live in and scare random pedestrians back onto the pavements. Moses parting the Red Sea would have felt like I did as I plowed across the junction with High Holborn into Endell Street with a brief moment of déjà vu as I shot down Bow Street and past the scaffolding that marked where they were still repairing the damage done to the Royal Opera House.

It’s easy to get messed up trying to go south from Covent Garden. The roads have all been bollarded and blocked to stop them from becoming traffic rat runs, but I’d spent two years patrolling out of Charing Cross nick so I knew where they were. I did a sharp right into Exeter Street and a sharp left down Burleigh Street, which caused the paramedic in the back to start screaming at me again. Which was uncalled for, since I felt I was finally getting on top of the ambulance’s tricky handling.

“How’s he doing?” I yelled over my shoulder.

“He’s bleeding to death,” she yelled back.

I merged briefly with the cars on the Strand before cutting across the oncoming traffic and into Savoy Street, a narrow lane that runs straight down to the river just west of Waterloo Bridge. Parking spaces are hard to find in Central London and people tend to pack their cars onto streets with no thought that a vehicle of some width and heft might be driven past by someone with less-than-full confidence in his control. All told, the actual total damages came in a tad less than twenty thousand pounds, mostly scraped paint, wing mirrors, side panels, and a pair of racing bikes that should never have been left secured to a roof rack in the first place. That’s not counting the damage to the ambulance, which I’m sure was entirely superficial.

I bounced off the bottom of the street and out into the Embankment, swerved right, and ran the ambulance up onto the pavement in front of the Savoy Pier. I scrambled out of the driver’s seat and into the back of the ambulance, where the paramedic stared at me with stunned hatred.

Ash was barely breathing and the dressing on his chest was completely soaked through with blood. When I asked the paramedic to open the door I thought for a moment she was going to hit me, but she released the latches and threw them open. She wouldn’t help me take Ash out and I didn’t have time to figure out how to work the lift at the back, so I pulled him over my shoulder and staggered out into the drizzle.

I’d actually chosen the Savoy Pier for two reasons. It wasn’t in use, so I wouldn’t have to clamber over a boat to get to the river, and it had a nice gentle access ramp that would have been perfect to roll the gurney down had I managed to get the damn thing out of the ambulance. Instead I had to first lumber up the ramp to the gate with Ash in a fireman’s lift. He was a big healthy guy and I suspected I was going to be an inch shorter by the time I reached the Thames. There’s a thing like an open telephone booth at the top end of the ramp, designed to stop tourists, drunks, and the merely criminal from running out onto the pier.

I paused for breath and realized that over the yodel of the ambulance’s own siren I could hear other sirens approaching. I looked up and down the Embankment and saw flashing blue lights coming from both directions. A glance over the parapet revealed that the tide was out and jumping down there would be a ten-foot drop onto stones and mud. I looked at the booth. It had the metal lock I remembered. I had been planning something subtle, but since I didn’t have time I blew the whole thing off its hinges.

As I ran down the ramp, I heard the Incident Response Vehicles skidding to a halt behind me and the medley of grunts, shouts, and radio chatter that announces that the Old Bill is here to sort you out. As I ran across the width of the pier something whacked me hard across the thighs. The safety railing I realized too late, and I went headfirst into the Thames.

The Goddess of the River will proudly tell you that the Thames is officially the cleanest industrial river in Europe, but it is not so clean that you want to drink it. I came up spitting with a metallic taste in my mouth.

A dark shape bobbed in the water a yard from me — Ash floating on his back.

I wear a pair of Dr. Martens shoes for general detective work. They’re smart, hard-wearing, and, crucially, retain some of that horrorshow goodness for kicking that still makes DMs the footwear of choice for all right-thinking skinheads and soccer hooligans. On the other hand, they’re heavy and you do not want to be wearing them while treading water. Once I had them off, I splashed forward to check on Ash — he appeared to be a lot more buoyant than I was. I could hear him breathing and it sounded stronger than before.

“Ash,” I said. “You feeling better?”

“Much better,” he said languidly. “The water’s a bit salty but nice and warm.”

It was bloody freezing for me. I looked back at the pier to see my fellow policemen shining their torches across the water but it was okay, because the tide was still going out and Ash and I were already a couple of hundred yards downstream. Well, okay until we were both swept out into the North Sea or I died of hypothermia or drowned — or most likely an exciting combination of all three.

The current took us under the arches of Waterloo Bridge.

“You never told me she was a pale lady,” said Ash.

“Who’s the pale lady?” I asked.

“Lady of death,” he said, and then added something in a language that sounded a bit like Welsh but probably wasn’t.

“Hey,” said a nearby voice. “What are you doing in the river?” Young, female, middle-class but with the clipped vowel sounds that comes from having parents who believe in education or else. This would be one of Mama Thames’s girls.

“That’s a difficult question,” I sputtered. “I was driving home from Oxford, Ash called me, and it all went pear-shaped from there. What are you doing in the river?”

“It’s our turn on the rota,” said a second voice as we emerged on the other side of the bridge.

Ash was happily floating and I wondered if I was the only one finding it hard to maintain a conversation while treading water. Something warm brushed against my leg and I twisted in time to see a girl pop her head out of the water. With just the lights from the bank she was hard to see clearly, but I recognized the cat’s curve to the corner of her eyes and her mother’s strong chin.

“What are you? Lifeguards?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” she said. “If you make it out of the river under your own steam, fair enough. If you don’t then you belong to Mama.”

The first girl surfaced again and rose out of the water until she was waist-deep and as steady as if she were standing on a box. I noticed she was wearing a black wet suit with ORCA written across her chest. Enough light caught her face for me to recognize her as Olympia, aka Counter’s Creek, one of the younger daughters of Mama Thames, which meant that the other was no doubt her twin sister, Chelsea.

“Do you like the suit?” Olympia asked. “Neoprene. It’s the best you can buy.”

“I thought you guys liked to skinny-dip?” I said. Their older sister Beverley had swum naked the last time I’d seen her in the water.

“In your dreams,” said Olympia.

Chelsea surfaced on the far side of Ash. “I thought I smelled blood,” she said. “How you doing, Ash?”

“Much better now,” he said drowsily.

“I think we need to get him back to Mama,” she said.

“He told me to get him in the river,” I said. My legs were getting really tired and I looked around to find the shore a lot farther away — I was being dragged out into the central channel.

“What do you want — a medal?” asked Chelsea.

“How about a tow back to shore,” I said.

“Doesn’t work like that,” said Olympia.

“But don’t worry,” said Chelsea. “If you go under for the third time — we’ll be waiting for you.”

And then, with an unremarkable plopping sound, they vanished under the water.

I swore at some length at that point and would have sworn for longer except I was freezing to death. I tried to gauge which bank was closer. It was tricky because the combination of the tide and current was sweeping me toward Black-friars Bridge. The same bridge under which Roberto Calvi, God’s own banker, got his neck stretched — not really a promising omen for me. I was freezing and trying to remember the water survival training I did when I got my swimming certificate in primary school. My legs felt heavy and my arms ached and, as far as I could see, neither bank was closer.

It’s remarkably easy to die in the Thames; lots of people manage it every year. I was beginning to worry I was going to be one.

I struck out for the south bank on the basis that the Thames path ran on that side so there were more likely to be members of the public able to render assistance. Plus the OxoTower made a convenient landmark. I didn’t try to fight the current and concentrated the last of my strength on getting closer to the bank.

I’ve never been what you’d call a strong swimmer but if the alternative is being a statistic it’s amazing what you can pull out of the reserves. The world contracted around me until there was nothing but the cold weight of my wet clothes, the pain in my arms, and the occasional malicious slap in the face by a wave that would leave me gasping and spitting.

Mama Thames, I prayed. You owe me, get me to shore.

I realized suddenly that my arms weren’t really working properly and that it was getting harder just to keep my face above the water.

Mama Thames, I prayed again. Please.

At some point the tide turned and I found myself being washed back upstream until a random eddy caught me and gently shoved me onto the dirty mud of the Thames bank. I pulled myself slithering as far up the foreshore as I could manage before rolling onto my back. I stared up at the rain clouds above, lit a dull sodium red by the lights of the city, and thought that of the many things I never wanted to do again this was near the top. I was so cold that my fingers and toes had gone numb, but I was shivering, which I took to be a good sign because I had this vague notion that it’s when you stop shivering that you should be really worried. I decided that I could afford to stay where I was and catch my breath or maybe some sleep — it had been a long day.

Contrary to what you might have been told, it is almost impossible to lie prostrate and groaning in a public place in London without attracting a crowd of putative good Samaritans — even when it’s raining.

“Are you all right, mate?”

There were people on the parapet above me. I looked at their quizzical upside-down faces from where I lay. Helpful people with mobile phones who would helpfully phone the police who in turn would probably ask me to help them with their inquiries about a certain hijacked ambulance.

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, I thought. For they are soggy and hard to light.

I considered making a run for it but the paramedic and the ambulance driver could both identify me and in any case I was just too knackered to move.

“You just hold on, mate,” said the voice from above. “The police are on their way.”

It took the police at least five minutes to get there, which wasn’t bad as response times go. I was duly wrapped in a blanket and put in the back of the IRV, where I told them I’d fallen in while pursuing a suspect and had ended up on the wrong side of the river. They didn’t ask me any of the usual questions about my imaginary suspect, which I thought was odd until the Jag pulled alongside the IRV and I realized that Nightingale had already put the fix in.

As we crossed back over Waterloo Bridge he asked me whether Ash was all right.

“I think so,” I said. “Chelsea and Olympia didn’t seem worried.”

Nightingale nodded. “Good work,” he said.

“I’m not in trouble?” I asked.

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “Just not with me.”

He still made me get up the next morning and do double practice — the bastard.

AFTER PRACTICE I took the hardcopy from Oxford to the tech-cave where I plonked it on the chaise longue and tried to pretend it didn’t exist. Entering that much data was going to be a pig and really probably not worth the time it would take me to do it. When I found Leslie had left me three emails expressing the unutterable boredom of a small seaside town off season I had one of those really stupid clever ideas. I emailed her back and asked whether she wanted to do some tedious data entry. She said yes and I called IPS and arranged to have them picked up and biked over. Because you can’t ask someone like Leslie, no matter how bored she is, to do something that dull without an explanation, I gave her an outline of who Jason Dunlop was and how we were looking for connections to Geoffrey Wheatcroft.

Lost books of magic, she wrote. YFKM. Data entry. I’m so sad, me.

Keep busy, I wrote back. She didn’t reply to that one.

Dr. Walid had posted me some JPEGs of what looked like thin slices of cauliflower, but the accompanying text assured me that they were thin sections of Michael “the Bone” Adjayi’s brain. When magnified they displayed the telltale neurological damage that was indicative of hyperthaumaturgical degradation — which is what kills if you do too much magic. And also, as we had learned on our last big case, what happens if some total bastard uses you to do magic by proxy. It’s a truism in policing that witnesses and statements are fine but nothing beats empirical physical evidence. Actually it isn’t a truism because most policemen think the word empirical is something to do with Darth Vader, but it damn well should be. To drive the point home, Dr. Walid included slices from Cyrus Wilkinson’s brain for comparison — the damage was identical.

This was proof that Mickey the Bone had been done in by the same method as Cyrus Wilkinson — if only I could figure out why.

I packaged up the lists for Leslie and gave them to Molly with strict instructions not to bite the courier when he came to call for them.

Back in the garage there was a note folded under the Jag’s windshield wiper. It read, in Nightingale’s surprisingly inelegant handwriting, Unsupervised use of the Jaguar is suspended until such time as the appropriate driving certification is presented. So Nightingale did know about the driving courses after all.

I took the Asbo — it gets better mileage anyhow.

CHEAM IS about as far southwest as you can get in London while officially staying in the capital. It’s another typical outer London village that acquired, in short order, a railway station, some posh detached villas in the late-Victorian style, and finally a smothering blanket of mock-Tudor semis built in the 1930s. Cheam is what the green belt was established to prevent happening to the rest of southeast England. Pictures of Cheam adorn the walls of planning offices of every Home County to serve as an awful warning. And that was before any black people moved into the area.

Chez Adjayi was a big detached Edwardian villa along a road lined with variations on that theme. Apart from a token oval of greenery, the front garden had been paved with concrete, the better to park a couple of big German cars conveniently in front of the house. I could read the family history in that house. Father and Mother had immigrated in the late 1960s, found jobs that they were wildly overqualified for, bought a run-down property in a relatively unfashionable area, and were now living off the fat of the property boom. Father would wear bespoke suits and be the man of the house; Mother would have a bedroom full of shoes and three mobile phones. The kids would be expected to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers in descending order of preference.

A young woman around my age opened the door and I guessed she was a sister or close cousin. She had the same big forehead, high cheekbones, and flat nose, although her face was plumper and rounder than Michael’s and she wore half-moon reading glasses with black enamel frames. She smiled when she opened the door and saw me, but the smile faded when I told her who I was. She was dressed in a sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms. I smelled perspiration and furniture polish. When she let me in I saw that the Hoover was sitting in the middle of the hallway and that the framed photographs that lined the walls had all been dusted and polished.

She invited me in and I asked her name.

“Martha,” she said and she must have seen me wince because she chuckled. “Yes, I know. I’m in the kitchen,” she said and led the way. It was a big kitchen with an oak table that was European but an array of large pots, ladles, and plastic washing-up bowls full of cassava and stockfish that was pure West African.

I declined tea and biscuits and we sat down at the far corner of the table.

“Mum’s at the hospital,” said Martha. “I’m just cleaning up.” She didn’t need to explain to me. Enough of my mum’s London family had died over the years for me to know the drill. Once word got out that Michael Adjayi was dead, the relatives would start coming around and God help Martha if the house wasn’t immaculate when they got there.

“Was he the eldest son?” I asked.

“Only son,” said Martha bitterly. “I’ve got two other sisters. They don’t live here anymore.”

I nodded to show I understood. Favored son, the girls work but the boy carries the name. “How long had he been playing jazz?”

“Mickey? Since forever,” said Martha.

“Did you think he was good?”

“He was brilliant,” she said.

I asked if her parents minded that he was going to be a musician but she said that Mickey had it covered. “He had a place at Queen Mary’s reading law,” she said. “He figured that would give him at least four years to become famous.”

And once he was famous Mother and Father wouldn’t care — as long as he was rich as well. Martha obviously thought it was a workable plan. I asked about his love life and apparently that wasn’t a problem either — at least not as much of a problem as it might have been.

“White girl?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “But Cherie was really nice and a bit posh so, you know, that softened the blow for Mum and Dad.”

Martha didn’t know the girlfriend’s details but she promised to ask her parents when they got back. She couldn’t think of anybody who had it in for Mickey, or anything suspicious at all. “He just went out one afternoon,” she said. “And came back dead.”

ON MY way back from Cheam I got a call from Ms. Ghosh at the Musicians Union. She wanted to tell me about the new wave of Anglo-Indian jazz that was coming out of Mumbai these days. I let her go on — it was better than the radio.

“Anyway,” she said eventually. “There was one case. A member called Henry Bellrush, died suddenly just after a gig. The reason I remember is because I’d met him a couple of times and he always seemed so fit and healthy. London Marathon and all that … sort of thing.”

She gave me the address. It was in Wimbledon and since I was still south of the river I headed over. Plus, I was pretty certain that sooner or later the whole hijacking-and-ambulance thing was going to land on my head. I wasn’t in a hurry to rush back for that.

“I’M NOT sure,” said Mrs. Bellrush as she offered me a cup of tea, “that I quite understand what you’re doing here.”

I took the cup and saucer, the visitor china, I noticed, and cradled it in my lap. I didn’t dare put it down on the immaculate mahogany coffee table, and resting it precariously on the arm of the sofa was out of the question.

“We periodically review nonhospital fatalities,” I said.

“Whatever for?” asked Mrs. Bellrush and seated herself opposite me, neatly tucking her legs to the left. Anita Bellrush, widow of Henry “the Lips” Bellrush, was in her mid-fifties, dressed in mauve slacks and a carefully ironed white silk blouse. She had sandy blond hair and narrow blue eyes. She lived in the kind of 1930s brick-built detached house with bay windows that you can find in the suburbs all over Britain, but in this case it was located in Wimbledon. It contained a lot of good solid oak furniture overlaid with a layer of doilies, flowery chair covers, and Dresden porcelain. It was chintz but not the cat-lady chintz I was used to. Perhaps it was Mrs. Bellrush’s manner or steely blue eyes but I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any IKEA flat-pack that showed its face around here was going to be kindling.

“Because of Harold Shipman,” I said. “You remember him?”

“The doctor who killed his patients,” she said. “Ah, I see. You do random checks of routine deaths in order to ensure that the reporting is accurate. Presumably you also apply pattern recognition systems to see if you can spot any anomalous trends.”

It sounded like a great idea but I suspected we didn’t because one of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there’s no point looking for it.

“I just do the legwork,” I said.

“Somebody always has to do the legwork,” she said. “Biscuit?”

They were the expensive ones with the dark chocolate covering with the greater-than-five-percent cocoa solids.

Henry Bellrush had learned to play the cornet in the army. He’d enlisted in the Royal Corps of Engineers and had risen through the ranks to major before taking early retirement at the turn of the century.

“We met in the army,” said Mrs. Bellrush. “He was a dashing captain and so was I, it was very romantic. In those days once you were married you were out, so I moved into civvie street.” And ironically found herself in the same line of work as she had been in the army. “Only much better paid of course,” she said.

I asked what kind of work but Mrs. Bellrush said she couldn’t tell me. “All very hush-hush I’m afraid,” she said. “Official Secrets Act and all that jazz.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Now, what is it you want to know about my husband’s death?”

If ever a man had enjoyed his retirement it had been Henry Bellrush, what with the garden, the grandchildren, the holidays abroad, and, of course, his music. He and some friends used to play at the local pub — strictly for their own enjoyment.

“But he joined the Musicians Union,” I said.

“That was Henry,” said Mrs. Bellrush. “He came up from the ranks — never lost that sense of solidarity with the common man.”

“You didn’t notice anything unusual in his behavior?” It was a standard question.

“Such as what?” she asked, just a tad too defensively.

“Staying out late, unexplained absences, forgetfulness,” I said, all of which got nothing. “Changes in spending habits, unusual receipts, credit card bills.” That got a reaction.

Her eyes met mine and then she looked away.

“He’d been making regular purchases from a shop in Soho,” she said. “He didn’t try to hide it from me and it was all there on his credit card statement. After he died I found some receipts still in his wallet.”

I asked where they were from.

“A Glimpse of Stocking,” she said.

“The lingerie shop?”

“You know it?”

“I’ve walked past it,” I said. Actually I’d once spent about ten minutes looking in the window, but to be fair I was on patrol, at three in the morning, and I was very bored. “Are you sure he wasn’t buying a present for you?”

“I’m sure I never received anything quite as daring as a scarlet Alloetta corset in raw silk with matching satin knickers,” she said. “Not that I would have been averse. Shocked, perhaps, but not averse.”

People don’t like to speak ill of the dead even when they’re monsters, let alone when they’re loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember? It’s not like they’re going to do it again. So I kept the next question as emotionally neutral as I could.

“Do you think he might have been having an affair?”

She stood, walked over to an antique folding desk, and retrieved an envelope.

“Given the nature of the purchases,” she said, handing me the envelope, “I can’t think of an alternative explanation — can you?”

Inside the envelope was a sheaf of receipts, most of them of the kind printed out by a modern till, but a couple handwritten in what I suspected was a deliberately archaic fashion — these had A GLIMPSE OF STOCKING printed at the top.

He might have been a transvestite, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

GIACOMO CASANOVA, the original Italian stallion, arrived in London to find one of his ex-lovers and babymothers holed up in Carlisle House, the former residence of the Earl of Salisbury, which faced onto Soho Square. Her name was Teresa Cornelys and, for her services to dissipation, debauchery, and the home furnishing industry she was once declared the Empress of Pleasure.

Carlisle House became London’s first members-only club. For a modest subscription one could enjoy an evening of opera, good food, and, it was rumored, convivial intimate company. It was Teresa who established the time-honored Soho tradition of packing them in, getting them drunk, and fleecing them till they squeaked. Alas, she was a better hostess than bookkeeper and eventually, after two decades, several bankruptcies, and a comeback tour she died alone and penniless in a debtors’ prison.

The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should “just say no” to opera, and that it’s always wise to diversify your investment portfolio. This was the advice followed by Gabriella Rossi, also Italian, who arrived in London as a child refugee in 1948. After a career in the rag trade she opened her first branch of A Glimpse of Stocking in 1986 where she profited from the wages of sin, albeit tastefully, said no to opera, and made sure that her portfolio was suitably robust. When she died in 2003 it was as Dame Rossi, knighted for her services to naughtiness and leaving behind a small chain of lingerie shops.

The Soho branch was managed by a skinny blond woman who dressed in a no-nonsense trouser suit, but with no blouse, and worryingly thin wrists. She seemed genuinely amused when I showed her my warrant card and although she had no recollection of Henry Bellrush, she laughed out loud when I suggested that he might have been buying for himself.

“I doubt that,” she said. “This particular type of corset has a ‘vintage’ waist. It’s designed to be ten inches smaller than the hips — I doubt a man could wear that.”

The shop was artfully cluttered with antique display racks and cabinets to give it a pleasantly retro feel so that even the English could enjoy frilly underwear safe in the knowledge that it came wrapped up with an ironic postmodern bow. On one wall there were framed photographs of women, all either monochrome or in the faded tones of 1960s color photography. The women were mostly half naked or dressed in corsets and the kind of frilly knickers that probably got my father in a twist. One was the famous Morley portrait of Christine Keeler sitting backward on a rather uncomfortable-looking Scandinavian chair. Several had been autographed and I recognized one of the names — Rusty Gaynor, the legendary queen of Soho strippers in the 1960s.

The manageress checked carefully through the receipts.

“Definitely not a man,” she said. “Not in these sizes. Although judging from the rest of the items, we’re talking about a big healthy girl here. If I had to make a guess I would say these were bought for a stage act.”

“What kind of act?”

“A burlesque dancer,” she said. “Without a doubt. Probably one of Alex’s girls. Alexander Smith, puts on shows down at the Purple Pussycat. Very tasteful.”

“A stripper you mean?” I asked.

“Oh dear,” said the manageress. “You mustn’t call them that.”

THE DIFFERENCE between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class.

“We don’t have poles onstage,” said Alexander Smith, burlesque impresario. He was a thin fox-faced man in a fawn-colored suit with 1970s lapels but not, because there are limits to decency, a kipper tie. Instead he wore a plum-colored ascot with matching pocket handkerchief and, probably, silk socks. He was so completely camp that it didn’t really come as too much of a surprise that he was married with grandkids. No gay man would have to work that hard. Smith cheerfully showed me the photographs of “her indoors” — his wife — along with little Penelope and Esmerelda, and explained why poles were the work of the devil.

“Inventions of Beelzebub himself,” he said. “Stripping is about getting your kit off in time to the music. There’s no real eroticism to it, the punters want to see her minge and she wants to get paid. Wham bam, no thank you, ma’am.”

Over his shoulder I watched as a fit-looking white woman on the club’s small stage rotated her hips to Lounge Against the Machine’s cover of “Baby’s Got Back.” She was wearing a dancer’s leotard and a baggy pink sweat top and I had to admit that, despite the lack of minge, I was suitably entranced. Smith turned to see what I was watching.

“It’s about glamour,” he said. “And the art of sensuality. The sort of show you could bring your mother to.”

Not my mother, I thought. She doesn’t do ironic postmodernism.

I showed Smith the picture of Henry Bellrush I’d gotten from his wife. “That’s Henry,” said Smith. “Has something happened to him?”

“Was he a regular?” I asked to move us on.

“He’s an artiste,” said Smith. “A musician. Beautiful, beautiful cornet player. He does this act with this lovely girl called Peggy. Very classy, just him on the cornet and her moving as he played. She could hold an audience transfixed just by taking her glove off. They used to sigh when she went topless ’cause they knew it was almost over.”

“And their relationship was strictly business?” I asked.

“You keep using the past tense,” said Smith. “Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

I explained that Henry Bellrush was dead and that I was conducting routine inquiries.

“Well, that’s a shame,” said Smith. “I wondered why they hadn’t turned up for a while. In answer to your question, those two were strictly professional, he liked playing and she liked dancing. I think that’s as far as it went.”

He also liked buying her the costumes, or perhaps he saw it as an investment. I wondered whether I should tell his wife or not.

I asked if he had any publicity pictures of the mysterious Peggy but, although he was sure they existed, he didn’t have any at the club.

I asked when their last gig was and he gave a date back at the start of the month, less than a day before Bellrush died. “Was it here?” I asked. Fourteen days was a long time for transient vestigia to be retained, but it was worth a try.

“No,” said Smith. “Much more classy than this — it was part of our Summer Burlesque Festival at the Café de Paris. We hold one every year to raise awareness of burlesque among the public.”

I EMERGED blinking into weak afternoon sunlight and before I could get my bearings I was ambushed by Simone Fitzwilliam.

“Constable,” she said brightly, and slipped her arm through mine. “What brings you to my neighborhood again?” Her arm was warm and soft against my side, and I smelled honeysuckle and caramel.

I told her I was still investigating some suspicious deaths.

“Including poor Cyrus?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Well, I’m determined to put that behind me,” she said. “Cyrus wouldn’t have wanted me to mope. He believed in living in the moment and double-entry bookkeeping. But then if we were all the same, where would be the fun in that? So where next will our sleuthing take us?”

“I need to check out the Café de Paris,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I haven’t been there for such a long time. You must take me, I could be your plucky sidekick.”

How could I argue with that.

I lied my way into the Café de Paris by claiming I was following up a spot check by Clubs and Vice and that I could be in and out in five minutes. The day manager either bought it or wasn’t being paid enough money to care either way.

The interior was a riot of gold leaf, red velvet, and royal blue drapes. The main room was oval with a split staircase at one end and small stage at the other. A balcony swept around the circumference that reminded me uneasily of the Royal Opera House.

“You can just feel the history,” said Simone, clutching my arm. “The Prince of Wales used to come here regularly.”

“I hope the food is macrobiotic then,” I said.

“What in the world is macrobiotic?” asked Simone.

“You know, beans and rice,” I said and stopped when I realized I didn’t know what macrobiotic was either. “Healthy food,” I said.

“That doesn’t sound like the prince,” she said. She skipped around to face me. “We have to dance.”

“There’s no music,” I said.

“We can hum,” she said. “You do know how to hum, don’t you?”

“I need to check the stage,” I said, trying to convince myself at the same time.

She pretended to pout, but the corner of her scarlet lips twitched and gave her away. “When constabulary duty’s to be done,” she said, “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

The small stage had enough room for its in situ baby grand and maybe a trio, if the singers were thin. I couldn’t see the buxom Peggy strutting her stuff, however tastefully, without falling off the edge. I said as much.

“Ahem,” said Simone. “I think you’ll find the stage can be extended forward to create more space. I believe theatrical people call it an ‘extendable stage.’ Mind you, I’m certain I remember the band being at the other end.”

I could feel them, layers of vestigia etched into the walls of the Café de Paris, flashes of laughter, the smell of tea, snatches of music, a sudden sharp taste of blood on my tongue. It was like an old church far too entangled in too many lives and events to be able to pick out any one thread. Certainly nothing recent. A vestigium isn’t laid down like a groove in a record, it’s not like a tape recording. It’s more like the memory of a dream, and the harder you grasp at it the faster it melts away.

Another flash, brick dust and a ringing silence. I remembered: The Café de Paris had been hit during the Blitz, killing most of the musicians including the legendary bandleader Ken Johnson. That might explain the silence. Polidori, cheerful bugger that he was, once described a plague pit he investigated as being an abyss of solitude.

“You promised me a dance,” said Simone.

Actually I hadn’t, but I took her in my arms and she pressed in closer. She started to hum as we artlessly swayed in a small circle. I didn’t recognize the tune. Her grip on my waist tightened and I grew hard against her. “You can do better than that,” she said.

I put some grind into the sway and for a moment I was back at the Brixton Academy with Lisa Pascal who lived on the Stockwell Park Estate and seemed determined to be my first ever, although actually she ended up being violently sick on Astoria Park Walk and I slept on the sofa in her mum’s front room.

Then I heard it, Johnny Green’s opening bars but with a swing beat and a voice singing far away: My heart is sad and lonely / For you I sigh, for you, dear, only. Simone was short enough to rest her cheek against my chest and it was only when I noticed that she was copying me that I realized I was humming the tune. Her perfume mingled with the vestigia of dust and silence and the words were clear enough for me to sing them softly. Why haven’t you seen it? / I’m all for you, body and soul.

I felt Simone shudder and put her arm around my neck and pull me down until she could whisper in my ear, “Take me home.”

WE WERE practically running by the time we got to Berwick Street and Simone had her keys out and ready for a front door that opened straight onto a steep staircase with dirty communal carpeting, forty-watt bulbs, and those pop-out timer switches that never last long enough for you to get all the way to the top. Simone led me up a third flight of stairs that doglegged around some bizarre retrofit put in back in the 1950s when this was a flat for French maids and “Ring top bell for models.” It was a steep climb and I was beginning to flag, but the sway of her hips dragged me up the fourth and final flight and we burst out onto the roof. I managed to get brief impressions of iron railings, bushy green potted plants, a bar table with a furled white-and-blue sunshade, and then we were kissing, her hands pushing down the back of my jeans, yanking me forward. And we went down onto a mattress.

Let’s be honest here, there’s no way to get out of a pair of tight jeans with any dignity, especially if a beautiful woman has one hand in your boxers and an arm wrapped around your waist. You always end up frantically kicking your legs in an effort to get the damn things past your ankles. I was a gentleman, though, and helped her off with her leggings — everything else we were wearing had to wait because Simone wasn’t looking for a slow buildup. She pulled me between her thighs and having lined me up to her satisfaction pulled me the rest of the way in. We went at it for ages but finally I looked up to find her rearing above me with the waning moon watching us over her shoulder, her waist bucking under my palms. She threw her head back and bellowed and with that we came together.

She flopped down on top of me, her skin feverish and sweaty, her face buried in my shoulder.

“Fuck me,” I said.

“What, again?” she asked. “There’s no stopping you, is there?”

I was instantly hard again, because nothing gets a man going like a bit of flattery. Yes, when it comes to sex we really are that shallow. It was chilly and I shivered as I rolled her over onto her back. She opened her arms wide but I ignored them and let my lips trace a line down to her belly button. Her hands grabbed my head — urging me lower, but I stretched it out. Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, that’s my motto. I put my mouth where the money was and I didn’t let up until her legs were pointing straight up in the air and her knees were locked. Then I climbed my slippery way back up and introduced myself once more. Simone’s ankles locked behind my backside and her arms snaked around my shoulders and for quite a long period coherent thought was something that happened to other people.

We came apart with a sticky pop and for a moment we just lay there and steamed in the night air. Simone kissed me open-mouthed, hungry, for a long moment and then levered herself off the mattress.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

I watched the heavy sway of her pale buttocks as she padded across the roof and slipped in through the door. There was still enough moon and street light to see that the top of the terrace had been converted into a roof garden and a good professional conversion it was too, with solid flags underfoot and waist-high iron railings. Wooden tubs stood at the four corners, each planted with something that was either a really big plant or a very small tree. The mattress I was lying on was actually a proper outdoor seating cushion with a water-resistant PVC covering. It was cooling off under my naked buttocks and so was I.

From below came the muttering, shouting party noise of another Soho evening. I became very conscious of the fact that I was lying stark bollock naked on top of a roof in Central London. I really hoped the guys at air support weren’t called into a patrol, otherwise I could end up on YouTube as that naked dickhead on the roof ROFL.

I was seriously considering looking for my clothes when Simone arrived back with a duvet and an old-fashioned picnic hamper with F&M stenciled on the side. She dropped the basket by the mattress and flung herself and the duvet around me.

“You’re freezing,” she said.

“You left me on the roof,” I said. “I nearly froze to death. They were scrambling the air–sea rescue helicopters and everything.”

She warmed me up for a bit, and then we investigated the hamper. It was a real Fortnum & Mason picnic hamper complete with stainless-steel flask of hot chocolate, a bottle of Hine cognac, and a whole Battenberg cake wrapped in grease-proof paper. No wonder it took her so long to come back.

“You just had this lying about?” I asked.

“I like to be prepared,” she said.

“Did you know Casanova used to live around here when he was in London?” I said. “When he went out for an assignation he used to carry a little valise with eggs, plates, and a spirit stove in it.” I slipped my hand around the warm heavy curve of her breast. “That way wherever he ended up he could still have a fried egg for breakfast.” I kissed her — she tasted of chocolate.

“I never knew Casanova was a Boy Scout,” she said.

We sat under the duvet and watched the moon setting behind the roofs of Soho, we ate Battenberg cake and listened to the police sirens whoop up and down Charing Cross Road and Oxford Street. When we were suitably refreshed we had mad sex until what passes for the dawn chorus in Soho was welcoming the first blush of the new day.

I like to think old Giacomo would have approved.