Moon Over Soho rol-2

by Ben Aaronovitch

  In the indifferent old days a proper coppers’ bar would have had a linoleum-covered floor, nicotine-stained wood paneling, and brass furnishings that were antique only by virtue of the fact that nobody could be bothered to replace them. But times had changed because now you could get a passable Cumberland sausage in onion gravy with chunky chips upstairs in the dining room, very nice with a Scrumpy Jack cider and just the thing after a hard morning’s interrogation. Stephanopoulis had the leek soup with a side order of rocket and a single-malt. I noticed a karaoke machine in the corner and asked whether it got a lot of use.

  “You should be here for competition nights,” said Stephanopoulis. “Clubs and Vice versus Arts and Antiques gets very heated — they had to ban ‘I Will Survive’ after there was a fight. Tell me about your investigation.”

  So I told her about the dead jazzmen and my efforts to track the person or persons unknown who seemed to be feeding off them.

  “Jazz vampires,” said Stephanopoulis.

  “I wish I hadn’t started calling them that,” I said.

  “What do you think the magician wants with them?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “To study, to enslave — we need to know more.”

  That was the cue for a minion, in the form of a rather sour-faced DC, to enter with the search warrant and present it to his boss. Stephanopoulis was careful to wait for him to leave before asking me how I thought we should handle the raid.

  Unless you’re going to knock and ask nicely there are basically two ways to execute the search warrant. The first is the traditional rush: smash in the door and run in screaming “Police” and “Clear” and giving a swift kicking to anyone who doesn’t lie down on their face as soon as you tell them. The second has no formal name but involves sidling up to the front door in plainclothes, knocking it in, and diving in like a posse of really persistent door-to-door salesmen. I suggested the latter, considering that we didn’t know what we were blundering into.

  “Keep some people on standby,” I said. “Just in case.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she said. “It’s not your overtime budget.” She finished her scotch. “Who goes in first?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “Not going to happen,” she said.

  In the end we compromised and both went first.

  In the 1950s and ’60s property in Soho was cheap. After all, who wanted to live in the middle of smoky old London? The middle classes were all heading for the leafy suburbs and the working classes were being packed off to brand-new towns built in the wilds of Essex and Hertfordshire. They were called New Towns only because the term Bantustan hadn’t been invented yet. The Regency terraces that made up the bulk of the surviving housing stock were subdivided into flats and shopfronts, basements were expanded to form clubs and bars. As property prices started rising, developers snatched up bomb sites and derelict buildings and erected the shapeless concrete lumps that have made the ’70s the shining beacon of architectural splendor that it is. Unfortunately for the proponents of futurism, Soho was not to be overwhelmed so easily. A tangle of ownership, good old-fashioned stubbornness, and outright corruption held development at bay until the strange urge to turn the historic center of British cities into gigantic outdoor toilets had ebbed. Still, developers are a wily bunch and one scam, if you can afford it, is to leave the property vacant until it falls derelict and thus has to be demolished.

  That’s what our target looked like — sandwiched between a Food City mini market and a Sex Shop on Brewer Street, it was down and neglected compared with its neighbors. Dirty windows, blackened walls, and peeling paint on the door frame. As part of the process of getting a search warrant, one of Stephanopoulis’s minions had done a property search that uncovered a typical company shell game with regard to ownership — we couldn’t wait for them to unpick it, so we got a warrant for the whole building.

  We sat in an unmarked silver Astra and watched the place for an hour before going in, just to be on the safe side. Nobody went in or out, so after checking that all the teams were in position, Stephanopoulis gave the go order.

  We all piled out of the cars and did the hundred-yard sidle to the side door where one of the entry team whipped out forty pounds of CQB ram and smacked it open with one practiced swing. His mate went in first holding a rectangular plastic shield ahead of him while a third entry-team guy stepped up behind him with a shotgun at the ready. The shotgun was in case the owner of the property had a dog, but we don’t like to talk about that because it upsets people.

  Stephanopoulis and I went in behind them, which counts as first if you’re not the entry team in case you were wondering, wearing our stab vests under our jackets and extendable batons on our belts. Beyond the door was a windowless hallway with a closed internal door on the left and a double stairway going down on the right. When I tried the switch we were rewarded with a dim light from an unshaded forty-watt bulb. Ancient flocked wallpaper in gold and red covered the walls, peeling where it met the ceiling.

  Stephanopoulis tapped one of the entry specialists on the shoulder and pointed at the door. The CQB swung again and the shield-and-shotgun team went up the stairs followed by a mixed half dozen from the Murder Team and the local Tactical Support Group. Their job would be to clear the top floors of the building while Stephanopoulis and I went downstairs.

  I shone my torch down the shadowed depths of the staircase. They were carpeted with the kind of hard-wearing short-haired nylon carpet that you find in cinemas and primary schools. It was gold and red to match the flocked wallpaper. I got a strong sense of foreboding, which could have been vestigia or just a sensible reluctance to go down the creepy dark staircase.

  We could hear the team working their way up through the building like a herd of baby elephants in a lumber yard. Stephanopoulis looked at me, I nodded, and we started down the stairs. We’d borrowed a pair of heavy-duty torches from the TSG, and their light illuminated a ticket office on the first landing. Beside it was an alcove with a counter and behind that was a yawning darkness that I hoped was just the cloakroom.

  I went down cautiously, hugging the wall so I could get the earliest view around the corner — I seriously didn’t want anything springing out. The stairs doubled back, descending into more darkness and a door in the far side of the landing marked STAFF ONLY. I smelled mildew and rotting carpet, which was reassuring. I leaned over the cloakroom counter and shone my torch around the interior to reveal a shallow L-shaped room lined with rails and empty clothes hangers. I climbed over and checked inside. There were no coats or long-forgotten bags but there were bits of paper on the floor — I picked one up. It was a ticket stub. I walked around to the staff door and opened it to find Stephanopoulis staring warily down the stairs.

  “Anything?” she asked. I shook my head.

  She clicked her fingers and a couple of Murder Team detectives came padding down the stairs with gloves and evidence bags. Stephanopoulis pointed at the staff door and they dutifully trooped past me to do a more thorough search of the cloakroom. One of them was a young Somali woman in a leather biker jacket and an expensive black silk hijab. She caught me looking and smiled.

  “Muslim ninja,” she whispered.

  Normally the police like to make a lot of noise going into a building because, unless you’re dealing with a psycho, it’s better to give any potential arrests a chance to carefully think through their options before they do something stupid. We were being quiet in this case, not something that came naturally, so that I could feel for any vestigia as we went down the stairs. I’d tried explaining vestigia to Stephanopoulis but I don’t think she really got it, although she seemed keen enough to let me go first.

  I saw the base of the cabinet first, mahogany and brass caught in the beam of my torch, more coming into view as I descended the steps. There was a double reflection from the front and back of a glass case and I realized I was looking at a fortune-telling machine parked incongruously in the center of the entrance
to the club proper. I flashed my torch around the room behind and caught glimpses of a bar, chairs stacked on tables, the dark rectangles of doorways farther in.

  The vestigia gave off a vivid flash of sunlight and cigarette smoke, petrol and expensive cologne, new leather seats and the Rolling Stones singing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. I took a couple of quick steps back and shone my torch at the cabinet.

  The mannequin in the fortune machine wasn’t the usual head-and-shoulders model. Instead the head rested directly on a pole of clear glass reinforced with bands of brass. Protruding from the truncated neck were two leathery bladders looking unpleasantly like lungs. The head itself was wearing the obligatory pantomime turban but lacked the standard-issue spade-shaped beard and pencil mustache. The skin was waxy and the whole thing looked disturbingly real — because of course it was.

  “Larry the Lark I presume,” I said.

  Stephanopoulis joined me. “Oh my God,” she said. She pulled a mug shot out of her pocket — an artifact, I assumed, from Larry the Lark’s criminal career — and held it up for comparison.

  “He looked better when he was alive,” I said.

  I felt it just before it happened; it was weirdly like the sensation I got when Nightingale was demonstrating a forma or a spell. The same catching at the corner of my mind. But this was different. It whirred and clanked as if made of clockwork.

  And the real clockwork started as with a dusty wheezing sound the bladders below Larry’s neck inflated and his mouth opened to reveal disconcertingly white teeth. I saw the muscles in his throat ripple and then he spoke.

  “Welcome, one and all,” he said. “To the garden of unearthly delights. Where the weary pilgrim may cast off the cloak of puritanical reserve, unlace the corset of bourgeois morality, and gorge himself on all that life may offer.”

  The mouth remained open as hidden machinery clanked and whirred to fill the bladders with air once more.

  “Please for Christ’s sake kill me,” said Larry. “Please, kill me.”

  Chapter 10

  Funland

  STEPHANOPOULIS PUT her hand on my shoulder and pulled me back to the base of the stairs.

  “Call your boss,” she said.

  Larry’s bladders had inflated for a third time but whether it was to plead for death or remind us that delicious snacks were available at the concession stand we never found out — as soon as we were more than a yard away his mouth closed and the bladders deflated with an unpleasant whistling sound.

  “Peter,” said Stephanopoulis. “Call your boss.”

  I tried my airwave — amazingly it got a signal — and called the Folly. Nightingale picked up and I described the situation.

  “I’m on my way,” he said. “Don’t go any farther in — don’t let anything out.”

  I told him I understood and he hung up.

  “You all right down there, guv?” called a voice from upstairs. The constable with the headscarf — Somali ninja girl.

  “I’m going to sort things out upstairs,” said Stephanopoulis. “Will you be okay down here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be as happy as Larry.”

  “Good man,” she said, patted me on the shoulder, and up she went.

  “Try and get some lights down here,” I called after her.

  “As soon as I can,” she called back.

  I kept my torch on and angled slightly downward to give me a reassuring wash of light as far as Larry’s cabinet. Larry’s face, thank God, was reduced to shadow. There was a glint of light from the darkness beyond. I shone my torch and caught a line of bottles along the back of the bar. I thought I heard breathing but when I turned the torch back on Larry both he and his bladders were still.

  Nightingale had said not to let anything out. I really wished he hadn’t said that, or at least had said what it was he thought might be in there.

  I wondered how long magic could preserve dead flesh. Or had Larry’s head been pickled and stuffed like a hunting trophy? Was there a brain inside? And if there was, how was it being supplied with nutrients? Dr. Walid had once taken cell swabs and blood samples from Nightingale, but they had grown in culture exactly as you’d expect cells from a forty-year-old man to grow. When I asked whether he’d gotten cultures from any of the river gods he laughed and told me that I was welcome to try to obtain some whenever I wanted. Neither of us even considered getting Molly to donate. Dr. Walid’s theory was that, however it worked, it worked at the level of the whole body. So once cells became physically detached from the body they no longer retained whatever quality it was that was keeping them young.

  “Or reducing replication errors,” Dr. Walid had said. “Or reversing entropy for all I know. It’s frustrating.”

  Ash had been nearly dead when he’d gone into the Thames and now I was reliably informed he was strolling around Chelsea and cutting a swath through the green wellies brigade. Something had repaired the gross tissue damage in his chest and if that was possible for him, then why not Leslie’s face? Maybe she had been right — what magic had done, magic could undo.

  I heard a noise from the darkness behind Larry’s cabinet — a scrabbling sound that seemed too regular to be rats. I shone my torch in that direction, but all I caught was a tangle of shadows among the table legs. Larry’s eyes glistened at me — they didn’t look like glass.

  I heard the scrabbling again.

  I tried my airwave and asked Stephanopoulis whether she had an ETA on Nightingale or even the portable lights. Because it’s a digital system you don’t get the weird atmospherics of an analogue walkie-talkie. Instead, the person you’re talking to drops out at random intervals. I think Stephanopoulis told me that “something” was going to be ten minutes and I was to stay where I was.

  Scrabbling.

  I took the batteries out of the airwave, turned off my phone, and conjured a nice bright werelight, which I floated off into the foyer beyond Larry’s cabinet. Once you’ve mastered the impello form, you learn to guide whatever it is you’re moving about, but it’s tricky. A bit like operating a remote-controlled plane with your toes. As the werelight curved around the cabinet, I noticed that Larry’s eyes actually moved to follow it. I tried to bring it around in a circle to check, but all I managed was to slow it down and make it wobble. I actually had to close my eyes and concentrate to get the thing to stay. But when I opened them I had my first good look at the foyer.

  More of the ubiquitous gold and red flocked wallpaper, and heavy red velvet drapes framing archways farther into the club. Dully gleaming stained pine doors with brass plates marked GENTLEMEN and LADIES on the right. The bar had a mirrored back wall, which meant I could see in the reflection that there was nothing lurking beneath the bar.

  My dad had played in clubs that looked like this. I’d gone clubbing in clubs like this, which made me realize how suspiciously unrotten the curtains were — despite the smell of mildew. Then I saw, hanging from a light fitting, the familiar folded-up neon shape of a compact fluorescent low-energy lightbulb — definitely not commercially available in the 1970s. Somebody had been down here recently and often enough to think it worth shelling out for some new bulbs.

  This time, when the scrabbling came, I saw movement at the far end of the foyer, where the drapes half hid the archway to the rest of the club. A strange kicking motion in the fabric. I managed to bob my werelight in the right general direction and saw two human legs, probably female, protruding below. They were dressed in stockings — the same rich red color as the wallpaper. And one of the feet was still shod in a matching scarlet pointy-toed stiletto. As my light wobbled closer the legs began to kick, a spastic mechanical movement that reminded me horribly of early biological experiments with frogs. There were no human sounds apart from the heels drumming against the carpet, and the drapes hid anything above the thighs — assuming there was anything above the thighs.

  It was possible a human being was in distress, and I had a duty to check it out — if only I could make my feet take a
step forward. The legs began to kick more violently and I noticed that my werelight was beginning to dim and take on a redder hue. I was well practiced at werelights by this point, and they never normally changed color without me changing the forma. I’d seen this before when I’d “fed” the ghost of Captain de Vries and my best guess was that as the magic was drained off, the short-wavelength, higher-energy light dropped away first. Although saying that really doesn’t convey how sodding sinister the effect was in real life.

  The legs kicked faster, the remaining shoe coming loose and spinning off into the shadows. The light grew dimmer and still I couldn’t make myself go forward.

  “Shut it down, Peter,” said Nightingale from behind me. I popped the werelight and immediately the legs stopped kicking. He’d arrived with a bunch of serious-looking forensics people in noddy suits carrying their evidence-collection kits in camera cases. At the back a couple of Murder Team guys, including Somali ninja girl, were wrestling some portable floodlights down the last flight of stairs. Nightingale himself was in a noddy suit, which despite being the most modern item of clothing I’d ever seen him wear still made him look like the lead from a 1950s black-and-white sci-fi classic. He had one of his silver-topped canes in his right hand and a coil of nylon rope slung over his shoulder.

  “Do not feed the animals,” he said.

  “You think there might be something alive in there?” I asked.

  “That’s something we’re going to have to discover for ourselves,” he said.