Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “And he’s down here because?”

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

  “He was a drinker?” I asked.

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

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

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

  “Drugs?”

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

  “What was the cause of death?”

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

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

  “Natural causes?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How did you spot this?” I asked.

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

  “Did you recognize the tune?”

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

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

  “Who played it?”

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

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

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

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

  Jazz had certainly done its best for my father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I asked who she was—politely.

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

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

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

  “He was my lover,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

  “He played the alto sax.”

  “And he played ja
zz?”

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

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

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

  “Do you play?”

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

  “Were you listening that night?”

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

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

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

  “Jimmy?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “You’d better tell me now,” she said.

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

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

  “When?” she asked.

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

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

  “I’m afraid so.”

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

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

  “You bitch,” shouted Melinda.

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