Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I climbed into the ambulance, and the paramedic pulled the door closed behind us.

  “Are we going to UCH?” I asked.

  “That’s the general idea,” he said.

  We didn’t bother with the blues and twos.

  YOU CAN’T just deposit a body at the morgue. For a start it has to be certified by a bona fide doctor. It doesn’t matter how many bits the body is in; until your actual fully accredited member of the BMA says it’s dead, it occupies, bureaucratically speaking, an indeterminate state just like an electron, an atomic cat-in-a-box, and my authority to conduct what was tantamount to a murder investigation on my own recognizance.

  Early Sunday morning in casualty is always a joy, what with the blood and the screaming and the recriminations as the booze wears off and the pain kicks in. Any police officer who’s feeling public-spirited enough to show his face can get himself involved in half a dozen exciting altercations often involving Ken and his best mate Ron and it weren’t like we were doing anything, Officer, honest, it was like totally unprovoked. So I stayed in the treatment cubicle with my nice quiet dead body, thank you very much. I borrowed a pair of surgical gloves from a box in a drawer and went through his wallet.

  Mickey the Bone’s full name was, according to his driver’s license, Michael Adjayi. So a Nigerian family then, and according to his date of birth Michael had just turned nineteen.

  You’re mum’s going to be really pissed with you, I thought sadly.

  He had a slew of cards, Visa, MasterCard, bank card, and one for the Musicians Union. There were a couple of business cards including one from an agent—I jotted the details down in my notebook. Then I carefully returned everything to the evidence bag.

  It wasn’t until quarter to three that a junior doctor turned up and finally pronounced Michael Adjayi definitively dead. It took another two hours, once I’d declared the body a crime scene, to get the doctor’s particulars, obtain copies of the relevant documentation, the paramedic’s and the doctor’s notes, and get the body downstairs and safely into the mortuary there to await Dr. Walid’s tender ministrations. That just left me with the joyful last part where I contact the victim’s loved ones and break the news to them. These days the easiest way to do that is to grab someone’s mobile and see what comes up on the call log. Predictably Mickey had had an iPhone. I found it in his jacket pocket, but the screen was blank and I didn’t need to open it up to know that the chip would be trashed. I put it in a second evidence bag but I didn’t bother labeling—it would be going back to the Folly with me. Once I was sure that nobody was going to interfere with the body, I called Dr. Walid. I didn’t see any reason to wake him so I rang his office number and left a message for him to get in the morning.

  If Mickey really was a second victim then it meant that the magic jazzman killer, and I was going to have to think of a better name for him than that, had struck twice less than four days apart.

  I wondered if there’d been a similar cluster among Dr. Walid’s lists of deaths. I’d have to check when I got back to the tech-cave at the Folly. I was just debating whether to go home or fall asleep in the mortuary staff room when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.

  “Hello.” I said.

  “This is Stephanopoulis,” said Detective Sergeant Stephanopoulis. “Your particular services are required.”

  “Where?”

  “Dean Street,” she said. Soho again. Of course, why not?

  “Can I ask what the case is?”

  “Murder most horrid,” she said. “Bring a spare pair of shoes.”

  Past a certain point, black coffee only gets you so far and if it hadn’t been for the nasty smell of the air freshener my surly Latvian driver used I might have fallen asleep in the back of his mini cab.

  Dean Street was sealed off from the corner with Old Compton to where it met Meard Street. I counted at least two unmarked Sprinter vans and a bevy of silver Vauxhall Astras, which is a sure sign that a Major Investigation Team is on the scene.

  A DC I recognized from the Belgravia Murder Team was waiting for me at the tape. A short way up Dean Street a forensics tent had been pitched over the entrance of the Groucho Club—it looked as inviting as something from a biological warfare exercise.

  Stephanopoulis was waiting for me inside. She was a short terrifying woman whose legendary capacity for revenge had earned her the title of the lesbian officer least likely to have a flippant remark made about her sexual orientation. She was stocky and had a square face that wasn’t helped by a Sheena Easton flattop that you might have called ironic postmodern dyke chic but only if you really craved suffering.

  She was already wearing her blue disposable forensics overalls, and a face mask hung around her neck. Someone had liberated a pair of folding chairs from somewhere and laid out a forensics suit for me. We call them noddy suits and you sweat like anything when you wear them. I noticed there were smears of blood around Stephanopoulis’s ankles on the plastic-bag thingies that you cover your shoes with.

  “How’s your governor?” asked DS Stephanopoulis as I sat and started pulling on the suit.

  “Fine,” I said. “Yours?”

  “Fine,” she said. “He’s back on duty next month.” Stephanopoulis knew the truth about the Folly. A surprisingly large number of senior police officers did; it just wasn’t the sort of thing you talked about in polite conversation.

  “Are you SIO on this, ma’am?” I asked. The senior investigating officer on a serious crime was usually at the very least a detective inspector, not a sergeant.

  “Of course not,” said Stephanopoulis. “We have a DCI on loan from Havering CID but he’s adopted a loose collaborative management approach in which experienced officers undertake a lead role in areas where they have greatest expertise.”

  In other words he’d locked himself in his office and let Stephanopoulis get on with it.

  “It’s always gratifying to see senior officers adopt a forward-looking posture in their vertical relationships,” I said and was rewarded by something that was almost a smile.

  “You ready?”

  I pulled the hood over my head and tightened the drawstring. Stephanopoulis handed me a face mask and I followed her into the club. The lobby had a white tile floor that, despite the obvious care taken, had smears of blood trailing through a pair of wooden trellis doors.

  “The body’s downstairs in the gents’,” said Stephanopoulis.

  The stairs down to the scene were so narrow that we had to wait for a herd of forensics types to come up before we could go down. There’s no such thing as a full-service forensics team. It’s very expensive, so you order bits of it up from the Home Office like a Chinese takeout. Judging by the number of noddy suits filing past us Stephanopoulis had gone for the super-deluxe meal for six with extra egg fried rice. I was, I guessed, the fortune cookie.

  Like most toilets in the West End of London, the ones in the Groucho were cramped and low-ceilinged from being retrofitted into the basement of a town house. The management had lined them with alternating panels of brushed steel and cherry-red Perspex—it was like a particularly creepy level of System Shock 2. Not helped by the bloody footsteps leading out.

  “The cleaner found him,” said Stephanopoulis, which explained the footsteps.

  On the left were square porcelain washbasins, in front a line of bog-standard urinals, and tucked away on the right, raised up a couple of steps, was the one and only toilet stall. The door was being held open with a couple of strips of masking tape. I didn’t need to be told what was inside.

  It’s funny how the mind processes a crime scene. For the first few seconds your eye just slides away from the horror and fixes on the mundane. He was a middle-aged white guy and he was sitting on the loo. His shoulders were slumped and his chin was resting on his chest, making it hard to see his face, but he had brown hair and the start of a bald patch at the crown of his head. He was wearing an expensive but worn tweed jacket that had been half pulled down his
shoulders to reveal a rather nice blue-and-white pin-striped shirt. His trousers and underwear were around his ankles, his thighs were pale and hairy. His hands hung limply between his legs, I guessed he’d been clutching his groin right up until the point he’d lost consciousness. His palms were sticky with blood, the cuffs of his jacket and shirt soaked in it. I made myself look at the wound.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said.

  Blood had poured into the toilet bowl and I really didn’t want to be the poor forensics sod who had to go fishing around in it later. Something had excised the man’s penis, right at the root just above his bollocks, and unless I was mistaken left him clutching what was left until he bled out.

  It was horrible, but I doubted that Stephanopoulis had dragged me down here for a crash course in scene-of-crime theory. There had to be something more, so I made myself look at the wound again and this time I saw the connection. I’m no expert but judging by the ragged edge of the wound I didn’t think it had been done with a knife.

  I stood up and Stephanopoulis gave me an approving look. Presumably because I hadn’t immediately clutched my groin and run whimpering from the scene.

  “Does this look familiar to you?” she asked.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.