Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  “Did he have an alarm system?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Trollope. “A good one.”

  The bungalow was a hideous redbrick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracey Emin instead. The interior was as characterless as the exterior, World of Leather sofa, generic flat-pack furniture, fitted kitchen. There were three separate bedrooms, which surprised me.

  “Did he have a family?” I asked.

  Trollope checked his notes. “Ex-wife, daughter, grandchildren—all living in Melbourne, Australia.”

  The two spare bedrooms looked like they were last furnished in the 1980s and were neat, tidy, and unlived-in. Trollope said that Johnson had a Polish woman who “did” for him twice a week. “It was her that found the body,” he said.

  In the master bedroom, which was still off-limits to people not wearing noddy suits, I stood in the doorway and examined the bed as best as I could. The forensics team had removed the sheets and pillows but the mattress was still in place with a reddish brown stain a third of the way up from the footboard. Too much blood had soaked in for it to dry out since the body had been removed, so I could still smell it as I walked away to check the other rooms. I’d brought my own gloves with me but I asked Trollope if he had a spare pair to give him something to feel superior about.

  If Johnson had died in his bedroom then he’d spent most of his life in the living room. LCD wide-screen TV, DVD with the remotes still on the coffee table by a copy of the Radio Times. There was an antique fold-down writing desk that Trollope said hadn’t been dusted yet so we left it well alone. And a couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks. Penguins, Corgis, and Panthers from the 1960s and ’70s—Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop. The bookshelves were the type that came in two parts, the bottom section acting as a pedestal for the top and being slightly deeper and having opaque doors. Carefully, because they hadn’t been dusted either, I opened the bottom sections to find them both empty except for a couple of scraps of paper—I left those for forensics as well.

  There were a couple of surprisingly good hunting prints on the wall as well as a framed photograph of his graduating class at Hendon. I couldn’t work out which shiny young uniform he was. Beside it was a photo of him being handed a commendation by a senior officer whom I later learned was Sir John Waldron, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1968–1972, no less. There were family photographs on the mantelpiece, a wedding complete with unfortunate sideburns and flares, a pair of children, boy and a girl, at various ages, toddler, infant school, on a pale yellow beach by a green ocean somewhere foreign. There were a couple taken outside the bungalow where the kids looked to be nine or ten—nothing after that. I did a quick mental calculation and guessed that the latest picture had been taken in the early 1980s. More than thirty years ago.

  “The family in Australia are still alive, aren’t they?” I asked. “They weren’t all tragically killed in a car crash or something like that?”

  “I’ll have to find out,” said Trollope. “Why?”

  “Thirty years is a long time to go without any new photographs,” I said.

  The last couple of pictures were in the second rank, half hidden by the wife and kids. More men in kipper ties, sideburns, and embarrassingly wide lapels, photographed in a bar that looked familiar and which I suddenly recognized as the French House in Soho. I also realized I was looking at the young Alexander Smith, the nightclub owner, looking like a dandy even back then in a crushed-velvet smoking jacket and ruffled shirt.

  “You didn’t happen to get any details about his career, did you?” I asked.

  Trollope checked his notebook again but I knew even before he said it where the bulk of DCSI Johnson’s career had been spent: in and around Soho.

  “He was CID at West End Central and before that he was in something called the OPS,” he said. I asked the dates and he said 1967 to 1975.

  The OPS was the Obscene Publications Squad, the single most corrupt specialist unit of the most corrupt division of the Metropolitan Police. And Johnson had been a member during the most corrupt decade since London Thief Takers stopped being paid by the collar.

  No wonder Alexander Smith was in the photograph. The OPS had run a protection racket for porno shops and strip clubs. You paid them so much cash a day and they made sure you didn’t get raided. Or if you did, they made sure you’d get lots of warning, so you had a comfortable and civilized interval in which to move all hard-core stuff somewhere else. As an added bonus you could bung the boys in blue a “drink” and they’d go around and raid your competitors and then sell their confiscated stock to you out of the back of the evidence room at Holborn nick. It also explained how Johnson could afford to take early retirement and probably why he had to take it.

  Which made me look at the three remote controls casually left on the coffee table.

  I squatted down by the TV stand. It was your typical gray laminated chipboard cheap piece of rubbish and quite difficult, because of the tangle of wires at the back, to clean the dust off effectively.

  “Give me a hand over here, would you?” I asked Trollope and explained what I wanted him to do. Carefully, so as not to disrupt any forensic evidence, we both took a side of the DVD player and lifted it up. Underneath, there was a clear rectangle of light gray where something had protected the laminated surface from years of dust, something with a smaller footprint than the DVD player. I nodded and we gingerly put the player back down.

  “What?” asked Trollope.

  “He had a VHS player,” I said and pointed at the remotes on the coffee table. One for the TV, one for the DVD, and …

  “Bugger,” said Trollope.

  “You need to tell your scene of crime guys that somebody’s stripped this house of VHS tapes,” I said.

  “Why did he still have VHS?” asked Trollope. “Do you know anyone who still has a VHS?”

  “It has to be something he couldn’t risk getting digitized,” I said.

  “These days?” said Trollope. “It would have to be something really disgusting or illegal. Child porn, or snuff movies, or, I don’t know, kitten strangling.”

  “The wife will have to be interviewed,” I said. “Maybe she knows something.”

  “Maybe that’s why she left,” said Trollope. “Reckon there’s a trip to Australia in it?”

  “Not for us,” I said. “They never send DCs abroad. It’s always ‘experienced officers’ who get the free trips.” We shared a moment of gloomy solidarity. “If you had a bunch of stuff that you were desperate to keep hidden,” I said, “where would you stash it?”

  “Garden shed,” said Trollope.

  “Really?”

  “That’s where my dad kept his grass,” said Trollope.

  “Really?”

  “Grow your own is a long tradition in these parts.”

  “You ever been tempted to bust him for possession?”

  “Only at Christmas,” he said.

  Ideally we would have trooped out and had a look in the shed ourselves, but you don’t do that on a modern crime scene without checking with forensics first and they said we couldn’t go out until they’d checked the lawn for footprints. And they couldn’t do that until morning. Fair enough. So we went and reported unto Stephanopoulis who was mightily pleased with both of us and bestowed her munificence in the form of sandwiches and coffee. Which we had to go and eat out in the road so as not to get crumbs on the crime scene. It was surprisingly cold but the Norfolk Constabulary had parked a couple of Transit vans outside so we sheltered in one of them. Even this close to Norwich, the sky was amazingly wide and full of stars. Stephanopoulis noticed me noticing. “City boy,” she said.

  I suggested that Johnson’s ex-wife be interviewed in Australia and she agreed although she felt the Victoria police were more than capable of handling that without the need to send a British officer over, s
enior or otherwise. Trollope snorted.

  “Something funny, Constable?” asked Stephanopoulis.

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  The sandwiches were the kind that get stocked by the twenty-four-hour shops attached to petrol stations, which managed the trick of being both soggy and stale. I think mine was ham salad but I barely tasted it. Stephanopoulis put hers down after the first bite.

  “We need to know what it was Johnson told Dunlop,” she said.

  “I’ll bet it had to do with the Obscene Publication Squad,” I said. “What else would he have to talk about?”

  “There’s more to people than the job,” said Stephanopoulis.

  “Not this man,” I said. “If he had any special interests they were on the stolen tapes. I think he may have been killed, in part, in order to recover them.”

  “I see it,” said Stephanopoulis. “OPS plus videotapes, plus story to a journalist, some juicy scandal from the 1960s? Maybe somebody wanted to shut him up. If we find out what the story was we’ll find out who has a motive.”

  I told her about Alexander Smith’s presence in one of the photos on the mantelpiece.

  “Who’s he when he’s at home?” she asked.

  “Nightclub impresario,” I said. “Goes all the way back to the 1960s, had an extended vacation abroad in the ’70s and ’80s.”

  “Is he a gangster?” asked Trollope.

  “He’s dodgy, is what he is,” I said.

  “How did he come to your attention?” asked Stephanopoulis.

  “During the course of another inquiry,” I said and glanced at Trollope. I wasn’t sure how much Stephanopoulis would want me to say outside the Met.

  “Do you think they’re related?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s definitely a place to start.”

  Stephanopoulis nodded and pointed at me. “You get some sleep. I want you nice and fresh tomorrow,” she said and then looked at Trollope. “You—your boss has given you to me as my plaything so I need you to run some errands for me—all right?”

  “Yes ma’am,” said Trollope.

  “What are we doing tomorrow?” I asked.

  “We’re going to have a nice long chat with one Alexander Smith,” she said.

  I FOUND it surprisingly easy to sleep across the backseat of the Transit but I woke up to a clear and freezing morning and was really glad when DC Trollope turned up in an unmarked Mondeo to ferry me and Stephanopoulis to the train station. I swapped mobile numbers with Trollope because it never hurts to network and headed inside in search of coffee. Norwich station has your standard late-Victorian brick, cast-iron, and glass shed retrofitted with the bright molded plastic of various fast-food franchises. I gratefully staggered in the direction of Upper Crust and considered asking if I could stick my head under their coffee spigot but settled for a couple of double espressos and a chicken tikka masala baguette instead. Stephanopoulis didn’t approve.

  “The chicken in that is embalmed, dried and pressed very flat, and then sprinkled with extra chemicals,” she said.

  “Too hungry to care,” I said.

  We caught the express to Liverpool Street and Stephanopoulis got us a warrant card upgrade to first class, which on a short route like that meant slightly bigger seats and slightly fewer plebs. This suited Stephanopoulis because she was asleep before the train left the station.

  There was no WiFi on the train so I booted up a PDF of Latin for Dummies on my laptop and spent an hour and a half getting to grips with third-declension adjectives. We were twenty minutes out of Liverpool Street and the suburbs were a comforting rainy smear when Trollope called me.

  “They let me into the shed,” he said. “I was right. The door was forced.” The entry method had everyone puzzled because the lock and small circle of the surrounding wood had been popped right out. “Nobody can work out how it was done,” he said.

  I knew. It was a spell. In fact it was one I’d seen Nightingale use on a garden gate in Purley when we were dealing with the vampire nest. Either our black magician was getting careless, didn’t know that there was anyone capable of hunting him, or just didn’t care that we might be alerted to his presence.

  According to Trollope, the shed had been the usual mess, gardening tools, flowerpots, hose, and bits of bicycle.

  “I don’t think we’re ever going to find out if something was nicked or not,” he said. Forensics were dusting for fingerprints all the same. The details of that, the lock, along with the report on the two possible footprints found in the lawn, were being attached to the relevant nominal on HOLMES. I thanked Trollope and promised to let him know if anything exciting happened.

  Stephanopoulis woke up with a snort just as we were pulling into the station and gave me the briefest look of confusion before she got oriented. I filled her in on the lock in the shed and she nodded.

  “Should we get your governor in?” she asked.

  Dr. Walid had been firm. “Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see if I can’t get confirmation from Alexander Smith first, before we get him out of bed.”

  “Oh yes, Smith,” said Stephanopoulis as the train came to a stop. “A villain of the old school. This should be a treat.”

  Stephanopoulis decided to use West End Central for the interview. Built in the 1930s on Savile Row, it’s a big square office block that’s been clad in expensive Portland stone in the hope that it will disguise its essential dullness. Just across Regent Street from Soho proper, it’s the main base of operations for Clubs and Vice, and Stephanopoulis persuaded an old friend of hers who worked there to pick up Alexander Smith for us. The idea was to promote in his head that he was just a small fry caught in a great big impersonal grinding machine. We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are. We let him marinate in the interview room for an hour and a bit while me and Stephanopoulis sat in the canteen drinking the bloody awful coffee and sketching out our strategy for the coming interrogation. Well actually, Stephanopoulis did the sketching while I sat there and filed it all away under best practice.

  Alexander Smith had been abroad in the 1970s and 1980s all right—living near Marbella in southern Spain on the notorious Costa del Crime along with a lot of tough middle-aged men who sounded like Ray Winstone and had all the moral fiber of damp tissue paper. He was a villain of the old school, but a smart one because he never got caught or prosecuted. He’d owned a club but his main income had been from acting as a middleman between bent coppers and the porn barons of Soho. He literally knew where the bodies were buried and would be expecting us to want to focus on that.

  “But he’s scared,” said Stephanopoulis. “He hasn’t asked for a brief or even a phone call—he actually wants to be banged up.”

  “Why not just ask for protection?”

  “Villains like that don’t ask for protection,” said Stephanopoulis. “They don’t talk to the police at all unless they’re looking to buy you. But he’s scared of something and we need to find out what it is. When we do, we jam in the knife, give it a twist, and he’ll open up like a winkle.”

  “Not an oyster then?” I asked.

  “You follow my lead,” said Stephanopoulis.

  “What if we start getting into my area of expertise?” I asked.

  Stephanopoulis snorted. “In the event of us charting that small corner of a foreign field you get to ask the questions you need to ask,” she said. “But be sensible and be careful because I don’t like to kick people under the table—it’s unprofessional.”

  We finished off our bloody awful coffee and had a brief discussion about stack size. It’s not unknown for police officers going into an interview to pad out their files with a few reams of fake paperwork, the better to convey the notion that we, the police, know everything already so you might as well just save time and tell us what you know. But Stephanopoulis felt that an old lag like Smith wasn’t going to fall for that. And
besides we wanted to convey the idea that we weren’t that bothered.

  “He wants something from us,” said Stephanopoulis. “He wants to be talked into giving it up. The more he thinks we don’t care, the keener he’ll be to talk.”

  Smith was back in his blue blazer but the carefully matching button-down shirt was open at the collar and his face was gray and unshaven. We made a big production of putting the tapes in the machine, introducing ourselves, and advising him of his rights.

  “You understand that you’re not under arrest and that you may terminate this interview at any point you wish.”

  “No, really?” asked Smith.

  “You’re also entitled to a lawyer or some other representative of your choice.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Smith. “Can we just get on with it.”

  “So you don’t want a brief?” I asked.

  “No I do not want a sodding brief,” said Smith.

  “You seem in a hurry. You’ve got somewhere to go?” asked Stephanopoulis. “Somebody waiting for you perhaps?”

  “What is it you want?” asked Smith.

  “The thing is, we want to clarify your involvement in a number of crimes,” said Stephanopoulis.

  “What crimes?” asked Smith. “I was a respectable businessman back then, I owned a club, that was it.”

  “Back when?” I asked.

  “The old days,” said Smith. “Isn’t that what you’re asking about? Because I was a respectable businessman.”

  “But Smithy,” said Stephanopoulis. “I don’t believe in respectable businessmen. I’ve been a copper for more than five minutes. And the constable here doesn’t think you’re respectable either, because it happens he is a card-carrying member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party and so regards all forms of property as a crime against the proletariat.”