Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  I didn’t have time to shout a warning, I just made the correct shape in my head and shouted, louder than I had intended, “Impello.”

  The spell picked her up and slammed her back against the railing and then, horrifyingly, she toppled backward and was gone.

  THE CENTRAL atrium at the Trocadero Centre is four stories high with an open basement that added another story to the fall. The space is crisscrossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were integral parts of the shopping experience. I was told much later that the Pale Lady had bounced off the side of one of the escalators on her way down, that she may even have been angling to try to land on it but couldn’t quite make the distance. That impact broke her back in two places but she was still alive when she hit the basement floor headfirst.

  Instantaneous, said Dr. Walid.

  A hundred-foot drop at thirty-two feet per second per second I make that about two and a half seconds to watch the ground coming up to meet you—that’s not what I call instantaneous.

  Backup was less then a minute away. They saw her fall. They were on hand to seal off the floor and take witness statements. I gave a brief statement to Stephanopoulis before Nightingale insisted that we go to casualty. The next thing I knew, we were in the A&E unit at UCH and Dr. Walid was hovering in the background and making the F2 junior doctor who was treating me nervous. Then Dr. Walid noticed that Nightingale was a bit pale and unsteady and forced him to lie down in an adjacent treatment cubicle. The junior doctor visibly relaxed and started chatting to me as he checked my various scrapes and bruises but I don’t remember what he was talking about. Then he bustled off to arrange some X-rays and left me with a redheaded Australian nurse whom I recognized from the Punchinello case. She winked at me as she cleaned the blood off my face and glued a cut on my cheek that I wasn’t even aware I had.

  “May the blessings of the river be upon you,” said the nurse as they wheeled me off to X-ray and zapped me a couple of times before wheeling me back to my cubicle to lounge around in a drafty hospital gown for an hour or so. It may have been longer because I think I dozed off. Being Saturday night there was a lot of drunken shouting and moaning and the sound of my fellow members of the constabulary telling people to “calm down” or asking them what happened. Dr. Walid popped his head in to say that he was keeping Nightingale in overnight. I asked for some water; he felt my forehead and then vanished.

  Somebody with a Scouse accent a couple of cubicles down said that he just wanted to go home. The doctor told him that they had to reset his leg first. The Scouser insisted that he felt fine and the doctor explained that they had to wait for the drink to wear off so they could anesthetize him.

  “I want to go home,” said the Scouser.

  “As soon as you’re fixed up,” said the doctor.

  “Not home here,” said the Scouser mournfully. “I want to go back to Liverpool.”

  I wanted the fluorescent lights to stop giving me a headache.

  Dr. Walid came back with water and a couple of ibuprofen tablets. He couldn’t stay because he had a brand-new body to look at. After some more time the junior doctor came back.

  “You can go home now,” he said. “Nothing is broken.”

  I think I walked back to the Folly—it’s not that far.

  I woke up the next morning to find that breakfast hadn’t been served. When I went down to the kitchen to find out why, I discovered Molly sitting on the table with her back to the door. Toby was sitting beside her but at least he looked up when I came in.

  “Is something wrong?” I asked.

  She didn’t move. Toby whined.

  “I’ll just go have breakfast out,” I said. “In the park.”

  That seemed fine with Molly.

  Toby jumped up and followed me out.

  “You are so mercenary,” I told him.

  He yapped. I guess from Toby’s point of view a sausage is a sausage.

  The Folly sits on the south side of Russell Square, the center of which is occupied by a park with fixed gravel paths, big trees that I didn’t know the names of, a fountain that was specifically designed to get children and small dogs soaking wet, and on the north side a café that does a decent double sausage, bacon, black pudding, egg, and chips. It was actually quite sunny, so I sat on the terrace outside the café and mechanically shoveled the food into my face. It really didn’t taste of anything, and in the end I put my plate on the floor and let Toby finish it off.

  I walked back to the Folly and in through the main door where there was a drift of junk mail. I scooped it up. It was mostly flyers for local pizza joints and kebab houses, although there was one crudely designed leaflet from a Ghanian fortune-teller who felt we could only benefit from his insight into future events. I dropped the lot into the magazine rack that Molly leaves in the atrium for that purpose.

  I felt a bit queasy, so I went into the toilet and threw up my breakfast and then I climbed back into my bed and went back to sleep.

  I woke up again in the late afternoon, feeling sticky and with the discombobulated feeling you get when you sleep through the day for no good reason. I went down the corridor and ran a bath in the claw-footed enamel monstrosity that we have instead of a proper shower. I got it as scalding as I could take, yelped when it lapped against the bruises on my thigh, and stayed in there until my muscles relaxed and I got bored of impersonating Louis Armstrong singing “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” I couldn’t shave because of the cut on my cheek, so I left my chin with manly stubble and went to look for some clean clothes.

  When I was growing up, the only way to keep my mum out of my room would have been to install steel security doors and probably not even that would have helped. It did mean that I’ve never been precious about people coming into my bedroom, especially if all they’re going to do is clean it and do the laundry. I put on khaki chinos, the quality button-down shirt, and my good shoes. I looked in the mirror. Miles Davis would have been proud of me; all I needed was a trumpet. There’s only one thing you can do when you look that good, so I picked up my mobile and called Simone.

  It didn’t work—I’d blown the chip when I used magic on the Pale Lady.

  I took one of my backup phones from the drawer in my desk, a crappy two-year-old Nokia with a pay-as-you-go SIM card. It already had my standard numbers saved so I added Simone’s and called her.

  “Hi, baby,” I said. “Want to go out?”

  When she stopped laughing, she said that she’d be delighted to.

  Only students and people from Basildon go clubbing on a Sunday so we went to the Renoir to see Spirit of the Escalator—un film de Dominique Baudis, which turned out, despite the subtitles, to be a romantic comedy. The Renoir is an art cinema that sits underneath the Brunswick Center, a cream-colored shopping center and housing development that reminded me of an Aztec pyramid turned inside out. It’s less than two minutes’ walk from the Folly, so it was convenient. It’s also still got the old-fashioned seats where you can snuggle up to your girlfriend without injuring yourself on a cup holder. She asked me about the cut on my cheek and I told her I’d been in a scuffle.

  Afterward we had supper at YO! Sushi—which Simone had never eaten at before, despite there being a branch practically outside her front door.

  “I’m terribly loyal to the Patisserie Valerie,” she said by way of explanation.

  She loved the little colored bowls trundling around the conveyer belt and was soon piling empty ones up by her plate like so many mounds of skulls. She was actually quite a dainty eater, but steady and determined. I picked at a bowl of spicy salmon rice. My stomach still wasn’t really settled, but it was a pleasure to watch the obvious delight she got from each dish. Fortunately the YO! Sushi closed before she exceeded my credit card limit and we tumbled out of the Brunswick Centre and walked back along Bernard Street toward Russell Square tube station. It had rained while we were in the cinema and the streets were s
lick and fresh. Simone stopped walking and dragged my head down so she could kiss me. She tasted of soy sauce.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  “How about my place,” I said.

  “Your place?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  The coach house is not the perfect crash pad but I certainly didn’t want Simone meeting Molly when she was in one of her moods. Simone blew right past my two grand worth of consumer electronics and went straight to the studio under the skylight.

  “Who’s this?” she asked. She’d found the portrait of Molly reclining nude while eating cherries.

  “Somebody who used to work here years ago,” I said.

  She gave me a sly look. “Turn around,” she said. “And close your eyes.”

  I did as I was told. Behind me I heard the stealthy rustle of clothes, a suppressed curse followed by a zip unfastening, the thump of her boots hitting the floor, the whisper of silk as it slipped over her skin. There was a long pause and then I heard the creak of antique furniture as she made herself comfortable.

  She made me wait a little bit longer.

  “You can turn around now,” she said.

  She was reclining, nude and beautiful, on the chaise longue. She didn’t have a bowl of cherries so she’d let her fingers drift down to twist in the brown curls of her hair. She was so delicious I didn’t know where to start.

  Then I saw it, a blotch like a port-wine birthmark in the corner of her mouth. I thought it was a smear of something she’d been eating but then it ripped while I was staring at it. With a hideous crunch her jaw splintered as a crude triangle of skin peeled back from her face. I saw muscle, tendon, and bone stretch and pop, and her jaw hung slack like that of a cut puppet.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Simone.

  Nothing. Her face was back as it had been, wide, beautiful, the arc of her smile fading as I staggered backward.

  “Peter?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what happened there.” I knelt down by the chaise longue and cupped her cheek in my hand—the bones beneath her skin were reassuringly solid. I kissed her, but after a moment she pushed my face away.

  “Has something happened?”

  “I was involved in an incident,” I said. “Somebody died.”

  “Oh,” she said and put her arms around me. “What happened?”

  “I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I said and slipped my hand down her hip in the hope that it would distract her.

  “But if you could talk about it,” she said. “You’d talk about it with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. But I was lying.

  “Poor thing,” she said and kissed me.

  I found that if I held her close I didn’t have any more nightmares. At one point in the proceedings the chaise longue shifted alarmingly and I heard the crack of splintering wood. We hurriedly separated just long enough for me to put a few cushions on the floor and throw a blanket over them. She pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and it all got wonderfully strenuous and sweaty until finally she flopped down on me as boneless and as slippery as a fish.

  “It’s peculiar,” she said after she’d caught her breath. “I used to always want to go out. But with you I just want to stay in all the time.”

  She rolled off and slid her hand down my stomach to cup my balls. “Do you know what I’d really like now?” she asked.

  “There’s cakes in the fridge,” I said.

  I was hard again and slipped her hand up to grab hold.

  “You’re a terrible man,” she said. She gave me a quick shake as if judging my readiness and then, pausing briefly to kiss it on the head, got up and made her way to the fridge. “That Jap food’s all very well,” she said. “But I don’t think they know how to make a decent patisserie.”

  Later, exhausted but unable to sleep, I lay with her under the skylight and watched the rain rippling down the panes. Simone again slept with her head on my shoulder, a leg slung possessively across my thighs, and her arm draped around my waist—as if making sure I couldn’t slink away in the middle of the night.

  I’m not a player, but I’d never had a girlfriend who’d lasted more than three months. Leslie said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Leslie swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya—counting down to disaster. Leslie could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.

  On the other hand, I thought as Simone snuggled up against me, even in the worst-case scenario there’s at least another two months left to run. Then of course that corner of my brain that is forever a policeman wanted to know whether I was sure Simone wasn’t involved in the case of the dying jazzmen. After all, she’d been living with Cyrus Wilkinson. But then Henry Bellrush was still living with his wife when he died. More tellingly, if Simone was really a creature of the night who seduced and then sucked the life out of jazz musicians, why was she sleeping with me—who had utterly failed to inherit his father’s talent or even his taste for music? Nor had her face appeared in any of the pictures from 1941.

  You actually get a lecture on this during training, which I admit most of us snoozed through because it wasn’t associated with any tests or essay writing. I did remember the lecturer warning that a copper’s natural instincts could quickly spill over into unwarranted paranoia. Life is unbelievably messy, the lecturer said, and coincidences happen all the time. If you’re still suspicious in the morning, I told myself, you can check her alibi against suspicious deaths last year, because nothing builds a healthy relationship like the third degree over the breakfast table.

  Having thought that just before I drifted off, I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen when I woke to find that Simone had slipped out at the crack of dawn and left me sleeping.

  I was summoned that morning to the John Peel Center in Hendon, where I was “debriefed” by a couple of officers from the Directorate of Professional Standards. This took place in a conference room with tea, coffee, and Sainsbury’s value digestive biscuits, and it was all very civilized. After establishing that I had a legitimate reason to be on that floor of West End Central, they asked me about the chase to the Trocadero Centre and the consequent death of the suspect in a fall from the top balcony. Apparently the CCTV footage was very clear—I was nowhere near the suspect when she went over the railing, therefore I could not have pushed her over nor could I reasonably have been expected to reach her in time to stop the fall. They seemed satisfied that I should return to duty, although they warned me that this was just the start of their investigation.

  “We may have more questions for you later,” they said.

  I’m fairly certain they were supposed to offer me psychological counseling at that point, but they didn’t. Which was a pity, because I would have rather liked it. Sadly the rules are very clear. As a red-blooded police officer you can only accept counseling when it is foisted on you by Guardian-reading social-worker types. I don’t need it, you protest to your mates, but you know these touchy-feely jobsworth types. Then you down your pint and soldier on—dignity intact.

  As well as the statement to the DPS, I had to generate my own reports for the files, which I did from the safety of the coach house, sending them off to be vetted by Leslie before I submitted them. She suggested I make a couple of deliberate mistakes because nothing says cover-up like perfectly consistent statements, so I pretended that I was a member of the public and misremembered some stuff. She also made it clear that rushing into the Trocadero Centre without backup had been foolish and, worse, unprofessional. She was sorry to say that I was clearly deteriorating badly without her there to curb my bad habits. I let her go on at me for some time, not least because she seemed to enjoy it so.

  I promised to be more careful in the future.

  Dr. Walid released Nightingale from the hospital that afternoon and he returned to the Folly long enou
gh to change his clothes before heading back to supervise the forensic work at the club. I asked if he needed me but he said no and gave me a reading list, one of which was a gloss by Bartholomew that was in Latin. I think he was hoping I’d spend all day with the text in one hand and a dictionary in the other, but I just typed the relevant sections into an online Latin translator and then tried to interpret the gibberish that came out the other end.

  I think Bartholomew was conjecturing that it might be possible to use magic to combine the characteristics of two creatures in violation of the great chain of being—that great hierarchy of creatures, slime at the bottom and angels at the top, ordained by God. Somebody had annotated my copy by writing in the margin in very small capitals something in Latin that my Web translator rendered as, “People are made nature and vice versa.”

  Real cat-girls, I thought. The Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with something as sleek and furry as a tiger. Whoever was running the club would have a made a fortune. The old ethically challenged magic practitioner had Chief Inspector Johnson to help keep it quiet but the new guy, his possible apprentice, the Faceless One, how had he planned to keep it secret?

  The next morning Nightingale took me for a tour of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. The landing and cloakroom area had been turned, appropriately enough, into a changing room for personnel to get in and out of their noddy suits. Dr. Walid was waiting for us and warned us to watch our feet. Lengths of cable had been run down the stairs and neatly secured against the walls with gaffer tape.

  “We wanted to avoid activating any electrical circuits in the club itself,” said Dr. Walid. “Just in case.”

  He led me down to the foyer, where I noticed that the Cabinet of Larry had been removed completely, as had the kicking legs. “I’ve had to lease extra space at the UCH,” said Dr. Walid. “I’ve never had this much material before.”