Moon Over Soho

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The curtains in the foyer had been taken down and we stepped through into the next room, which proved to be the club proper, where the dance floor and stage would have been if cages hadn’t been bolted into the floor. They looked brand-new and similar to the cages that labs keep their animals in.

  “Exactly the same,” said Dr. Walid when I pointed this out. “Bollingtek Animal Containment Systems—we use them at the hospital. They were installed sometime this year.”

  “Stephanopoulis has her people tracing the serial numbers,” said Nightingale.

  The cages were empty, but I could smell the bitter tang of animal shit. I saw fingerprint powder dusted around the locks and any other surface that a keeper might have put a hand on while looking after the inmates.

  “How many were there?” I asked.

  “Five in cages,” said Dr. Walid. “I’m still doing tests but they all seem to be chimeras.”

  That was a term I’d had to look up the night before when translating Bartholomew. A creature that has some cells with one set of DNA and other cells with another set of DNA. It’s vanishingly rare in mammals and usually happens when two eggs are fertilized by different sperm and then merge before going on to grow into a fetus. Not that Bartholomew knew what tetragametic chimerism was—the fathers of genetics, Crick and Watson, weren’t even a gleam in their grandfathers’ eyes when he’d been writing. Bartholomew had described chimeras as the degenerate product of unnatural unions created through the foulest and blackest magic. But I had a horrible feeling that both definitions might fit.

  “Were any of them alive?” I asked.

  Dr. Walid looked uncomfortably at Nightingale, who shook his head.

  “One of them was still alive,” said Nightingale. “But it died after we moved it.”

  “Did it say anything?” I asked.

  “It never regained consciousness,” said Dr. Walid.

  We agreed that, given the newness of the cages, they must have been the work of the New Magician rather than the Old. “Do we think the Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the Old Magician?” I asked.

  “We don’t have any link between him and this place,” said Nightingale. “In addition, I find it somewhat unlikely that he could pursue an academic career and maintain a double life as a nightclub impresario.”

  “But he definitely trained the New Magician?” I asked. “The Faceless One.”

  “Oh, without doubt,” said Nightingale. “I’m quite certain of that.”

  “I like ‘Faceless One,’ ” said Dr. Walid. “Did you come up with that?”

  “He could have had accomplices,” I said. “Another practitioner who handled the London end. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “Quite possible,” said Nightingale. “Good thinking.”

  “Or more than one partner. There could be—what do you call a group of magicians?” I asked. “A gang, a coven?”

  “An argument,” said Dr. Walid. “It’s an argument of wizards.”

  We both looked at Dr. Walid, who shrugged.

  “You both need to read more widely,” he said. This from a man who did peer review for the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

  “A cabal,” said Nightingale. “It’s called a cabal of magicians.”

  “Operating under our noses since the 1960s,” said Dr. Walid.

  “Just to add salt to the wound,” said Nightingale.

  “I should start running down the names that we got from Oxford and cross-referencing them with known associates of the Soho gangs,” I said.

  “Not before I show you something else,” he said.

  I actually went cold when he said that. I’d been very happy to find that everything had been cleaned out and I really wasn’t that keen to see anything else. Nightingale led me farther into the club. Beyond the cages there was another STAFF ONLY door that took us to a short corridor and a suite of rooms that might have once been offices or storage. They were all largely the same: grubby mattresses on the floor, a loose collection of clothes and shoes stuffed into cardboard boxes, a DVD player and an old-fashioned electron-gun TV, a few pathetic attempts to brighten up the walls, a picture of kittens and a Justin Timberlake poster. It was depressingly familiar to anyone who has ever helped raid a safe house used by human traffickers.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “We found plenty of DNA evidence,” said Dr. Walid. “Blood, semen, hair follicles. So far we’ve identified eight individuals—all chimeras.”

  “Oh God,” I said.

  “He must have another safe house,” said Nightingale. “But it could be anywhere.”

  IT WASN’T all bad news. Leslie called later with a whole new way for me to dig myself into a hole. She’d discovered it while trawling through the records from Oxford University. She hadn’t found any obvious connections between Wheatcroft and Alexander Smith, but …

  “Guess whose name I did come across?” she asked.

  “Prince Harry?”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Leslie. “Harry went to Sandhurst. No, a certain other undergraduate going by the name of Cecelia Tyburn Thames.”

  “Lady Ty knew Wheatcroft?” I asked.

  “No, you idiot,” said Leslie. “But—” She broke off to cough some more. She moved the phone away from her mouth but I could hear her coughing and swearing. Then a pause as she drank some water.

  I asked if she was okay and she said she was. There was going to be a second operation sometime toward the end of the year to see if they could restore greater functionality to her voice box.

  “But,” she said, “the point is that Tyburn was at Oxford at roughly the same time as Jason Dunlop and you once told me that one of her sisters could smell the magic on you.”

  “That was Brent,” I said. “She’s four years old.”

  “That just means it’s a natural ability,” said Leslie.

  I said it was unlikely that Tyburn, even if she had spotted any magic at Oxford, was going to tell me.

  “You just don’t want to see Tyburn again,” said Leslie.

  Damn right I didn’t want to go see Tyburn again. I’d humiliated her in front of her mother, which meant I could have whipped her naked down Kensington High Street and she would have been less pissed off with me. But I only ever argue with Leslie about two things and neither of those has anything to do with police work. It had to be worth a try.

  I knew Tyburn had a house in Hampstead; I’d blown up a particularly rare fountain the last time I’d visited—although in my defense she had been trying to mind-control me at the time. But that was just the source of her river. I’d heard that she actually lived somewhere in Mayfair. The very rich and the very poor have one thing in common. They both generate a great deal of information—the rich in the media and the poor on the vast and unwieldy databases of the state. The rich, providing they avoid celebrity, can take steps to preserve their anonymity—Lady Ty’s Wikipedia page read like it was produced by a PR flack because no doubt Lady Ty had hired a PR flack to ensure it stayed the way she wanted it. Or more likely one of Lady Ty’s “people” had hired a PR company, which hired a freelancer, who’d knocked it out in half an hour the better to focus on the novel he was writing. It did reveal that Lady Ty was married, to a civil engineer no less, and they had two beautiful children one of whom, the boy, was eighteen years old. Old enough to drive but young enough to still be living at home.

  The thing about being a policeman is you get to cheat. You get to look things up on the PNC, things that even the richest and most influential person has to provide accurate information about—in this case, driving tests. Stephen George McAllister-Thames passed his in January, and the address of record was Chesterfield Hill, Mayfair.

  It was the kind of perfect Regency terrace with a rusticated façade and decorative ironwork that causes grown estate agents to break down and weep with joy. It was located less than a third of a mile to the west of the Trocadero Centre, on streets that would have been much nicer if all the character had
n’t been stripped off them by decades of money.

  The door was opened by a tall mixed-race young man whom I recognized off the picture on his driver’s license. He’d inherited an unfortunate pair of ears and what my mum would have described as “better” hair from his dad but he had his grandmother’s cat-shaped eyes—and that wasn’t all he’d inherited.

  “Mum,” he called back into the depths of the house. “There’s a wizard here to see you.” And then, just in case I hadn’t realized he was a teenager, he slouched off back to whatever it was he was doing before I so rudely interrupted him. His mother passed him in the hallway and came and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. She let me stew for a good ten seconds before asking what I wanted.

  “I was wondering if you could help me with my inquiries,” I said.

  She took me through into a kitchen furnished in French oak and cool green tile. She offered me tea, which just to be on the safe side I refused. She poured herself a white wine.

  “What inquiries are these?” she asked.

  I asked her to cast her mind back to her days as an undergraduate at Oxford University.

  “Where I gained my double first,” she said. “Not that I think that was an achievement. Being less important than the mere act of being born within the sound of the Bow Bells.” She finished her glass and refilled.

  “While you were at Oxford,” I said, “did you notice anyone practicing magic, perhaps clandestinely?”

  “Does this have something to do with the altercation at the Trocadero Centre?” she asked.

  “It’s related, yes,” I said. “And to the attack on Ash.”

  “I’m curious,” she said. “What makes you think I should tell you?”

  “So you were aware of magic being practiced,” I said.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because you think you have something to withhold,” I said.

  “I’ll admit it’s a trifle irrational, but I still find myself minded to tell you to piss off,” she said. “Why should I help you?”

  “If you tell me what you know I promise I’ll go away,” I said.

  “Tempting,” she said.

  “And because we think there’s an evil magician operating in London and we think he may have been at Oxford—at the same time you were.” I looked at her. “You may even know him.”

  “No. I would have smelled him,” she said. “Even as I can smell you now.”

  “So what do I smell like?”

  “Ambition, vanity, pride.” She shrugged. “Fried plantain and honeysuckle. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Who were they?” I asked. “The practitioners at Oxford—I know you know.”

  She tried to stop herself but in the end there are some varieties of information that are only fun if you tell them to someone else.

  “There was a dining club. Do you know what that is?” she asked.

  An excuse for students to gather together and get pissed, as far as I knew. The membership criteria were set at variable levels of exclusivity and expense. I doubted Tyburn had joined one and, had I gone to Oxford, I’m not sure I could have joined one if I’d wanted to.

  It was called the Little Crocodiles, she told me. And it was boys only, and while it wasn’t exclusive to any one college it was mostly a Magdalen crowd. They were considered to be very dull, not aristocratic enough for the social climbers and not riotous enough for the aristos.

  “Not my cup of tea,” said Tyburn. “But I remember running into a couple of members once at a party and catching that whiff.” She waved her hand in front of her nose. “Like I said, ambition, sweaty, like somebody who’s working too hard.”

  “Do you remember their names?” I asked.

  She did, because remembering who was who was part of who she was. She also had half a dozen other names of possible Little Crocodiles.

  “And you’re sure the dining club were actively training?” I asked.

  “I made a point of getting close enough to smell any member I could find,” she said. “I thought they were somehow related to Professor Postmartin and your boss. I assumed that this was their attempt to expand the influence of the Folly.”

  She shook her wine bottle and poured the remaining half measure into her glass.

  I judged that now would be an opportune moment to depart, so I thanked her, put away my notebook, and stood up.

  “For fifty years they do nothing and then suddenly there’s you,” she said. “How did that happen?”

  “You know what you smell like to me, Ty?” I said. “Brandy and cigars and old rope.”

  “They hung Jonathan Wild at Tyburn,” she said. “For all that he thought himself the Thief Taker General of Great Britain.”

  I didn’t answer that one because I felt getting out the front door intact was more important.

  I TOLD Nightingale what I’d learned over breakfast the next morning and he insisted we go down to the firing range in the basement and blow the shit out of some targets. To be fair, I think he’d been planning a training session for some time. He also didn’t swear.

  Several months of random fire by me had depleted our stock of World War II vintage silhouettes so I’d bought some 1960s NATO standard-issue targets off the Internet. Gone were the coal scuttle helmets and rampaging Hun, to be replaced by snarling figures carefully stripped of any national or ethnic identity. NATO, these figures implied, was ready to take on paper soldiers from anywhere.

  Nightingale put three fireballs in the center mass of the left-hand target.

  “What made you think Ty would tell you?” asked Nightingale.

  “She couldn’t help herself,” I said. “First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it. Besides, I think she has such a low opinion of us that she thinks it’s only a matter of time until we … mess up and she can sweep in like the cavalry.”

  “Given our track record so far,” said Nightingale, “that’s hardly prescient.”

  “A Ministry of Magic,” I said. “Is that what she really wants?”

  “Deep breath,” said Nightingale. “And loose!”

  The trick behind an effective fireball is that it becomes an ingrained forma. A spell that you don’t have to think about to perform. I loosed a trio of fireballs that I could see moving, which was bad, but at least I hit the target—or a target at any rate. I also forgot to release them immediately, which meant that they sat there and fizzed a bit before exploding.

  “Have you been practicing at all?” asked Nightingale.

  “Of course I have, boss. Watch this,” I said and threw a skinny grenade down the range, which stuck right in the center mass of the target.

  “Your aim is getting better,” said Nightingale. “It’s a pity about the release …”

  The grenade detonated and cut the target in half.

  “And what was that?” asked Nightingale. He didn’t always approve of me departing from the strict forms he laid down for spells. His motto was that bad habits now could get you killed later.

  “Skinny grenade,” I said. “You use scindere like you do with lux impello scindere except instead of a light in a fixed place you get a bomb.”

  “Skinny grenade?”

  “From scindere,” I said. Nightingale shook his head.

  “How are you managing the timing?” he asked.

  “That’s a bit hit and miss,” I admitted. “I did some tests and it’s anywhere between ten seconds and five minutes.”

  “So you don’t know when it’s going to explode?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Is there anything I could say that would stop you from doing all this unauthorized experimentation?”

  “Honestly,” I said. “Probably not.”

  “I have to ask,” he said. “Why did you use impello at the Trocadero Centre—why not a fireball?

  “I didn’t want to kill her,” I said. “And I’m still more confident with impello than I am with anything e
lse.”

  “You realize she was just a diversion,” said Nightingale. “Alexander Smith was shot in the chest with a couple of narrow-gauge fireballs.”

  “I thought it was gunshots,” I said.

  “That’s why he used a narrow-gauge fireball to disguise the wound.”

  “Forensic countermeasure,” I said. “This guy is way too fucking clever.”

  “He probably walked out the back while you were chasing the Pale Lady out the front.”

  I cut a target in half with my next fireball.

  “That’s much better,” said Nightingale. “They need to go faster. If the enemy can see them coming, you might as well just carry a gun and shoot them with that instead.”

  “Why don’t we just carry guns?” I asked. “I know you’ve got a roomful of them.”

  “Well, for one thing,” said Nightingale, “the paperwork has become very tiresome, then there’s care, maintenance, and trying to ensure one doesn’t leave it on the Underground by mistake. Plus a fireball is more versatile and can pack more of a punch than any caliber pistol I’d be happy to carry.”

  “Really?” I asked. “More than a .44 magnum?”

  “Indubitably,” he said.

  “What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?” I asked.

  “That would be a tiger,” said Nightingale.

  “Well, don’t tell Greenpeace,” I said. “They’re an endangered species.”

  “Not that sort of tiger,” said Nightingale. “A Panzerkampfwagen sechs Ausf E.”

  I stared at him. “You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?”

  “Actually I knocked out two,” said Nightingale. “I have to admit that the first one took three shots—one to disable the tracks, one through the driver’s eye slot, and one down the commander’s hatch—brewed up rather nicely.”

  “And the second Tiger?”

  “I didn’t have time to be so clever with that one,” said Nightingale. “Straight frontal shot into the weak spot where the turret meets the hull. Must have caught the ammo store because it brewed up like a firework factory. The turret blew right off.”

  “This was at Ettersberg, wasn’t it?”