Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

There were booths, upholstered in tatty red velvet, lining the walls, and people staring out onto the dance floor. Bottles crowded the tables and faces, mostly pale, nodded in time to the Funk Mechanics’ butchering of a classic. There was a white couple snogging in a booth at the end. The man’s hand was shoved down the front of the woman’s dress, the outline of his fingers squeezing obscenely through the material. The sight made me feel sick and outraged and that’s when I realized that these emotions had nothing to do with me.

I’ve seen much worse in my travels and I quite like jazz funk. I must have just walked through a lacuna , a hot spot of residual magic. I’d been right: Something was going down.

Leslie always complained that I was too easily distracted to be a good copper, but then she would have walked right through the lacuna without giving it a second thought.

James and the band pushed through the crowd to surprise me with a bottle of beer. I took a swig and it was good. I checked the label and saw it was an expensive bottle of Schneider Weisse. I looked over at the band, who held up their own bottles.

“It was on the house,” shouted Max, a bit excitedly.

I could feel James wanting to talk about my dad but fortunately it was too loud and crowded for him to start.

“So this is the modern style,” shouted Daniel.

“So I’ve heard,” shouted James.

And then I had it, the vestigium , cool and distant among the heat of the dancing bodies. I realized that it was different from the residue of magic that had clung to Cyrus Wilkinson. This was fresher, crisper, and behind the solo there was a woman’s voice singing — My heart is sad and lonely . Again the smell of dust and burned and broken wood.

And something else. The vestigia that clung to Cyrus had manifested itself like a saxophone, but what I was getting now was definitely a trombone. My dad was always sniffy about the ’bone. He said that it was all right in a brass section but you could count the number of decent trombone soloists on the fingers of one foot. It’s a difficult instrument to take seriously but even my dad admitted that a man who could solo on a slide trombone had to be something special. Then he’d talk about Kai Winding or J. J. Johnson. But the guys on stage were trumpet, electric bass, and drums — no trombone.

I had a horrible feeling I’d turned up two coupons short of the pop-up toaster.

I let the vestigium lead me through the crowd. There was a door to the left of the stage half hidden behind the speaker stacks with STAFF ONLY crookedly stenciled on it, yellow paint on black. It wasn’t until I reached the door that I realized that the band had followed me over like lost sheep. I told them to stay outside — so of course they followed me in.

The door opened straight into the green room/changing room/storage area, a long narrow space that looked to me like a converted coal bunker. The walls were plastered with ancient yellowing posters for bands and gigs. An old-fashioned theatrical dressing table with a horseshoe of bare bulbs was sandwiched between an American-sized fridge and a trestle table covered by a disposable tablecloth in Christmas green and red. A forest of beer bottles covered a coffee table and a white woman in her early twenties was asleep on one of the two green leather sofas that filled the rest of the room.

“So this is how the other half lives,” said Daniel.

“Makes all those years of rehearsing seem almost worthwhile,” said Max.

The woman on the sofa sat up and stared at us. She was wearing dungarees that were loose to the waist and a yellow T-shirt with I SAID NO SO FUCK OFF printed across the chest.

“Can I help you?” she said. She was wearing dark purple lipstick that had gotten smeared across one cheek.

“I’m looking for the band,” I said.

“Aren’t we all,” she said and held out her hand. “My name’s Peggy.”

“The band?” I asked, ignoring her hand.

Peggy sighed and rolled the kinks out of her shoulders, which pushed out her chest and got everyone’s attention — except for Daniel’s of course. “Aren’t they onstage?” she asked.

“The band before them,” I said.

“They’ve gone?” said Peggy. “Oh that bitch, she said she’d wake me up after the set. This really is too much.”

“What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

Peggy rolled off the sofa and started looking for her shoes. “Honestly,” she said. “I don’t remember. They were Cherry’s band.”

“Did they have a trombone player?” I asked. “A good one.”

Max found her shoes behind the other sofa — four-inch stiletto open-toed strap sandals which I didn’t really think went with the dungarees. “I’ll say so,” she said. “That’ll be Mickey. He’s one in a million.”

“Do you know where they were going after the gig?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I was just going with the groove.” In her heels she was almost as tall as I was. The dungarees gaped at the sides to reveal a strip of pale skin and a frilly line of scarlet silk knickers. I turned away — I’d lost the vestigium when I entered the room and Peggy wasn’t helping my concentration. I got flashes of other stuff: the smell of lavender, of a car bonnet left out in the sun, and a ringing sound like the silence that comes after a loud noise.

“Who are you?” asked Peggy.

“We’re the jazz police,” said James.

“ ’He’s the jazz police,” said Max, meaning me I suppose. “We’re more like the Old Compton Street irregulars.”

That made me laugh, which shows how drunk I still was.

“Is Mickey in trouble?” asked Peggy.

“Only if he’s been dripping his spit valve on someone’s shoulder,” said Max.

I didn’t have any more time for banter. There was a second door in the room, marked as a fire exit, so I headed for that. On the other side there was another short, bare, gray brick corridor half blocked with stacked furniture, crates, and black plastic bags in spectacular contravention of Health and Safety Regulations. Another fire door, this one with push-bars, led to a staircase up to street level. The push-bars on the door at the top of the stairs were illegally fastened with a bicycle lock.

Nightingale has this spell which can pop a lock right out of its socket but apparently I’m at least a year away from learning it — I had to improvise. I stopped a safe distance away and dropped one of my unsuccessful light bombs on the lock. What they lack in finesse they make up for in ferocity. I had to take a step back because of the heat and, squinting, I could see the lock sag within the little rippling globe. When I figured the lock was good and soft, I let go of the spell and the globe popped like a soap bubble. Then I made nice basic impello forma in my mind. It was the second forma I ever learned so it’s something I know I’m good at. Impello moves things about, in this case the center line of the double doors. It smacked the doors open, breaking the lock and slamming them hard enough to knock one off its hinges.

It was impressive stuff, even if I say so myself. And certainly the irregulars, who’d come up the stairs behind me, thought so.

“What the fuck was that?” asked James.

“Thermite chewing gum,” I said hopefully.

The fire alarm in the club went off — it was time to move on. Me and the irregulars did the fifty-yard nonchalant stroll around the corner onto Frith Street in Olympic-qualifying time. It was late enough by then for the tourists to have gone back to their hotels and the streets were noisy with lads and ladettes.

James got in front of me and made me stop walking.