Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“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.

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.