Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“We did play our own version of squash,” he’d said, “using the movement forms. That could get a bit lively.”

The school itself had been requisitioned during World War II by the military and by the time it was released back to civilian use in the early 1950s there hadn’t been enough children to make it worthwhile. “Or enough teachers,” Nightingale had said and then fallen silent for a long while. I made a point of not bringing up the subject again.

We did spend quite a lot of time going through the library looking for references to vagina dentata , which led me to Wolfe’s Exotica . What Polidori was to macabre death, Samuel Erasmus Wolfe was to weird fauna and what Dr. Walid calls “legitimate cryptozoology.” He was a contemporary of Huxley and Wilberforce and bang up to date with the then-latest theories of evolution. In his introduction to The Role of Magic in Inducing Pseudo Lamarckian Inheritance he argues that exposure to magic could induce changes in an organism, which could then be inherited by its offspring. Among modern biologists this sort of thing is known as soft inheritance and, if espoused, causes them to point and laugh. It sounded plausible, but unfortunately before he could complete the part of his book where he proved his theory, Wolfe was killed by a shark while taking the waters off Sidmouth.

I thought that, as a theory, it could explain the “evolution” of many of the creatures detailed in the Exotica . Wolfe had avoided mention in his theory of the genii locorum , the local gods, who most definitely existed. But I could see that if a person were to come under the influence of the vast and subtle magic that seemed to permeate certain localities, then perhaps they could be physically shaped by that magic. For example, Father Thames, Mama Thames, and even Beverley Brook, whom I’d kissed at Seven Dials.

Inherited by the offspring, I thought. Perhaps it was a good thing that Beverley Brook was safely out of temptation’s reach.

“Assuming the forensic dentistry confirms that it’s the same ‘creature,’ ” I said, “can we assume that she’s not natural? I mean, she’s got to be magical in some way — right? Which means she must be leaving a trail of vestigium wherever she goes?”

Nightingale poured more tea. “You haven’t picked up anything so far.”

“True,” I said. “But if she’s got a gaff, a nest where she spends most of her time, then the vestigia will have had a chance to build up. That should make it easier to spot, and since both attacks were in Soho, the chances are that’s where her lair is.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” he said.

“It’s a start,” I said and flicked a sausage at Toby, who executed a neat standing jump to catch it. “What we need is something that has a proven track record of hunting supernatural things.”

We both looked at Toby, who swallowed his sausage in a single gulp.

“Not Toby,” I said. “Someone who owes me a favor.”

WHEN I brokered a peace between the two halves of the River Thames, part of the deal involved an exchange of hostages. All very medieval, but the best I could come up with at the time. From the court of Mama Thames, the London contingent, I chose Beverley Brook, she of the dark brown eyes and cheeky face, and in exchange I got Ash, all film-star good looks and the greasy blond charisma of a traveling funfair. After a fairly disastrous stay at Mama Thames’s home in Wapping, the eldest daughters had stashed him at the Generator, a student hostel that existed on the boundary where roughneck King’s Cross became affluent Bloomsbury. It also put him just a short dash from the Folly in case of emergencies.

The hostel was based in a courtyard mews off Tavistock Place. On the outside it was strictly English Heritage vanilla Georgian but inside it was the kind of easy-to-clean primary colors that adorn the sets of children’s TV shows. Staff members were decked out in blue-and-green T-shirts, baseball caps, and mandatory happy smiles that slipped a bit when they saw me.

“I’m just here to pick him up,” I told them, and their smiles returned to the regulation intensity.

It wasn’t lost on me that despite the fact that I’d worked all night, had a nap and shower, and caught up on some paperwork, I still managed to arrive at Ash’s room to find him just getting up. He opened the door wrapped in a grubby olive bath towel.

“Petey,” he said. “Come in.”

The private rooms at the Generator are furnished with bunk beds in order to retain that crucial youth-hostel ambience. Technically, even when you rent a private room you’re required to share it with at least one other guest. Shortly after moving in, Ash, using an oxyacetylene torch liberated from God knows where, had reconfigured his bunk into a double bed. If anyone was going to be sharing a room with him it was going to be under the same duvet. When the management complained, Mother Thames sent her daughter Tyburn to sort things out. And when Lady Ty puts the fix in, things stay fixed. To be fair to Ash, he rarely spends a night alone. Ty hates him, but because — before Ash came along — I was at the top of her shit list, I regarded that as a bonus.

Last night’s young woman regarded me cautiously from the safety of the duvet. There wasn’t anywhere else to sit but at the end of the bed, so I perched there and gave her a reassuring smile. She looked nervously after Ash as he headed up the corridor toward the communal showers.

“Afternoon,” I said and she nodded back.

She was pretty in a calculated way, delicate cheekbones, olive skin, curly black hair that fell in ringlets on her shoulders. It wasn’t until she relaxed enough to sit up and the duvet fell away to reveal a smooth, hairless, and totally flat chest that I twigged that he wasn’t a she.

“Are you a guy?” I asked. Just to show that the sensitivity training at Hendon hadn’t been wasted.

“Only biologically,” he said. “How about you?”

I was saved from having to answer that by Ash, who swept back into the room and, stark naked, hunted out a pair of faded jeans and a Bra’ Anansi T-shirt that just had to have come from Effra. Pausing only to French-kiss the young man in the bed, he pulled on a pair of DM boots and out we went.

I waited until we were out of the hostel and heading for the Ford Asbo before asking about the guy in his bed.

Ash shrugged. “I didn’t know he was a guy until we got back to the room,” he said. “And I was having such a good time I thought, why not?”

For someone who’d never been in a built-up area larger than Cirencester all his life, Ash was turning out to be surprisingly metro.

“Where we going?” asked Ash as we got in the car.

“Your favorite part of town,” I said. “Soho.”

“You going to buy me breakfast?” he asked.

“Lunch,” I said. “Late lunch.”

We ended up eating fish-and-chips alfresco on Berwick Street, which has the offices of TV companies at one end, a street market in the middle, and a little furtive knot of sex shops at the other. It also has some world-famous record stores, strictly vinyl-only, the sort of places my dad would go to sell his collection — as if that were ever going to happen this side of him being dead.

I told him what I wanted him to do.

“You want me to hang out in Soho?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Going to pubs and clubs and meeting new people,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. “And keeping your eye out for a psychotic, possibly supernatural, killer female.”

“So, go to clubs and look for dangerous women,” he said. “What does she look like?”

“She looks like Molly but she may have changed her hair a bit,” I said. “I’m hoping she’ll stand out, you know, to you in particular, in a spiritual way.”