Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

I put the garbage bag down and made a werelight bright enough to see the whole of the room — the memorial covered two whole walls from top to bottom. There must have been thousands of names.

“There’s Donny Shanks who made it through the siege of Leningrad without a scratch and then got himself torpedoed, and Smithy at Dieppe and Rupert Dance, Lazy Arse Dance we used to call him …” Nightingale trailed off. I turned to see tears glinting on his cheeks, so I looked away.

“Some days it seems so long ago and some days …”

“How many?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Two thousand three hundred and ninety-six,” said Nightingale. “Three out of five of every British wizard of military age. Many of those who survived were wounded or in such bad shape mentally that they never practiced again.” He gestured and his werelight snapped back to hover over his hand. “I think we’ve spent enough time in the past.”

I let my light die away and hefted the garbage bag over my shoulder and followed. As we were leaving I asked him who’d carved the names.

“I did it myself,” said Nightingale. “The hospital encouraged us to take up a hobby; I chose woodcarving. I didn’t tell them why.”

“Why not?”

We ducked back into the service corridors. “The doctors were already worried that I was too morbid.”

“Why did you carve the names?”

“Oh,” he said. “Somebody had to do it and as far as I could tell I was the only one still active. I also had this ridiculous notion that it might help.”

“Did it?”

“No,” he said. “Not really.”

We stepped out through the night gate and blinked in the evening light. I’d forgotten that it was still daytime outside the school. Nightingale pulled the gate closed behind us and followed me up the steps. Toby had gone to sleep on the sun-warmed hood of the Jag. You could see where he’d tracked mud across the bonnet. Nightingale frowned.

“Why do we have this dog?” he asked.

“He keeps Molly amused,” I said and threw the card files into the back. Toby woke up at the sound of the door and dutifully made his own way to the backseat where he promptly fell asleep. Me and Nightingale put our seat belts on and I started the car. I had a last look at the blind windows of the old school as I turned the Jag around before I put it behind me and we headed for London.

It was dark by the time we merged with the rush-hour traffic on the M25. Big gray rain clouds were sweeping in from the east, and soon raindrops were splattering on the windshield. The Jag’s old-fashioned handling stayed rock-solid but the wipers were a disgrace.

Nightingale spent the trip back with his face turned away — staring out the window. I didn’t try to make conversation.

We were just hopping back onto the Westway when my phone rang, I put it on speaker — it was Ash.

“I can see her,” he shouted. Behind him I could hear crowd noises and a thumping beat. I put him on the car speakers.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at the Pulsar Club.”

“Are you sure it’s her?” I asked.

“Tall, skinny, pale, long black hair. Smells like death,” said Ash. “Who else could it be?”

I told him not to get any closer and that I was on my way. Nightingale reached out in the rain and put the spinner on the roof and I started picking up speed.

Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves. Driving in traffic is difficult and stressful and really sodding dangerous. Because of this the Met has a world-famous driving school at Hendon where an integrated series of advanced driving courses is designed to train officers to the point where they can do a ton down a city street and keep the body count in single figures.

As I came off the Westway and into the heavy traffic on the Harrow Road I really wished I’d taken one of them. Nightingale, as my senior officer, shouldn’t have been letting me drive. But then he probably didn’t even know there was such a thing as an advanced driving course. Or even, given that they only became compulsory in 1934, a driving test of any kind.

I turned into Edgware Road and found myself doing less then twenty even with every driver with a guilty conscience scrambling to get out of my way. I took the opportunity to call Ash again. I told him we were less than ten minutes away.

“She’s heading for the door,” said Ash.

“Is she with anyone?”

“She’s taking some feller out with her,” said Ash.

Shit, shit, shit — so much for keeping it in the family. Nightingale was way ahead of me. He pulled an airwave set out of the glove box and punched in a number — impressive, given that I’d taught him how to do that only a week ago.

“Follow her,” I said. “But stay on the phone and don’t take any risks.”

I risked waiting until Marble Arch to turn east — Oxford Street is restricted to buses and taxis only and I was counting on it being quicker to go straight down it than to plow through the weird one-way systems around Bond Street.

“Stephanopoulis is on her way,” said Nightingale.

I asked Ash where he was.

“I’m just coming out of the club,” he said. “She’s fifteen feet in front of me.”

“Heading which way?”

“Toward Piccadilly,” he said.

I worked out the location in my head. “Sherwood Street,” I told Nightingale, who relayed it to Stephanopoulis. “Going south.”

“What do I do if she starts in on her boyfriend?” asked Ash.

I swerved around a bus stalled in the road with its emergency lights flashing. My spinner blued the faces of the downstairs passengers as they watched me slide past.

“Stay away from her,” I said. “Wait for us.”

“Too late,” said Ash. “I think she saw me.”

The instructors at the advanced driving school would not have been happy with the way I put the Jag through the lights at Oxford Circus and skidded into a right turn that had me going down Regent Street with blue smoke coming from my wheels.

“Steady on,” said Nightingale.

“The good news,” said Ash, “is that she’s let the poor guy go.”

“They’re almost on Denham Street,” said Nightingale, meaning local plod. “Stephanopoulis is telling them to secure a perimeter.”

I almost screamed when an obviously deaf and blind driver in a Ford Mondeo decided to pull out in front of me. What I shouted at him was fortunately lost in the sound of my siren.

“The bad news,” said Ash, “is she’s coming toward me.”

I told him to run.

“Too late,” he said.

I heard a hiss, a yell, and the distinctive noise a mobile phone makes when it’s hurled against a hard surface and breaks.

I did half a bootleg turn into Glasshouse Street, which I swear got me applause from the pedestrians and a startled yelp from Toby as he slammed into the passenger door. There was a reason the Jaguar Mk II was the favored getaway car for blaggers and the Flying Squad, and Nightingale’s Jag had definitely been modified for pursuit. Which is why once her backside had stopped swinging I could put my foot down and be doing sixty before I was level with the Leicester Arms on the corner.

Then what I thought was the reflection of our spinner turned out to be the emergency lights on an ambulance and we all learned just how good the upgraded four-wheel disk brakes really were — the answer being good enough. If there’d been one installed I’d have been eating the air bag. Instead I had a savage bruise across my chest from the seat belt, but I didn’t even notice that until later because I was out the door and running across the junction and up Sherwood Street fast enough to keep pace with the ambulance. It stopped, I didn’t.