Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“He used to be fit,” said Dr. Walid. “But recently he seems to have let himself go.”

“Drugs?”

“I’ve done all the quick checks and nothing,” said Dr. Walid. “It’ll be a couple of days before I get the results on the hair samples.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“Heart failure. I found indications of dilated cardiomyopathy,” said Dr. Walid. “That’s when the heart becomes enlarged and can’t do its job properly — but I think what did for him last night was an acute myocardial infarction.”

Another term I recognized from the what-to-do-if-your-suspect-keels-over-in-custody classes I’d taken at Hendon. In other words, a heart attack.

“Natural causes?” I asked.

“Superficially, yes,” said Dr. Walid. “But he really wasn’t sick enough to just drop dead the way he did. Not that people don’t just drop dead all the time, of course.”

“So how do you know this is one of ours?”

Dr. Walid patted the corpse’s shoulder and winked at me. “You’re going to have to get closer to find out.”

I don’t really like getting close to corpses, even ones as unassuming as Cyrus Wilkinson, so I asked Dr. Walid for a filter mask and some eye protectors. Once there was no chance of me touching the corpse by accident, I cautiously bent down until my face was close to his.

Vestigium is the imprint magic leaves on physical objects. It’s a lot like a sense impression, like the memory of a smell or sound you once heard. You’ve probably felt it a hundred times a day but it gets mixed up with memories, daydreams, and even smells you’re smelling and sounds you’re hearing. Some things, stones for example, sop up everything that happens around them even when it’s barely magical at all — that’s what gives an old house its character. Other things, like the human body, are terrible at retaining vestigia — it takes the magical equivalent of a grenade going off to imprint anything on a corpse.

Which was why I was a little bit surprised to hear the body of Cyrus Wilkinson playing a saxophone solo. The melody floated in from a time when all the radios were made out of Bakelite and blown glass and with it came a builder’s-yard smell of cut wood and cement dust. I stayed there long enough to be sure I could identify the tune and then I stepped away.

“How did you spot this?” I asked.

“I check all the sudden deaths,” said Dr. Walid. “Just on the off chance. I thought it sounded like jazz.”

“Did you recognize the tune?”

“Not me. I’m strictly prog rock and the nineteenth-century romantics,” said Dr. Walid. “Did you?”

“It’s ‘Body and Soul,’ ” I said. “It’s from the 1930s.”

“Who played it?”

“Just about everybody,” I said. “It’s one of the great jazz classics.”

“You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?”

I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age.

“You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.”

Jazz had certainly done its best for my father.

YOU DON’T get vestigia on a body like that without some serious magic, which meant either somebody did something magical to Cyrus Wilkinson or he was a user himself. Nightingale called civilians who used magic practitioners; according to him practitioners, even amateurs, frequently leave evidence of their “practice” at their homes, so I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr. Wilkinson’s driver’s license to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.

His house was a two-story Edwardian terrace on the “right” side of Tooting Bec Road. This was VW Golf country with a couple of Audis and a BMW to raise the tone a little. I parked on a yellow line and walked up the street. A fluorescent orange Honda Civic caught my eye — not only did it have the sad little 1.4 VTEC engine but there was a woman in the driver’s seat watching the address. I made a mental note of the car’s index before I opened the cast-iron gate, walked up the short path, and rang the doorbell. For a moment I smelled broken wood and cement dust but then the door opened and I lost interest in anything else.

She was unfashionably curved, plump and sexy in a baggy sky blue Shetland sweater. She had a pale pretty face and a mess of brown hair that would have fallen halfway down her back if it hadn’t been tied up in a crude bundle at the back of her head. Her eyes were chocolate brown and her mouth was big, full-lipped, and turned down at the corners. She asked me who I was and I identified myself.

“And what can I do for you, Constable?” she asked. Her accent was cut glass almost to the point of parody. When she spoke I expected a Spitfire to go zooming over our heads.

“Is this Cyrus Wilkinson’s house?” I asked.

“I’m rather afraid it was, Constable,” she said.

I asked who she was — politely.

“Simone Fitzwilliam,” she said and stuck out her hand. I took it automatically; her palm was soft, warm. I smelled honeysuckle. I asked if I could come in, and she stood aside to let me enter.

The house had been built for the aspirational lower middle class so the hallway was narrow but well proportioned. It still had its original black-and-white tiles, though, and a scruffy but antique oak hall cupboard. Simone led me into the living room. I noticed that she had sturdy but well-shaped legs under the black leggings she wore. The house had undergone the standard gentrification package, front room knocked through into the dining room, original oak floorboards sanded down, varnished, and covered in rugs. The furniture looked John Lewis, expensive, comfortable, and unimaginative. The plasma TV was conventionally large and hooked up to Sky and a Blu-ray player; the nearest shelves held DVDs, not books. A reproduction Monet hung over where the fireplace would have been if it hadn’t been ripped out sometime in the last hundred years.

“What was your relationship with Mr. Wilkinson?” I asked.

“He was my lover,” she said.

The stereo was a boring high-end Hitachi, strictly CD and solid state — no turntable at all. There were a couple of racks of CDs, Wes Montgomery, Dewey Redman, Stan Getz; the rest were a random selection of hits from the 1990s.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if I can.”

“Is that entirely necessary, Constable?” she asked.

“We often investigate cases where the circumstances surrounding the death are unclear,” I said. Actually we, that is the police, don’t investigate unless foul play is bleeding obvious or if the Home Office has recently issued a directive insisting that we prioritize whatever the crime du jour was for the duration of the current news cycle.

“Are they unclear?” asked Simone. “I understood poor Cyrus had a heart attack.” She sat down on a pastel blue sofa and gestured for me to take my place on the matching armchair. “Isn’t that what they call natural causes?” Her eyes glistened and she rubbed at them with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Constable,” she said.

I told her to call me Peter, which you are just not supposed to do at this stage of an inquiry — I could practically hear Leslie yelling at me all the way from the Essex coast. She still didn’t offer me a cup of tea, though — I guess it just wasn’t my day.

Simone smiled. “Thank you, Peter. You can ask your questions.”

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

“Modal, bebop, or mainstream?” I asked, showing off.