Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said. “I shall do that.”

“Wait,” said Stephanopoulis. “I want you to check the follow-up interviews with Colin Sandbrow — they should be on the system by now.”

“Who’s Colin Sandbrow?”

“The man who would have been the next victim if your weirdo friend hadn’t gotten in the way,” she said. “If you think you can do that without generating more property damage.”

I laughed to show that I was a good sport, but cop humor being what it is I knew I’d be carrying that ambulance around for the rest of my career. I left Stephanopoulis to impose her will on the crime scene and slipped through St. Anne’s Court and D’Arblay Street to Berwick Street. Since I hadn’t been paying attention the night before, I had to stop and get my bearings before I spotted the door — sandwiched between a chemist’s and a record shop that specialized in vintage vinyl. The black paint on the door was peeling and the little cards on the entry phone were either smudged or missing entirely. It didn’t matter. I knew she was on the top floor.

“You wretch,” spluttered the entry phone. “I’m not ready.”

“I can go around the block again,” I said.

The lock buzzed and I pushed the door open. The stairs didn’t look any better in the daylight; the carpet was pale blue and worn through in places and the walls showed stains from where people had put their hands out to balance themselves. On each floor there were blind doors, which in Soho could lead anywhere from Strict Discipline at Reasonable Rates to a television production company. I paced myself so I wasn’t panting when I reached the top floor and knocked on the door.

When Simone opened it and saw me in my uniform she skipped back a step and clapped her hands. “Look at this,” she said. “It’s a strippergram.”

She’d been cleaning in a pair of gray tracksuit bottoms and a navy blue sweatshirt that looked like it had been cropped with a pair of nail scissors. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf in an English way that I’d only ever seen on Coronation Street . I stepped forward and grabbed her. She smelled of sweat and Domestos. It would have been straight onto the floor right then if she hadn’t gasped out that the door was still open. We broke long enough to close the door and stumble to the bed. Only one bed I noticed, but it was king-sized and we did our best to use every bit. At some point my uniform came off and we never did find what happened to her sweatshirt — she left the scarf on, though, because something about it turned me on.

An hour and a bit later I had a chance to look around the flat. The bed took up one whole corner of the main room and was, apart from one overstuffed leather armchair, the only thing to sit on. The only other furniture was a mismatched trio of wardrobes lining one wall and a solid oak chest of drawers that was so big, the only way to get it into the room must have been to winch it in through the window. There was no TV that I could see, or stereo, although a suitably small MP3 player might have vanished among the drifts of cloth that had colonized the room. I’m an only child, so I’ve only ever had to live with one woman at a time and wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of clothes that could be generated by three sisters sharing one flat. The shoes were particularly pervasive; serried ranks of, to me, almost identical open-toed sling-back stilettos. Tangles of sandals had been stuffed into random nooks while boxes of pumps filled the gaps between the wardrobes. Pairs of boots, from calf-length to thigh-high, hung from nails on the wall like the rows of swords in a castle.

Simone saw me eyeing a pair of fetish boots with three-inch spike heels and started to wriggle out of my arms. “Want me to try them on?” she said.

I pulled her back against my chest and kissed her neck — I didn’t want her going anywhere. She twisted in my arms and we kissed until she said she had to pee. Once your lover’s done you might as well get up and so I folded myself into the bathroom — a tiny cubbyhole with just enough room for a surprisingly modern power shower, a toilet, and the kind of small odd-shaped sink designed to fit into the space of last resort. While I was in there my copper’s instincts got the better of me and I had a rummage through their medicine cabinet. Simone and her sisters were clearly in favor of the long-term storage of dangerous chemicals because there were acetaminophen and prescription sleeping tablets that dated back ten years.

“Are you going through my things?” asked Simone from the kitchen.

I asked how her and her sisters managed to get along with such a small bathroom.

“We all went to boarding school, darling,” said Simone. “Survive that and you can handle anything.”

When I came out she asked me if I wanted tea. I said why not and we had a full English tea — on a tray with blue-and-gold Wedgwood crockery, blackberry jam, and heavily buttered crumpets.

I liked looking at her naked, reclining on the bed like something out of the National Gallery with a cup of tea in one hand and a crumpet in the other. Given that we’d just had quite a good summer her skin was very pale, translucent almost. When I lifted my hand from her thigh a pink outline remained.

“Yes,” she said. “Some of us don’t tan very well — thank you for reminding me.”

I kissed the spot better by way of apology and then the curve of her belly by way of invitation. She giggled and pushed me away.

“I’m ticklish,” she said. “Finish your tea first, you savage. Have you no manners?”

I took up the willow-pattern teacup and sipped the tea. It tasted different, exotic. A posh blend I suspected, from another Fortnum & Mason hamper. She fed me some crumpet and I asked her why she didn’t have a TV.

“We didn’t have television when we were growing up,” she said. “So we never got into the habit of watching. There’s a radio somewhere for listening to The Archers . We never miss an episode of The Archers . Although I must admit I can’t always keep all the characters straight, they do seem to be always getting married, having secret love affairs, and as soon as I’ve grown familiar with them they die or leave Ambridge.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Not a follower of The Archers , are you?”

“Not really,” I said.

“We must seem like such bohemians to you,” she said finishing her tea. “Living all higgledy-piggledy in one room, no television, in among the fleshpots of Soho.” She placed teacup and tray on the floor by the bed before reaching out to pluck the empty cup from my fingers.

“I think you worry too much about what I think,” I said.

Simone put the teacup safely off the bed and kissed me on the knee.

“Do I?” she asked and grabbed me with her hand.

“Definitely,” I said trying not to squeak as she kissed her way up my thigh.

Two hours later she threw me out of bed, but in the nicest possible way.

“My sisters will be back soon,” she said. “We have rules. No men in the bed past ten o’clock.”

“There have been other men?” I said while looking for my boxers.

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re my first.”

Simone was pulling on random items that she’d found on the floor including a pair of satin knickers that fit her like a second skin. Watching them go on was almost as sexy as watching them come off would be. She caught me panting and wagged her finger at me.

“No,” she said. “If we start again we’ll never stop.”

I could have lived with that but a gentleman knows when to give in gracefully and depart the scene. Not without some serious snogging in the doorway first, though.

I walked back through Soho with the scent of honeysuckle in my nostrils and, according to subsequent records, helped officers from Charing Cross and West End Central break up two fights, a domestic and a hen party that had ended with an attempted sexual assault on a male stripper. But I don’t remember any of that.