Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

The vestigium left on the body of Mickey the Bone had sounded like a trombone. At Cyrus Wilkinson’s demise it had been an alto sax — the instruments the musicians had played in life. Henry Bellrush had played the cornet, but I hadn’t sensed a cornet at the Café de Paris.

I’d sensed Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his West Indian Orchestra who had all died there, in the Café de Paris, more than seventy years ago.

That couldn’t be a coincidence.

THE NEXT morning I talked myself out of practice and headed for Clerkenwell and the Metropolitan Archive. The Corporation of London is the organization dedicated to ensuring that the City — that’s the financial bit of London — is untainted by all this newfangled democracy that’s been rearing its ugly head in the last two hundred years or so. If an oligarchy was good enough for Dick Whittington, they argue, then it’s good enough for the heart of twenty-first-century London. After all, they say, it works in China.

They are also in charge of old archives of the London County Council, which are kept in a workmanlike but still elegant art deco building with white walls and gray carpet. I flashed my warrant card at one of the librarians, and she quickly pulled up a list of documents and showed me how to order.

She also suggested that she could check the digital archive to see if there were any images available. “Is this a cold case?” she asked.

“A very cold case,” I said.

First up from the storeroom was LCC/CE/4/7, a cardboard box full of manila folders tied up with dirty white ribbons. I was looking for item #39 report from March 8, 1941. The identification was handwritten in black ink and I untied the folder to find the report printed in purple type on pale yellow paper, a surefire sign, said the librarian, that it had been duplicated with a mimeograph. It was marked SECRET and dated March 9, 1941. SITUATION REPORT AS AT 0600 HOURS. It listed, in order of importance, damage to factories, railways, telecommunications, electricity supply, docks, roads, hospitals, and public buildings. St. Thomas’s Babies Hostel in Lambeth had been hit and, I was relieved to read, no casualties taken. Oddly relieved, given that it all happened half a century before I was born. I found what I was looking for halfway down the third page.

While I was waiting for the other files to be brought up, the librarian called me over to the information point to show me some of the pictures she’d found in the digital archive. Most of them came from the Daily Mail , which must have had a photographer on the scene almost as soon as the bombs fell. In monochrome everything looked curiously bloodless and it wasn’t until you recognized that the light gray tube poking out from under a table was a woman’s forearm that you realized you were looking at a charnel house. There were six more pictures of the interior of the nightclub and several of casualties arriving at Charing Cross Hospital, pale faces and stunned expressions among the blankets and primitive equipment of a wartime hospital.

I almost missed it but some flicker of recognition made me click back one and check.

The picture was confused and I couldn’t identify where it was taken, possibly the ambulance loading bay. A group of women were being led past the camera, all but one of them hunched over with blankets across their shoulders. One face was staring at the camera, the expression erased by shock into a smooth pale oval. A face that I recognized, and which I’d last seen in the green room at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died.

She’d called herself Peggy. I wondered if that was her real name.

THE CAFÉ de Paris had been built twenty feet below ground level and was considered safe by management and customers alike. Unless you took cover in the Underground system, no civilian shelter in London was built nearly as deep. Later it was determined that two bombs penetrated the building above the nightclub; one failed to detonate while the other dropped down an airshaft and exploded right in front of the band, killing the musicians and most of the dancers. Ken Johnson had his head blown clear off his shoulders and there were reports of customers killed where they sat, but remaining upright at their tables. Eyewitnesses remembered that there had been a great many Canadian nurses and servicemen in the club that night, but despite going down to the storage area with the librarian I couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled a casualty list. I found duplicates typed on paper as thin as tissue concerning an exchange of correspondence dealing with complaints that ambulances hadn’t arrived quickly enough to deal with the casualties, and a report on the shocking boldness of the looters who had steamed through the site nicking valuables.

Nothing more on the mysterious Peggy who, if it was the same person, would have to be pushing ninety. A year ago I would have considered that unlikely, but these days I was working with a guy who was born in 1900 and he wasn’t even the oldest person I’d met. Oxley had been a medieval monk and his “father” dated back to the foundation of the City in the first century AD.

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing, and Check everything. But you’ve got to start somewhere, and I was going to start with Peggy.

The archive has a whitewashed room with lockers, two coffeemakers, and one of those machines that dispenses chocolate bars and stale snacks. I got a coffee and a Mars bar and called in a PNC check on Peggy, female, IC1, eighteen to twenty-five. The civilian operator laughed at me down the line and said she wasn’t even going to tell me how big a set of nominals that returned. I asked her to limit the area to Soho and go back as far as 1941. To her credit she didn’t ask me why.

“Not everything from that far back is on the system,” the operator said. She had a Scouse accent so she managed to make it sound like this was personally my fault. She hummed something from the late 1990s chart under her breath while she checked. “I’ve got a load of nominals that fit those parameters,” she said. “Mostly prostitution and drug arrests.” But nothing that stood out. I asked her to forward the nominal list to the HOLMES case file I’d been building. She was impressed — most coppers don’t even know you can do that.

Peggy had been at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died. She’d mentioned Cherry who was probably Cherie, Mickey’s bit of posh that his sister had talked about. In the old days I would have had to schlep back down to Cheam to show a picture to the sister, but all I had to do now was call her mobile and text it to her instead. I cropped the 1941 image until it was just the face and sent that.

“She looks kind of familiar,” said Mickey’s sister. In the background I could hear voices and music muffled by a firmly closed door — the wake for her brother was continuing.

“Do you have an address for Cherie?” I asked.

“She lived up in town,” said Mickey’s sister. “I don’t know where.”

I asked if she had any pictures of Cherie, she said she thought she might and promised to text them over if she found any. I thanked her and asked how she was coping.

“Okay I guess,” she said.

I told her to hang in there — what else could I say?

Thanks to the magic of science I copied the rest of the pictures onto a flash drive, which, thanks to the science of magic, I’d tested and found they didn’t get messed up every time I did a spell. As far as I could determine, nearby use of magic only degraded chips that had power running through them at the time, but it frustrated me that I didn’t even have a theory as to how magic actually worked. A little analytical voice in my head pointed out that any working hypothesis was probably going to involve quantum theory at some point — the part of physics that made my brains trickle out of my ears.