Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

“PC Grant,” I said.

“What?”

“Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

Or maybe not.

“I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

“Busy,” said No-Neck.

There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness — “I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside” — while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have them deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.

“Look, I’m the police,” I said. “And we could … you know … do the whole thing, but you’d get arrested and blah blah blah and stuff, whereas I just want a chat … so what’s the point of all … this?”

No-neck thought about this for a moment, before grunting and shifting enough to let me squeeze past. That’s how real men settle their differences. Through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.

Alexander Smith’s office was surprisingly neat. A pair of self-assembly desks, two walls lined with bracket shelves covered with magazines, books, papers, overstuffed box files, and DVDs. The windows had dusty cream venetian blinds, one of which had obviously gotten stuck halfway up sometime around the turn of the century and hadn’t been touched since. Smith had been working on a PowerBook but ostentatiously closed it when I walked in. He was still a dandy in a lemon-yellow blazer and crimson ascot, but outside of the club he seemed smaller and meaner.

“Hello, Alexander,” I said and threw myself into his visitor’s chair. “How’s tricks?”

“Constable Grant,” he said and I noticed that he’d picked up an involuntary leg tremor. He noticed me noticing and put his hand on his knee to stop it. “What can I do you for?”

Definitely nervous about something. And even though it probably had nothing to do with my case, a little extra leverage never hurts.

“Have you got something you need to be doing?”

“Just the usual,” he said.

I asked him if his girls were all right and he visibly relaxed. This was not the source of his nerves.

Bollocks, I thought. Now he knows I don’t know.

To prove it, he offered me a cup of instant coffee, which I declined.

“Are you expecting company?” I asked.

“Eh?”

“What’s with the gorilla on the door?”

“Oh,” said Smith. “That’s Tony. I inherited him from my brother. I mean, I couldn’t get rid of him. He’s practically a family retainer.”

“Isn’t he expensive to feed?”

“The girls like to have him around,” said Smith. “Is there anything particular that I can do for you?”

I pulled out one of my 1941 prints and handed it to Smith. “Is that Peggy?”

“Looks like her,” he said. “What about it?”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“Not since the gig at the Café de Paris,” he said. “Which was spectacular. Did I tell you that. Fucking spectacular.”

And weirdly coincidental but I wasn’t going to tell Smith that.

“Do you have a home address?” I asked.

“No,” said Smith. “This is a bit of a cash-only business. What the Revenue don’t see, the Revenue don’t worry about.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m pay-as-you-earn myself.”

“That could change,” said Smith. “Anything else you’re interested in? Only some of us don’t get paid by the hour.”

“You go back, don’t you?” I asked.

“We all go back,” he said. “Some of us go back farther than others.”

“Was she around then?”

“Who?”

“Peggy,” I said. “Was she dancing back in the 1990s?”

“I generally get nervous when they’re still at infant school,” he said.

“How about in the 1980s?”

“Now I know you’re mucking me about,” he said, but hesitated just a little bit too long.

“Maybe not her then,” I said. “Maybe it was her mum — same sort of look.”

“Sorry. I was abroad for most of the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “Although there was one bird used to do one of them fan dances at the Windmill Theatre, but that was 1962 — that would be a bit far back even for Peggy’s mum.”

“Why’d you have to leave the country?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “But this place was a shit hole so I got out.”

“You came back, though.”

“I missed the jellied eels,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

I wasn’t going to get anything else useful, but I made a note to look up Smith on the PNC once I got back to the tech-cave. I gave No-Neck Tony a friendly pat on the shoulder as I squeezed past.

“You’re a living treasure, my son,” I said.

He grunted and I was satisfied, as I went down the stairs, that we’d made a connection.

Anyway, confirmation — either Peggy’s grandmother bore an uncanny resemblance to her granddaughter, or Peggy had been around since 1941 feeding on jazz musicians. So far all my confirmed sightings of Peggy and all the recent deaths had taken place around Soho. So that seemed the place to start. It would also be useful to pin down some “known associates,” particularly Cherry or Cherie — Mickey the Bone’s girlfriend. This is the point when somebody working on a proper investigation asks his governor for some bodies to do a door-to-door canvass, but there was only me. So I started at one end of Old Compton Street and worked my way down.

They didn’t know her in the Spice of Life or Ed’s Diner, or the other food places at the east end of the street. One of the ticket staff at GAY said she looked familiar but that was it; a woman working in a corner newsagent/mini supermarket said that she thought she’d seen Peggy come in and buy cigarettes. I didn’t get anything at the Admiral Duncan except a couple of offers to take me out to dinner. They knew her in Trashy Lingerie as “that posh bird who comes in every so often and turns her nose up at our stock.” I was thinking it might be worth heading up to A Glimpse of Stocking when a madwoman ran out of Patisserie Valerie calling my name.

It was Simone, high heels skidding on the pavement as she swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian. She was wearing a pair of faded stretch jeans and a burgundy cardigan that gaped open to reveal nothing but a crimson lace bra underneath — front catch, I noticed. She was waving and yelling and I saw there was a smear of cream on her cheek.

Once she saw that I’d spotted her, she stopped shouting and self-consciously pulled the cardigan closed across her chest.