Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

That’s what our target looked like — sandwiched between a Food City mini market and a Sex Shop on Brewer Street, it was down and neglected compared with its neighbors. Dirty windows, blackened walls, and peeling paint on the door frame. As part of the process of getting a search warrant, one of Stephanopoulis’s minions had done a property search that uncovered a typical company shell game with regard to ownership — we couldn’t wait for them to unpick it, so we got a warrant for the whole building.

We sat in an unmarked silver Astra and watched the place for an hour before going in, just to be on the safe side. Nobody went in or out, so after checking that all the teams were in position, Stephanopoulis gave the go order.

We all piled out of the cars and did the hundred-yard sidle to the side door where one of the entry team whipped out forty pounds of CQB ram and smacked it open with one practiced swing. His mate went in first holding a rectangular plastic shield ahead of him while a third entry-team guy stepped up behind him with a shotgun at the ready. The shotgun was in case the owner of the property had a dog, but we don’t like to talk about that because it upsets people.

Stephanopoulis and I went in behind them, which counts as first if you’re not the entry team in case you were wondering, wearing our stab vests under our jackets and extendable batons on our belts. Beyond the door was a windowless hallway with a closed internal door on the left and a double stairway going down on the right. When I tried the switch we were rewarded with a dim light from an unshaded forty-watt bulb. Ancient flocked wallpaper in gold and red covered the walls, peeling where it met the ceiling.

Stephanopoulis tapped one of the entry specialists on the shoulder and pointed at the door. The CQB swung again and the shield-and-shotgun team went up the stairs followed by a mixed half dozen from the Murder Team and the local Tactical Support Group. Their job would be to clear the top floors of the building while Stephanopoulis and I went downstairs.

I shone my torch down the shadowed depths of the staircase. They were carpeted with the kind of hard-wearing short-haired nylon carpet that you find in cinemas and primary schools. It was gold and red to match the flocked wallpaper. I got a strong sense of foreboding, which could have been vestigia or just a sensible reluctance to go down the creepy dark staircase.

We could hear the team working their way up through the building like a herd of baby elephants in a lumber yard. Stephanopoulis looked at me, I nodded, and we started down the stairs. We’d borrowed a pair of heavy-duty torches from the TSG, and their light illuminated a ticket office on the first landing. Beside it was an alcove with a counter and behind that was a yawning darkness that I hoped was just the cloakroom.

I went down cautiously, hugging the wall so I could get the earliest view around the corner — I seriously didn’t want anything springing out. The stairs doubled back, descending into more darkness and a door in the far side of the landing marked STAFF ONLY. I smelled mildew and rotting carpet, which was reassuring. I leaned over the cloakroom counter and shone my torch around the interior to reveal a shallow L-shaped room lined with rails and empty clothes hangers. I climbed over and checked inside. There were no coats or long-forgotten bags but there were bits of paper on the floor — I picked one up. It was a ticket stub. I walked around to the staff door and opened it to find Stephanopoulis staring warily down the stairs.

“Anything?” she asked. I shook my head.

She clicked her fingers and a couple of Murder Team detectives came padding down the stairs with gloves and evidence bags. Stephanopoulis pointed at the staff door and they dutifully trooped past me to do a more thorough search of the cloakroom. One of them was a young Somali woman in a leather biker jacket and an expensive black silk hijab. She caught me looking and smiled.

“Muslim ninja,” she whispered.

Normally the police like to make a lot of noise going into a building because, unless you’re dealing with a psycho, it’s better to give any potential arrests a chance to carefully think through their options before they do something stupid. We were being quiet in this case, not something that came naturally, so that I could feel for any vestigia as we went down the stairs. I’d tried explaining vestigia to Stephanopoulis but I don’t think she really got it, although she seemed keen enough to let me go first.

I saw the base of the cabinet first, mahogany and brass caught in the beam of my torch, more coming into view as I descended the steps. There was a double reflection from the front and back of a glass case and I realized I was looking at a fortune-telling machine parked incongruously in the center of the entrance to the club proper. I flashed my torch around the room behind and caught glimpses of a bar, chairs stacked on tables, the dark rectangles of doorways farther in.

The vestigia gave off a vivid flash of sunlight and cigarette smoke, petrol and expensive cologne, new leather seats and the Rolling Stones singing I Can’t Get No Satisfaction . I took a couple of quick steps back and shone my torch at the cabinet.

The mannequin in the fortune machine wasn’t the usual head-and-shoulders model. Instead the head rested directly on a pole of clear glass reinforced with bands of brass. Protruding from the truncated neck were two leathery bladders looking unpleasantly like lungs. The head itself was wearing the obligatory pantomime turban but lacked the standard-issue spade-shaped beard and pencil mustache. The skin was waxy and the whole thing looked disturbingly real — because of course it was.

“Larry the Lark I presume,” I said.

Stephanopoulis joined me. “Oh my God,” she said. She pulled a mug shot out of her pocket — an artifact, I assumed, from Larry the Lark’s criminal career — and held it up for comparison.

“He looked better when he was alive,” I said.

I felt it just before it happened; it was weirdly like the sensation I got when Nightingale was demonstrating a forma or a spell. The same catching at the corner of my mind. But this was different. It whirred and clanked as if made of clockwork.

And the real clockwork started as with a dusty wheezing sound the bladders below Larry’s neck inflated and his mouth opened to reveal disconcertingly white teeth. I saw the muscles in his throat ripple and then he spoke.

“Welcome, one and all,” he said. “To the garden of unearthly delights. Where the weary pilgrim may cast off the cloak of puritanical reserve, unlace the corset of bourgeois morality, and gorge himself on all that life may offer.”

The mouth remained open as hidden machinery clanked and whirred to fill the bladders with air once more.

“Please for Christ’s sake kill me,” said Larry. “Please, kill me.”

STEPHANOPOULIS PUT her hand on my shoulder and pulled me back to the base of the stairs.

“Call your boss,” she said.

Larry’s bladders had inflated for a third time but whether it was to plead for death or remind us that delicious snacks were available at the concession stand we never found out — as soon as we were more than a yard away his mouth closed and the bladders deflated with an unpleasant whistling sound.

“Peter,” said Stephanopoulis. “Call your boss.”

I tried my airwave — amazingly it got a signal — and called the Folly. Nightingale picked up and I described the situation.

“I’m on my way,” he said. “Don’t go any farther in — don’t let anything out.”

I told him I understood and he hung up.