Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“Is this your current address?” I asked as I handed her license back.

“Sort of,” she said. “It was and as it happens I’m just waiting to get it back now. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s part of an ongoing investigation,” I said. “Do you happen to know a man called Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“He’s my fiancé,” she said and gave me a hard look. “Has something happened to Cyrus?”

There are ACPo-approved guidelines for breaking the news to loved ones and they don’t include blurting it out in the middle of the street. I asked if she’d like to sit in the car with me, but she wasn’t having any of it.

“You’d better tell me now,” she said.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” I said.

Anybody who’s ever watched The Bill or Casualty knows what that means. Melinda started back then caught herself. She nearly lost it, but then I saw it all being sucked back behind the mask of her face.

“When?” she asked.

“Two nights ago,” I said. “It was a heart attack.”

She looked at me stupidly. “A heart attack?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She nodded. “Why are you here?” she asked.

I was saved from having to lie because a mini cab pulled up outside the house and honked its horn. Melinda turned, stared at the front door, and was rewarded when Simone emerged carrying her two suitcases. The driver, showing an uncharacteristic level of chivalry, rushed smartly over to take the cases from her and loaded them into the back of his cab while she locked the front door — both the Yale and the Chubb, I noticed.

“You bitch,” shouted Melinda.

Simone ignored her and headed for the cab, which had exactly the effect on Melinda that I expected it to have. “Yes you,” she shouted. “He’s dead, you bitch. And you couldn’t even be fucking bothered to tell me. That’s my house, you fat slag.”

Simone looked up at that, and at first I didn’t think she’d recognized who Melinda was, but then she nodded to herself and absently threw the house keys in our general direction. They landed at Melinda’s feet.

I know ballistic when I see it coming and so I already had my hand around her upper arm before she could rush across the street and try to kick the shit out of Simone. Maintaining the Queen’s Peace — that’s what it’s all about. For a skinny little thing Melinda wasn’t half strong and I ended up having to use both hands as she screamed abuse over my shoulder, making my ears ring.

“Would you like me to arrest you?” I asked. That’s an old police trick: If you just warn people they often just ignore you, but if you ask them a question then they have to think about it. Once they start to think about the consequences they almost always calm down, unless they’re drunk of course, or stoned, or aged between fourteen and twenty-one, or Glaswegian.

Fortunately it had the desired effect on Melinda, who paused in her screaming long enough for the mini cab to drive away. Once I was sure she wasn’t going to attack me out of frustration, an occupational hazard if you’re the police, I bent down, retrieved the keys, and put them in her hands.

“Is there someone you can call?” I asked. “Someone who’ll come around and stay with you for a bit?”

She shook her head. “I’m just going to wait in my car,” she said. “Thank you.”

Don’t thank me, ma’am , I didn’t say, I’m just doing … Who knew what I was doing? I doubted I could get anything useful from her that evening so I left well enough alone.

SOMETIMES AFTER a hard day’s work nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it — no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule. One side of the embankment had suffered from an outbreak of modernism in the 1960s but I kept my back to their dull concrete façades and instead watched the sun setting fire to the tops of Millbank Tower and the Palace of Westminster. The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

Officially I belong to ESC9, which stands for Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, otherwise known as the Folly, also known as the unit that nice well-brought-up coppers don’t talk about in polite company. There’s no point trying to remember ESC9 because the Metropolitan Police has a reorganization once every four years and all the names change. That’s why the Commercial Robberies Unit of the Serious and Organized Crime Group has been called the Flying Squad since its introduction in 1920 or the Sweeney if you want to establish your cockney geezer credentials. That’s Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad in case you were wondering.

Unlike the Sweeney, the Folly is easy to overlook: partly because we do stuff nobody likes to talk about, but mostly because we have no discernible budget. No budget means no bureaucratic scrutiny and therefore no paper trail. It also helps that up until January this year it had a personnel complement of one: a certain Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Despite doubling the staffing levels when I joined and catching up on a good ten years of unprocessed paperwork, we maintain a stealthy presence within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police. Thus we pass among the other coppers in a mysterious way, our duties to perform.

One of our duties is the investigation of unsanctioned wizards and other magical practitioners, but I didn’t think that Cyrus Wilkinson had been a practitioner of anything except a superior saxophone. I also doubted he’d killed himself with the traditional jazz cocktail of drugs and drink, but confirmation would have to wait for the tox screen. Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it — at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.

Across the river a catamaran pulled away from the Millbank Pier in a roar of diesel. I bundled up the kebab paper and dumped it in a rubbish bin. I climbed back into the Jag, started her up, and pulled out into the twilight.

At some point I was going to have to hit the library back at the Folly and look for historical cases. Polidori was usually good for lurid stuff involving drink and debauchery. Probably from all the time he spent off his head with Byron and the Shelleys by Lake Geneva. If anyone knew about untimely and unnatural deaths it was Polidori, who literally wrote the book on the subject just before drinking cyanide — it’s called An Investigation into Unnatural Deaths in London in the Years 1768–1810 and it weighs over two pounds — I just hoped that reading it didn’t drive me to suicide too.

It was late evening by the time I reached the Folly and parked up the Jag in the coach house. Toby started barking as soon as I opened the back door and he came skittering across the marble floor of the atrium to hurl himself at my shins. Molly glided in from the direction of the kitchens like the winner of the world all-comers creepy gothic Lolita contest. I ignored Toby’s yapping and asked whether Nightingale was awake. Molly gave me the slight head tilt that meant “no” and then an inquiring look.

Molly served as the Folly’s housekeeper, cook, and rodent exterminator. She never speaks, has too many teeth and a taste for raw meat, but I try never to hold that against her or let her get between me and the exit.

“I’m knackered — I’m going straight to bed,” I said.

Molly glanced at Toby and then at me.

“I’ve been working all day,” I said.

Molly gave me the head tilt that meant “I don’t care, if you don’t take the smelly little thing out for his walk you can be the one who cleans up after him.”