Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

The Pale Lady ran up another short flight of stairs and into a dark noisy cavern full of flashing lights. An electric-blue neon sign over the entrance said WELCOME TO FUNLAND.

It was packed, mostly teenagers and young men who were killing time before the clubs opened. They were playing slot machines and old-fashioned racing games that I remembered from ten years ago. If the Pale Lady had gone to ground among all those bodies I might have lost her. But either she was on a timetable or she was smart enough to know that the wrath of the Metropolitan Police was about to fall on her from a great height. Nobody kills a suspect in a police station and gets away with it — at least nobody without a warrant card.

Amid the games and slot machines two escalators led upward to the next floor. When I saw a teenage boy pointing and his mate pulling out his phone to film something out of my sight I knew the Pale Lady was going up that way. I’d already spotted that if I jumped onto the Skittles machine I could jump again high enough to grab the escalator rail and vault onto the steps. I landed just short of the Pale Lady, riding up lying flat on her back to stay hidden. She hissed and lashed her foot at my face but I got out of the way in time to hear her heel go past my ear with a sound like ripping silk. I reared back and tried to stamp on her other knee, but she scrambled back and tried to kick me in the bollocks. I twisted and her kick grazed off my thigh, but hard enough to stagger me. She was just about to kick me again when we reached the top of the escalator.

She screamed and I realized that her hair, as short as it was, had caught in the metal teeth at the top of the escalator. She thrashed, did a sort of roll and then a desperate headstand to pull it clear. I grabbed my baton, extended it, and lashed down as hard as I could. I didn’t think I’d get a second chance like this.

They train us to use our batons, you know. They don’t just issue them to us and say “Try not to kill anyone.” There are light taps for warnings, a full arm swing that’s deliberately slow to make your suspect flinch back, the sneaky slap to the thigh that isn’t easy to see on the news footage. But the basic principle is that the amount of force is always controlled and appropriate. This is why I lunged forward while she was upside down and hit the Pale Lady in the hip with everything I had. Something crunched under the baton and she howled loud enough to cut through all the music and sound effects. Then she kicked me in the cheek.

It wasn’t her best effort, but it was hard enough to snap my head back so that I didn’t see the end of the escalator and stumbled off while she flipped herself backward, twisted, and tried to crawl away. I wasn’t having that, so I threw myself on her back. I fell heavy, to try to drive the air out of her. But in an astonishingly fluid motion she arched her back and flung me into the side of a Spinna Winna machine. My elbow smashed into the glass and I felt a sensation that told me I was on the numb-now, pain-later plan. I straightened up just in time to see her fist coming for my face. She must have been slowing down, because this time I got safely out the way and her hand splintered into the glass and through. I whirled and brought my baton down on her wrist just as hard as I could. Again a crack, and a spray of blood as the glass cut her skin. She let out a wet gasp and turned her head to stare at me.

“Give it up,” I said.

There was pain in her face and anger and the sort of self-pity you see on the faces of thwarted bullies. She bared her teeth in a snarl of defiance and wrenched her hand out of the Spinna Winna machine — a curl of blood splattered my face. I lunged forward with my head down and got my shoulder jammed into her chest. She hammered at my shoulders while I drove her back toward the balcony railing. She was unnaturally strong, but I was still bigger and heavier. And if I could stay inside her reach I might be able to pin her down long enough for backup to arrive.

Surely backup should be arriving soon.

Her back hit the barrier and we came to a shuddering halt. I made a grab for her knee to see if I could trip her up, but she caught me a stunning blow on the side of the head and then threw me hard enough that I fetched up on my side ten feet away. I shook my head and looked up to see the Pale Lady charging toward me with blood staining her clothes and murder in her eyes. She could have at least tried to make her escape; I wasn’t going to follow her anymore. But I think she knew she was going down and was planning to make somebody pay before she went. That somebody being yours truly.

I didn’t have time to shout a warning, I just made the correct shape in my head and shouted, louder than I had intended, “Impello.”

The spell picked her up and slammed her back against the railing and then, horrifyingly, she toppled backward and was gone.

THE CENTRAL atrium at the Trocadero Centre is four stories high with an open basement that added another story to the fall. The space is crisscrossed at random intervals by escalators, presumably because the architects felt that disorientation and an inability to find the toilets were integral parts of the shopping experience. I was told much later that the Pale Lady had bounced off the side of one of the escalators on her way down, that she may even have been angling to try to land on it but couldn’t quite make the distance. That impact broke her back in two places but she was still alive when she hit the basement floor headfirst.

Instantaneous, said Dr. Walid.

A hundred-foot drop at thirty-two feet per second per second I make that about two and a half seconds to watch the ground coming up to meet you — that’s not what I call instantaneous.

Backup was less then a minute away. They saw her fall. They were on hand to seal off the floor and take witness statements. I gave a brief statement to Stephanopoulis before Nightingale insisted that we go to casualty. The next thing I knew, we were in the A&E unit at UCH and Dr. Walid was hovering in the background and making the F2 junior doctor who was treating me nervous. Then Dr. Walid noticed that Nightingale was a bit pale and unsteady and forced him to lie down in an adjacent treatment cubicle. The junior doctor visibly relaxed and started chatting to me as he checked my various scrapes and bruises but I don’t remember what he was talking about. Then he bustled off to arrange some X-rays and left me with a redheaded Australian nurse whom I recognized from the Punchinello case. She winked at me as she cleaned the blood off my face and glued a cut on my cheek that I wasn’t even aware I had.

“May the blessings of the river be upon you,” said the nurse as they wheeled me off to X-ray and zapped me a couple of times before wheeling me back to my cubicle to lounge around in a drafty hospital gown for an hour or so. It may have been longer because I think I dozed off. Being Saturday night there was a lot of drunken shouting and moaning and the sound of my fellow members of the constabulary telling people to “calm down” or asking them what happened. Dr. Walid popped his head in to say that he was keeping Nightingale in overnight. I asked for some water; he felt my forehead and then vanished.

Somebody with a Scouse accent a couple of cubicles down said that he just wanted to go home. The doctor told him that they had to reset his leg first. The Scouser insisted that he felt fine and the doctor explained that they had to wait for the drink to wear off so they could anesthetize him.

“I want to go home,” said the Scouser.

“As soon as you’re fixed up,” said the doctor.

“Not home here,” said the Scouser mournfully. “I want to go back to Liverpool.”