Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“Poor thing,” she said and kissed me.

I found that if I held her close I didn’t have any more nightmares. At one point in the proceedings the chaise longue shifted alarmingly and I heard the crack of splintering wood. We hurriedly separated just long enough for me to put a few cushions on the floor and throw a blanket over them. She pushed me onto my back, straddled me, and it all got wonderfully strenuous and sweaty until finally she flopped down on me as boneless and as slippery as a fish.

“It’s peculiar,” she said after she’d caught her breath. “I used to always want to go out. But with you I just want to stay in all the time.”

She rolled off and slid her hand down my stomach to cup my balls. “Do you know what I’d really like now?” she asked.

“There’s cakes in the fridge,” I said.

I was hard again and slipped her hand up to grab hold.

“You’re a terrible man,” she said. She gave me a quick shake as if judging my readiness and then, pausing briefly to kiss it on the head, got up and made her way to the fridge. “That Jap food’s all very well,” she said. “But I don’t think they know how to make a decent patisserie.”

Later, exhausted but unable to sleep, I lay with her under the skylight and watched the rain rippling down the panes. Simone again slept with her head on my shoulder, a leg slung possessively across my thighs, and her arm draped around my waist — as if making sure I couldn’t slink away in the middle of the night.

I’m not a player, but I’d never had a girlfriend who’d lasted more than three months. Leslie said that my exes knew that past a certain point I’d lost interest and that’s why they always packed me in first. That’s not the way I remember it, but Leslie swore she could have constructed a calendar based on my love life. A cyclical one, she said, like the Maya — counting down to disaster. Leslie could be surprisingly erudite sometimes.

On the other hand, I thought as Simone snuggled up against me, even in the worst-case scenario there’s at least another two months left to run. Then of course that corner of my brain that is forever a policeman wanted to know whether I was sure Simone wasn’t involved in the case of the dying jazzmen. After all, she’d been living with Cyrus Wilkinson. But then Henry Bellrush was still living with his wife when he died. More tellingly, if Simone was really a creature of the night who seduced and then sucked the life out of jazz musicians, why was she sleeping with me — who had utterly failed to inherit his father’s talent or even his taste for music? Nor had her face appeared in any of the pictures from 1941.

You actually get a lecture on this during training, which I admit most of us snoozed through because it wasn’t associated with any tests or essay writing. I did remember the lecturer warning that a copper’s natural instincts could quickly spill over into unwarranted paranoia. Life is unbelievably messy, the lecturer said, and coincidences happen all the time. If you’re still suspicious in the morning, I told myself, you can check her alibi against suspicious deaths last year, because nothing builds a healthy relationship like the third degree over the breakfast table.

Having thought that just before I drifted off, I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen when I woke to find that Simone had slipped out at the crack of dawn and left me sleeping.

I was summoned that morning to the John Peel Center in Hendon, where I was “debriefed” by a couple of officers from the Directorate of Professional Standards. This took place in a conference room with tea, coffee, and Sainsbury’s value digestive biscuits, and it was all very civilized. After establishing that I had a legitimate reason to be on that floor of West End Central, they asked me about the chase to the Trocadero Centre and the consequent death of the suspect in a fall from the top balcony. Apparently the CCTV footage was very clear — I was nowhere near the suspect when she went over the railing, therefore I could not have pushed her over nor could I reasonably have been expected to reach her in time to stop the fall. They seemed satisfied that I should return to duty, although they warned me that this was just the start of their investigation.

“We may have more questions for you later,” they said.

I’m fairly certain they were supposed to offer me psychological counseling at that point, but they didn’t. Which was a pity, because I would have rather liked it. Sadly the rules are very clear. As a red-blooded police officer you can only accept counseling when it is foisted on you by Guardian -reading social-worker types. I don’t need it, you protest to your mates, but you know these touchy-feely jobsworth types. Then you down your pint and soldier on — dignity intact.

As well as the statement to the DPS, I had to generate my own reports for the files, which I did from the safety of the coach house, sending them off to be vetted by Leslie before I submitted them. She suggested I make a couple of deliberate mistakes because nothing says cover-up like perfectly consistent statements, so I pretended that I was a member of the public and misremembered some stuff. She also made it clear that rushing into the Trocadero Centre without backup had been foolish and, worse, unprofessional. She was sorry to say that I was clearly deteriorating badly without her there to curb my bad habits. I let her go on at me for some time, not least because she seemed to enjoy it so.

I promised to be more careful in the future.

Dr. Walid released Nightingale from the hospital that afternoon and he returned to the Folly long enough to change his clothes before heading back to supervise the forensic work at the club. I asked if he needed me but he said no and gave me a reading list, one of which was a gloss by Bartholomew that was in Latin. I think he was hoping I’d spend all day with the text in one hand and a dictionary in the other, but I just typed the relevant sections into an online Latin translator and then tried to interpret the gibberish that came out the other end.

I think Bartholomew was conjecturing that it might be possible to use magic to combine the characteristics of two creatures in violation of the great chain of being — that great hierarchy of creatures, slime at the bottom and angels at the top, ordained by God. Somebody had annotated my copy by writing in the margin in very small capitals something in Latin that my Web translator rendered as, “People are made nature and vice versa.”

Real cat-girls, I thought. The Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with something as sleek and furry as a tiger. Whoever was running the club would have a made a fortune. The old ethically challenged magic practitioner had Chief Inspector Johnson to help keep it quiet but the new guy, his possible apprentice, the Faceless One, how had he planned to keep it secret?

The next morning Nightingale took me for a tour of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. The landing and cloakroom area had been turned, appropriately enough, into a changing room for personnel to get in and out of their noddy suits. Dr. Walid was waiting for us and warned us to watch our feet. Lengths of cable had been run down the stairs and neatly secured against the walls with gaffer tape.

“We wanted to avoid activating any electrical circuits in the club itself,” said Dr. Walid. “Just in case.”

He led me down to the foyer, where I noticed that the Cabinet of Larry had been removed completely, as had the kicking legs. “I’ve had to lease extra space at the UCH,” said Dr. Walid. “I’ve never had this much material before.”

The curtains in the foyer had been taken down and we stepped through into the next room, which proved to be the club proper, where the dance floor and stage would have been if cages hadn’t been bolted into the floor. They looked brand-new and similar to the cages that labs keep their animals in.