Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

“Exactly the same,” said Dr. Walid when I pointed this out. “Bollingtek Animal Containment Systems — we use them at the hospital. They were installed sometime this year.”

“Stephanopoulis has her people tracing the serial numbers,” said Nightingale.

The cages were empty, but I could smell the bitter tang of animal shit. I saw fingerprint powder dusted around the locks and any other surface that a keeper might have put a hand on while looking after the inmates.

“How many were there?” I asked.

“Five in cages,” said Dr. Walid. “I’m still doing tests but they all seem to be chimeras.”

That was a term I’d had to look up the night before when translating Bartholomew. A creature that has some cells with one set of DNA and other cells with another set of DNA. It’s vanishingly rare in mammals and usually happens when two eggs are fertilized by different sperm and then merge before going on to grow into a fetus. Not that Bartholomew knew what tetragametic chimerism was — the fathers of genetics, Crick and Watson, weren’t even a gleam in their grandfathers’ eyes when he’d been writing. Bartholomew had described chimeras as the degenerate product of unnatural unions created through the foulest and blackest magic. But I had a horrible feeling that both definitions might fit.

“Were any of them alive?” I asked.

Dr. Walid looked uncomfortably at Nightingale, who shook his head.

“One of them was still alive,” said Nightingale. “But it died after we moved it.”

“Did it say anything?” I asked.

“It never regained consciousness,” said Dr. Walid.

We agreed that, given the newness of the cages, they must have been the work of the New Magician rather than the Old. “Do we think the Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the Old Magician?” I asked.

“We don’t have any link between him and this place,” said Nightingale. “In addition, I find it somewhat unlikely that he could pursue an academic career and maintain a double life as a nightclub impresario.”

“But he definitely trained the New Magician?” I asked. “The Faceless One.”

“Oh, without doubt,” said Nightingale. “I’m quite certain of that.”

“I like ‘Faceless One,’ ” said Dr. Walid. “Did you come up with that?”

“He could have had accomplices,” I said. “Another practitioner who handled the London end. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Quite possible,” said Nightingale. “Good thinking.”

“Or more than one partner. There could be — what do you call a group of magicians?” I asked. “A gang, a coven?”

“An argument,” said Dr. Walid. “It’s an argument of wizards.”

We both looked at Dr. Walid, who shrugged.

“You both need to read more widely,” he said. This from a man who did peer review for the European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology .

“A cabal,” said Nightingale. “It’s called a cabal of magicians.”

“Operating under our noses since the 1960s,” said Dr. Walid.

“Just to add salt to the wound,” said Nightingale.

“I should start running down the names that we got from Oxford and cross-referencing them with known associates of the Soho gangs,” I said.

“Not before I show you something else,” he said.

I actually went cold when he said that. I’d been very happy to find that everything had been cleaned out and I really wasn’t that keen to see anything else. Nightingale led me farther into the club. Beyond the cages there was another STAFF ONLY door that took us to a short corridor and a suite of rooms that might have once been offices or storage. They were all largely the same: grubby mattresses on the floor, a loose collection of clothes and shoes stuffed into cardboard boxes, a DVD player and an old-fashioned electron-gun TV, a few pathetic attempts to brighten up the walls, a picture of kittens and a Justin Timberlake poster. It was depressingly familiar to anyone who has ever helped raid a safe house used by human traffickers.

“How many?” I asked.

“We found plenty of DNA evidence,” said Dr. Walid. “Blood, semen, hair follicles. So far we’ve identified eight individuals — all chimeras.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“He must have another safe house,” said Nightingale. “But it could be anywhere.”

IT WASN’T all bad news. Leslie called later with a whole new way for me to dig myself into a hole. She’d discovered it while trawling through the records from Oxford University. She hadn’t found any obvious connections between Wheatcroft and Alexander Smith, but …

“Guess whose name I did come across?” she asked.

“Prince Harry?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Leslie. “Harry went to Sandhurst. No, a certain other undergraduate going by the name of Cecelia Tyburn Thames.”

“Lady Ty knew Wheatcroft?” I asked.

“No, you idiot,” said Leslie. “But — ” She broke off to cough some more. She moved the phone away from her mouth but I could hear her coughing and swearing. Then a pause as she drank some water.

I asked if she was okay and she said she was. There was going to be a second operation sometime toward the end of the year to see if they could restore greater functionality to her voice box.

“But,” she said, “the point is that Tyburn was at Oxford at roughly the same time as Jason Dunlop and you once told me that one of her sisters could smell the magic on you.”

“That was Brent,” I said. “She’s four years old.”

“That just means it’s a natural ability,” said Leslie.

I said it was unlikely that Tyburn, even if she had spotted any magic at Oxford, was going to tell me.

“You just don’t want to see Tyburn again,” said Leslie.

Damn right I didn’t want to go see Tyburn again. I’d humiliated her in front of her mother, which meant I could have whipped her naked down Kensington High Street and she would have been less pissed off with me. But I only ever argue with Leslie about two things and neither of those has anything to do with police work. It had to be worth a try.

I knew Tyburn had a house in Hampstead; I’d blown up a particularly rare fountain the last time I’d visited — although in my defense she had been trying to mind-control me at the time. But that was just the source of her river. I’d heard that she actually lived somewhere in Mayfair. The very rich and the very poor have one thing in common. They both generate a great deal of information — the rich in the media and the poor on the vast and unwieldy databases of the state. The rich, providing they avoid celebrity, can take steps to preserve their anonymity — Lady Ty’s Wikipedia page read like it was produced by a PR flack because no doubt Lady Ty had hired a PR flack to ensure it stayed the way she wanted it. Or more likely one of Lady Ty’s “people” had hired a PR company, which hired a freelancer, who’d knocked it out in half an hour the better to focus on the novel he was writing. It did reveal that Lady Ty was married, to a civil engineer no less, and they had two beautiful children one of whom, the boy, was eighteen years old. Old enough to drive but young enough to still be living at home.

The thing about being a policeman is you get to cheat. You get to look things up on the PNC, things that even the richest and most influential person has to provide accurate information about — in this case, driving tests. Stephen George McAllister-Thames passed his in January, and the address of record was Chesterfield Hill, Mayfair.

It was the kind of perfect Regency terrace with a rusticated façade and decorative ironwork that causes grown estate agents to break down and weep with joy. It was located less than a third of a mile to the west of the Trocadero Centre, on streets that would have been much nicer if all the character hadn’t been stripped off them by decades of money.