Ben Aaronovitch: Moon Over Soho

Toby paused in his barking long enough to give me a hopeful look.

“Where’s his lead?” I asked.

THE GENERAL public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you’ve generated some sort of urgent lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life — like drinking and sleeping and, if you’re lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice. And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn’t also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England. Which meant I spent my spare time learning magic, studying dead languages, and reading books like Essays on the Metaphysical by John “never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like” Cartwright.

And learning magic, of course — which is what makes the whole thing worthwhile.

This is a spell: Lux iactus scindere — say it quietly, say it loudly, say it with conviction in the middle of a thunderstorm while striking a dramatic pose — nothing will happen. That’s because the words are just labels for the forma that you make in your mind; lux to make the light and scindere to fix it in place. If you do this particular spell right it creates a light source in a fixed position. If you do it wrong it can burn a hole through a lab table.

“You know,” said Nightingale, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen before.”

I gave the bench a last squirt with the CO 2extinguisher and bent down to see whether the floor under the table was still intact. There was a burn mark but luckily no crater.

“It keeps getting away from me,” I said.

Nightingale stood up out of his wheelchair and had a look for himself. He moved carefully and favored his right side. If he was still wearing bandages on his shoulder they were hidden under a crisp lilac shirt that had last been fashionable during the abdication crisis. Molly was busily feeding him up, but to me he still looked pale and thin. He caught me staring,

“I wish you and Molly would stop watching me like that,” he said. “I’m well on the road to recovery. I’ve been shot before, so I know what I’m talking about.”

“Shall I give it another go?”

“No,” said Nightingale. “The problem is obviously with scindere . I thought you’d progressed through that too swiftly. Tomorrow we’re going to start to relearn that forma and then once I’m certain of your mastery we’ll return to this spell.”

“Oh joy,” I said.

“This isn’t unusual.” Nightingale’s voice was low and reassuring. “You have to get the foundations of the art right or everything you build on top will be crooked, not to mention unstable. There are no shortcuts in wizardry, Peter. If there were, everyone would be doing it.”

Probably on Britain’s Got Talent , I thought, but you don’t say these things to Nightingale because he doesn’t have a sense of humor about the art and only used the telly for watching rugby.

I assumed the attentive look of the dutiful apprentice but Nightingale wasn’t fooled.

“Tell me about your dead musician,” he said.

I laid out the facts with emphasis on the intensity of the vestigia Dr. Walid and I had felt around the body.

“Did he feel it as strongly as you did?” asked Nightingale.

I shrugged. “It’s vestigia , boss,” I said. “It was strong enough for both of us to hear a melody. That’s got to be suspicious.”

“It’s suspicious,” he said and settled back down in his wheelchair with a frown. “But is it a crime?”

“The statute only says that you have to unlawfully kill someone under the Queen’s Peace with malice aforethought. It doesn’t say anything about how you do it.” I’d checked in Blackstone’s Police Manual before coming down for breakfast that morning.

“I’ll be interested to see the Crown Prosecution Service argue that in front of a jury,” he said. “In the first instance you’ll need to prove that he was killed by magic and then find out who was capable of doing it and making it look like natural causes.”

“Could you do it?” I asked.

Nightingale had to think about that. “I think so,” he said. “I’d have to spend a while in the library first. It would be a very powerful spell, and it’s possible that the music you’re hearing is a practitioner’s signare — his involuntary signature.” Because, just as the old telegraph operators could identify one another from the way each one tapped their key, so every practitioner casts a spell in a style unique to themselves.

“Do I have a signature?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Nightingale. “When you practice, things have an alarming tendency to catch fire.”

“Seriously, boss.”

“It’s too early for you to have a signare but another practitioner would certainly know that you were my apprentice,” said Nightingale. “Assuming he’d ever seen my work, of course.”

“Are there other practitioners out there?” I asked.

Nightingale shifted in his wheelchair. “There are some survivors from the prewar mob,” he said. “But apart from them, you and I are the last of the classically trained wizards. Or at least you will be if you ever concentrate long enough to be trained.”

“Could it have been one of these survivors?”

“Not if jazz was part of the signare .”

And therefore probably not one of their apprentices either — if they had apprentices.

“If it wasn’t one of your mob …”

“ Our mob,” said Nightingale. “You swore an oath, that makes you one of us.”

“If it wasn’t one of our mob, who else could do it?”

Nightingale smiled. “One of your riverine friends would have the power,” he said.

That made me pause. There were two gods of the River Thames and both of them had their own fractious children, one for each tributary. They certainly had power — I’d personally witnessed Beverley Brook flooding out Covent Garden, incidentally saving my life and that of a family of German tourists in the process.

“But Father Thames wouldn’t operate below Teddington Lock,” said Nightingale. “And Mama Thames wouldn’t risk the agreement with us. If Tyburn wanted you dead she’d do it through the courts. While Fleet would humiliate you to death in the media. And Brent is too young. Finally, leaving aside that Soho is on the wrong side of the river, if Effra was going to kill you with music it wouldn’t be with jazz.”

Not when she’s practically the patron saint of UK Grime, I thought. “Are there other people?” I asked. “Other things?”

“It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But I’d concentrate on determining how before I worried too much about whom .”

“Any advice?”

“You could start,” said Nightingale, “by visiting the scene of the crime.”

MUCH TO the frustration of the ruling class, who like their cities to be clean, ordered, and to have good lines of fire, London has never responded well to grandiose planning projects. Not even after it was razed to the ground in 1666. Mind you this hasn’t stopped people from trying, and in the 1880s the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to facilitate better communications both north and south and east and west. That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in the process, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous. Where the avenue and the road crossed became Cambridge Circus and on the west side today stands the Palace Theatre, in all its late-Victorian gingerbread glory. Next to that, and built in the same style, stands what was once the George and Dragon Public House but was now named the Spice of Life. According to its own publicity — London’s premier spot for jazz.