Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho

Friday night on Berwick Street and the punters were quietly slipping in and out of the sex shops on the corner with Peter Street. The market had closed but the pubs and the record shops were still open and a steady stream of media workers were threading their way home through the tourists. I took some time to check the front of Simone’s house — up on the top floor the light was on.

I didn’t like the idea of Simone and her sisters just disappearing at the hands of Caffrey and his lads. I believe in the rule of law and this was, however weird, a police matter and I was a sworn constable who was about to exercise his discretion to resolve a breach of the Queen’s Peace.

Or as Leslie would have it — I was out of my fucking mind.

I pressed random buttons on the intercom until someone answered.

“Come to read the meter, love,” I said and they buzzed me in. I made a mental note to pass the number of the building to West End Central’s crime prevention team for a stern lecture and started up the stairs.

They hadn’t gotten any less steep. No wonder Simone and her sisters had to suck the life force out of people.

I was just catching a breather in front of their door when somebody grabbed me from behind and held a knife to my throat.

“It’s him,” she hissed. “Open the door.”

Because of the height difference she had to reach up under my armpit to get her blade, an old kitchen knife I thought, against my neck. She would really have been better off threatening my back or stomach. If I’d been desperate I could have chopped down with my arm and forced her hand away. It would have depended on how fast she was and how willing to kill.

The door opened and Simone looked out.

“Hello, Simone,” I said. “We need to have a chat.”

She looked stricken to see me.

The woman with the knife pushed me and I edged carefully into the room. Peggy was in there too, still dressed in dungarees, hair still spiky, face pale and scared. That meant Cherie was the one with the knife. Simone closed the door behind us.

“Get his handcuffs,” said Cherie.

Peggy groped me around the waist. “He hasn’t got any.”

“Why haven’t you brought your handcuffs?” said Simone. “I told them you’d have handcuffs.”

“I’m not here to arrest anyone,” I said.

“We know,” hissed Cherie. “You’re here to kill us.”

“What, just me on my own?” I asked, but I was thinking of Caffrey and his posse drinking tea back at the Folly. Only by now they’d have finished their tea and were probably in a van, a nondescript Ford Transit most likely, doing last-minute checks on their weapons and night-vision equipment.

“I’m not here to kill anyone,” I said.

“Liar,” said Cherie. “He said you’d disappear us.”

“Perhaps we should let them,” said Peggy.

“We haven’t done anything wrong,” said Cherie and her knife nicked my throat by accident — thank God it wasn’t sharp.

“Yes, we have,” said Simone. There were tears on her face, and when she saw me looking at her she turned away.

“Who said we would kill you?” I asked.

“This man,” said Cherie.

“Did you meet him in a pub?” I asked. “What man? Can you remember what he looked like?”

Cherie hesitated and that’s when I knew.

“I can’t remember,” she said. “It’s not important what he looks like. He said that you worked for the government and all the government was interested in was eliminating anybody who isn’t normal.”

What could I say? I was pretty much here to tell them the same thing.

“What color were his eyes?” I asked. “Was he white, black, something else?”

“Why do you care?” shouted Cherie.

“Why can’t you remember?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cherie and relaxed her grip.

I didn’t wait for her to remember she was supposed to be holding me hostage. I grabbed her wrist and twisted her knife hand up and away. The rule for fighting a person with a knife is to start off by making it point away from you and then ensure that it hurts too much to hold on to. I felt something crack under my grip, Cherie screamed and dropped the knife. Peggy tried to hit me but I was already twisting away and she ended up smacking Cherie in the face.

“Stop it,” yelled Simone.

I shoved Cherie over toward her sisters. She stumbled into Peggy and they both tripped on the edge of the mattress and went down. Peggy came up spitting like a cat.

“Wait up,” I said. “I’m trying to do you a favor here. There’s a real evil man out there that you don’t want to be messing with.”

“You should know,” spat Peggy. “You work for him.”

“It’s not our fault,” said Cherie dejectedly. Simone sat down beside her and put her arm around her sister.

“I get that,” I said. “I really do. But whatever you think about my governor there’s another total evil bastard out there and by the way — why the fuck are you still here? Everyone knows where you live.”

I figured I might just have another ten minutes before Nightingale and Caffrey turned up to demonstrate the military version of the hard target entry, followed by a unique close-up view of their search-and-destroy procedures.

“He’s right,” said Peggy. “We can’t stay here.”

“Where can we go?” asked Cherie.

“I’ll get you into a hotel,” I said. “We can talk about what to do next then.” I concentrated on Simone, who was looking at me with a kind of sick longing. “Simone, we don’t have much time.”

She nodded. “I think we should leave immediately and never return.”

“But what about my things?” wailed Cherie.

“We’ll get you more things,” said Peggy, hauling Cherie to her feet.

“I’ll check the coast is clear,” I said. I stepped out onto the landing and pressed the pop-in switch thingy that turned on the miserly forty-watt bulb.

There was a crash downstairs, the distinctive double bang of a heavy door being smashed open and the rebound off a side wall. It’s no joke, that rebound. There have been plenty of instances where the first bastard through the door has been knocked right back out on his arse.

I was too late. I didn’t know if it was Nightingale with Caffrey in support or a CO19 armed response team sent in by Stephanopoulis. Either way I had to de-escalate the situation before they reached the top of the house. I told Simone and the others to stay in the room.

“Officer on the scene,” I shouted. “No weapons, no hostages. I repeat, no weapons, no hostages.”

I paused to listen. From down below I thought I heard someone sniggering and then a deep voice with a lisp said — “Excellent.” Then I definitely heard feet running up the lower staircases. I held up my hands at chest level, palm out to show I was unarmed. It wasn’t an easy thing to do — one of the reasons why the Met has to train its officers in conflict resolution is to overcome our natural London urge to get our retaliation in first.

The push-in light switch popped out and it suddenly went dark. I frantically slapped at the switch to get it on again — anything that can go wrong with armed men in the light can go twice as wrong in the dark.

The footsteps reached the landing below me and a figure came bounding around the corner and up the stairs.

And that’s when my brain let me down. Whatever you’ve been told, seeing is not believing. Your brain does a great deal of interpretation before it deigns to let your consciousness know what the hell is going on. If we’re suddenly exposed to something unfamiliar, a damaged human face, a car flying through the air toward us, something that looks almost but not quite human, it can take time, sometimes even seconds, for our minds to react. And those seconds can be crucial.