Moon Over Soho (23 page)

Once she saw that I’d spotted her, she stopped shouting and self-consciously pulled the cardigan closed across her chest.

“Hello, Peter,” she said as I walked over. “Fancy running into you like this.” She touched her face, found the cream, grimaced, and tried to rub it off with her sleeve. Then she wrapped her arms around my neck and pulled my face down for a kiss.

“You must think me perfectly demented,” she said as we broke.

“Pretty demented,” I said.

She pulled my head down again and asked me in a whisper whether I was free that afternoon. “You left me alone all yesterday,” she said. “I think you owe me an afternoon of carnal pursuits at the very least.”

Given that it was that or several hours of door-to-door canvassing, I didn’t really have to work that hard. Simone laughed, slipped her arm through mine, and led me up the street. I waved a hand at the Patisserie Valerie. “What about your bill?” I asked.

“You mustn’t worry about the patisserie,” she said. “I have an account.”

I
T STARTED
raining sometime after lunch. I woke up in Simone’s big bed to find the room filled with gray light and rain drumming against the window. Simone was pressed warmly up against me, her cheek against my shoulder, one arm flung possessively across my chest. After some maneuvering I managed to check my watch and found that it was
past two o’clock. Simone’s arm tightened around me, her eyes opened, and she gave me a sly look before kissing the hollow of my neck. I decided that it was too wet for doing door-to-door anyway, and that I would compensate by doing all that boring data entry as soon as I got back to the Folly. My schedule suitably modified, I rolled Simone over on her back and set to seeing how worked up I could get her without using my hands. She sighed as my lips found her nipple, which wasn’t the effect I was going for, and gently stroked my head.

“Come up here,” she said and tugged at my shoulders, pulling me up and between her legs so that I slipped in without even trying and then, when she had me arranged to her satisfaction, she held me there, a look of contentment on her face.

My hips twitched.

“Wait,” she said.

“I can’t help it,” I said.

“If you could just restrain yourself a moment,” she said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

We stayed locked together. I felt a strange vibration in my chest and belly, which I realized was Simone humming deep in her diaphragm, or whatever it is singers use. I couldn’t quite make out the tune, but it made me think of smoky cafés and women in padded jackets and pillbox hats.

“Nobody makes me feel like you,” she said.

“I thought I was the first,” I said.

“Hypothetically,” she said. “If there had been others, none of them would have made me feel the way you do.”

I twitched again but this time she lifted her hips to meet me.

Afterward, we dozed again, sweaty and content and lying in each other’s arms. I would have stayed there forever if I hadn’t been driven out of bed by my bladder, and a guilty sense that there were things that I needed to be getting on with—important things.

Simone lay sprawled naked and inviting across the bed and watched me getting dressed under deliberately heavy-lidded eyes.

“Come back to bed,” she said and let her fingers drift idly around one erect nipple, then the other.

“I’m afraid the mighty army of justice that is the Metropolitan Police never sleeps,” I said.

“I don’t want the mighty army of justice to sleep,” she said. “On the contrary I expect it to be most diligent in its dealings with me. I’m a bad girl and I need to be held accountable for my actions.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“At least take me to your father’s concert,” she said.

I’d told her about Dad’s upcoming gig, but I hadn’t told her that Cyrus Wilkinson’s old band would be playing with him.

“I want to meet your mum and your dad and your friends,” she said. “I’ll be good.”

I knelt down by the bed and kissed her. She clutched at my arms and I thought, Sod it—they’re going to find out sooner or later. I told her she could come.

She finished our kiss and threw herself back on the bed.

“That is all I wanted,” she said and waved her hand in a regal fashion. “You may go about your duties, Constable, and I shall languish here until we meet again.”

The rain had slackened off to a light drizzle that, if you’re a Londoner, barely counts as rain at all. Even so, I splashed out on a black cab to take me back to the Folly where Molly served up steak-and-kidney pudding with roast potatoes, peas, and carrots.

“She always does this when I’m ill,” said Nightingale. “It’ll be black pudding for breakfast tomorrow. Thickens the blood.”

We were eating dinner in the so-called Private Dining Room, which adjoined the English library on the second floor. Since the main dining room could sit sixty, we never used it in case Molly got it into her head to lay all the tables. Nonetheless, Nightingale and I had dressed for dinner—we both have standards and one of us had been exerting himself that afternoon.

I knew from experience that you didn’t dive into one of Molly’s steak-and-kidney puddings until some of the superheated
steam had had a chance to dissipate and the interiors had ceased to be hot enough to fire pottery.

Nightingale swallowed a couple of pills with some water and asked about the case.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The jazz musicians first,” he said.

I filled him in on the Café de Paris bombing and my search for Peggy and possibly Cherie.

“You think there’s more than one,” he paused. “What are you calling them?”

“Jazz vampires,” I said. “But I don’t think they’re feeding on the music. I think that’s just a side effect, like the sound a generator makes when it’s turned on.”

“Tactus disvitae,”
said Nightingale. “Another species of vampire—Wolfe would be pleased.”

The pudding was cool enough for me to dig in. An afternoon with Simone had left me starving and, according to Nightingale, Molly made her puddings with ox’s liver. Which he said was the proper old-fashioned recipe.

“Why doesn’t Molly go out to buy stuff?” I asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because she’s different,” I said. “Like the jazz vampire and the Pale Lady. But, unlike them, we’ve had a chance to learn what makes her tick.”

Nightingale finished a mouthful and wiped his lips on his napkin.

“The Pale Lady?”

“That’s what Ash called her,” I said.

“Interesting name,” said Nightingale. “As to the food, as far as I know she has everything delivered.”

“She shops on the Internet?”

“Good God no,” said Nightingale. “There are still some establishments that do things the old-fashioned way, whose staff members are still capable of reading a handwritten note.”

“Could she leave if she wanted to?” I asked.

“She’s not a prisoner,” said Nightingale. “Or a slave if that’s what you’re alluding to.”

“So, she could just walk out the door tomorrow?”

“If she so desired,” said Nightingale.

“What’s stopping her?”

“Fear,” said Nightingale. “I believe she’s frightened of what’s out there.”

“What is out there?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” said Nightingale. “She won’t say.”

“You must have a theory,” I said.

Nightingale shrugged. “Other creatures like Molly,” he said.

“Creatures?”

“People, if you prefer,” said Nightingale. “People who, like Molly, are not the same as you or I or even the
genii locorum
. They were changed by magic, or they were born into lineages that have been changed. And as far as I know this leaves them—incomplete.”

Nightingale, despite literally being a relic of a bygone age, had learned to modify his language around me because when I’d looked into the literature the most common terms started with
un
—unfit, unsuited, undesirable and behind them came the terms starting with
sub
. However, with a bit of running translation, it was clear that “incomplete” people like Molly were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their more powerful supernatural brethren and by practitioners with no moral scruples. Magicians, according to Nightingale, of the blackest hue.

“Sorry. Ethically challenged practitioners,” said Nightingale. “My first ‘governor,’ Inspector Murville, had handled a notorious case in Limehouse in 1911. It involved a famous stage magician working under the name of Manchu the Magnificent who had collected some very strange ‘people’ and was using them to carry out his nefarious plans.”

“And his nefarious plans were what, exactly?” I asked.

“Nothing less than the overthrow of the British Empire itself. Apparently, Inspector Murville, as he set off on his crusade, had it on good authority that Manchu the Magnificent operated an opium den on the Limehouse Causeway. There the yellow devil sat like a fat spider at the center of a web of plots, white slavery being merely the start of it.”

“What’s white slavery when it’s at home?” I asked.

Nightingale had to think about it a bit but apparently when he was young white slavery mostly referred to the trafficking of white women and children for the purposes of prostitution. The inscrutable Chinese were supposedly behind this dastardly trade in lily-white female flesh. I wondered if part of the outrage came from a guilty conscience. I said as much.

“There were established cases, Peter,” said Nightingale sharply. “Women and children were bought and sold in beastly circumstances and suffered real hardship. I doubt they found the historical irony much comfort.”

Inspector Murville, convinced of the seriousness of the threat, organized a raid with half the available wizards in London and a mob of constables loaned to him by the commissioner. Cue a great deal of banging down doors and shouting of “Hold still, you Oriental devil” and then a certain amount of stunned silence.

“The Great Manchu the Magnificent,” said Nightingale, “was revealed to be a Canadian by the name of Henry Speltz. Although he was married to a Chinese woman with whom he had five daughters, all of whom had acted as his beautiful assistant ‘Li Ping’ at one time or other.”

Nothing was found at the house except for a strange young European girl who lived in the household and worked as a maid. Under caution Speltz told Inspector Murville that the girl, whom nobody in the household had thought to name, had been found cowering in one of his disappearing cabinets at the end of a matinee performance at the Hackney Empire.

I mopped up the last of the onion gravy with the last bit of bread in the basket. Nightingale had left half his pudding untouched. “Are you going to finish that?” I asked.

“Help yourself,” said Nightingale, and I did while he finished the story.

Some things never change and a senior police officer doesn’t organize a costly raid and admit to failure, or violating the Magna Carta, until he’s done his best to convict someone of something. Had Speltz actually been Chinese, things might have gone very hard for him. But in the end he was formally charged with disturbing the peace and let go with a police caution.

“The girl was taken into protective custody,” said Nightingale. “Even old Murville could sense there was something not quite right about her.” He looked quickly toward the doors. “Have you finished?” he asked.

I said I had, and Nightingale grabbed the now empty plate and put it back in front of himself just in time for Molly to come drifting into the dining room, pushing the sweets cart. As she cleared the plates, she gave Nightingale a distinctly suspicious look. But she couldn’t prove anything.

She scowled at us and we smiled back.

“Very nice,” I said.

Molly laid out a custard tart and, with one last suspicious look aimed at me, silently left the dining room.

“What happened to the girl?” I asked as I served up the tart.

“She was brought here and examined,” said Nightingale. “And found to be too abnormal to be fostered …”

“Or put into a workhouse,” I said. Under a thick layer of nutmeg, the custard was just as good as that of the Patisserie Valerie. I wondered if I could smuggle some out for Simone. Or, better yet, smuggle her in for dinner.

“It may put your mind at rest to know that we had an agreement with Corum’s Foundling Hospital,” said Nightingale. “She would have been placed there but for the unfortunate fact that once allowed into the Folly, she would not allow herself to be taken out.”

From under the table I could hear Toby looking for the last of the leftovers.

“This is Molly we’re talking about,” I said.

“So she slept in the scullery and was raised by the staff,” he said.

I helped myself to another piece of tart.

“Postmartin was right,” said Nightingale. “I let myself get too comfortable. And while I lived here with Molly the world continued on without me.”

I
WAS
stuffed, but I forced myself over to the coach house to do some data entry. Once there I was irresistibly drawn to the sofa and
Arsenal v. Tottenham
. It was going badly for
Spurs when my phone rang and a strange voice said, “Hello, Peter.”

I checked the caller ID. “Is that you, Leslie?”

I heard a rasping breathy sound. “No,” said Leslie. “It’s Darth Vader.”

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help myself.

“It’s better than Stephen Hawking,” she said. It sounded like she was trying to talk with a plastic bottle in her mouth, and I got the strong impression that it was painful to do.

“You were in London for an operation,” I said. “You could have told me.”

“They didn’t know if it would work,” she said.

“Did it?”

“I’m talking, aren’t I,” said Leslie. “It bloody hurts, though.”

“Want to go back to text?”

“No,” she said. “Sick of typing. Have you checked your cases on HOLMES yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve been doing door-to-door.”

“I went through the records that you sent over and Professor Geoffrey Wheatcroft didn’t ever formally teach Jason Dunlop but Dunlop did dedicate his first novel ‘For master Geoffrey from whom I gained my true education.’ Isn’t that what you trainee wizards call your teachers?”