Moon Over Soho (24 page)

Not this apprentice. But
master
doesn’t mean the same thing to white boys at Oxford. Given the books in Dunlop’s flat it had to mean, barring a really bizarre set of coincidences, that Geoffrey Wheatcroft had taught Dunlop formal Newtonian magic.

I said as much to Leslie.

“Thought so,” she said. “Question is, was he the only one? And if he wasn’t how do we find out.”

“We need to check the Murder Team’s files and see if known associates or nominals track back to Magdalen College around the time he was there.”

“I love it when you talk dirty,” she said. “It makes you sound like a real copper.”

“Do you think you can do that?” I asked.

“Why not?” she said. “It’s not as if I have anything better to do. When are you coming up to see me?”

“Soon as I get a chance,” I said—lying.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m not supposed to talk too much.”

“You take care,” I said.

“You too,” she said and hung up.

How many apprentices could one master teach? You needed a trained wizard to act as what Nightingale called an exemplar, to demonstrate the form. But I didn’t see why you couldn’t do that with more than one person at a time. It would depend on how motivated your students were. At somewhere like Nightingale’s old school you’d be dealing with your usual range of talent and enthusiasm. But university students learning magic for fun? Nightingale said it took ten years to be a proper wizard, but I’d managed to do quite a lot of damage within three months of starting training—I didn’t think Jason Dunlop, or any fellow students, would be any different.

I fired up the HOLMES terminal and started looking for connections to Oxford University that had lasted beyond his time there. That got me a list of twenty-plus names, mostly former students, whose paths had crossed professionally or, as far as the Murder Team could tell, socially with Jason Dunlop.

In a major inquiry a person who comes to the attention of the police as part of that inquiry is listed on HOLMES as a nominal. Any task that an investigating officer decides needs doing is called an action. Actions are prioritized and put on a list and officers are assigned to carry them out. Actions lead to more nominals and more actions and the whole investigation quickly becomes a whirling vortex of information from which there seems no escape. HOLMES lets you do word searches and comparison tests, but half the time that just leads to more actions and more nominals and more items of information. Deal with this for any length of time and you start to get nostalgic for the good old days when you just found a suspect you thought looked a bit tasty and beat out a confession with a phone book.

Background checks on the Oxford University names had a low priority, so I started with the Police National Computer to at least see if any of them had criminal records and to nab likenesses from their driver’s licenses. This was not a quick process but at least it meant I was still awake and dressed when Stephanopoulis called me at one in the morning.

“Grab your overnight bag,” she said. “I’ll be picking you up in ten minutes.”

I didn’t have an overnight bag, so I grabbed my gym bag and hoped that nobody asked me to a formal dinner while I was away. I bunged a spare airwave in with my backup laptop just to be on the safe side. To save time, I went out the side door and walked up Bedford Place to Russell Square. It was drizzling and the moisture put yellow halos around the streetlamps.

Stephanopoulis wouldn’t have called me out of hours for anything less than another murder, and the overnight bag said it was out of London.

I heard it coming before I saw it, a black Jaguar XJ with twenty-inch wheels and, unmistakably from the sound, a supercharged V8 engine. From the way it pulled up it was obvious that the driver had been on all the courses I hadn’t been on and was clearly authorized to drive insanely fast.

The back passenger door opened and I slipped into the smell of newly liveried leather seats to find Stephanopoulis waiting for me. The car took off as soon as the door closed and I found myself slipping around on the backseat until I managed to wrestle my seat belt into place.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Norwich,” said Stephanopoulis. “Our friend’s been grazing again.”

“Dead?”

“Oh yes,” said the man in the front passenger seat. “Quite dead.” Stephanopoulis introduced him as Detective Chief Inspector Zachary Thompson.

“People call me Zack,” he said as he shook my hand.

And I shall call you Chief Inspector
is what I didn’t say. Thompson was a tall man with a narrow face and an enormous
beaklike nose. He had to be tougher than he sounded to get through life with a nose like that.

“Zack,” said Stephanopoulis, “is the SIO on this case.”

“I’m her beard,” he said cheerfully.

Now, I’m not part of the Met’s famous canteen culture. I do not mourn the good old days when coppers were real coppers, not least because that spares me from what would have been almost continuous racist abuse. But even I get nervous when senior officers tell me to call them by their first name—no good can come of that sort of thing.

“Is there anything unusual about this one?” I asked. “I mean more unusual than usual.”

“He’s ex-Job,” said Stephanopoulis. “Detective Chief Inspector Jerry Johnson, retired from the Met in 1979.”

“Is there a connection to Jason Dunlop?”

“There’s a notation in Dunlop’s diary from March,” said DCI Thompson. “
Meet J. J. Norwich
. His credit card trace shows that he bought a return ticket from Liverpool Street to Norwich on that day. We think Johnson might have been a source for a story that Dunlop was working on.”

“If it’s the same J. J.,” I said.

“You let us worry about that,” said Stephanopoulis. “You’re there to check for signs of black magic.”

To my amazement, we fell in behind a pair of motorcycle outriders and by the time we hit the M11 we were doing over 120 mph.

M
Y DAD
says that being a Londoner has nothing to do with where you’re born. He says that there are people who get off a jumbo jet at Heathrow, go through immigration waving any kind of passport, hop on the tube, and by the time the train’s pulled into Piccadilly Circus they’ve become Londoners. He said there were others, some of whom were born within the sound of the Bow Bells, who spend their whole life dreaming of an escape. When they do go, they almost always head for Norfolk where the skies are big, the land is flat, and the demographics are full of creamy-white goodness. It is, says my dad, the poor man’s alternative to Australia now that South Africa has gone all multicultural.

Jerry Johnson was one of the later type of non-Londoner, born in Finchley in 1940 by the grace of God and died in a bungalow on the outskirts of Norwich with his penis bitten off. That last detail explaining why me and the scariest police officer in the Met, her beard, and two motorcycle outriders were doing a steady ton plus change up the M11. It was two in the morning as we came off the motorway so we filtered onto the A-road almost without slowing down. We reached the crime scene in under ninety minutes, which was impressive, only to find the Norfolk Constabulary had already taken the body away, which was not. Stephanopoulis stamped off with DCI Thompson to bite chunks out of the local plod, which left me to sidle up to the crime scene on my own.

“No sign of forced entry,” said DC Trollope.

Contrary to my dad’s prejudices the local plod were neither stupid nor noticeably inbred. If the kissing cousins of Norwich were getting it on then at least their offspring weren’t joining the police. Instead DC David Trollope was the kind of sober fit young man that would warm the heart of any backseat home secretary in the land.

“Do you think he let his assailant in?” I asked.

“It seems that way,” he said. “What do you think?” Police officers, like African matrons at a wedding, are acutely aware of the subtle and all-but-invisible gradations in status. We were the same rank and about the same age but the disadvantage I suffered from being on his patch had to be balanced against the fact that I’d arrived in a Jaguar XJ V8 that was blatantly borrowed from Diplomatic Protection. We settled for a kind of uneasy bonhomie and, like the African matrons, providing nobody had spiked the punch bowl, we’d probably get through the encounter without an embarrassing incident.

“Did he have an alarm system?” I asked.

“Yeah,” said Trollope. “A good one.”

The bungalow was a hideous redbrick structure built, if I had to guess, in the early 1980s by some hack architect who’d been aiming at art deco and hit Tracey Emin instead. The interior was as characterless as the exterior, World of Leather sofa, generic flat-pack furniture, fitted kitchen. There were three separate bedrooms, which surprised me.

“Did he have a family?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notes. “Ex-wife, daughter, grandchildren—all living in Melbourne, Australia.”

The two spare bedrooms looked like they were last furnished in the 1980s and were neat, tidy, and unlived-in. Trollope said that Johnson had a Polish woman who “did” for him twice a week. “It was her that found the body,” he said.

In the master bedroom, which was still off-limits to people not wearing noddy suits, I stood in the doorway and examined the bed as best as I could. The forensics team had removed the sheets and pillows but the mattress was still in place with a reddish brown stain a third of the way up from the footboard. Too much blood had soaked in for it to dry out since the body had been removed, so I could still smell it as
I walked away to check the other rooms. I’d brought my own gloves with me but I asked Trollope if he had a spare pair to give him something to feel superior about.

If Johnson had died in his bedroom then he’d spent most of his life in the living room. LCD wide-screen TV, DVD with the remotes still on the coffee table by a copy of the
Radio Times
. There was an antique fold-down writing desk that Trollope said hadn’t been dusted yet so we left it well alone. And a couple of glass-fronted bookcases filled with paperbacks. Penguins, Corgis, and Panthers from the 1960s and ’70s—Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop. The bookshelves were the type that came in two parts, the bottom section acting as a pedestal for the top and being slightly deeper and having opaque doors. Carefully, because they hadn’t been dusted either, I opened the bottom sections to find them both empty except for a couple of scraps of paper—I left those for forensics as well.

There were a couple of surprisingly good hunting prints on the wall as well as a framed photograph of his graduating class at Hendon. I couldn’t work out which shiny young uniform he was. Beside it was a photo of him being handed a commendation by a senior officer whom I later learned was Sir John Waldron, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1968–1972, no less. There were family photographs on the mantelpiece, a wedding complete with unfortunate sideburns and flares, a pair of children, boy and a girl, at various ages, toddler, infant school, on a pale yellow beach by a green ocean somewhere foreign. There were a couple taken outside the bungalow where the kids looked to be nine or ten—nothing after that. I did a quick mental calculation and guessed that the latest picture had been taken in the early 1980s. More than thirty years ago.

“The family in Australia are still alive, aren’t they?” I asked. “They weren’t all tragically killed in a car crash or something like that?”

“I’ll have to find out,” said Trollope. “Why?”

“Thirty years is a long time to go without any new photographs,” I said.

The last couple of pictures were in the second rank, half hidden by the wife and kids. More men in kipper ties, sideburns, and embarrassingly wide lapels, photographed in a bar that looked familiar and which I suddenly recognized as the French House in Soho. I also realized I was looking at the young Alexander Smith, the nightclub owner, looking like a dandy even back then in a crushed-velvet smoking jacket and ruffled shirt.

“You didn’t happen to get any details about his career, did you?” I asked.

Trollope checked his notebook again but I knew even before he said it where the bulk of DCSI Johnson’s career had been spent: in and around Soho.

“He was CID at West End Central and before that he was in something called the OPS,” he said. I asked the dates and he said 1967 to 1975.

The OPS was the Obscene Publications Squad, the single most corrupt specialist unit of the most corrupt division of the Metropolitan Police. And Johnson had been a member during the most corrupt decade since London Thief Takers stopped being paid by the collar.

No wonder Alexander Smith was in the photograph. The OPS had run a protection racket for porno shops and strip clubs. You paid them so much cash a day and they made sure you didn’t get raided. Or if you did, they made sure you’d get lots of warning, so you had a comfortable and civilized interval in which to move all hard-core stuff somewhere else. As an added bonus you could bung the boys in blue a “drink” and they’d go around and raid your competitors and then sell their confiscated stock to you out of the back of the evidence room at Holborn nick. It also explained how Johnson could afford to take early retirement and probably why he had to take it.