Moon Over Soho (6 page)

“You need a haircut,” said Mum. And by haircut she meant, of course, shaved short enough for my scalp to tan. I promised her that I’d take care of it, and she stalked into the kitchen to make dinner.

“I was a war baby,” said Dad. “Your nan was evacuated before she had me and that’s why my birth certificate says Cardiff. Luckily for you she unevacuated us back to Stepney before the end of the war.” Or we might have been Welsh, in my dad’s eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

He said that growing up in the London of the late 1940s it was like the war was still going on in people’s heads, what with the bomb sites, the rationing, and the patronizing voices of the BBC Home Service. “Minus the high explosives of course,” said Dad. “In them days people still talked about Bowlly getting blown up on Jermyn Street or Glen Miller’s plane going missing in ’44. Did you know he was a proper
American air force major?” said Dad. “To this day he’s still listed as Missing in Action.”

But to be young and talented in the 1950s was to live on the cusp of change. “First time I heard ‘Body and Soul’ was at the Flamingo Club,” Dad said. “It was being played by Ronnie Scott just when he was becoming Ronnie Scott. The Flamingo Club in the late ’50s was a magnet for black airmen down from Lakenheath and other U.S. bases.

“They wanted our women,” said Dad. “And we wanted their records. They always had the latest stuff. It was a match made in heaven.”

Mum came in with dinner. We were always a two-pot family, one for Mum and a considerably less spicy pot for Dad. He also likes slices of white bread and marge rather than rice, which would be just asking for heart trouble if he weren’t as skinny as a rake to start with. I was a two-pot child, both rice and white bread, which explains my chiseled good looks and manly physique.

Mum’s pot was cassava leaf while Dad had lamb casserole. I opted for the lamb that evening because I’ve never liked cassava leaf, especially when Mum drowns it in palm oil. She uses so much pepper that her soup turns red and I swear it’s only a matter of time before one of her dinner guests spontaneously combusts. We ate off the big glass coffee table in the middle of the living room with a plastic bottle of Highland Spring at its center. There were pink paper napkins and bread sticks in cellophane wrappers that Mum had swiped from her latest cleaning job. I marged up some bread for Dad.

As we ate I caught my mum looking at me. “What?” I asked.

“Why can’t you play like your father?” she asked.

“Because I can sing like my mother,” I said. “But fortunately I cook like Jamie Oliver.”

She gave me a smack on the leg. “You’re not so big I can’t beat you,” she said.

“Yeah, but I’m so much faster than I used to be,” I said.

I actually don’t remember the last time I sat down with Mum and Dad for a meal, at least not without half a dozen
relatives present. I’m not even sure it happened that much when I was a kid. There was always an auntie, an uncle, or an evil LEGO-stealing younger cousin, not that I’m bitter, in the house.

When I brought this up, Mum pointed out that said LEGO-stealing cousin had just commenced an engineering degree at Sussex.
Good
, I thought,
she can jack somebody else’s LEGO
. I pointed out that I was officially a detective constable now and working for a hush-hush branch of the Metropolitan Police.

“What do you do there?” she asked.

“It’s secret, Mum,” I said. “If I tell you I have to kill you.”

“He does magic,” said my dad.

“You shouldn’t keep secrets from your mum,” she said.

“You don’t believe in magic, do you, Mum?”

“You shouldn’t make jokes about these things,” she said. “Science doesn’t have all the answers, you know.”

“It’s got all the best questions, though,” I said.

“You are not doing these witchcraft things, are you?” Suddenly she was serious. “I worry about you enough as it is.”

“I promise I am not consorting with any evil spirits or any other kind of supernatural entity,” I said. Not least because the supernatural entity I’d have most liked to consort with was currently living in exile up the river at the court of Father Thames. It was one of those tragic relationships: I’m a junior policeman, she’s the goddess of a suburban river in South London—it was never going to work out.

Once we were finished, I volunteered for the washing up. While I was using half a bottle of Sainsbury’s own brand washing-up liquid to scrub off the palm oil, I could hear my parents talking in the next room. The TV was still off and my mum hadn’t spoken to anyone on the phone for over three hours—it was beginning to get a little bit Fringe. When I finished, I stepped out to find them sitting side by side on the sofa holding hands. I asked if they wanted more tea, but they said no and gave me strange identical, slightly distant smiles. I realized with a start that they were dying for me to leave so they could go to bed. I quickly grabbed my coat, kissed my
mum good-bye, and practically ran out of the house. There are some things a young man does not want to think about.

I was in the lift when I got a call from Dr. Walid.

“Have you seen my email yet?” he asked.

I told him I’d been at my mum’s house.

“I’ve been collating mortality statistics for jazz musicians in the London area,” he said. “You’ll want to have a look as soon as you can—phone me tomorrow once you’ve done that.”

“Is there something I should know now?”

The lift doors opened and I stepped out into the tiled lobby. The evening was warm enough to allow a couple of kids to loiter by the main doors. One of them tried to give me the eye but I gave it right back and he looked away. Like I said, it’s my manor. And besides, I used to be that boy.

“From the figures I have, I believe that two to three jazz musicians have died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area in the last year.”

“I take it that’s statistically significant?”

“It’s all in the email,” said Dr. Walid.

We hung up just as I reached the Asbo.

To the tech-cave, I thought.

T
HE
F
OLLY
, according to Nightingale, is protected by an interlocking series of magical protections. They were last renewed in 1940 to allow the post office to run in a then-cutting-edge coaxial telephone cable to the main building and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass-and-mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish.

Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and adds that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the Dark Ages.

Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency-style when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house, so that the horses and the smellier
servants could be housed downwind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once housed servants and later served as a party space for the young bucks back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least more than one. The magical “protections”—Nightingale was not happy when I called them “force fields”—used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century.

The coach house attic has a studio skylight at one end, an Ottoman couch, a chaise longue, a plasma TV, and an IKEA kitchen table that once took me and Molly three bloody hours to assemble. I’d used the Folly’s status as an Operational Command Unit to get the Directorate of Information to cough up half a dozen airwave handsets with charging rack and a dedicated HOLMES 2 terminal. I also had my laptop and my backup laptop and my PlayStation—which I hadn’t had a chance to get out of the box yet. Because of this there is a big sign on the front door that says
NO MAGIC ON PAIN OF PAIN
. This is what I call the tech-cave.

The first thing I got when I booted up was an email from Leslie with the header
Bored!
so I sent her Dr. Walid’s autopsy report to keep her occupied. Then I opened up Police National Computer Xpress and ran a DVLA check on Melinda Abbot’s license plate and found that the listed information matched that on her driver’s license. I ran Simone Fitzwilliam as well, but evidently she’d never applied for a license or owned a car. Nor had she committed, been the victim of, or reported a crime within the United Kingdom. Or possibly all that information had been lost, inaccurately entered into the databases, or she’d just changed her name recently. Information technology only gets you so far, which is why coppers still go around knocking on doors and writing things down in little black notebooks. I Googled them both for good measure. Melinda Abbot had a Facebook page as did a couple of people with the same name, but Simone Fitzwilliam had no obvious Internet presence at all.

I worked my way through Dr. Walid’s list of dead jazz musicians—all
men, I noticed—in much the same way. They’re always doing clever cross-referencing stuff on the TV, and it’s all perfectly possible, but what they never show is how sodding long it takes. It was pushing midnight by the time I got to the end of the list and I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at.

I took a Red Stripe from the fridge, opened the can, and had a swig.

Definite fact number one: Each year for the last five, two or three jazz musicians had died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area. In each case the coroner had ruled the death either “accidental” by way of substance abuse or by natural causes—mostly heart attacks with a couple of aneurysms thrown in for a bit of variety.

Dr. Walid had included a supplemental file recording every person who’d listed their profession as musician and had died over the same period. Definite fact number two: While other musicians dropped dead from “natural causes” with depressing frequency, they didn’t seem to regularly die just after gigs the way the jazzmen did.

Definite fact number three: Cyrus Wilkinson hadn’t even listed his occupation as musician but as an accountant. You never claim to be a freelance or artistic anything unless you want a personal credit rating lower than an Icelandic bank’s. Which led to definite fact number four: My statistical analysis was pretty much worthless.

And yet three jazz musicians a year—I didn’t believe it was a coincidence.

But Nightingale wasn’t going to go for anything that flimsy. And he was still going to expect me to perfect
scindere
starting the next morning. I shut everything down and turned it all off at the plugs. That’s good for the environment and more important stops all my expensive gear from getting randomly fried by a surge in magic.

I let myself into the Folly through the kitchen. The waning moon lit the atrium through the skylight so I left the lights off as I climbed the stairs to my floor. On the balcony opposite I glimpsed a pale figure silently gliding among the muffled shadows of the west reading room. It was just Molly,
restlessly doing whatever it is she restlessly does at night. When I reached my landing the musty carpet smell told me that Toby had once again fallen asleep against my door. The little dog lay on his back, his thin ribs rising and falling under his fur. He snuffled and kicked in his sleep, hind legs pawing the air, indicating at least five hundred milliyaps of background magic. I let myself into my bedroom and carefully closed the door so as not to wake him.

I climbed into bed and before I turned out the side lamp I texted Leslie—
WTF DO NOW?

The next morning I got a text back. It read:
GO TLK BAND—IDIOT!

T
HE BAND
weren’t that hard to find—the Spice of Life had their contact details and they all agreed to meet me at French House on Dean Street, but it had to be in the evening because they all had day jobs. That suited me because I was still behind on my Latin vocab. I trolled over to Soho just after six and found them all waiting for me, propping up a wall peppered with pictures of people who had been famous just at the time my dad hadn’t.

The Spice of Life playbill listed my lot as the Better Quartet, but they didn’t really look much like jazzmen to me. Bassists are famously steady but Max—really Derek—Harwood was an average-looking white guy in his mid-thirties. He was even wearing a diamond-patterned Marks & Spencer V-neck sweater under his jacket.

“We already had a Derek in the band before last,” said Max. “So I went by Max to avoid confusion.” He took a subdued sip from his beer. I’d bought the first round and was feeling suitably gouged. Max was an integrated systems specialist for the London Underground—something to do with signaling systems, apparently.

The pianist, Daniel Hossack, was a classically trained music teacher at Westminster School for the terminally privileged. He had receding blond hair, round Trotsky glasses, and the sort of sensible kindness that probably led to him being savagely lampooned by the spotty wits of the lower sixth—that’s year 12 in the new money.