Moon Over Soho (10 page)

“Well?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. “If he was attacked by magic it wasn’t directly.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” said Stephanopoulis. “Couldn’t we call it ‘other means.’ ”

“If you like, boss,” I said. “It’s possible this attack had nothing to do with ‘other means.’ ”

“No? A woman with teeth in her fanny? I’d have to say that was pretty ‘other,’ wouldn’t you?”

Me and Nightingale had discussed this after the first attack. “It’s possible she was wearing a prosthetic, you know, like a set of dentures only inserted … vertically. If a woman did that, don’t you think she could …” I realized that I was making snapping movements with my hand and stopped it.

“Well, I couldn’t do that,” said Stephanopoulis. “But thank you, Constable, for that fascinating bit of speculation. It’s definitely going to keep me awake at night.”

“Not as badly as the men, boss,” I said and really wished I hadn’t.

Stephanopoulis gave me a strange look. “You’re a cheeky bugger, aren’t you?” she said.

“Sorry, boss,” I said.

“Do you know what I like, Grant? A good Friday-night stabbing, some poor sod getting knifed because he looks funny at some other drunk bastard,” she said. “It’s a motive I can relate to.”

We both stood for a moment and contemplated the hazy far-off days of yesterday evening.

“You’re not officially part of this investigation,” said
Stephanopoulis. “Consider yourself a consultant only. I’m the acting senior investigating officer and if I think I need you, I’ll give you a shout. Understood?”

“Yes, boss,” I said. “There’s some leads I can follow, ‘other means’ of pursuing the investigation.”

“Fair enough,” said Stephanopoulis. “But any actions that you generate you’re to clear through me first. Any normal leads you feed back through HOLMES and in return I’ll make sure any creepy stuff involves you. Is that clear?”

“Yes, guv,” I said.

“Good boy,” she said. I could tell she’d liked the “guv.” “Now fuck off and let’s hope I don’t have to see you again.”

I walked back up the forensics tent and stripped off my noddy suit, but carefully, to make sure I didn’t get any blood on my clothes.

Stephanopoulis wanted my involvement to be low-profile. Given that the Covent Garden riots had put forty people in the hospital, had seen the arrests of two hundred more, including most of the cast of
Billy Budd
, put a deputy assistant commissioner in the hospital and then on disciplinary suspension and Stephanopoulis’s own governor on medical leave after I’d stuck him with a syringe full of elephant tranquilizer (in my defense he had been trying to hang me at the time), and that was before the Royal Opera House was trashed and the market burned down—low-profile was fine with me.

I
ARRIVED
back at the Folly to find Nightingale in the breakfast room helping himself to kedgeree from one of the silver salvers that Molly insists on laying out on the buffet table every single morning. I lifted the lids on one of the others to reveal Cumberland sausage and poached eggs—sometimes when you’ve been up all night you can substitute a good fry-up for sleep. It worked long enough for me to brief Nightingale on the body in the Groucho Club, although I steered clear of the Cumberland sausage for some reason. Toby sat on his haunches by the table and gave me the alert stare of a dog who was ready for any meaty comestible that life might throw him.

When the sadly penis-less St. John Giles came to our attention we’d drafted in a forensic dentist to confirm that teeth had done the damage rather than a knife or a miniature bear trap or something. The dentist had run up a best-guess reconstruction of the configuration of the teeth. It looked remarkably like a human mouth only shallower and with a vertical orientation. In his opinion, the canine and incisors were broadly similar to those in the human mouth but the premolars and molars were unusually thin and sharp. “More suggestive of a carnivore than an omnivore,” the dentist had said. He was a nice man and very professional but I got the distinct impression he thought we were having him on.

This had led to a bizarre debate about the process of human digestion, which wasn’t settled until I went out and bought some school biology textbooks and talked Nightingale through the stomach, the intestines, the small intestines, and what they were for. When I asked him whether they had covered this at his old school he said that they might have but he hadn’t been paying attention. When I asked him what had kept his attention he said rugby and spells.

“Spells?” I’d asked. “Are you saying you went to Hogwarts?”

Which led to me having to explain the Harry Potter books, after which he said that, yes, he had been to a school for the sons of certain families with strong magical traditions but it really hadn’t been much like the school in the books. Although he did like the idea of quidditch, they’d mostly played rugby, and using magic on the playing field was strictly outlawed.

“We did play our own version of squash,” he’d said, “using the movement forms. That could get a bit lively.”

The school itself had been requisitioned during World War II by the military and by the time it was released back to civilian use in the early 1950s there hadn’t been enough children to make it worthwhile. “Or enough teachers,” Nightingale had said and then fallen silent for a long while. I made a point of not bringing up the subject again.

We did spend quite a lot of time going through the library looking for references to
vagina dentata
, which led me to
Wolfe’s
Exotica
. What Polidori was to macabre death, Samuel Erasmus Wolfe was to weird fauna and what Dr. Walid calls “legitimate cryptozoology.” He was a contemporary of Huxley and Wilberforce and bang up to date with the then-latest theories of evolution. In his introduction to
The Role of Magic in Inducing Pseudo Lamarckian Inheritance
he argues that exposure to magic could induce changes in an organism, which could then be inherited by its offspring. Among modern biologists this sort of thing is known as soft inheritance and, if espoused, causes them to point and laugh. It sounded plausible, but unfortunately before he could complete the part of his book where he proved his theory, Wolfe was killed by a shark while taking the waters off Sidmouth.

I thought that, as a theory, it could explain the “evolution” of many of the creatures detailed in the
Exotica
. Wolfe had avoided mention in his theory of the
genii locorum
, the local gods, who most definitely existed. But I could see that if a person were to come under the influence of the vast and subtle magic that seemed to permeate certain localities, then perhaps they could be physically shaped by that magic. For example, Father Thames, Mama Thames, and even Beverley Brook, whom I’d kissed at Seven Dials.

Inherited by the offspring, I thought. Perhaps it was a good thing that Beverley Brook was safely out of temptation’s reach.

“Assuming the forensic dentistry confirms that it’s the same ‘creature,’ ” I said, “can we assume that she’s not natural? I mean, she’s got to be magical in some way—right? Which means she must be leaving a trail of
vestigium
wherever she goes?”

Nightingale poured more tea. “You haven’t picked up anything so far.”

“True,” I said. “But if she’s got a gaff, a nest where she spends most of her time, then the
vestigia
will have had a chance to build up. That should make it easier to spot, and since both attacks were in Soho, the chances are that’s where her lair is.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch,” he said.

“It’s a start,” I said and flicked a sausage at Toby, who executed
a neat standing jump to catch it. “What we need is something that has a proven track record of hunting supernatural things.”

We both looked at Toby, who swallowed his sausage in a single gulp.

“Not Toby,” I said. “Someone who owes me a favor.”

W
HEN
I brokered a peace between the two halves of the River Thames, part of the deal involved an exchange of hostages. All very medieval, but the best I could come up with at the time. From the court of Mama Thames, the London contingent, I chose Beverley Brook, she of the dark brown eyes and cheeky face, and in exchange I got Ash, all film-star good looks and the greasy blond charisma of a traveling funfair. After a fairly disastrous stay at Mama Thames’s home in Wapping, the eldest daughters had stashed him at the Generator, a student hostel that existed on the boundary where roughneck King’s Cross became affluent Bloomsbury. It also put him just a short dash from the Folly in case of emergencies.

The hostel was based in a courtyard mews off Tavistock Place. On the outside it was strictly English Heritage vanilla Georgian but inside it was the kind of easy-to-clean primary colors that adorn the sets of children’s TV shows. Staff members were decked out in blue-and-green T-shirts, baseball caps, and mandatory happy smiles that slipped a bit when they saw me.

“I’m just here to pick him up,” I told them, and their smiles returned to the regulation intensity.

It wasn’t lost on me that despite the fact that I’d worked all night, had a nap and shower, and caught up on some paperwork, I still managed to arrive at Ash’s room to find him just getting up. He opened the door wrapped in a grubby olive bath towel.

“Petey,” he said. “Come in.”

The private rooms at the Generator are furnished with bunk beds in order to retain that crucial youth-hostel ambience. Technically, even when you rent a private room you’re required to share it with at least one other guest. Shortly after
moving in, Ash, using an oxyacetylene torch liberated from God knows where, had reconfigured his bunk into a double bed. If anyone was going to be sharing a room with him it was going to be under the same duvet. When the management complained, Mother Thames sent her daughter Tyburn to sort things out. And when Lady Ty puts the fix in, things stay fixed. To be fair to Ash, he rarely spends a night alone. Ty hates him, but because—before Ash came along—I was at the top of her shit list, I regarded that as a bonus.

Last night’s young woman regarded me cautiously from the safety of the duvet. There wasn’t anywhere else to sit but at the end of the bed, so I perched there and gave her a reassuring smile. She looked nervously after Ash as he headed up the corridor toward the communal showers.

“Afternoon,” I said and she nodded back.

She was pretty in a calculated way, delicate cheekbones, olive skin, curly black hair that fell in ringlets on her shoulders. It wasn’t until she relaxed enough to sit up and the duvet fell away to reveal a smooth, hairless, and totally flat chest that I twigged that he wasn’t a she.

“Are you a guy?” I asked. Just to show that the sensitivity training at Hendon hadn’t been wasted.

“Only biologically,” he said. “How about you?”

I was saved from having to answer that by Ash, who swept back into the room and, stark naked, hunted out a pair of faded jeans and a Bra’ Anansi T-shirt that just had to have come from Effra. Pausing only to French-kiss the young man in the bed, he pulled on a pair of DM boots and out we went.

I waited until we were out of the hostel and heading for the Ford Asbo before asking about the guy in his bed.

Ash shrugged. “I didn’t know he was a guy until we got back to the room,” he said. “And I was having such a good time I thought, why not?”

For someone who’d never been in a built-up area larger than Cirencester all his life, Ash was turning out to be surprisingly metro.

“Where we going?” asked Ash as we got in the car.

“Your favorite part of town,” I said. “Soho.”

“You going to buy me breakfast?” he asked.

“Lunch,” I said. “Late lunch.”

We ended up eating fish-and-chips alfresco on Berwick Street, which has the offices of TV companies at one end, a street market in the middle, and a little furtive knot of sex shops at the other. It also has some world-famous record stores, strictly vinyl-only, the sort of places my dad would go to sell his collection—as if that were ever going to happen this side of him being dead.

I told him what I wanted him to do.

“You want me to hang out in Soho?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Going to pubs and clubs and meeting new people,” he said.

“Yep,” I said. “And keeping your eye out for a psychotic, possibly supernatural, killer female.”

“So, go to clubs and look for dangerous women,” he said. “What does she look like?”

“She looks like Molly but she may have changed her hair a bit,” I said. “I’m hoping she’ll stand out, you know, to you in particular, in a spiritual way.”

I saw Ash translate that one in his head. “Oh,” he said. “Got you. What do I do if I spot her?”

“You call me and you don’t get close,” I said. “This is strictly surveillance, is that clear?”

“Crystal,” said Ash. “What’s in it for me?”

“I bought you chips, didn’t I?”

“Tight arse,” he said. “Beer money?”

“I’ll reimburse you,” I said.

“You couldn’t front me?”

We found an ATM and I pulled a ton and a half for walking-around money and handed it over. “I want receipts,” I said. “Or I’m going to tell Tyburn what really happened that night in Mayfair.”

“It was just a cat,” said Ash.

“There are some things that shouldn’t happen to anybody,” I said. “Not even a cat.”

“It looked good shaved,” said Ash.

“I don’t think Tyburn saw it that way,” I said.

“I think I shall start my reconnaissance in the Endurance,” said Ash. “Care to join me?”

“Can’t, some of us have to work for a living,” I said.

“So have I,” said Ash. “I’m doing your job.”

“Just be careful,” I said.

“As if I were out poaching,” he said. “On a beautiful moonlit night.”

I watched him pinch an apple off a market stand as he sauntered away.

The thing about Soho is that that because it’s a bugger to drive through, and has no tube station or bus routes through it, you end up walking everywhere. And because you’re walking you run into people you might normally miss. I’d stashed the Asbo on Beak Street and so I turned down Broadwick, but before I could achieve Soho escape velocity I was intercepted on Lexington.