Moon Over Soho (22 page)

“I’m concerned,” he said, “that Thomas has been pushing himself too hard.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s picked up an infection and he’s running a fever,” said Dr. Walid.

“He was okay at breakfast,” I said.

“Man could be dead on his feet before he’d admit to it,”
said Dr. Walid. “I don’t want him disturbed for the next couple of days. He was shot through the chest, Peter, there’s tissue damage there that will never fully heal, and it will make him prone to chest infections like the one he’s got now. I’ve put him on a course of antibiotics, which I expect Molly to make sure he completes.”

Molly arrived with the good Wedgwood tea set on a lacquered wooden tray. She poured for Dr. Walid with quick dainty movements and pointedly left without pouring mine. Obviously she blamed me for Nightingale’s relapse—perhaps she knew about the beer.

Dr. Walid poured my tea and helped himself to a HobNob.

“I heard Leslie is in town for an operation,” I said.

“She’s going to be fine,” said Dr. Walid. “You just need to make sure that when she asks for your help, you’re ready to give it. How do you feel about her injuries?”

“It didn’t happen to me,” I said. “It happened to Leslie and Dr. Framline and that poor Hari Krishna sod and the others.”

“Do you feel guilty?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t do it to them and I did my best to stop it. But I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty, if that helps.”

“Not all my patients start off dead,” said Dr. Walid. “Not in my medical practice anyway. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the outcomes can be less than optimal. It’s not whether you feel responsible, it’s whether you don’t shy away when she needs you.”

“The thought of her face scares me to death,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Not as much as it scares her,” he said and patted my arm. “Not as much as the thought that you might reject her scares her. Make sure you are there when she needs you—that’s your responsibility in this—your part of the job, if you like.”

We were way over our daily quota of emo so I changed the subject.

“Do you know about the nest of vampires in Purley?” I asked.

“That was a nasty business.”

“Nightingale called what I felt there the
tactus disvitae
,
antilife,” I said. “He implied that the vampires sucked ‘life’ from their environment.”

“As I understand it,” he said.

“Have you ever had a chance to section the brain of one of their victims?”

“Usually they’re in an advanced state of desiccation when we get them,” said Dr. Walid. “But one or two of them have been fresh enough to get some useful results. I think I know where you’re going with this.”

“Did the brain sections show signs of hyperthaumic degradation?”

“It’s hyperthaumaturgical degradation,” said Dr. Walid. “And yes, they showed terminal levels of HTD, damage to at least ninety percent of the brain.”

“Is it possible that ‘life’ energy and magic are essentially the same thing?” I asked.

“That wouldn’t contradict anything I’ve observed,” he said.

I told him about the experiments I’d run with pocket calculators and about how the damage done to their microprocessors had resembled the damage done to the human brain by HTD.

“That would mean that magic was affecting biological and nonbiological constructions,” said Dr. Walid. “Which means it might be possible to develop some form of nonsubjective instrumentality.” Clearly Dr. Walid was just as frustrated as I was with the Toby the Dog method of magic detection. “We have to replicate your experiments. This has to be documented.”

“We can do that later,” I said. “But what I need to know now is about the effect this might have on life extension.”

Dr. Walid gave me a sharp look. “You’re talking about Thomas,” he said.

“I’m talking about the vampires,” I said. “I checked in Wolfe and he lists at least three cases where it was confirmed that the vampires were at least two hundred years old.”

Dr. Walid was too good a scientist to just accept the word of a natural philosopher from the early nineteenth century but he conceded that the evidence indicated it was a possibility.
Really, you’d expect a cryptopathologist to be a bit more credulous. Still, I wasn’t going to let a little bit of skepticism get in the way of a perfectly good theory.

“Let’s say for the moment that I’m right,” I said. “Is it possible that all the creatures with extended lives, the
genii locorum
, Nightingale, Molly, the vampires—isn’t it possible that they’re all drawing magic from the environment to keep themselves from aging?”

“Life protects itself,” said Dr. Walid. “As far as we know, vampires are the only creatures that can take life—magic, whatever—directly from people.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Let’s forget about the gods, Molly, and the other weirdos for a moment and concentrate on the vampires. Would it be possible for there to be a vampire-like creature that fed off musicians—that the act of making music made them uniquely vulnerable?”

“You think there are vampires that feed off jazz?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Jazz vampires?”

“If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck …,” I said.

“Why jazz?”

“I don’t know,” I said. My dad would’ve had an answer. He would have said it had to be jazz because that was the only proper music there was. “I suppose we could line up different kinds of musicians, expose them to our vampire, and see which ones suffer brain damage.”

“I’m not sure that would meet the BMA’s ethical guidelines on human experimentation,” he said. “Not to mention the difficulty of finding volunteers to be guinea pigs.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Musicians? If you offered them money. Free beer, even.”

“So this is your hypothesis for what happened to Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I think I may have stumbled upon a sort of trigger event.” I explained about Peggy and Snakehips Johnson and the Café de Paris and it all sounded thinner and thinner even as I was laying it out.

Dr. Walid finished his tea as I wound down.

“We need to find this Peggy,” I said.

“That much is certain,” said Dr. Walid.

I
DIDN’T
feel like doing data entry and I still couldn’t get Leslie on the phone. So I cropped a high-resolution image of Peggy in 1941 and printed out a dozen copies on the laser printer. Armed with those, I headed into Soho to see if I could find anyone who remembered her. Starting with Alexander Smith. After all, Peggy and Henry Bellrush were one of his top acts.

When he wasn’t paying women to take off their clothes in an ironic postmodernist way, Alexander Smith operated out of a small office above a sex-shop-turned-coffee-bar on Greek Street. I buzzed the intercom and a voice asked who I was.

“PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

“PC Grant,” I said.

“What?”

“Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

Or maybe not.

“I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

“Busy,” said No-Neck.

There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness—“I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside”—while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have
them
deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.

“Look, I’m the police,” I said. “And we could … you know … do the whole thing, but you’d get arrested and blah blah blah and stuff, whereas I just want a chat … so what’s the point of all … this?”

No-neck thought about this for a moment, before grunting and shifting enough to let me squeeze past. That’s how real men settle their differences. Through reasoned discussion and a dispassionate analysis. He farted as I reached the inner door as a sign, I decided, of his respect.

Alexander Smith’s office was surprisingly neat. A pair of self-assembly desks, two walls lined with bracket shelves covered with magazines, books, papers, overstuffed box files, and DVDs. The windows had dusty cream venetian blinds, one of which had obviously gotten stuck halfway up sometime around the turn of the century and hadn’t been touched since. Smith had been working on a PowerBook but ostentatiously closed it when I walked in. He was still a dandy in a lemon-yellow blazer and crimson ascot, but outside of the club he seemed smaller and meaner.

“Hello, Alexander,” I said and threw myself into his visitor’s chair. “How’s tricks?”

“Constable Grant,” he said and I noticed that he’d picked up an involuntary leg tremor. He noticed me noticing and put his hand on his knee to stop it. “What can I do you for?”

Definitely nervous about something. And even though it probably had nothing to do with my case, a little extra leverage never hurts.

“Have you got something you need to be doing?”

“Just the usual,” he said.

I asked him if his girls were all right and he visibly relaxed. This was not the source of his nerves.

Bollocks, I thought. Now he knows I don’t know.

To prove it, he offered me a cup of instant coffee, which I declined.

“Are you expecting company?” I asked.

“Eh?”

“What’s with the gorilla on the door?”

“Oh,” said Smith. “That’s Tony. I inherited him from my brother. I mean, I couldn’t get rid of him. He’s practically a family retainer.”

“Isn’t he expensive to feed?”

“The girls like to have him around,” said Smith. “Is there anything particular that I can do for you?”

I pulled out one of my 1941 prints and handed it to Smith. “Is that Peggy?”

“Looks like her,” he said. “What about it?”

“Have you seen her recently?”

“Not since the gig at the Café de Paris,” he said. “Which was spectacular. Did I tell you that. Fucking spectacular.”

And weirdly coincidental but I wasn’t going to tell Smith that.

“Do you have a home address?” I asked.

“No,” said Smith. “This is a bit of a cash-only business. What the Revenue don’t see, the Revenue don’t worry about.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’m pay-as-you-earn myself.”

“That could change,” said Smith. “Anything else you’re interested in? Only some of us don’t get paid by the hour.”

“You go back, don’t you?” I asked.

“We all go back,” he said. “Some of us go back farther than others.”

“Was she around then?”

“Who?”

“Peggy,” I said. “Was she dancing back in the 1990s?”

“I generally get nervous when they’re still at infant school,” he said.

“How about in the 1980s?”

“Now I know you’re mucking me about,” he said, but hesitated just a little bit too long.

“Maybe not her then,” I said. “Maybe it was her mum—same sort of look.”

“Sorry. I was abroad for most of the ’70s and ’80s,” he said. “Although there was one bird used to do one of them fan dances at the Windmill Theatre, but that was 1962—that would be a bit far back even for Peggy’s mum.”

“Why’d you have to leave the country?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “But this place was a shit hole so I got out.”

“You came back, though.”

“I missed the jellied eels,” he said. But I didn’t believe him.

I wasn’t going to get anything else useful, but I made a note to look up Smith on the PNC once I got back to the tech-cave. I gave No-Neck Tony a friendly pat on the shoulder as I squeezed past.

“You’re a living treasure, my son,” I said.

He grunted and I was satisfied, as I went down the stairs, that we’d made a connection.

Anyway, confirmation—either Peggy’s grandmother bore an uncanny resemblance to her granddaughter, or Peggy had been around since 1941 feeding on jazz musicians. So far all my confirmed sightings of Peggy and all the recent deaths had taken place around Soho. So that seemed the place to start. It would also be useful to pin down some “known associates,” particularly Cherry or Cherie—Mickey the Bone’s girlfriend. This is the point when somebody working on a proper investigation asks his governor for some bodies to do a door-to-door canvass, but there was only me. So I started at one end of Old Compton Street and worked my way down.

They didn’t know her in the Spice of Life or Ed’s Diner, or the other food places at the east end of the street. One of the ticket staff at GAY said she looked familiar but that was it; a woman working in a corner newsagent/mini supermarket said that she thought she’d seen Peggy come in and buy cigarettes. I didn’t get anything at the Admiral Duncan except a couple of offers to take me out to dinner. They knew her in
Trashy Lingerie as “that posh bird who comes in every so often and turns her nose up at our stock.” I was thinking it might be worth heading up to A Glimpse of Stocking when a madwoman ran out of Patisserie Valerie calling my name.

It was Simone, high heels skidding on the pavement as she swerved to avoid a startled pedestrian. She was wearing a pair of faded stretch jeans and a burgundy cardigan that gaped open to reveal nothing but a crimson lace bra underneath—front catch, I noticed. She was waving and yelling and I saw there was a smear of cream on her cheek.