Moon Over Soho (3 page)

“What was your relationship with Mr. Wilkinson?” I asked.

“He was my lover,” she said.

The stereo was a boring high-end Hitachi, strictly CD and solid state—no turntable at all. There were a couple of racks of CDs, Wes Montgomery, Dewey Redman, Stan Getz; the rest were a random selection of hits from the 1990s.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions if I can.”

“Is that entirely necessary, Constable?” she asked.

“We often investigate cases where the circumstances surrounding the death are unclear,” I said. Actually we, that is the police, don’t investigate unless foul play is bleeding obvious or if the Home Office has recently issued a directive insisting that we prioritize whatever the crime du jour was for the duration of the current news cycle.

“Are they unclear?” asked Simone. “I understood poor Cyrus had a heart attack.” She sat down on a pastel blue sofa and gestured for me to take my place on the matching armchair. “Isn’t that what they call natural causes?” Her eyes glistened and she rubbed at them with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, Constable,” she said.

I told her to call me Peter, which you are just not supposed to do at this stage of an inquiry—I could practically hear Leslie yelling at me all the way from the Essex coast. She still didn’t offer me a cup of tea, though—I guess it just wasn’t my day.

Simone smiled. “Thank you, Peter. You can ask your questions.”

“Cyrus was a musician?” I asked.

“He played the alto sax.”

“And he played jazz?”

Another brief smile. “Is there any other kind of music?”

“Modal, bebop, or mainstream?” I asked, showing off.

“West Coast cool,” she said. “Although he wasn’t averse to a bit of hard bop when the occasion called for it.”

“Do you play?”

“Lord no,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly inflict my ghastly lack of talent upon an audience. One needs to know one’s limitations. I am a keen listener, though—Cyrus appreciated that.”

“Were you listening that night?”

“Of course,” she said. “Front-row seat, although that isn’t hard in a tiny little place like the Spice of Life. They were playing ‘Midnight Sun,’ Cyrus finished his solo and just sat down on the monitor, I did think he was a bit flushed, and then he fell over on his side and that’s when we all realized that something was wrong.”

She stopped and looked away from me, her hands balling into fists. I waited a bit and asked some dull routine questions to center her again—did she know what time he’d collapsed, who’d called the ambulance, and did she stay with him the whole time? I jotted down the answers in my notebook.

“I wanted to go in the ambulance, I really did, but before I knew it they’d whisked him away. Jimmy gave me a lift to the hospital but by the time I got there it was too late.”

“Jimmy?” I asked.

“Jimmy’s the drummer, very nice man, Scottish I think.”

“Can you give me his full name?” I asked.

“I don’t think I can,” said Simone. “Isn’t that awful. I’ve just always thought of him as Jimmy the drummer.”

I asked who else was in the band but she could only remember them as Max the bass and Danny the piano.

“You must think I’m an awful person,” she said. “I’m certain I must know their names but I just can’t seem to recall them. Perhaps it’s Cyrus dying like that, perhaps it’s like shell shock.”

I asked whether Cyrus had suffered from any recent illnesses or health conditions. Simone said not. Nor did she know the name of his GP, although she assured me that she could dig it out of his papers if it was important. I made a note to ask Dr. Walid to track it down for me.

I felt I’d asked enough questions to cover the real reason for the visit and asked, as innocuously as I could, if I might have a quick look around the rest of the house. Normally the mere presence of a policeman is enough to make the most law-abiding citizen feel vaguely guilty and therefore reluctant to let you clomp your size elevens around their home, so
it was a bit of a surprise when Simone just waved at the hallway and told me to help myself.

Upstairs was pretty much what I’d expected, master bedroom at the front, second bedroom at the back that was being used, judging from the cleared floor and the music stands lined up against the wall, as a music room. They’d sacrificed the usual half bedroom to expand the bathroom to allow for a tub, shower, bidet and toilet combo, tiled with pale blue ceramics with an embossed fleur de lys pattern. The bathroom cupboard was the standard one-quarter male, three-quarters female ratio; he favored double-bladed disposables and aftershave gel, she did a lot of depilation and shopped at Superdrug. Nothing indicated that either of them were dabbling in the esoteric arts.

In the master bedroom both fitted wardrobes were wide open and a trail of half-folded clothes led from there to where two suitcases lay open on the bed. Grief, like cancer, hits people at different rates, but even so I thought it was a bit early for her to be packing up her beloved Cyrus’s things. Then I spotted a pair of hipsters that no self-respecting jazz man would wear and I realized that Simone was packing her own things, which I found equally suspicious. I listened to make sure she wasn’t coming up the stairs and had a poke through the underwear drawers but got nothing except a vague sense of being really unprofessional.

The music room at least had more character. There were framed posters of Miles Davis and Art Pepper on the walls and shelves stuffed with sheet music. I’d saved the music room for last because I wanted a sense of what Nightingale called the house’s
sensis illic
, and what I called background
vestigium
, before I entered what was clearly Cyrus Wilkinson’s inner sanctum. I did get a flash of “Body and Soul” and, mingled with Simone’s honeysuckle perfume, the smell of dust and cut wood again, but it was muted and elusive. Unlike the rest of the house, the music room had bookshelves holding more than photographs and amusingly expensive mementos of foreign holidays. I figured that anyone looking to become a practitioner outside official channels would have to work their way through a lot of occult rubbish before
they stumbled on proper magic—if such a thing was possible. At least some of those books should have been on the shelves but Cyrus had nothing like that on his, not even Aleister Crowley’s
Book of Lies
, which is always good for a laugh if nothing else. In fact they looked a lot like my dad’s bookshelves: mainly jazz biographies,
Straight Life, Bird Lives
, with a few early Dick Francis novels thrown in for variety.

“Have you found something?” Simone was in the doorway.

“Not yet,” I said. I’d been too intent on the room to hear her coming up the stairs. Leslie said that the capacity not to notice a traditional Dutch folk-dancing band walk up behind you was not a survival characteristic in the complex fast-paced world of the modern policing environment. I’d like to point out that I was trying to give directions to a slightly deaf tourist at the time and anyway it was a Swedish dance troupe.

“I don’t wish to hurry you,” said Simone. “Only I’d already ordered a taxi before you came and you know how these chaps hate to be kept waiting.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Just to stay with my sisters,” she said. “Until I find my feet.”

I asked for her address and wrote it down when she told me. Surprisingly it was in Soho, on Berwick Street. “I know,” she said when she saw my expression. “They’re rather bohemian.”

“Did Cyrus have any other properties, a lockup, a garden maybe?”

“Not that I know of,” she said and then she laughed. “Cyrus digging a garden—what an extraordinary notion.”

I thanked her for her time, and she saw me to the door.

“Thank you for everything, Peter,” she said. “You’ve been most kind.”

There was enough of a reflection in the side window for me to see that the Honda Civic was still parked opposite the house and the woman driver was staring right at us. When I turned away from the door, she jerked her face around and pretended to be reading the stickers on the back of the car in
front. She risked a glance back, only to find me bearing down on her from across the street. I saw her panic in her embarrassment and vacillate between starting the engine and getting out. When I knocked on the window she flinched. I showed her my warrant card, and she stared at it in confusion. You get that about half the time, mainly because most members of the public have never seen a warrant card close up and have no idea what the hell it is. Eventually she twigged and buzzed down her window.

“Could you step out of the car please, madam,” I asked.

She nodded and got out. She was short, slender, and well dressed in an off-the-rack but good-quality turquoise skirt suit. An estate agent, I thought, or something customer facing like PR or big-ticket retail. When dealing with the police most people lean against their cars for moral support, but she didn’t, although she did fiddle with the ring on her left hand and push her hair back behind her ears.

“I was just waiting in the car,” she said. “Is there a problem?”

I asked for her driver’s license and she surrendered it meekly. If you ask a random member of the public for their name and address, not only do they frequently lie to you, but they don’t even have to give it unless you report them for an offense
and
you have to fill in a receipt to prove that you’re not unfairly singling out blond estate agents. If, however, you make them think it’s a traffic stop, then they cheerfully hand over their driver’s license, which lists their name, including any embarrassing middle names, their address and their date of birth—all of which I noted down. Her name was Melinda Abbott, she was born in 1980, and her address was the one I’d just left.

“Is this your current address?” I asked as I handed her license back.

“Sort of,” she said. “It was and as it happens I’m just waiting to get it back now. Why do you want to know?”

“It’s part of an ongoing investigation,” I said. “Do you happen to know a man called Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“He’s my fiancé,” she said and gave me a hard look. “Has something happened to Cyrus?”

There are ACPo-approved guidelines for breaking the news to loved ones and they don’t include blurting it out in the middle of the street. I asked if she’d like to sit in the car with me, but she wasn’t having any of it.

“You’d better tell me now,” she said.

“I’m afraid I have some bad news,” I said.

Anybody who’s ever watched
The Bill
or
Casualty
knows what
that
means. Melinda started back then caught herself. She nearly lost it, but then I saw it all being sucked back behind the mask of her face.

“When?” she asked.

“Two nights ago,” I said. “It was a heart attack.”

She looked at me stupidly. “A heart attack?”

“I’m afraid so.”

She nodded. “Why are you here?” she asked.

I was saved from having to lie because a mini cab pulled up outside the house and honked its horn. Melinda turned, stared at the front door, and was rewarded when Simone emerged carrying her two suitcases. The driver, showing an uncharacteristic level of chivalry, rushed smartly over to take the cases from her and loaded them into the back of his cab while she locked the front door—both the Yale and the Chubb, I noticed.

“You bitch,” shouted Melinda.

Simone ignored her and headed for the cab, which had exactly the effect on Melinda that I expected it to have. “Yes you,” she shouted. “He’s dead, you bitch. And you couldn’t even be fucking bothered to tell me. That’s my house, you fat slag.”

Simone looked up at that, and at first I didn’t think she’d recognized who Melinda was, but then she nodded to herself and absently threw the house keys in our general direction. They landed at Melinda’s feet.

I know ballistic when I see it coming and so I already had my hand around her upper arm before she could rush across the street and try to kick the shit out of Simone. Maintaining the Queen’s Peace—that’s what it’s all about. For a skinny little thing Melinda wasn’t half strong and I ended up having to
use both hands as she screamed abuse over my shoulder, making my ears ring.

“Would you like me to arrest you?” I asked. That’s an old police trick: If you just warn people they often just ignore you, but if you ask them a question then they have to think about it. Once they start to think about the consequences they almost always calm down, unless they’re drunk of course, or stoned, or aged between fourteen and twenty-one, or Glaswegian.

Fortunately it had the desired effect on Melinda, who paused in her screaming long enough for the mini cab to drive away. Once I was sure she wasn’t going to attack me out of frustration, an occupational hazard if you’re the police, I bent down, retrieved the keys, and put them in her hands.

“Is there someone you can call?” I asked. “Someone who’ll come around and stay with you for a bit?”

She shook her head. “I’m just going to wait in my car,” she said. “Thank you.”

Don’t thank me, ma’am
, I didn’t say,
I’m just doing …
Who knew what I was doing? I doubted I could get anything useful from her that evening so I left well enough alone.

S
OMETIMES AFTER
a hard day’s work nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it—no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule. One side of the embankment had suffered from an outbreak of modernism in the 1960s but I kept my back to their dull concrete façades and instead watched the sun setting fire to the tops of Millbank Tower and the Palace of Westminster. The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a wannabe trophy wife to a promising center forward.

Officially I belong to ESC9, which stands for Economic and Specialist Crime Unit 9, otherwise known as the Folly, also known as the unit that nice well-brought-up coppers don’t talk about in polite company. There’s no point trying to remember
ESC9
because the Metropolitan Police has a reorganization
once every four years and all the names change. That’s why the Commercial Robberies Unit of the Serious and Organized Crime Group has been called the Flying Squad since its introduction in 1920 or the Sweeney if you want to establish your cockney geezer credentials. That’s Sweeney Todd = Flying Squad in case you were wondering.