Moon Over Soho (32 page)

On the other hand, I thought as Simone snuggled up against me, even in the worst-case scenario there’s at least another two months left to run. Then of course that corner of my brain that is forever a policeman wanted to know whether I was sure Simone wasn’t involved in the case of the dying jazzmen. After all, she’d been living with Cyrus Wilkinson. But then Henry Bellrush was still living with his wife when he died. More tellingly, if Simone was really a creature of the night who seduced and then sucked the life out of jazz musicians, why was she sleeping with me—who had utterly failed to inherit his father’s talent or even his taste for music? Nor had her face appeared in any of the pictures from 1941.

You actually get a lecture on this during training, which I admit most of us snoozed through because it wasn’t associated with any tests or essay writing. I did remember the lecturer warning that a copper’s natural instincts could quickly spill over into unwarranted paranoia. Life is unbelievably messy, the lecturer said, and coincidences happen all the time. If you’re still suspicious in the morning, I told myself, you can check her alibi against suspicious deaths last year,
because nothing builds a healthy relationship like the third degree over the breakfast table.

Having thought that just before I drifted off, I hoped it wasn’t a bad omen when I woke to find that Simone had slipped out at the crack of dawn and left me sleeping.

I was summoned that morning to the John Peel Center in Hendon, where I was “debriefed” by a couple of officers from the Directorate of Professional Standards. This took place in a conference room with tea, coffee, and Sainsbury’s value digestive biscuits, and it was all very civilized. After establishing that I had a legitimate reason to be on that floor of West End Central, they asked me about the chase to the Trocadero Centre and the consequent death of the suspect in a fall from the top balcony. Apparently the CCTV footage was very clear—I was nowhere near the suspect when she went over the railing, therefore I could not have pushed her over nor could I reasonably have been expected to reach her in time to stop the fall. They seemed satisfied that I should return to duty, although they warned me that this was just the start of their investigation.

“We may have more questions for you later,” they said.

I’m fairly certain they were supposed to offer me psychological counseling at that point, but they didn’t. Which was a pity, because I would have rather liked it. Sadly the rules are very clear. As a red-blooded police officer you can only accept counseling when it is foisted on you by
Guardian
-reading social-worker types. I don’t need it, you protest to your mates, but you know these touchy-feely jobsworth types. Then you down your pint and soldier on—dignity intact.

As well as the statement to the DPS, I had to generate my own reports for the files, which I did from the safety of the coach house, sending them off to be vetted by Leslie before I submitted them. She suggested I make a couple of deliberate mistakes because nothing says
cover-up
like perfectly consistent statements, so I pretended that I was a member of the public and misremembered some stuff. She also made it clear that rushing into the Trocadero Centre without backup had been foolish and, worse, unprofessional. She was sorry
to say that I was clearly deteriorating badly without her there to curb my bad habits. I let her go on at me for some time, not least because she seemed to enjoy it so.

I promised to be more careful in the future.

Dr. Walid released Nightingale from the hospital that afternoon and he returned to the Folly long enough to change his clothes before heading back to supervise the forensic work at the club. I asked if he needed me but he said no and gave me a reading list, one of which was a gloss by Bartholomew that was in Latin. I think he was hoping I’d spend all day with the text in one hand and a dictionary in the other, but I just typed the relevant sections into an online Latin translator and then tried to interpret the gibberish that came out the other end.

I think Bartholomew was conjecturing that it might be possible to use magic to combine the characteristics of two creatures in violation of
the great chain of being
—that great hierarchy of creatures, slime at the bottom and angels at the top, ordained by God. Somebody had annotated my copy by writing in the margin in very small capitals something in Latin that my Web translator rendered as, “People are made nature and vice versa.”

Real cat-girls, I thought. The Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with something as sleek and furry as a tiger. Whoever was running the club would have a made a fortune. The old ethically challenged magic practitioner had Chief Inspector Johnson to help keep it quiet but the new guy, his possible apprentice, the Faceless One, how had he planned to keep it secret?

The next morning Nightingale took me for a tour of the Strip Club of Dr. Moreau. The landing and cloakroom area had been turned, appropriately enough, into a changing room for personnel to get in and out of their noddy suits. Dr. Walid was waiting for us and warned us to watch our feet. Lengths of cable had been run down the stairs and neatly secured against the walls with gaffer tape.

“We wanted to avoid activating any electrical circuits in the club itself,” said Dr. Walid. “Just in case.”

He led me down to the foyer, where I noticed that the Cabinet
of Larry had been removed completely, as had the kicking legs. “I’ve had to lease extra space at the UCH,” said Dr. Walid. “I’ve never had this much material before.”

The curtains in the foyer had been taken down and we stepped through into the next room, which proved to be the club proper, where the dance floor and stage would have been if cages hadn’t been bolted into the floor. They looked brand-new and similar to the cages that labs keep their animals in.

“Exactly the same,” said Dr. Walid when I pointed this out. “Bollingtek Animal Containment Systems—we use them at the hospital. They were installed sometime this year.”

“Stephanopoulis has her people tracing the serial numbers,” said Nightingale.

The cages were empty, but I could smell the bitter tang of animal shit. I saw fingerprint powder dusted around the locks and any other surface that a keeper might have put a hand on while looking after the inmates.

“How many were there?” I asked.

“Five in cages,” said Dr. Walid. “I’m still doing tests but they all seem to be chimeras.”

That was a term I’d had to look up the night before when translating Bartholomew. A creature that has some cells with one set of DNA and other cells with another set of DNA. It’s vanishingly rare in mammals and usually happens when two eggs are fertilized by different sperm and then merge before going on to grow into a fetus. Not that Bartholomew knew what tetragametic chimerism was—the fathers of genetics, Crick and Watson, weren’t even a gleam in their grandfathers’ eyes when he’d been writing. Bartholomew had described chimeras as the degenerate product of unnatural unions created through the foulest and blackest magic. But I had a horrible feeling that both definitions might fit.

“Were any of them alive?” I asked.

Dr. Walid looked uncomfortably at Nightingale, who shook his head.

“One of them was still alive,” said Nightingale. “But it died after we moved it.”

“Did it say anything?” I asked.

“It never regained consciousness,” said Dr. Walid.

We agreed that, given the newness of the cages, they must have been the work of the New Magician rather than the Old. “Do we think the Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the Old Magician?” I asked.

“We don’t have any link between him and this place,” said Nightingale. “In addition, I find it somewhat unlikely that he could pursue an academic career and maintain a double life as a nightclub impresario.”

“But he definitely trained the New Magician?” I asked. “The Faceless One.”

“Oh, without doubt,” said Nightingale. “I’m quite certain of that.”

“I like ‘Faceless One,’ ” said Dr. Walid. “Did you come up with that?”

“He could have had accomplices,” I said. “Another practitioner who handled the London end. That’s possible, isn’t it?”

“Quite possible,” said Nightingale. “Good thinking.”

“Or more than one partner. There could be—what do you call a group of magicians?” I asked. “A gang, a coven?”

“An argument,” said Dr. Walid. “It’s an argument of wizards.”

We both looked at Dr. Walid, who shrugged.

“You both need to read more widely,” he said. This from a man who did peer review for the
European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology
.

“A cabal,” said Nightingale. “It’s called a cabal of magicians.”

“Operating under our noses since the 1960s,” said Dr. Walid.

“Just to add salt to the wound,” said Nightingale.

“I should start running down the names that we got from Oxford and cross-referencing them with known associates of the Soho gangs,” I said.

“Not before I show you something else,” he said.

I actually went cold when he said that. I’d been very happy to find that everything had been cleaned out and I really wasn’t that keen to see anything else. Nightingale led me farther
into the club. Beyond the cages there was another
STAFF ONLY
door that took us to a short corridor and a suite of rooms that might have once been offices or storage. They were all largely the same: grubby mattresses on the floor, a loose collection of clothes and shoes stuffed into cardboard boxes, a DVD player and an old-fashioned electron-gun TV, a few pathetic attempts to brighten up the walls, a picture of kittens and a Justin Timberlake poster. It was depressingly familiar to anyone who has ever helped raid a safe house used by human traffickers.

“How many?” I asked.

“We found plenty of DNA evidence,” said Dr. Walid. “Blood, semen, hair follicles. So far we’ve identified eight individuals—all chimeras.”

“Oh God,” I said.

“He must have another safe house,” said Nightingale. “But it could be anywhere.”

I
T WASN’T
all bad news. Leslie called later with a whole new way for me to dig myself into a hole. She’d discovered it while trawling through the records from Oxford University. She hadn’t found any obvious connections between Wheatcroft and Alexander Smith, but …

“Guess whose name I did come across?” she asked.

“Prince Harry?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Leslie. “Harry went to Sandhurst. No, a certain other undergraduate going by the name of Cecelia Tyburn Thames.”

“Lady Ty knew Wheatcroft?” I asked.

“No, you idiot,” said Leslie. “But—” She broke off to cough some more. She moved the phone away from her mouth but I could hear her coughing and swearing. Then a pause as she drank some water.

I asked if she was okay and she said she was. There was going to be a second operation sometime toward the end of the year to see if they could restore greater functionality to her voice box.

“But,” she said, “the point is that Tyburn was at Oxford at
roughly the same time as Jason Dunlop and you once told me that one of her sisters could smell the magic on you.”

“That was Brent,” I said. “She’s four years old.”

“That just means it’s a natural ability,” said Leslie.

I said it was unlikely that Tyburn, even if she had spotted any magic at Oxford, was going to tell me.

“You just don’t want to see Tyburn again,” said Leslie.

Damn right I didn’t want to go see Tyburn again. I’d humiliated her in front of her mother, which meant I could have whipped her naked down Kensington High Street and she would have been less pissed off with me. But I only ever argue with Leslie about two things and neither of those has anything to do with police work. It had to be worth a try.

I knew Tyburn had a house in Hampstead; I’d blown up a particularly rare fountain the last time I’d visited—although in my defense she had been trying to mind-control me at the time. But that was just the source of her river. I’d heard that she actually lived somewhere in Mayfair. The very rich and the very poor have one thing in common. They both generate a great deal of information—the rich in the media and the poor on the vast and unwieldy databases of the state. The rich, providing they avoid celebrity, can take steps to preserve their anonymity—Lady Ty’s Wikipedia page read like it was produced by a PR flack because no doubt Lady Ty had hired a PR flack to ensure it stayed the way she wanted it. Or more likely one of Lady Ty’s “people” had hired a PR company, which hired a freelancer, who’d knocked it out in half an hour the better to focus on the novel he was writing. It did reveal that Lady Ty was married, to a civil engineer no less, and they had two beautiful children one of whom, the boy, was eighteen years old. Old enough to drive but young enough to still be living at home.

The thing about being a policeman is you get to cheat. You get to look things up on the PNC, things that even the richest and most influential person has to provide accurate information about—in this case, driving tests. Stephen George McAllister-Thames passed his in January, and the address of record was Chesterfield Hill, Mayfair.

It was the kind of perfect Regency terrace with a rusticated
façade and decorative ironwork that causes grown estate agents to break down and weep with joy. It was located less than a third of a mile to the west of the Trocadero Centre, on streets that would have been much nicer if all the character hadn’t been stripped off them by decades of money.

The door was opened by a tall mixed-race young man whom I recognized off the picture on his driver’s license. He’d inherited an unfortunate pair of ears and what my mum would have described as “better” hair from his dad but he had his grandmother’s cat-shaped eyes—and that wasn’t all he’d inherited.

“Mum,” he called back into the depths of the house. “There’s a wizard here to see you.” And then, just in case I hadn’t realized he was a teenager, he slouched off back to whatever it was he was doing before I so rudely interrupted him. His mother passed him in the hallway and came and stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. She let me stew for a good ten seconds before asking what I wanted.