Moon Over Soho Read Online Free

a practitioner outside official channels would have to work their way through a lot of occult rubbish beforethey 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 infront. 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