Moon Over Soho Read Online Free Page B

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 reorganizationonce 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.
    Unlike the Sweeney, the Folly is easy to overlook: partly because we do stuff nobody likes to talk about, but mostly because we have no discernible budget. No budget means no bureaucratic scrutiny and therefore no paper trail. It also helps that up until January this year it had a personnel complement of one: a certain Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Despite doubling the staffing levels when I joined and catching up on a good ten years of unprocessed paperwork, we maintain a stealthy presence within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police. Thus we pass among the other coppers in a mysterious way, our duties to perform.
    One of our duties is the investigation of unsanctioned wizards and other magical practitioners, but I didn’t think that Cyrus Wilkinson had been a practitioner of anything except a superior saxophone. I also doubted he’d killed himself with the traditional jazz cocktail of drugs and drink, but confirmation would have to wait for the tox screen. Why would someone use magic to kill a jazz musician in the middle of his set? I mean, I have my problems with the New Thing and the rest of the atonal modernists but I wouldn’t kill someone for playing it—at least not if I wasn’t trapped in the same room.
    Across the river a catamaran pulled away from the Millbank Pier in a roar of diesel. I bundled up the kebab paper and dumped it in a rubbish bin. I climbed back into the Jag, started her up, and pulled out into the twilight.
    At some point I was going to have to hit the library back at the Folly and look for historical cases. Polidori was usually good for lurid stuff involving drink and debauchery. Probably from all the time he spent off his head with Byron and the Shelleys by Lake Geneva. If anyone knew about untimely and unnatural deaths it was Polidori, who literally wrote the book on the subject just before drinking cyanide—it’scalled
An Investigation into Unnatural Deaths in London in the Years 1768–1810
and it weighs over two pounds—I just hoped that reading it didn’t drive me to suicide too.
    It was late evening by the time I reached the Folly and parked up the Jag in the coach house. Toby started barking as soon as I opened the back door and he came skittering across the marble floor of the atrium to hurl himself at my shins. Molly glided in from the direction of the kitchens like the winner of the world all-comers creepy gothic Lolita contest. I ignored Toby’s yapping and asked whether Nightingale was awake. Molly gave me the slight head tilt that meant “no” and then an inquiring look.
    Molly served as the Folly’s housekeeper, cook, and rodent exterminator. She never speaks, has too many teeth and a taste for raw meat, but I try never to hold that against her or let her get between me and the exit.
    “I’m knackered—I’m going straight to bed,” I said.
    Molly glanced at Toby and then at me.
    “I’ve been working all day,” I said.
    Molly gave me the head tilt that meant “I don’t care, if you don’t take the smelly little thing out for his walk you can be the one who cleans up after him.”
    Toby paused in his barking long enough to give me a hopeful look.
    “Where’s his lead?” I asked.

T HE GENERAL public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense