Moon Over Soho rol-2 Page 11

  Nightingale grinned. “This is where you watch and learn.”

  We walked to a spot on the left of the stairs up to the main doors where, hidden by the long grass, a narrow flight of steps led down to a thick oak door that was, I noticed, free of any boarding or chains. It also lacked any visible door handles.

  “Behold,” said Nightingale. “The night gate. This was originally built so that the footmen could go straight from their quarters and hop onto the back of their master’s carriage before he could get down the stairs.”

  “How very eighteenth-century,” I said.

  “Quite,” said Nightingale. “But in my school days we used it for something else.” He placed his palm on the door about where you’d expect the lock to be and muttered something Latin under his breath. There was a click, followed by a scraping sound. Nightingale pushed and the door swung inward.

  “There used to be a curfew and we, being the dreadful young men that we were, wanted to go out drinking,” he said. “It’s not easy to beat a curfew when the masters can command the very spirits of the earth and air against you.”

  “Really?” I asked. “The spirits of the earth and air?”

  “So they said,” said Nightingale. “And I for one believed them.”

  “So no drinking,” I said.

  Nightingale made a werelight and stepped through the door. Not to be outdone I made my own light and followed him inside. I heard Toby barking from outside but he seemed reluctant to follow us in. Our werelights illuminated a short corridor of undressed brick that reminded me of the service corridors under the Folly.

  “Not until you were in the sixth form,” he said. “Once you were inducted into the common room, the upper six would teach you the spell for the night gate and then you could go drinking. Unless you were Horace Greenway, who was unpopular with the prefects.”

  We reached a T-junction and went right.

  “What happened to him?”

  “Died during the battle of Crete,” said Nightingale.

  “I meant how did he get to the pub?”

  “One of us would open the door for him,” said Nightingale.

  “And the teachers never twigged you were sneaking out?” I asked.

  We reached a flight of wooden stairs leading up. They creaked alarmingly under our weight.

  “The masters knew all about it,” said Nightingale. “After all, they’d once been sixth formers themselves.”

  As we reached a short, wood-paneled landing I caught a flash of vestigia, lemon drops and sherbet, wet wool and the sound of running feet. I saw there were brass coat hangers lining both walls and benches sized for adolescent boys to sit and change their shoes. I brushed my fingertips on the wood and felt instead the rough paper of old comic books.

  “Plenty of memories,” said Nightingale when he saw me pause.

  Ghosts, I was thinking, memories — I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

  Nightingale opened a battered wooden door and we stepped out into a huge hall, the suddenly inadequate werelights revealing two massive staircases and bare stone walls that still showed faded rectangles where framed paintings had once hung. With all the windows covered, we’d have been in pitch darkness if we weren’t making our own lights.

  “The great hall,” said Nightingale. “The library’s up the sinister staircase.”

  I caught myself before I asked him why it was sinister when I realized that we were walking up the left-hand staircase. Sinister is Latin for “left,” making it the sort of enjoyable schoolboy pun that is such an advert for mixed-gender education. Just imagine if one of their school friends had had the misfortune to be called Dexter, I thought. How they must have laughed. As we ascended I caught a glimpse of rows of names carved into the far wall but, before I could ask what they were about, Nightingale was on the landing and heading into the cool depths of the school.

  The walls were mostly painted brick with more pale rectangular patches to show where paintings had hung. I’d helped my mum to clean enough offices to know that whoever Nightingale was contracting to maintain the house was using a big industrial Hoover to do the carpets — you could see the stripes and judging from the dust it was at least two weeks since they’d come around.

  Without books, stacks, or furniture, the library looked like just another large room, made cavernous by the shifting illumination of our werelights. I recognized the card file cabinets by their outline under the dust sheets. The mundane library at the Folly had two just like them. The school library had eight. Fortunately Nightingale said only one of them had the cards for magical books. Nightingale provided the light while I pulled off the sheet and opened up the drawers. There was no dust and surprisingly little vestigia.

  “They were books about magic,” said Nightingale when I mentioned this. “Not magical books.”

  They were standard index cards with the name of the book and library number manually typed on at the top and a handwritten list of names and showing who had borrowed the book and when. We’d popped into Ryman before leaving Oxford and picked up a jumbo-sized pack of rubber bands so I could preserve the order the cards were in. It took me ages to process all the drawers and I ended up with a black garbage bag that wasn’t really that much lighter to carry than the cabinet.

  “We should have just taken the whole thing with us,” I said, but Nightingale pointed out that it had been screwed into the floorboards.

  I slung the bag over my shoulder and, staggering a little, followed Nightingale back to the main hall. I took the opportunity to ask who the names on the wall were.

  “Those,” said Nightingale, “are the honored dead.” He led me to the dexter staircase and floated his werelight up to show the first names. “Peninsula Campaign,” he said. There were a handful of names. “Waterloo Campaign” — just one name. Half a dozen for the Crimea, two for the Indian mutiny, maybe twenty more names scattered through a list of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, more in total than the less than twenty dead in World War I.

  “There was an agreement between the Germans and us not to involve magic,” said Nightingale. “We sat that one out.”

  “I bet that made you popular,” I said.

  Nightingale floated his werelight along to reveal the honored dead of World War II.

  “You see, there’s Horace,” said Nightingale, illuminating the inscription: HORACE GREENWAY, KASTELLI, MAY 21, 1941. “And there’s Sandy and Champers and Pascal.” The werelight darted across the serried ranks of names, listed as fallen at Tobruk and Arnhem and other places that I dimly remembered from history. But most of them were listed as having died at a place called Ettersberg on January 19, 1945.

  I put the garbage bag down and made a werelight bright enough to see the whole of the room — the memorial covered two whole walls from top to bottom. There must have been thousands of names.

  “There’s Donny Shanks who made it through the siege of Leningrad without a scratch and then got himself torpedoed, and Smithy at Dieppe and Rupert Dance, Lazy Arse Dance we used to call him …” Nightingale trailed off. I turned to see tears glinting on his cheeks, so I looked away.

  “Some days it seems so long ago and some days …”

  “How many?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Two thousand three hundred and ninety-six,” said Nightingale. “Three out of five of every British wizard of military age. Many of those who survived were wounded or in such bad shape mentally that they never practiced again.” He gestured and his werelight snapped back to hover over his hand. “I think we’ve spent enough time in the past.”

  I let my light die away and hefted the garbage bag over my shoulder and followed. As we were leaving I asked him who’d carved the names.

  “I did it myself,” said Nightingale. “The hospital encouraged us to take up a hobby; I chose woodcarving. I didn’t tell them why.”

  “Why not?”

  We ducked back into the service corridors. “The doctors were already worried that I wa
s too morbid.”

  “Why did you carve the names?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Somebody had to do it and as far as I could tell I was the only one still active. I also had this ridiculous notion that it might help.”

  “Did it?”

  “No,” he said. “Not really.”

  We stepped out through the night gate and blinked in the evening light. I’d forgotten that it was still daytime outside the school. Nightingale pulled the gate closed behind us and followed me up the steps. Toby had gone to sleep on the sun-warmed hood of the Jag. You could see where he’d tracked mud across the bonnet. Nightingale frowned.

  “Why do we have this dog?” he asked.

  “He keeps Molly amused,” I said and threw the card files into the back. Toby woke up at the sound of the door and dutifully made his own way to the backseat where he promptly fell asleep. Me and Nightingale put our seat belts on and I started the car. I had a last look at the blind windows of the old school as I turned the Jag around before I put it behind me and we headed for London.

  It was dark by the time we merged with the rush-hour traffic on the M25. Big gray rain clouds were sweeping in from the east, and soon raindrops were splattering on the windshield. The Jag’s old-fashioned handling stayed rock-solid but the wipers were a disgrace.

  Nightingale spent the trip back with his face turned away — staring out the window. I didn’t try to make conversation.

  We were just hopping back onto the Westway when my phone rang, I put it on speaker — it was Ash.

  “I can see her,” he shouted. Behind him I could hear crowd noises and a thumping beat. I put him on the car speakers.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Pulsar Club.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” I asked.

  “Tall, skinny, pale, long black hair. Smells like death,” said Ash. “Who else could it be?”

  I told him not to get any closer and that I was on my way. Nightingale reached out in the rain and put the spinner on the roof and I started picking up speed.

  Every male in the world thinks he’s an excellent driver. Every copper who’s ever had to pick an eyeball out of a puddle knows that most of them are kidding themselves. Driving in traffic is difficult and stressful and really sodding dangerous. Because of this the Met has a world-famous driving school at Hendon where an integrated series of advanced driving courses is designed to train officers to the point where they can do a ton down a city street and keep the body count in single figures.

  As I came off the Westway and into the heavy traffic on the Harrow Road I really wished I’d taken one of them. Nightingale, as my senior officer, shouldn’t have been letting me drive. But then he probably didn’t even know there was such a thing as an advanced driving course. Or even, given that they only became compulsory in 1934, a driving test of any kind.

  I turned into Edgware Road and found myself doing less then twenty even with every driver with a guilty conscience scrambling to get out of my way. I took the opportunity to call Ash again. I told him we were less than ten minutes away.

  “She’s heading for the door,” said Ash.

  “Is she with anyone?”

  “She’s taking some feller out with her,” said Ash.

  Shit, shit, shit — so much for keeping it in the family. Nightingale was way ahead of me. He pulled an airwave set out of the glove box and punched in a number — impressive, given that I’d taught him how to do that only a week ago.

  “Follow her,” I said. “But stay on the phone and don’t take any risks.”

  I risked waiting until Marble Arch to turn east — Oxford Street is restricted to buses and taxis only and I was counting on it being quicker to go straight down it than to plow through the weird one-way systems around Bond Street.

  “Stephanopoulis is on her way,” said Nightingale.

  I asked Ash where he was.

  “I’m just coming out of the club,” he said. “She’s fifteen feet in front of me.”

  “Heading which way?”

  “Toward Piccadilly,” he said.

  I worked out the location in my head. “Sherwood Street,” I told Nightingale, who relayed it to Stephanopoulis. “Going south.”

  “What do I do if she starts in on her boyfriend?” asked Ash.

  I swerved around a bus stalled in the road with its emergency lights flashing. My spinner blued the faces of the downstairs passengers as they watched me slide past.

  “Stay away from her,” I said. “Wait for us.”

  “Too late,” said Ash. “I think she saw me.”

  The instructors at the advanced driving school would not have been happy with the way I put the Jag through the lights at Oxford Circus and skidded into a right turn that had me going down Regent Street with blue smoke coming from my wheels.

  “Steady on,” said Nightingale.

  “The good news,” said Ash, “is that she’s let the poor guy go.”

  “They’re almost on Denham Street,” said Nightingale, meaning local plod. “Stephanopoulis is telling them to secure a perimeter.”

  I almost screamed when an obviously deaf and blind driver in a Ford Mondeo decided to pull out in front of me. What I shouted at him was fortunately lost in the sound of my siren.

  “The bad news,” said Ash, “is she’s coming toward me.”

  I told him to run.

  “Too late,” he said.

  I heard a hiss, a yell, and the distinctive noise a mobile phone makes when it’s hurled against a hard surface and breaks.

  I did half a bootleg turn into Glasshouse Street, which I swear got me applause from the pedestrians and a startled yelp from Toby as he slammed into the passenger door. There was a reason the Jaguar Mk II was the favored getaway car for blaggers and the Flying Squad, and Nightingale’s Jag had definitely been modified for pursuit. Which is why once her backside had stopped swinging I could put my foot down and be doing sixty before I was level with the Leicester Arms on the corner.

  Then what I thought was the reflection of our spinner turned out to be the emergency lights on an ambulance and we all learned just how good the upgraded four-wheel disk brakes really were — the answer being good enough. If there’d been one installed I’d have been eating the air bag. Instead I had a savage bruise across my chest from the seat belt, but I didn’t even notice that until later because I was out the door and running across the junction and up Sherwood Street fast enough to keep pace with the ambulance. It stopped, I didn’t.

  One side of Sherwood Street has an arcade in the rather sad 1950s ceramic-tiled fashion that, having been designed to resemble a public convenience, was perhaps justifiably used by half-cut members of the public who got caught short late at night. As far as the Murder Team could reconstruct it later, it looked like the penis eater had been planning to take her latest victim into the shadows for an impromptu snog and vasectomy.

  I found Ash prostrate in the center of a circle of concerned citizens, two of whom were trying to comfort him while he writhed around on the pavement. There was blood on him, on the concerned citizens, and on half a yard of iron spike that was stuck through his shoulder.

  I got myself some room by shouting “Police!” at people and tried to get him into recovery position.

  “Ash,” I said. “I told you to stay away from her.”

  Ash stopped thrashing long enough to get a good look at me.

  “Peter,” he said. “The bitch stuck me with a railing.”

  Chapter 6

  The Empress of Pleasure

  THE MEN and women of the London Ambulance Service are not prone to hysterics, given that they spend their days scraping up the victims of fatal car accidents, suicide attempts both successful and botched, and members of the public who’ve “fallen” in front of a train. Those are called “one-unders,” incidentally. I once asked whether a couple under a train would be a “two-under” but apparently that’s a “two one-under.” Anyway, a daily routine consisting of pain and misfor
tune tends to breed steady and pragmatic personalities. In short, just the kind of person you want staffing your ambulance in the middle of the night. The paramedic in the ambulance who picked up Ash was a middle-aged woman with short practical hair and a New Zealand accent. But a couple of minutes into the ride I could see that her composure was beginning to slip.

  “The bitch,” yelled Ash. “The bitch stabbed me with a railing.”

  About two feet torn from a rather nice bit of Victorian wrought-ironwork, judging by the precisely milled orthogonal cross section. To my untrained eye it looked as if it had gone right through his heart. That hadn’t stopped Ash from thrashing around and yelling.

  “Hold him down,” shouted the paramedic.

  I grabbed Ash’s arm and tried to pin it to the gurney. “Can’t you give him something?” I asked.

  The paramedic gave me a wild look. “Give him something?” she said. “He should be dead.”

  Ash tore his arm from my grip and grabbed at the railing.

  “Get it out!” screamed Ash. “It’s cold iron, get it out!”

  “Can we pull it out?” I asked.

  That was the last straw for the paramedic. “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “Cold iron,” he said. “Killing me.”

  “We’ll take it out at the hospital,” I said.

  “No hospital,” said Ash. “I need the River.”

  “Dr. Walid will be there,” I said.

  Ash stopped thrashing and grabbed my hand, pulled me closer.

  “Please, Peter,” he said. “The River.”

  Polidori talks about cold iron having a deleterious effect upon the fae and their many cousins but I assumed he was making it up or stating the bleeding obvious. Cold iron has a deleterious effect on anyone if you shove it right through their body.

  “Please,” said Ash.

  “I’m going to pull this out of him,” I said.

  The paramedic expressed her opinion that she felt this would be a poor course of action and that, for even contemplating it, I was an anatomically incomplete person of low intelligence and with a penchant for self-abuse.