Moon Over Soho Read online

  The trouble was never inside the club, though, because the Management hired the roughest bouncers they could find, strapped them into sharp suits, and gave them carte blanche on the door entry policy. They were famously arbitrary in their exercise of power and even at eleven forty-five there was a queue of hopefuls down the street.

  There’s always been a tradition of po-faced seriousness about the British jazz scene and a kind of chin-stroking “yes I see” roll-necked sweaterness to the fans—my current company being a case in point. Judging from the punters in the queue, old tradition was not the Management’s target demographic. This was Armani-suit, dress-to-impress, bling-wearing, switchblade-carrying jazz and I didn’t think it likely that me and the band were going to make the cut.

  Well, definitely not the band anyway. And to be honest that suited me because whereas the band had grown on me, a night of semiprofessional jazz has never been my idea of a good time. If it had been, my dad would have been a happier man.

  Still James, in the grand tradition of belligerent Scotsmen down the ages, was not prepared to give up without a struggle, so ignoring the queue he went immediately on the offensive.

  “We’re jazzmen,” he said to the bouncer. “That’s got to count for something.”

  The bouncer, a side of meat that I knew for a fact had done time in Wandsworth for various crimes that started with the word aggravated, at least gave this some serious consideration. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said.

  “Maybe maybe,” said James. “But we are all part of the same community of spirit—yes? The same brotherhood of music.” Behind his back Daniel and Max exchanged looks and shuffled back a foot or two.

  I stepped forward to head off the inevitable violence and as I did I caught a flash of “Body and Soul.” The vestigium was subtle but against the Soho ambience it stood out like a cool breeze on a hot night. And it was definitely coming from the club.

  “Are you his friend?” asked the bouncer.

  I could have shown my warrant card but once that’s out in the open all the useful witnesses have a tendency to melt away into the darkness and develop impressively detailed alibis.

  “Go and tell Stan and Don that Lord Grant’s son is waiting outside,” I said.

  The bouncer scrutinized my face. “Do I know you?” he asked.

  No, I thought, but you might remember me from such Saturday-night hits as “Would you please put that punter down I’d like to arrest him,” “You can stop kicking him now, the ambulance has arrived,” and the classic “If you don’t back off right now I’m going to nick you as well.”

  “Lord Grant’s son,” I repeated.

  I heard James whisper behind me, “What the fuck did he say?”

  When my dad was twelve his music teacher gave him a secondhand trumpet and paid, out of his own pocket, for Dad to have lessons. By the time he was fifteen he’d left school, gotten himself a job as a delivery boy in Soho, and was spending his spare time hungrily looking for gigs. When he was eighteen Ray Charles heard him playing at the Flamingo and said—loud enough for anyone who was important enough to hear—“Lord but that boy can play.” Tubby Hayes called my dad Lord Grant as a joke and the nickname stuck from then on.

  The bouncer tapped his Bluetooth and asked to speak to Stan and told him what I said. When he got a reply I was impressed by the way his expression didn’t change as he stepped aside and ushered us in.

  “You never said your dad was Lord Grant,” said James.

  “It’s not the sort of thing you just drop into a conversation, is it?”

  “I don’t know,” said James. “If my dad was a jazz legend I think I’d at least bring it up just a wee bit.”

  “We’re not worthy,” said Max as we descended into the club.

  “You remember that,” I said.

  If the Spice of Life was old wood and polished brass, the Mysterioso was cement floors and the kind of flocked wallpaper that curry houses stripped off their walls in the late 1990s. As advertised, it was dark, crowded, and surprisingly smoky. The Management in its quest for authenticity was obviously turning a blind eye to the smoking of tobacco contrary to the provisions of the Health Act (2006). Not just tobacco either, judging by the fruity tang drifting over the bobbing heads of the punters—my dad would have loved this place even though the acoustics were rubbish. All it needed was an animatronic Charlie Parker shooting up in the corner and it would be a perfect theme-park re-creation.

  James and the boys, in the grand tradition of musicians everywhere, headed straight for the bar. I let them go and moved closer to the band who—according to the front of the bass drum—were called the Funk Mechanics. True to their name they were playing jazz funk on a stage that was barely raised above the floor. It was two white guys with a black guy on bass and a redheaded drummer with a pound of silver attached to various parts of her face. As I worked my way toward the stage I realized that they were doing a funked-up version of “Get Out of Town,” but they’d given it a completely spurious Latin rhythm that pissed me off. Which struck me as strange even then.

  There were booths, upholstered in tatty red velvet, lining the walls, and people staring out onto the dance floor. Bottles crowded the tables and faces, mostly pale, nodded in time to the Funk Mechanics’ butchering of a classic. There was a white couple snogging in a booth at the end. The man’s hand was shoved down the front of the woman’s dress, the outline of his fingers squeezing obscenely through the material. The sight made me feel sick and outraged and that’s when I realized that these emotions had nothing to do with me.

  I’ve seen much worse in my travels and I quite like jazz funk. I must have just walked through a lacuna, a hot spot of residual magic. I’d been right: Something was going down.

  Leslie always complained that I was too easily distracted to be a good copper, but then she would have walked right through the lacuna without giving it a second thought.

  James and the band pushed through the crowd to surprise me with a bottle of beer. I took a swig and it was good. I checked the label and saw it was an expensive bottle of Schneider Weisse. I looked over at the band, who held up their own bottles.

  “It was on the house,” shouted Max, a bit excitedly.

  I could feel James wanting to talk about my dad but fortunately it was too loud and crowded for him to start.

  “So this is the modern style,” shouted Daniel.

  “So I’ve heard,” shouted James.

  And then I had it, the vestigium, cool and distant among the heat of the dancing bodies. I realized that it was different from the residue of magic that had clung to Cyrus Wilkinson. This was fresher, crisper, and behind the solo there was a woman’s voice singing—My heart is sad and lonely. Again the smell of dust and burned and broken wood.

  And something else. The vestigia that clung to Cyrus had manifested itself like a saxophone, but what I was getting now was definitely a trombone. My dad was always sniffy about the ’bone. He said that it was all right in a brass section but you could count the number of decent trombone soloists on the fingers of one foot. It’s a difficult instrument to take seriously but even my dad admitted that a man who could solo on a slide trombone had to be something special. Then he’d talk about Kai Winding or J. J. Johnson. But the guys on stage were trumpet, electric bass, and drums—no trombone.

  I had a horrible feeling I’d turned up two coupons short of the pop-up toaster.

  I let the vestigium lead me through the crowd. There was a door to the left of the stage half hidden behind the speaker stacks with STAFF ONLY crookedly stenciled on it, yellow paint on black. It wasn’t until I reached the door that I realized that the band had followed me over like lost sheep. I told them to stay outside—so of course they followed me in.

  The door opened straight into the green room/changing room/storage area, a long narrow space that looked to me like a converted coal bunker. The walls were plastered with ancient yellowing posters for bands and gigs. An old-fashioned theatrical dress
ing table with a horseshoe of bare bulbs was sandwiched between an American-sized fridge and a trestle table covered by a disposable tablecloth in Christmas green and red. A forest of beer bottles covered a coffee table and a white woman in her early twenties was asleep on one of the two green leather sofas that filled the rest of the room.

  “So this is how the other half lives,” said Daniel.

  “Makes all those years of rehearsing seem almost worthwhile,” said Max.

  The woman on the sofa sat up and stared at us. She was wearing dungarees that were loose to the waist and a yellow T-shirt with I SAID NO SO FUCK OFF printed across the chest.

  “Can I help you?” she said. She was wearing dark purple lipstick that had gotten smeared across one cheek.

  “I’m looking for the band,” I said.

  “Aren’t we all,” she said and held out her hand. “My name’s Peggy.”

  “The band?” I asked, ignoring her hand.

  Peggy sighed and rolled the kinks out of her shoulders, which pushed out her chest and got everyone’s attention—except for Daniel’s of course. “Aren’t they onstage?” she asked.

  “The band before them,” I said.

  “They’ve gone?” said Peggy. “Oh that bitch, she said she’d wake me up after the set. This really is too much.”

  “What’s the name of the band?” I asked.

  Peggy rolled off the sofa and started looking for her shoes. “Honestly,” she said. “I don’t remember. They were Cherry’s band.”

  “Did they have a trombone player?” I asked. “A good one.”

  Max found her shoes behind the other sofa—four-inch stiletto open-toed strap sandals which I didn’t really think went with the dungarees. “I’ll say so,” she said. “That’ll be Mickey. He’s one in a million.”

  “Do you know where they were going after the gig?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just going with the groove.” In her heels she was almost as tall as I was. The dungarees gaped at the sides to reveal a strip of pale skin and a frilly line of scarlet silk knickers. I turned away—I’d lost the vestigium when I entered the room and Peggy wasn’t helping my concentration. I got flashes of other stuff: the smell of lavender, of a car bonnet left out in the sun, and a ringing sound like the silence that comes after a loud noise.

  “Who are you?” asked Peggy.

  “We’re the jazz police,” said James.

  “ ’He’s the jazz police,” said Max, meaning me I suppose. “We’re more like the Old Compton Street irregulars.”

  That made me laugh, which shows how drunk I still was.

  “Is Mickey in trouble?” asked Peggy.

  “Only if he’s been dripping his spit valve on someone’s shoulder,” said Max.

  I didn’t have any more time for banter. There was a second door in the room, marked as a fire exit, so I headed for that. On the other side there was another short, bare, gray brick corridor half blocked with stacked furniture, crates, and black plastic bags in spectacular contravention of Health and Safety Regulations. Another fire door, this one with push-bars, led to a staircase up to street level. The push-bars on the door at the top of the stairs were illegally fastened with a bicycle lock.

  Nightingale has this spell which can pop a lock right out of its socket but apparently I’m at least a year away from learning it—I had to improvise. I stopped a safe distance away and dropped one of my unsuccessful light bombs on the lock. What they lack in finesse they make up for in ferocity. I had to take a step back because of the heat and, squinting, I could see the lock sag within the little rippling globe. When I figured the lock was good and soft, I let go of the spell and the globe popped like a soap bubble. Then I made nice basic impello forma in my mind. It was the second forma I ever learned so it’s something I know I’m good at. Impello moves things about, in this case the center line of the double doors. It smacked the doors open, breaking the lock and slamming them hard enough to knock one off its hinges.

  It was impressive stuff, even if I say so myself. And certainly the irregulars, who’d come up the stairs behind me, thought so.

  “What the fuck was that?” asked James.

  “Thermite chewing gum,” I said hopefully.

  The fire alarm in the club went off—it was time to move on. Me and the irregulars did the fifty-yard nonchalant stroll around the corner onto Frith Street in Olympic-qualifying time. It was late enough by then for the tourists to have gone back to their hotels and the streets were noisy with lads and ladettes.

  James got in front of me and made me stop walking.

  “This has something to do with Cy’s death, doesn’t it?”

  I was too knackered to argue. “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “Did someone do something to Cyrus?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If you’d just finished a gig where would you go?”

  James looked confused. “What?”

  “Help me out, James. I’m trying to find this trombone player—where you would go?”

  “The Potemkin has a late license,” said Max.

  That made sense. You could get food there, and more important, alcohol, up until five o’clock in the morning. I headed down Frith Street with the irregulars in tow. They wanted to know what was going on—and so did I. James in particular was proving dangerously canny.

  “Are you worried the same thing is going to happen to this trombone player?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  We turned into Old Compton Street and as soon as I saw the flashing blue light on the ambulance I knew I was too late. It was parked outside a club, the back doors were open, and judging by the leisurely way the paramedics were moving about the victim was either unharmed or very dead. I wasn’t betting on unharmed. A desultory crowd of onlookers had gathered under the wary eye of a couple of PCSOs and a PC I recognized from my time at Charing Cross nick.

  “Purdy,” I shouted and he looked over. “What’s the griff?”

  Purdy lumbered over. When you’re wearing a stab vest, equipment belt, extendable baton, nipple-shaped helmet, shoulder harness, airwave radio, cuffs, pepper spray, notebook, and emergency Mars bar, lumbering is what you do. Phillip Purdy had a bit of a reputation as a “uniform carrier,” which is a copper who’s not good for anything but wearing the uniform. But that was all to the good—right now I didn’t want effective. Effective coppers ask too many questions.

  “Ambulance pickup,” said Purdy. “Guy just dropped dead in the middle of the street.”

  “Let’s have a look?” I made it a question. It pays to be polite.

  “Are you working?”

  “I don’t know until I have a look,” I said.

  Purdy grunted and let me past.

  The paramedics were just lifting the victim onto their gurney. He was younger than me, dark-skinned and African-featured—Nigerian or Ghanian if I had to guess, or more likely had a parent from one of those places. He was dressed smart, khaki chinos, custom suit jacket. The paramedics had ripped open an expensive-looking white cotton shirt in order to use the defibrillator. His eyes were open, dark brown, and empty. I didn’t need to get any closer. If he’d been playing “Body and Soul” any louder I could have roped off the street and sold tickets.

  I asked the paramedics for a cause of death, but they shrugged and said heart failure.

  “Is he dead?” I heard Max say behind me.

  “No, he’s just having a wee lie-down,” said James.

  I asked Purdy if he had any identification and he held up a ziplock bag with a wallet in it. “This your shout?” he asked.

  I nodded, took the bag, and signed the paperwork to carefully ensure the chain of custody against any future legal proceedings before stuffing the whole lot in my trouser pocket.

  “Was there anyone with him?”

  Purdy shook his head. “Nobody that I saw.”

  “Who made the 999 call?”

  “Dunno,” said Purdy
. “Mobile probably.”

  It’s officers like Purdy that give the Metropolitan Police the reputation for sterling customer service that makes us the envy of the civilized world.

  As they loaded the gurney into the ambulance I heard Max being noisily sick.

  Purdy eyed Max with the particular interest of a copper who’s facing a long Saturday-night shift and who could easily make dropping a drunk and disorderly off at the cells last at least a couple of hours. Paperwork to be done in the canteen with a cup of tea and a sandwich—curse this bureaucratic red tape that keeps good police officers away from the front lines where the action is. I disappointed Purdy by saying I’d take care of it.

  The paramedics said they wanted to be off, but I told them to wait. I didn’t want to risk the body going astray before Dr. Walid had a chance to look at it but I needed to know whether this guy had been playing at the Mysterioso. Of the irregulars, Daniel looked the most upright.

  “Daniel,” I said. “Are you sober?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And getting soberer with every passing second.”

  “I’ve got to go with the ambulance. Can you nip back to the club and get a copy of the playlist?” I gave him my card. “Call me on the mobile when you’ve got it.”

  “You think the same thing happened to him?” he said. “As Cyrus, I mean.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “As soon as I know something I’ll call you guys.”

  The paramedics called over, “You coming or what?”

  “You all right with this?”

  Daniel gave me a grin. “Jazzman, remember,” he said. I held up my fist and after a moment of incomprehension Daniel knocked knuckles with me.