Moon Over Soho (19 page)

“You were left in a supervisory position despite your medical condition because I was assured that you remain the only officer qualified to handle ‘special’ cases,” he said. “Was this a mistake on my part?”

“No sir,” said Nightingale. “Until such time as Constable Grant is fully trained I remain the only suitably qualified officer currently serving in the Metropolitan Police. Believe me, sir, I am as alarmed at this prospect as you are.”

The commissioner nodded. “Since it appears that Grant had no choice but to act as he did, I am willing to chalk this up to a failure of supervision on your part. This will be considered a verbal reprimand and a note will be entered into your record.” He turned to me, and I kept my eye on a nice safe patch of the wall an inch to the left of his head.

“While I accept that you are inexperienced and being forced to use your own judgment in circumstances that lie—” The commissioner paused to choose his words. “—outside of conventional police work, I would like to remind
you that you swore an oath both as a constable and as an apprentice. And you were warned when you did so that extraordinary things were expected of you. At this point no disciplinary action will be taken and no note will be appended to your record. However, in the future I wish to see you exercise more tact, more discretion, and to try to keep the property damage to a bare minimum. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“The property damage,” said the commissioner, turning back to Nightingale, “including that to the ambulance, will be paid for out of the Folly’s budget, not the Met’s general contingency fund. As will any legal costs and damages that arise out of civil litigation taken against the Metropolitan Police. Is that understood?”

We both said yes sir.

I was sweating with relief. The only reason that I wasn’t facing a serious disciplinary hearing was because the commissioner probably didn’t want to explain to the Metropolitan Police Authority why a lowly constable was currently de facto head of an Operational Command Unit. Any advocate I called in from the Police Federation would have had a field day with my lack of effective supervision by a senior officer—Nightingale being on sick leave, remember. Not to mention the health and safety implications of being forced to jump into the Thames in the middle of the night.

I thought it was all over but it wasn’t. The commissioner touched his intercom. “You can send them in now, please.”

I recognized the guests. The first was a short, rangy middle-aged white man looking surprisingly dapper in an M&S ready-to-wear blue pin-striped suit. No tie, I noticed, and his hair was as resolutely comb-resistant as a hedgerow. Oxley Thames, wisest of the sons of Father Thames, his chief counselor, media guru, and hatchet man. He gave me a wry look as he took the seat offered by the commissioner to the right of his desk. The second was a handsome fair-skinned woman with a sharp nose and slanted eyes. She wore a black Chanel skirt suit that, had it been a car, would have done zero to sixty in less than 3.8 seconds. Lady Ty, Mama Thames’s
favorite daughter, Oxford graduate and ambitious fixer, she seemed pleased to see me—which didn’t bode well. As she joined Oxley I realized that the bollocking wasn’t over, and this was to be The Bollocking 2: This Time It’s Personal.

“I believe you know Oxley and Lady Tyburn,” said the commissioner. “They’ve been asked by their ‘principals’ to clarify their position with regard to Ash Thames.” He turned to Oxley and Ty and asked who wanted to go first.

Ty turned to the commissioner. “I have a question for Constable Grant. If I may?” she asked.

The commissioner made a gesture that suggested that I was all hers.

“At any point,” she said, “did it cross your mind what would have happened to my sister had Ash been killed?”

“No ma’am,” I said.

“Which is an interesting admission given that you helped negotiate that agreement,” she said. “Were you unaware of the exact nature of an exchange of hostages perhaps? Or did you just forget that should death befall Ash while he was in our care, my sister’s life would have been forfeit? You do know what the word
forfeit
means?”

I went cold, because I hadn’t given it a thought, not when recruiting Ash for the surveillance job or even when I was sailing down the Thames with him. If he’d been killed then, Beverley Brook, Lady Ty’s sister, would have faced the ultimate forfeit. Which meant I’d nearly killed two people that night.

I glanced at Nightingale, who frowned and nodded for me to reply.

“I do know what the word
forfeit
means,” I said. “And in my defense, I’d like to say that I never expected Ash to put himself in harm’s way. I considered him a sober reliable figure, like all his brothers.”

Oxley snorted, which earned him a glare from Lady Ty.

“I hadn’t counted on him being quite so brave or quick-witted,” I said and got a look from Oxley that conveyed the notion that there’s such a thing as laying the blarney on too thick. It didn’t matter, because the reason you don’t fight
with Lady Ty is she just waits for you to finish dancing about and then gives you a smack.

“While I’m of course aware of the role played by Inspector Nightingale and Constable Grant in facilitating a conciliation framework,” said Lady Ty, “I think it would be better, in light of recent events, if they took a less proactive stance with regard to matters relating to riverine diplomacy.”

I was moved almost to applause. The commissioner nodded, which just proved that the fix was in—probably with the Greater London Police Authority and the Mayor’s Office. He probably felt he had enough on his plate without us dishing out any more. He turned to Oxley and asked whether he had anything to add.

“Ash is a young man,” said Oxley. “And it’s well known that boys will be boys. Still, I don’t think it would hurt if Constable Grant were to exercise a hair more responsibility when dealing with him.”

We waited a moment for more but Oxley just looked bland. Lady Ty didn’t look happy so maybe the fix wasn’t as firmly in place as she would like. I gave her my secretive little boy smirk, the one that I’ve been using to drive my mum berserk since I was eight. Her lips thinned, but she was obviously made of sterner stuff than my mum.

“That seems reasonable,” said Nightingale. “As long as all parties stay within the agreement and the law, I’m sure we can agree to a hands-off approach.”

“Good,” said the commissioner. “And while I’m always glad to have these little chats, let’s try to keep them out of my office in the future.”

And with that we were dismissed.

“That could have been worse,” I said as we walked past the eternal flame of remembrance that burns in the New Scotland Yard foyer. It’s there to remember those brave men and women who have fallen while doing their duty and to remind us, the living, to be bloody careful.

“Tyburn’s dangerous,” said Nightingale as we headed for the underground car park. “She thinks she can define her role in the city through bureaucratic maneuvering and office politics.
Sooner or later she’ll come into conflict with her own mother.”

“And if that happens?”

“The consequences could well be mythic,” said Nightingale. “I think it would be in your interests not to be standing between them when that happens.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Or anywhere within the Thames Valley for that matter.”

Nightingale was due for a checkup at the UCH so he dropped me off in Leicester Square and I called Simone.

“Give me an hour to clean up,” she said. “And then come over.”

I was still in my uniform, which would have made drinking in a pub a bit of a problem, so I grabbed a coffee in the Italian place on Frith Street before proceeding at a leisurely place up Old Compton Street. I was just thinking of picking up some cakes from the Patisserie Valerie when my highly tuned copper’s senses were irresistibly drawn, like those of a big-game hunter, by the subtle clues that something was amiss in Dean Street.

And also the police tape, the forensics tent, and the uniformed bodies who’d been given the exciting task of guarding the crime scene. My professional curiosity got the better of me, so I sidled up to have a look.

I spotted Stephanopoulis talking to a couple of other DSs from the Murder Team. You don’t just step into someone else’s crime scene without permission so I paused at the tape and waited until I could catch Stephanopoulis’s eye. She stamped over a minute later and clocked the uniform.

“Back on patrol with us mere mortals, are you?” she said. “I think you got off lightly. The even money in the incident room was that you were going to be suspended with extreme prejudice.”

“Verbal warning,” I said.

Stephanopoulis looked incredulous. “For hijacking an ambulance?” she said. “You get a verbal warning? You’re not making any friends among the rank and file, you know.”

“I know,” I said. “Who’s dead?”

“Nothing to do with you,” said Stephanopoulis. “Construction
foreman from Crossrail. Found this morning in one of his access shafts.” Although the bulk of the new Crossrail station was finished, the contractors still seemed intent on digging up the streets. “Might just be an accident anyway, health and safety on these sites is almost as bad as it is in the Met.”

Health and safety was the current obsession of the Police Federation. Last year it had been stab vests but lately they felt that police officers were taking unnecessary safety risks while pursuing suspects. They wanted better H&S guidelines to prevent injury and, presumably, remote-controlled drones to do the actual chases.

“Did it happen in the dark?”

“No, at eight o’clock this morning in full daylight,” said Stephanopoulis. “Which means he was probably pushed but, and this is the important bit as far as you’re concerned, there is definitely nothing remotely supernatural about the scene, thank God. So you can just bugger off.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said. “I shall do that.”

“Wait,” said Stephanopoulis. “I want you to check the follow-up interviews with Colin Sandbrow—they should be on the system by now.”

“Who’s Colin Sandbrow?”

“The man who would have been the next victim if your weirdo friend hadn’t gotten in the way,” she said. “If you think you can do that without generating more property damage.”

I laughed to show that I was a good sport, but cop humor being what it is I knew I’d be carrying that ambulance around for the rest of my career. I left Stephanopoulis to impose her will on the crime scene and slipped through St. Anne’s Court and D’Arblay Street to Berwick Street. Since I hadn’t been paying attention the night before, I had to stop and get my bearings before I spotted the door—sandwiched between a chemist’s and a record shop that specialized in vintage vinyl. The black paint on the door was peeling and the little cards on the entry phone were either smudged or missing entirely. It didn’t matter. I knew she was on the top floor.

“You wretch,” spluttered the entry phone. “I’m not ready.”

“I can go around the block again,” I said.

The lock buzzed and I pushed the door open. The stairs didn’t look any better in the daylight; the carpet was pale blue and worn through in places and the walls showed stains from where people had put their hands out to balance themselves. On each floor there were blind doors, which in Soho could lead anywhere from Strict Discipline at Reasonable Rates to a television production company. I paced myself so I wasn’t panting when I reached the top floor and knocked on the door.

When Simone opened it and saw me in my uniform she skipped back a step and clapped her hands. “Look at this,” she said. “It’s a strippergram.”

She’d been cleaning in a pair of gray tracksuit bottoms and a navy blue sweatshirt that looked like it had been cropped with a pair of nail scissors. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf in an English way that I’d only ever seen on
Coronation Street
. I stepped forward and grabbed her. She smelled of sweat and Domestos. It would have been straight onto the floor right then if she hadn’t gasped out that the door was still open. We broke long enough to close the door and stumble to the bed. Only one bed I noticed, but it was king-sized and we did our best to use every bit. At some point my uniform came off and we never did find what happened to her sweatshirt—she left the scarf on, though, because something about it turned me on.

An hour and a bit later I had a chance to look around the flat. The bed took up one whole corner of the main room and was, apart from one overstuffed leather armchair, the only thing to sit on. The only other furniture was a mismatched trio of wardrobes lining one wall and a solid oak chest of drawers that was so big, the only way to get it into the room must have been to winch it in through the window. There was no TV that I could see, or stereo, although a suitably small MP3 player might have vanished among the drifts of cloth that had colonized the room. I’m an only child, so I’ve only ever had to live with one woman at a time and wasn’t prepared for the sheer volume of clothes that could be generated by three sisters sharing one flat. The shoes were particularly
pervasive; serried ranks of, to me, almost identical open-toed sling-back stilettos. Tangles of sandals had been stuffed into random nooks while boxes of pumps filled the gaps between the wardrobes. Pairs of boots, from calf-length to thigh-high, hung from nails on the wall like the rows of swords in a castle.

Simone saw me eyeing a pair of fetish boots with three-inch spike heels and started to wriggle out of my arms. “Want me to try them on?” she said.

I pulled her back against my chest and kissed her neck—I didn’t want her going anywhere. She twisted in my arms and we kissed until she said she had to pee. Once your lover’s done you might as well get up and so I folded myself into the bathroom—a tiny cubbyhole with just enough room for a surprisingly modern power shower, a toilet, and the kind of small odd-shaped sink designed to fit into the space of last resort. While I was in there my copper’s instincts got the better of me and I had a rummage through their medicine cabinet. Simone and her sisters were clearly in favor of the long-term storage of dangerous chemicals because there were acetaminophen and prescription sleeping tablets that dated back ten years.