Moon Over Soho

  At just that moment, at least according to the time code from the CCTV camera in the foyer, yours truly was flashing his warrant card and getting buzzed into the building. I then head, with my Costa Coffee double macchiato in one hand and a cinnamon swirl in the other, for the central staircase and make my way up toward the same interview room—at this stage I’m one floor down.

  Interview rooms used to be just ordinary offices fitted out with a table, a couple of chairs, good soundproofing, and a place to leave the telephone books when you were finished. These days, a modern interview room has two camera positions, a tape recorder, a one-way mirror, and a separate recording suite from which an enterprising senior investigating officer can monitor several interviews at once or have a bit of a nap. Since at West End Central all of this had to be shoehorned into the space designed in the 1930s as a modest open-plan office, it meant the access corridor outside the interview rooms was a bit narrow. The single CCTV camera that covered the corridor began to malfunction about the time I started up the steps and none of the recording equipment in the interview rooms was turned on. This is all to the good for me, because it means that when I came around the corner and found myself face-to-face with the Pale Lady my thirty seconds of stunned indecision were not recorded for posterity.

  Apart from her hair, which had been shorn off into a ragged pageboy, she looked exactly like the witness descriptions: white face, big eyes, disturbing mouth. She was dressed in gray joggers, a salmon-pink hoodie, and she didn’t see me at first because she was attempting to shake PC Phillip Purdy off her leg. He was stretched out on the floor with his left arm, broken in two places I learned later, dragging beside him and his right hand locked around the Pale Lady’s surprisingly slender ankle. One of his eyes was beginning to swell shut and there was blood pouring from his nose.

  I don’t know if it was shock or the fact that I had a mouthful of cinnamon swirl, or just because I’d already had a day of weird shit and was getting a bit punch-drunk, but I just couldn’t make myself move.

  Purdy saw me, though. “Help,” he croaked.

  The Pale Lady looked at me and cocked her head to one side.

  “Help,” said Purdy again.

  I tried to tell him to let go and move away, but it came out muffled in a shower of cinnamon crumbs.

  Without taking her eyes off me, the Pale Lady elegantly lifted one hand and then slammed it down on Purdy’s wrist. I heard bones break and Purdy whimpered and let go. She smiled, revealing far too many teeth—I’d faced a smile like that before. I knew what was coming next. She tensed, so did I, then she surged toward me with a terrifying burst of speed, head thrust forward, mouth open, teeth bared. As she sprang at me I threw my coffee in her face. I’d just bought it. It was very hot.

  She screamed and I flung myself out of her way. But because the corridor was narrow her shoulder slammed into mine, and the impact spun me around and dumped me on the floor. It was like being hit by a fast-moving cyclist. I rolled to avoid any follow-up and staggered to my feet, only to find that the Pale Lady was long gone. Each interview room has an alarm button by the door and I slapped my palm on one as I stepped over Purdy and slammed into the room where we’d stashed Alexander Smith.

  He was slumped back in his chair, head thrown back, mouth open, and what looked like a bullet hole in his chest with the same charring around the cloth of his shirt that I’d seen on No-Neck earlier.

  A uniformed PC cautiously stuck her head around the door and pointed a taser at me. “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Peter Grant,” I said. “Suspect is an IC1 female, gray tracksuit bottoms, pink hoodie.” If I left it there some idiot was going to get himself gutted trying to tackle her. “Psychiatric patient, very dangerous, possibly armed. Probably still in the building.”

  The PC looked at me in astonishment. “Yeah, right,” she said.

  “Have you done the first-aid course?” I asked.

  “Last month,” she said.

  “Okay, give me the taser and you see to Purdy,” I said.

  She handed me the taser; it was heavy, plastic, and looked like something from Doctor Who. Even in her state of shock she could tell that Smith was dead so she went off to get the first-aid kit for Purdy.

  I stepped back over Purdy and took a moment to check he was still alive. “Help’s on its way,” I told him. “What the hell were you doing here?”

  His face was white and sweaty with pain but he actually laughed—sort of. “It’s got a better canteen,” he said.

  I told him to take it easy and headed for the stairs.

  The thing about policing is that it’s something you do out on the streets rather than inside the police station. During a normal working day, the civilian staff will outnumber your actual constables by a ratio of three to one. Which means that when there’s a crisis at the local nick everybody has to rush back to deal with it. Which takes time. Feral the Pale Lady might have been, but I didn’t think she was stupid. Which meant she was going to go out by the fastest possible route, before all the police officers came rushing back in.

  Since the IRA bombing campaigns started in the 1970s, police stations in London have developed a very clear idea of what constitutes inside and outside and placed a great deal of reinforced laminated Perspex between the two. West End Central was no exception. But the entrance also featured a marble-faced external staircase that had definitely been built with no concern to the needs of wheelchair users and so a second door, at pavement level and just to left of the main entrance, had been knocked into the façade—conveniently located at the base of the stairwell so you could wheel yourself straight into the lift. The designers weren’t stupid, though. It was a very thick door, and alarmed in such a way that the desk sergeant in reception could check you over on CCTV before he buzzed you out. It would have been totally secure if a young detective constable hadn’t been returning to the station with an armful of Chinese takeout and decided that it would serve as a useful shortcut to the CID offices.

  The Pale Lady hit him when he was halfway through the door. I came down the stairs just in time to see him go down in a spray of what turned out to sweet-and-sour sauce.

  “Call it in,” I yelled as I jumped over him and into the pouring rain.

  I’d seen her veer right down Savile Row and charge down the middle of the road. A silver Mercedes SL500 swerved to avoid her and piled into the side of a parked Porsche Carrera and set off car alarms along the whole street. I stayed in the road behind and concentrated on trying to close the distance—as far as I knew, I was the only officer with a visual on the suspect. It was Saturday night in the West End, and despite the weather the crowds were out. If I lost contact she’d vanish without a trace.

  I stuffed the taser into my jacket pocket and fumbled for my airwave. I tried it a few times until I remembered that I’d neglected to put the batteries back in. The Pale Lady was running out of road as Savile Row made a T-junction with Vigo Street. She went left, toward Regent Street and Soho. I lost hold of the airwave as I followed her around the corner and it went spinning under a parked car.

  Vigo Street was little more than an alleyway with pretensions, a narrow road lined with coffee shops and sandwich bars that linked Savile Row with Regent Street. It was late enough for them to be closing and the Pale Lady was having to dodge around pedestrians, presumably because running over them might slow her down even more. I managed to get my phone out of my pocket. Like every police officer under the age of forty I have the bypass number for Metcall on speed dial—that’s a number that routes you directly through to a CAD operator without all that “Which service do you require?” stuff.

  When you’re sprinting after a suspect through a narrow street in heavy rain it’s almost impossible to hear someone talking to you on your phone, so I waited a suitable interval and started breathlessly identifying myself and the suspect I was chasing. It’s hard to talk and stay with a fleeing suspect, especially one who runs across a major thoroughfare without wait
ing for the lights to change.

  Regent Street was a slow-moving river of wet metal, but I thought she might even make it until White Van Man came to my rescue and she went spinning off the front of a Ford Transit. She ricocheted off the back of a Citroën with a thin scream of rage and went staggering for the entrance to Glass house Street.

  Fortunately for me, the river of metal ran itself aground on the rocks of potential insurance claims and so the traffic had stopped moving by the time I followed her across. I was now less than five yards behind the Pale Lady so I pulled out the taser and tried to remember what its effective range was. I also realized where she was going—twenty yards farther on, Glasshouse Street branches left into Brewer Street. She was heading back to the club.

  Then she just accelerated away. I’m a young man, I’m fit, and I used to sprint at school. But she just left me standing like a fat kid on sports day. I came to a stop on the corner of Brewer and Glasshouse, put my hands on my knees and tried to catch my breath. The die-hard smokers outside the Glassblower Pub on the corner gave me an ironic cheer.

  You bastards, I thought, I’d like to see you run her down.

  I heard a siren in the distance and looked up to see her running back toward me. Behind her I saw the flashing lightbars of at least two IRVs. When she saw me waiting for her, she gave me a look not of hatred or fear but a sort of weary disgust. As if I were a particularly persistent unwanted smell. I was somewhat insulted, so I shot her in the chest with my taser.

  The Metropolitan Police uses an X26 model taser manufactured by the imaginatively titled Taser International Company. It uses a compressed nitrogen charge to fire two metal prongs into suspects and then zap them with fifty thousand volts. Which causes neuromuscular incapacitation, which causes them to fall over. Which was why I was a tad disappointed when the Pale Lady just grunted, blinked, and then tore the prongs out of her chest. She glared at me, I took an involuntary step backward, and she spun on her heel and shot off down Glasshouse Street, bowling over the smokers as she went.

  I dropped the taser and rocked forward for a good start. Even though my shoes slipped on the wet road I like to think I trimmed a bit of time off my start. If I could get close enough to give her a heel tap I could bring her down long enough for me and half a van of TSG to land on top of her.

  She tore down Glasshouse Street with what I realized were bare feet slapping on the road surface. I came after her sweating and blowing. But, weirdly, either she was slowing down or I was warming up, because I was gaining. But where was she going? At the far end of Glasshouse Street was Piccadilly Circus, lots of traffic, lots of tourists to get lost in, and a tube station. The tube. There were steps down to Piccadilly Circus station right where Glasshouse met the circus.

  I was right. As she reached the ugly pink façade of the doughnut shop she started angling right for the station entrance. I dug for it, but I didn’t have enough left to get me closer than two yards. Then she suddenly veered left again and started curving around past the big Boots and heading for Shaftesbury Avenue. I couldn’t figure it out until I saw a pair of PCSOs idling in front of the steps down to the station—the Pale Lady must have thought they were after her.

  She went across the traffic island, bounced off a hatchback, and ran right over the bonnet of a Ford Mondeo before sprinting past the Rainforest Café, bowling tourists aside as she went. I went around the cars to a chorus of hooting and headed after her, but I groaned out loud when she did a sharp turn into the Trocadero Centre. The only way in was a set of escalators going up a floor. Chasing someone up stairs or escalators is always a nightmare because there’s a chance they’ll be waiting in the blind spot at the top to kick you back down again. But I couldn’t risk losing the Pale Lady, so I ran up the down escalators on the assumption that if she was waiting for me it would be on the wrong side. It was a good theory, and had she been waiting for me I’d have been well pleased with myself.

  The Trocadero was a five-story bastard child of a building built in the Baroque style in 1896 and sorely used over the centuries as everything from a music hall to a restaurant and a waxworks. In the mid-1980s the interior was completely gutted and replaced with the sets from Logan’s Run—or that might be just the way I remember it. It’s got a cinema and a multilevel amusement arcade that I remember well, because my mum used to clean it. And one of my uncles knew a trick to blag free turns on Street Fighter II.

  I caught a flash of salmon pink as I crested the escalator and saw the Pale Lady jump the short flight of steps that led down to the mezzanine level. A bunch of plump white girls in black hoodies scattered as she landed among them. As I chased her I was praying Please God don’t go into the cinema because short of a minefield, a multiplex is the last place you want to chase a suspect. She skidded on the waxed floor and went left.

  I yelled “Police!” at the plump white girls, who scattered again.

  One of them yelled “Wanker” as I jumped the stairs and followed the Pale Lady along the mezzanine. She went past a café with a drift of aluminum chairs and tables half blocking the way. Some poor sod stood up at the wrong moment and got the Pale Lady’s forearm smashed into his head. He went down hard, upending a table and sending a tray spinning over the railings and down into the atrium three stories below.

  “Police,” I yelled again, which just got me bewildered looks from the bystanders. I really don’t know why we don’t just save our breath. Which I needed to save at that point, I can tell you.

  The Pale Lady ran up another short flight of stairs and into a dark noisy cavern full of flashing lights. An electric-blue neon sign over the entrance said WELCOME TO FUNLAND.

  It was packed, mostly teenagers and young men who were killing time before the clubs opened. They were playing slot machines and old-fashioned racing games that I remembered from ten years ago. If the Pale Lady had gone to ground among all those bodies I might have lost her. But either she was on a timetable or she was smart enough to know that the wrath of the Metropolitan Police was about to fall on her from a great height. Nobody kills a suspect in a police station and gets away with it—at least nobody without a warrant card.

  Amid the games and slot machines two escalators led upward to the next floor. When I saw a teenage boy pointing and his mate pulling out his phone to film something out of my sight I knew the Pale Lady was going up that way. I’d already spotted that if I jumped onto the Skittles machine I could jump again high enough to grab the escalator rail and vault onto the steps. I landed just short of the Pale Lady, riding up lying flat on her back to stay hidden. She hissed and lashed her foot at my face but I got out of the way in time to hear her heel go past my ear with a sound like ripping silk. I reared back and tried to stamp on her other knee, but she scrambled back and tried to kick me in the bollocks. I twisted and her kick grazed off my thigh, but hard enough to stagger me. She was just about to kick me again when we reached the top of the escalator.

  She screamed and I realized that her hair, as short as it was, had caught in the metal teeth at the top of the escalator. She thrashed, did a sort of roll and then a desperate headstand to pull it clear. I grabbed my baton, extended it, and lashed down as hard as I could. I didn’t think I’d get a second chance like this.

  They train us to use our batons, you know. They don’t just issue them to us and say “Try not to kill anyone.” There are light taps for warnings, a full arm swing that’s deliberately slow to make your suspect flinch back, the sneaky slap to the thigh that isn’t easy to see on the news footage. But the basic principle is that the amount of force is always controlled and appropriate. This is why I lunged forward while she was upside down and hit the Pale Lady in the hip with everything I had. Something crunched under the baton and she howled loud enough to cut through all the music and sound effects. Then she kicked me in the cheek.

  It wasn’t her best effort, but it was hard enough to snap my head back so that I didn’t see the end of the escalator and stumbled off while she flipped herself backward
, twisted, and tried to crawl away. I wasn’t having that, so I threw myself on her back. I fell heavy, to try to drive the air out of her. But in an astonishingly fluid motion she arched her back and flung me into the side of a Spinna Winna machine. My elbow smashed into the glass and I felt a sensation that told me I was on the numb-now, pain-later plan. I straightened up just in time to see her fist coming for my face. She must have been slowing down, because this time I got safely out the way and her hand splintered into the glass and through. I whirled and brought my baton down on her wrist just as hard as I could. Again a crack, and a spray of blood as the glass cut her skin. She let out a wet gasp and turned her head to stare at me.

  “Give it up,” I said.

  There was pain in her face and anger and the sort of self-pity you see on the faces of thwarted bullies. She bared her teeth in a snarl of defiance and wrenched her hand out of the Spinna Winna machine—a curl of blood splattered my face. I lunged forward with my head down and got my shoulder jammed into her chest. She hammered at my shoulders while I drove her back toward the balcony railing. She was unnaturally strong, but I was still bigger and heavier. And if I could stay inside her reach I might be able to pin her down long enough for backup to arrive.

  Surely backup should be arriving soon.

  Her back hit the barrier and we came to a shuddering halt. I made a grab for her knee to see if I could trip her up, but she caught me a stunning blow on the side of the head and then threw me hard enough that I fetched up on my side ten feet away. I shook my head and looked up to see the Pale Lady charging toward me with blood staining her clothes and murder in her eyes. She could have at least tried to make her escape; I wasn’t going to follow her anymore. But I think she knew she was going down and was planning to make somebody pay before she went. That somebody being yours truly.