Moon Over Soho

  “This was the final act at Ettersberg,” he said. “We were trying to pull out when this platoon of Tigers just came crawling out of the tree line. We didn’t expect the Germans to have anything but rear-echelon troops, so it caught us on the hop, I can tell you. I was the rear guard, so I had to deal with them.”

  “Lucky you,” I said. But my brain was still trying to get around the idea that Nightingale could put a hole in four inches of steel armor when I still sometimes had trouble getting through the paper of the targets.

  “Practice and training,” said Nightingale. “Not luck.”

  We kept it up until lunch and after that there was exciting paperwork including a surprisingly long form in which I explained how I’d managed to lose an expensive X26 taser pistol and reduce the working insides of an airwave handset to sand. Coming up with a plausible explanation for both kept me busy until late afternoon when Simone phoned.

  “I’ve found us a hotel room,” she said and gave me an address off Argyle Square.

  “When shall we meet?” I asked.

  “I’m already there,” she said. “Naked and decorated with whipped cream.”

  “Really?”

  “Actually,” she said, “I’ve eaten the whipped cream, but it’s the thought that counts.”

  Argyle Square is about a fifteen-minute walk from the Folly. Twenty if you stop off at the mini market to pick up a couple of cans of aerosol whipped cream—it always pays to be prepared.

  It was only a two-star hotel but the sheets were clean, the bed was sturdy, and it had a tiny en suite toilet and shower. The walls were a bit thin but we only found that out when next door banged on the wall for us to be quiet. We did our best that one last time—which, and I’m guessing here, lasted a couple of hours and resulted in both of us walking funny the next morning.

  Then we got to stay in our sturdy yet comfortable bed and fall asleep to the London lullaby of police sirens, shunting trains, and catfights.

  “Peter,” she said. “You haven’t changed your mind about tomorrow, have you?”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Your dad’s gig,” she said. “You said I could come, you promised.”

  “You can meet me there,” I said.

  “Good,” she said and fell asleep in my arms.

  THE IMPORTANT thing about Camden Market is that nobody planned it. Before London swallowed it whole, Camden Town was the fork in the road best known for a coaching inn called the Mother Red Cap. It served as a last-chance stop for beer, highway robbery, and gonorrhea before heading north into the wilds of Middlesex. In the early nineteenth century men in frock coats and serious muttonchop sideburns built the eastward branch of Regents Canal just to the north of the coaching inn. I say they built it, but the actual work was done by a couple of thousand strapping Irish fellers who came to be known, because of their canal work, as inland navigators or navvies. They and the navvies who came after them would go on to the build the three main phases of infrastructure development that characterize the history of the industrial revolution: the canals, the railways, and the motorways. I know this because I built a model of the area in junior school and got a gold star, a commendation, and the enduring hatred of Barry Sedgeworth, playground bully and poor loser. A couple of serious canal locks were built next to the Chalk Farm Road, from whence the market gets its name—Camden Lock. There were extensive warehouses along the canal and a large timber merchant.

  In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart. The planning blight caused by these schemes meant that what should have been lucrative land to be developed into multistory car parks or municipal rabbit hutches was instead leased to a trio of London wide-boys dressed in Afghan coats. These likely lads set up craft workshops in the old timber yard and on the weekends held a market where the products could be sold. By the mid-1980s the market had spread up Chalk Farm Road and down to the Electric Ballroom, and Camden Council finally stopped trying to put it out of business. It’s currently the second most visited tourist attraction in London and home to the Arches Jazz Club where my dad was going to make his comeback gig with the irregulars.

  The irregulars were surprisingly nervous but my dad was remarkably unfazed.

  “I’ve played bigger gigs,” he said. “I once played with Joe Harriott in a basement in Catford. After having to go on with him I never got stage fright again.”

  The Arches Jazz Club had, in the early days of Camden Lock, been a disreputable dive located in a former lockup under a brick railway arch—hence the name. As the market prospered, the club had moved to one of the units in the west yard just short of the horse bridge, so that while waiting for a gig a punter could sit outside at a café table and have a drink while enjoying the view across the lock basin. These days, my dad assured me, you almost never found dead dogs floating in the canal.

  Lord Grant and the Irregulars were due to go on first in support of the main act. On the stage Daniel and Max were setting up the instruments and doing sound checks. There weren’t that many punters in yet. They were mostly outside having a crafty fag or sneaking a drink. I asked where James was.

  “Throwing up in the toilet,” said Daniel. “He’s that nervous.”

  I looked over to where my mum was standing in her Sunday best nervously shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She gave me a little wave and I indicated that I was going outside to wait for Simone. She nodded and followed me out.

  That late in September it was getting dark before seven, but the clouds had held off and the last of the sunshine painted the brick front of the lock a golden orange. I saw Simone step down from Chalk Farm Road, wave happily, and then sashay over on a pair of high-heeled sling-backs, the sort that my mum buys occasionally but never wears. It was obviously ’80s night because her hair was piled under a broad-brimmed hat and the transparent top she was wearing was only street-legal because she had her jacket buttoned up.

  I turned to my mum. “Mum, this is Simone.”

  She said nothing, which wasn’t what I expected. Then she balled her fists and strode past me.

  “Get away, you bitch,” she screamed.

  Simone skittered to a halt, stared at Mum bearing down at her and then at me. Before I could move, my mum reached her and fetched Simone such a tremendous open-hand slap that she went reeling backward.

  “Get away,” shouted my mum.

  Simone stepped back, shock and outrage on her face, a pale hand covering the cheek where she’d been struck. I rushed forward to stop Mum, but before I could reach her she’d grabbed Simone’s hair with her left hand and was yanking at her jacket with her right. Simone was screaming and flailing, trying to get away as my mum shredded the gauze top with her fingers.

  You don’t just hit your mum, even when she’s attacking your girlfriend. And you don’t rugby-tackle her, knock her to the floor, put her in an armlock, or any of the various techniques I was trained to use on violent suspects. I settled for grabbing her by the wrists and yelling “Stop” in her ear as loud as I could.

  She let go of Simone, who staggered to safety, and whirled to face me.

  “What are you doing?” my mum demanded and shook my hands free of her wrists. Then she reached up and slapped me around the face. “I said what are you doing?”

  “What am I doing?” I asked. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  That got me another slap, but this one was perfunctory and didn’t make my ears ring. “How dare you bring that witch here,” she said.

  I looked around but Simone had sensibly scarpered by that point.

  “Mum,” I shouted. “Mum, what’s going on?”

  She spat something in Krio, using words that I’d certainly never heard before. Then she drew herself up and spat on the ground. “Stay away from her,” she said. “She is a witch. She was after your father and now she
is after you.”

  “What do you mean, after my father?” I asked. “After Dad—what?”

  My mum gave me the same look she always gives me when I ask what she considers a blindingly obvious question. Now that Simone was out of sight Mum seemed to be calming down.

  “She was after your father when I met him,” she said.

  “Met him where?”

  “When I met him,” she said slowly. “Before you were a baby.”

  “Mum,” I said. “She’s the same age as I am. How could she possibly be around when you met Dad.”

  “This is what I am trying to tell you,” said my mum matter-of-factly. “She is an evil witch.”

  I FOUND her sitting on the pavement outside the piercing shop that’s next to the KFC. She must have seen me coming, because she leapt to her feet, hesitated for a moment, then spun and started walking away. In those heels it wasn’t hard for me to catch up. I called her name.

  “Stop looking at me,” she said.

  “I can’t stop myself.”

  She halted and, before she could protest, I put my arms around her. She hugged me back and pressed her face against my chest. She sobbed once, caught herself, and took a deep breath.

  “What on earth was all that about?” she asked.

  “That was my mum,” I said. “She can get a little bit excitable.”

  She pulled back and looked up at me. “But the things she said—I don’t understand how she could think I was—what did she think I was doing?”

  “She’s on medication,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Simone. “What does that mean?”

  “She’s not well,” I said.

  “Are you saying she’s mad?” she asked.

  I looked appropriately stricken. “Oh,” said Simone. “Poor thing, poor you. I don’t suppose we can go back.”

  I realized that people were watching us from inside the KFC. Perhaps they thought we were street theater.

  “And I was so looking forward to hearing your dad play,” she said.

  “There’ll be other gigs,” I said. “Let me offer you an evening’s entertainment chez Peter.”

  “Not the chaise longue again,” she said. “I’ve still got a crick in my back.”

  “I laid in some cake.”

  “That’s suspicious,” she said. “Almost as if you were expecting company after the gig. Who were you planning to take home?”

  I kept my arm around her shoulders and guided her down the road toward Camden Town. “I don’t care for your tone, young lady,” I said.

  “Where did you get the cake?” she asked. “Tesco?”

  “Marks & Spencer,” I said.

  She sighed and her arm tightened around my waist. “You know me so well.”

  I hailed a black cab to take us back to the Folly. It seemed the safest thing to do.

  When we got back to the coach house she took a moment to fix her face in my emergency shaving mirror.

  “Do I look frightful?” she said. “I simply can’t tell with this teeny-weeny mirror.”

  I said she looked beautiful, which she did. The imprint of my mother’s hand, which had still been a livid red on her cheek in the cab, was beginning to fade and she’d reapplied her lipstick. There was enough left of the transparent top she was wearing to make me want to tear off the rest and my desire was making me hot and queasy. I concentrated on queueing up the right playlist on my iPod and making sure that it was plugged into the speakers.

  “I promised you cake,” I said as she advanced on me.

  Simone wasn’t to be distracted that easily. “Cake later,” she said and slipped her arms around my waist, one hand sliding under my shirt. I reached out and pressed play on the iPod.

  “What’s this?” she asked as the music began to play.

  “Coleman Hawkins,” I said. “ ‘Body and Soul.’ ” It was the wrong first track. It was supposed to be Billie Holiday.

  “Is it?” she asked. “You see, it just doesn’t sound real when it’s recorded.”

  I slipped my hand under her jacket and pulled her against me. The skin of her back felt feverish under my palm. “This is better,” she said and then she leaned forward and bit the top button right off the front of my shirt.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Fair’s fair,” she said.

  “Did you ever hear him play?” I asked. “Coleman?”

  “Oh yes,” she breathed. “People always wanted this song—it used to make him quite cross.” She pinged off another button and kissed my bared chest. I felt her tongue trace a line down my breastbone.

  I smelled it then. The scent of honeysuckle, and behind that, broken brick and smashed wood. How could I have ever thought it was her perfume?

  “Did Cyrus play ‘Body and Soul’?” I asked.

  “Who’s Cyrus?” she said and bit off a third button. I was running out of buttons.

  “You used to go out with him,” I said. “You used to live at his house.”

  “Did I? It seems so long ago,” she said and kissed my chest. “I used to love watching them play.”

  “Who are they?”

  “All my lovely jazzmen,” she said. “I was happiest when they were playing, I liked the sex and the company but I was really happiest when they were playing.”

  I groaned as the next track on the iPod turned out to be the John Coltrane. Had I put it on shuffle by accident? It’s impossible to slow-dance to his version of “Body and Soul”—for a start he never actually stays with the melody for more than three notes, and after a couple of bars he goes to the wild musical place that only people like my dad can follow. I steered us over to the fridge so I could surreptitiously press the next-track button on the iPod. It was Nina Simone, thank God, a young Nina with a voice that could melt an ice sculpture at a Scottish bankers’ convention.

  “What about Lord Grant?” I had to ask.

  “The one that got away,” she said. “They said he was going to be an English Clifford Brown but he kept on leaving the scene. Cherie was so cross. You see, she had rather set her cap for him. She claimed once that she’d caught him, but then he got away.” She smiled at the memory. “I rather think I was more his type, and who knows what might have happened except that he had this fearsome wife.”

  “How fearsome?”

  “Oh, terrifying,” she said. “But you should know, she’s your—” Simone froze in my arms and frowned up at me but I rocked her back into the dance. In her eyes I could actually see the memory slipping away.

  “Did you always love jazz?” I asked.

  “Always,” she said.

  “Even when you were at school?”

  “We had the strangest music mistress at school,” said Simone. “Her name was Miss Patternost. She used to have her favorites around for tea—there she would play us records and encourage us to ‘commune’ with the music.”

  “Were you one of her favorites?”

  “Of course I was,” she said and slipped her hand inside my shirt again. “I was everybody’s favorite. Am I not your favorite as well?”

  “Definitely,” I said. “Were Cherie and Peggy favorites too?”

  “Yes, they were,” said Simone. “We used to practically live in Patternost’s room.”

  “So you and your sisters all went to the same school?”

  “They’re not really my sisters,” she said. “They’re like my sisters, like the sisters I never had. We met at school.”

  “What was the name of the school?” If I had the school then I could probably track all three of their identities.

  “Cosgrove Hall,” said Simone. “It was just outside Hastings.”

  “Nice school?”

  “It was perfectly all right, I suppose,” said Simone. “The masters weren’t too beastly to us and it had its own riding stable and Miss Patternost—I mustn’t forget her. She was very taken with Elisabeth Welch. ‘Stormy Weather,’ that was her favorite. She used to make us lie on the carpet—she had a lovel
y Oriental carpet, from Persia I think—and make pictures in our minds.”

  I asked what kind of records and Simone said that it was nearly always jazz, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, and of course Billie Holiday. Miss Patternost told the girls that jazz was the Negro’s great contribution to world culture and that as far as she was concerned they could eat as many missionaries as they wanted, as long as they continued to produce such beautiful music. After all, said Miss Patternost, the various societies were churning out hundreds of missionaries every week but there was only one Louis Armstrong.

  I knew from my own dad’s collection that some of those disks would have been hard to get on the right side of the pond. When I asked where they came from, Simone told me about Sadie, Miss Patternost’s woman friend.

  “Did she have a surname?”

  Simone stopped pulling my shirt out of my trousers. “Why do you want to know?” she asked.

  “I’m a policeman,” I said. “We’re born curious.”

  Simone said that as far as she and any of the other girls knew, Miss Patternost’s friend Sadie was always just called “Sadie.”

  “That’s how Miss Patternost used to introduce her,” she said.

  It was never divulged what it was Sadie did, but the girls deduced from hints dropped in conversation that she worked in the movies in Hollywood and that she and Miss Patternost had been engaged in a passionate correspondence for over fifteen years. Every month or so, in addition to the almost daily letters, a package would arrive wrapped in brown paper and strong twine and marked HANDLE WITH CARE. These were the precious records on Vocalion, Okeh, and Gennett. Once a year Sadie would arrive, always just before the Easter hols, and ensconce herself in Miss Patternost’s rooms, and there would be much playing of jazz records until the wee small hours of the morning. It was a scandal, said the girls of the lower sixth. But Simone, Peggy, and Cherie didn’t care.

  “Crushed beetles,” said Simone suddenly.

  “What about them?” I asked. I was wishing I hadn’t blown out my iPhone because the recording app would have come in very handy right now.

  “The icing on my birthday cake,” said Simone. It seemed that the big treat on a girl’s birthday at Cosgrove Hall was that you got to choose the color of the icing on your cake. It was a matter of honor that the birthday girl would try to come up with most unlikely color of icing she could think of, violet and orange being popular, with blue spots. The kitchen always managed to provide the color and the girls were convinced that they did it by grinding up beetles as coloring.