Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch Read Free Book Online Page B

building and the installation of a modern switchboard. I’d found that under a dust sheet in an alcove off the main entrance lobby, a beautiful glass-and-mahogany cabinet with brass fittings kept shiny by Molly’s obsessive need to polish.
    Nightingale says that these protections are vital, although he won’t say why, and adds that he, acting on his own, is not capable of renewing them. Running a broadband cable into the building was out of the question and it looked for a while like I was going to be firmly mired in the Dark Ages.
    Fortunately, the Folly had been built in the Regency-style when it had become fashionable to build a separate mews at the back of a grand house, so that the horses and the smellierservants could be housed downwind of their masters. This meant a coach house at the back, now used as a garage, and above that an attic conversion that had once housed servants and later served as a party space for the young bucks back when the Folly had young bucks. Or at least more than one. The magical “protections”—Nightingale was not happy when I called them “force fields”—used to scare the horses, so they don’t extend to the coach house. Which means I get to run in a broadband cable, and at last there is a corner of the Folly that is forever in the twenty-first century.
    The coach house attic has a studio skylight at one end, an Ottoman couch, a chaise longue, a plasma TV, and an IKEA kitchen table that once took me and Molly three bloody hours to assemble. I’d used the Folly’s status as an Operational Command Unit to get the Directorate of Information to cough up half a dozen airwave handsets with charging rack and a dedicated HOLMES 2 terminal. I also had my laptop and my backup laptop and my PlayStation—which I hadn’t had a chance to get out of the box yet. Because of this there is a big sign on the front door that says NO MAGIC ON PAIN OF PAIN . This is what I call the tech-cave.
    The first thing I got when I booted up was an email from Leslie with the header
Bored!
so I sent her Dr. Walid’s autopsy report to keep her occupied. Then I opened up Police National Computer Xpress and ran a DVLA check on Melinda Abbot’s license plate and found that the listed information matched that on her driver’s license. I ran Simone Fitzwilliam as well, but evidently she’d never applied for a license or owned a car. Nor had she committed, been the victim of, or reported a crime within the United Kingdom. Or possibly all that information had been lost, inaccurately entered into the databases, or she’d just changed her name recently. Information technology only gets you so far, which is why coppers still go around knocking on doors and writing things down in little black notebooks. I Googled them both for good measure. Melinda Abbot had a Facebook page as did a couple of people with the same name, but Simone Fitzwilliam had no obvious Internet presence at all.
    I worked my way through Dr. Walid’s list of dead jazz musicians—allmen, I noticed—in much the same way. They’re always doing clever cross-referencing stuff on the TV, and it’s all perfectly possible, but what they never show is how sodding long it takes. It was pushing midnight by the time I got to the end of the list and I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at.
    I took a Red Stripe from the fridge, opened the can, and had a swig.
    Definite fact number one: Each year for the last five, two or three jazz musicians had died within twenty-four hours of playing a gig in the Greater London area. In each case the coroner had ruled the death either “accidental” by way of substance abuse or by natural causes—mostly heart attacks with a couple of aneurysms thrown in for a bit of variety.
    Dr. Walid had included a supplemental file recording every person who’d listed their profession as musician and had died over the same period. Definite fact number two: While other musicians dropped dead from “natural causes” with