Moon Over Soho Read Free

failure. I found indications of dilated cardiomyopathy,” said Dr. Walid. “That’s when the heart becomes enlarged and can’t do its job properly—but I think what did for him last night was an acute myocardial infarction.”
    Another term I recognized from the what-to-do-if-your-suspect-keels-over-in-custody classes I’d taken at Hendon. In other words, a heart attack.
    “Natural causes?” I asked.
    “Superficially, yes,” said Dr. Walid. “But he really wasn’t sick enough to just drop dead the way he did. Not that people don’t just drop dead all the time, of course.”
    “So how do you know this is one of ours?”
    Dr. Walid patted the corpse’s shoulder and winked at me. “You’re going to have to get closer to find out.”
    I don’t really like getting close to corpses, even ones as unassuming as Cyrus Wilkinson, so I asked Dr. Walid for a filter mask and some eye protectors. Once there was no chance of me touching the corpse by accident, I cautiously bent down until my face was close to his.
    Vestigium
is the imprint magic leaves on physical objects. It’s a lot like a sense impression, like the memory of a smell or sound you once heard. You’ve probably felt it a hundred times a day but it gets mixed up with memories, daydreams, and even smells you’re smelling and sounds you’re hearing. Some things, stones for example, sop up everything that happens around them even when it’s barely magical at all—that’s what gives an old house its character. Other things, like the human body, are terrible at retaining
vestigia
—it takes the magical equivalent of a grenade going off to imprint anything on a corpse.
    Which was why I was a little bit surprised to hear the body of Cyrus Wilkinson playing a saxophone solo. The melody floated in from a time when all the radios were made out of Bakelite and blown glass and with it came a builder’s-yard smell of cut wood and cement dust. I stayed there long enough to be sure I could identify the tune and then I stepped away.
    “How did you spot this?” I asked.
    “I check all the sudden deaths,” said Dr. Walid. “Just on the off chance. I thought it sounded like jazz.”
    “Did you recognize the tune?”
    “Not me. I’m strictly prog rock and the nineteenth-century romantics,” said Dr. Walid. “Did you?”
    “It’s ‘Body and Soul,’ ” I said. “It’s from the 1930s.”
    “Who played it?”
    “Just about everybody,” I said. “It’s one of the great jazz classics.”
    “You can’t die of jazz,” said Dr. Walid. “Can you?”
    I thought of Fats Navarro, Billie Holiday, and Charlie Parker who, when he died, was mistaken by a coroner for a man twice his real age.
    “You know,” I said, “I think you’ll find you can.”
    Jazz had certainly done its best for my father.
    Y OU DON’T get
vestigia
on a body like that without some serious magic, which meant either somebody did something magical to Cyrus Wilkinson or he was a user himself. Nightingale called civilians who used magic practitioners; according to him practitioners, even amateurs, frequently leave evidence of their “practice” at their homes, so I headed over the river to the address listed on Mr. Wilkinson’s driver’s license to see whether there was anyone who loved him enough to kill him.
    His house was a two-story Edwardian terrace on the “right” side of Tooting Bec Road. This was VW Golf country with a couple of Audis and a BMW to raise the tone a little. I parked on a yellow line and walked up the street. A fluorescent orange Honda Civic caught my eye—not only did it have the sad little 1.4 VTEC engine but there was awoman in the driver’s seat watching the address. I made a mental note of the car’s index before I opened the cast-iron gate, walked up the short path, and rang the doorbell. For a moment I smelled broken wood and cement dust but then the door opened and I lost interest in anything else.
    She was unfashionably curved, plump and sexy in