Moon Over Soho Read Free Page B

solo and just sat down on the monitor, I did think he was a bit flushed, and then he fell over on his side and that’s when we all realized that something was wrong.”
    She stopped and looked away from me, her hands balling into fists. I waited a bit and asked some dull routine questions to center her again—did she know what time he’d collapsed, who’d called the ambulance, and did she stay with him the whole time? I jotted down the answers in my notebook.
    “I wanted to go in the ambulance, I really did, but before I knew it they’d whisked him away. Jimmy gave me a lift to the hospital but by the time I got there it was too late.”
    “Jimmy?” I asked.
    “Jimmy’s the drummer, very nice man, Scottish I think.”
    “Can you give me his full name?” I asked.
    “I don’t think I can,” said Simone. “Isn’t that awful. I’ve just always thought of him as Jimmy the drummer.”
    I asked who else was in the band but she could only remember them as Max the bass and Danny the piano.
    “You must think I’m an awful person,” she said. “I’m certain I must know their names but I just can’t seem to recall them. Perhaps it’s Cyrus dying like that, perhaps it’s like shell shock.”
    I asked whether Cyrus had suffered from any recent illnesses or health conditions. Simone said not. Nor did she know the name of his GP, although she assured me that she could dig it out of his papers if it was important. I made a note to ask Dr. Walid to track it down for me.
    I felt I’d asked enough questions to cover the real reason for the visit and asked, as innocuously as I could, if I might have a quick look around the rest of the house. Normally the mere presence of a policeman is enough to make the most law-abiding citizen feel vaguely guilty and therefore reluctant to let you clomp your size elevens around their home, soit was a bit of a surprise when Simone just waved at the hallway and told me to help myself.
    Upstairs was pretty much what I’d expected, master bedroom at the front, second bedroom at the back that was being used, judging from the cleared floor and the music stands lined up against the wall, as a music room. They’d sacrificed the usual half bedroom to expand the bathroom to allow for a tub, shower, bidet and toilet combo, tiled with pale blue ceramics with an embossed fleur de lys pattern. The bathroom cupboard was the standard one-quarter male, three-quarters female ratio; he favored double-bladed disposables and aftershave gel, she did a lot of depilation and shopped at Superdrug. Nothing indicated that either of them were dabbling in the esoteric arts.
    In the master bedroom both fitted wardrobes were wide open and a trail of half-folded clothes led from there to where two suitcases lay open on the bed. Grief, like cancer, hits people at different rates, but even so I thought it was a bit early for her to be packing up her beloved Cyrus’s things. Then I spotted a pair of hipsters that no self-respecting jazz man would wear and I realized that Simone was packing her own things, which I found equally suspicious. I listened to make sure she wasn’t coming up the stairs and had a poke through the underwear drawers but got nothing except a vague sense of being really unprofessional.
    The music room at least had more character. There were framed posters of Miles Davis and Art Pepper on the walls and shelves stuffed with sheet music. I’d saved the music room for last because I wanted a sense of what Nightingale called the house’s
sensis illic
, and what I called background
vestigium
, before I entered what was clearly Cyrus Wilkinson’s inner sanctum. I did get a flash of “Body and Soul” and, mingled with Simone’s honeysuckle perfume, the smell of dust and cut wood again, but it was muted and elusive. Unlike the rest of the house, the music room had bookshelves holding more than photographs and amusingly expensive mementos of foreign holidays. I figured that anyone looking to become