Moon Over Soho Read Online Free PDF

he was killed by magic and then find out who was capable of doing it and making it look like natural causes.”
    “Could you do it?” I asked.
    Nightingale had to think about that. “I think so,” he said. “I’d have to spend a while in the library first. It would be a very powerful spell, and it’s possible that the music you’re hearing is a practitioner’s
signare
—his involuntary signature.” Because, just as the old telegraph operators could identify one another from the way each one tapped their key, so every practitioner casts a spell in a style unique to themselves.
    “Do I have a signature?” I asked.
    “Yes,” said Nightingale. “When you practice, things have an alarming tendency to catch fire.”
    “Seriously, boss.”
    “It’s too early for you to have a
signare
but another practitioner would certainly know that you were my apprentice,” said Nightingale. “Assuming he’d ever seen my work, of course.”
    “Are there other practitioners out there?” I asked.
    Nightingale shifted in his wheelchair. “There are some survivors from the prewar mob,” he said. “But apart from them, you and I are the last of the classically trained wizards. Or at least you will be if you ever concentrate long enough to be trained.”
    “Could it have been one of these survivors?”
    “Not if jazz was part of the
signare
.”
    And therefore probably not one of their apprentices either—if they had apprentices.
    “If it wasn’t one of your mob …”
    “
Our
mob,” said Nightingale. “You swore an oath, that makes you one of us.”
    “If it wasn’t one of our mob, who else could do it?”
    Nightingale smiled. “One of your riverine friends would have the power,” he said.
    That made me pause. There were two gods of the River Thames and both of them had their own fractious children, one for each tributary. They certainly had power—I’d personally witnessed Beverley Brook flooding out Covent Garden, incidentally saving my life and that of a family of German tourists in the process.
    “But Father Thames wouldn’t operate below Teddington Lock,” said Nightingale. “And Mama Thames wouldn’t risk the agreement with us. If Tyburn wanted you dead she’d do it through the courts. While Fleet would humiliate you to death in the media. And Brent is too young. Finally, leaving aside that Soho is on the wrong side of the river, if Effra was going to kill you with music it wouldn’t be with jazz.”
    Not when she’s practically the patron saint of UK Grime, I thought. “Are there other people?” I asked. “Other things?”
    “It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But I’d concentrate on determining
how
before I worried too much about
whom
.”
    “Any advice?”
    “You could start,” said Nightingale, “by visiting the scene of the crime.”
    M UCH TO the frustration of the ruling class, who like their cities to be clean, ordered, and to have good lines of fire, London has never responded well to grandiose planning projects. Not even after it was razed to the ground in 1666. Mind you this hasn’t stopped people from trying, and in the 1880s the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to facilitate better communications both north and south and east and west. That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in theprocess, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous. Where the avenue and the road crossed became Cambridge Circus and on the west side today stands the Palace Theatre, in all its late-Victorian gingerbread glory. Next to that, and built in the same style, stands what was once the George and Dragon Public House but was now named the Spice of Life. According to its own publicity—London’s premier spot for jazz.
    Back when my old man was on the scene the Spice of Life wasn’t a happening place for jazz. It was, according to him,