Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

Which meant I spent my spare time learning magic, studying dead languages, and reading books like Essays on the Metaphysical by John “never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like” Cartwright.

At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wobble and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.

It being an article of faith with my dad that you don’t even pick up a reed instrument unless you’re vain about the shape your face makes when you’re blowing down it.

Purdy lumbered over. When you’re wearing a stab vest, equipment belt, extendable baton, nipple-shaped helmet, shoulder harness, airwave radio, cuffs, pepper spray, notebook, and emergency Mars bar, lumbering is what you do.

It wasn’t until she relaxed enough to sit up and the duvet fell away to reveal a smooth, hairless, and totally flat chest that I twigged that he wasn’t a she. “Are you a guy?” I asked. Just to show that the sensitivity training at Hendon hadn’t been wasted.

“The world was different before the war,” he said. “We didn’t have this instantaneous access to information that your generation has. The world was a bigger, more mysterious place—we still dreamed of secret caves in the Mountains of the Moon, and tiger hunting in the Punjab.”

When all the map was red, I thought. When every boy expected his own adventure and girls had not yet been invented.

I’m an old-fashioned copper—I don’t believe in breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

I counted my fingers to make sure they were all there and I didn’t need Nightingale to tell me that I’d handled that one wrong. One thing for certain, Abigail who lived up the road was going on my watch list. In fact I was going to create a watch list just so I could put Abigail at the top of it.

Thanks to the magic of science I copied the rest of the pictures onto a flash drive, which, thanks to the science of magic, I’d tested and found they didn’t get messed up every time I did a spell.

We were way over our daily quota of emo so I changed the subject.

Chasing someone up stairs or escalators is always a nightmare because there’s a chance they’ll be waiting in the blind spot at the top to kick you back down again. But I couldn’t risk losing the Pale Lady, so I ran up the down escalators on the assumption that if she was waiting for me it would be on the wrong side. It was a good theory, and had she been waiting for me I’d have been well pleased with myself.

For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.

IT WAS a cold miserable day in October when I headed out of London. As I crawled out of town in the rush-hour traffic I had time to watch people heading into work, coats on, shoulders hunched, heads down—summer was over and the promising center forward was on a plane to Rio with a beautician from Malaga. But London didn’t care, she never does when you leave her because she knows for every one that leaves another two arrive. Besides, she was too busy painting on her neon lipstick and dolling herself up in red and gold. Don’t you know, darling, soccer stars are so last season. The theater’s where the action is now. She was looking for a Hollywood star out to prove his acting chops in the West End.