Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London US Book 2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

Having four daughters meant that he had parental looming down to a fine art, and I fought the urge to ask whether Lesley could come out and play.

That’s Sweeney Todd, Cockney rhyming slang for Flying Squad, in case you were wondering.

My dad always said that a trumpet player likes to aim his weapon at the audience, but a sax man likes to cut a good profile and that they always have a favourite side. 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.

So that day I was driving a battered silver ex-Metropolitan Police Ford Asbo that, despite my best efforts, smelled vaguely of old stake-outs and wet dog. I had it stashed up Romilly Street, with my magic police-business talisman in the window to ward off traffic wardens.

‘Why can’t you play like your father?’ she asked. ‘Because I can sing like my mother,’ I said. ‘But fortunately I cook like Jamie Oliver.’

‘They were books about magic,’ said Nightingale when I mentioned this. ‘Not magical books.’

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, I thought, for they are soggy and hard to light.

The kids would be expected to become doctors, lawyers or engineers in descending order of preference.

Real cat-girls, I thought. The Strip Club of Doctor Moreau. I wondered what it would be like to sleep with something as sleek and furry as a tiger. Whoever was running the club would have a made a fortune.

‘I’m still doing tests, but they all seem to be chimeras.’ That was a term I’d had to look up the night before when translating Bartholomew. It means a creature that has some cells with one set of DNA and other cells with another set of DNA. It’s vanishingly rare in mammals, and usually happens when two eggs are fertilised by different sperm and then merge before going on to grow into a foetus.

Bartholomew had described chimeras as the degenerate product of unnatural unions created through the foulest and blackest magic. But I had a horrible feeling that both definitions might fit.

The French, with that subtle rapier wit that has made them famous, nicknamed the bombs ‘petards’, or farts. People still use the term ‘hoisted by his own petard’ to refer to a situation where one is damaged by one’s own scheme.

‘Go to the right. There’s a fire escape down to Duck Lane.’ I’d spotted it during my night of passion with Simone as a possible access point for burglars. Which proves, if nothing else, that a police constable is never off duty, even when he’s not wearing his underpants.

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.

So I’d been sleeping with a jazz vampire. It made a kind of weird sense.

I decided to invent some rules just so I could add a new rule to the rules; never diss somebody’s mum, never play chess with the Kurdish mafia and never lie down with a woman who’s more magical than you are.