Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London US Book 2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

The evening was still warm enough for shirtsleeves, and the city was clinging to summer like a WAG to a promising centre forward.

In 1593, Galileo Galilei took time off from astronomy and promulgating heresy to invent a thermoscope for measuring heat. In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss invented a device to measure the strength of a magnetic field, and in 1908 Hans Geiger made a detector for ionising radiation. At this very moment astronomers are detecting planets around distant stars by measuring how much their orbits wibble, and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.

Every Londoner has their manor – a collection of bits of the city where they feel comfortable.

We ended up in Wong Kei on Wardour Street, where the food is reliable, the service is brusque and you can get a table at eleven thirty on a Friday night

On top is a circular café, whose Perspex walls give a three-sixty panorama of the whole park where customers can sit, drink tea and plot world domination.

A vestigium isn’t laid down like a groove in a record; it’s not like a tape recording. It’s more like the memory of a dream, and the harder you grasp at it the faster it melts away.

Len Deighton, Ian Fleming and Clive Cussler. It looked like the fiction section of a charity shop.

Only students and people from Basildon go clubbing on a Sunday, so we went to the Renoir to see Spirit of the Escalator, un film de Dominique Baudis which turned out, despite the subtitles, to be a romantic comedy.

‘What’s the biggest thing you’ve zapped with a fireball?’ I asked. ‘That would be a tiger,’ said Nightingale. ‘Well don’t tell Greenpeace,’ I said. ‘They’re an endangered species.’ ‘Not that sort of tiger,’ said Nightingale. ‘A Panzer-kampfwagen sechs Ausf E.’ I stared at him. ‘You knocked out a Tiger tank with a fireball?’

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

‘I’ve played bigger gigs,’ he said. ‘I once played with Joe Harriott in a basement in Catford.

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.

‘What did all your friends die for, all those names on the wall, what did they die for if not for that?’ He recoiled. ‘I don’t know what they died for,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know then and I still don’t know now.’ ‘Well I do,’ I said. ‘Even if you’ve forgotten. They died because they thought there was a better way of doing things, even if they were still arguing about what it was.’