Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London US Book 2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind. If you drive north-east up the A12 you eventually come to Colchester, Britain’s first Roman capital and the first city to be burned down by that red-headed chavette from Norfolk known as Boudicca.

Sometimes, after a hard day of graft, nothing will satisfy but a kebab. I stopped at a random Kurdish place on my way through Vauxhall and pulled up on the Albert Embankment to eat it – no kebab in the Jag, that’s the rule.

Inside, the pub was pleasantly cool, dim and empty, with just a whiff of cleaning products fighting with years of spilled beer. I wanted to get a feel for the place, and I decided the most natural way to do that was to stand at the bar and have a beer, but because I was on duty I kept it to a half. Unlike a lot of London pubs, The Spice of Life had managed to hang on to its brass and polished wood interior without slipping into kitsch.

and the clever people at CERN are smashing particles together in the hope that Doctor Who will turn up and tell them to stop.

There’s a particular kind of safety that comes from being on the streets where you went to school, had your first snog, or drink, or threw up your first chicken vindaloo.

‘Spells?’ I asked. ‘Are you saying you went to Hogwarts?’ Which led to me having to explain the Harry Potter books, after which he said that yes, he had been to a school for the sons of certain families with strong magical traditions, but it really hadn’t been much like the school in the books. Although he did like the idea of Quidditch, they’d mostly played rugby, and using magic on the playing field was strictly outlawed.

I turned to the frontispiece and found a faint rectangular discoloration. My dad had books with that same pattern, ones that he’d jacked from his school library when he was young. The mark was from the glue that once held a folder into which a library card would have fitted back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the earth and computers were the size of washing machines.

Black magic, as defined by Nightingale, was the use of magic in such a way as to cause a breach of the peace. I pointed out that a definition like that was so broad as to essentially include any use of magic outside of that authorised by the Folly.

Actually I’d once spent about ten minutes looking in the window, but to be fair I was on patrol, it was three in the morning, and I was very bored.

Blackstone’s Police Operational Handbook recommends the ABC of serious investigation: Assume nothing, Believe nothing and Check everything. But you’ve got to start somewhere,

I knew from experience that you didn’t dive into one of Molly’s steak and kidney puddings until some of the superheated steam had had a chance to dissipate, and the interior had ceased to be hot enough to fire pottery.

‘You are so mercenary,’ I told him. He yapped. I guess from Toby’s point of view a sausage is a sausage.

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.