Ben Aaronovitch - Moon Over Soho  

PRAISE FOR

Fresh, original, and a wonderful read. I loved it.

C HARLAINE H ARRIS

Midnight Riot is what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz. A hilarious, keenly imagined caper.

D IANA G ABALDON

Filled with detail and imagination, a consummate story of real policing in a vividly real world intersecting the decidedly unreal. The quality of this achievement stands out, making Aaronovitch a name to watch.

P ETER F. H AMILTON

An invocation to everything that is hidden, haunted, and forgotten in London, Midnight Riot is a ghost story with teeth. Aaronovitch crafts a tale with more twists than a foggy back alley, and I guarantee youll stay up all night reading.

C AITLIN K ITTREDGE ,
author of the Black London series

A witty and inventive twist to urban fantasy. Hooked me with its charm. Reeled me in with its creepy violence. Wouldnt let go until the last page.

M ARIO A CEVEDO ,
author of Werewolf Smackdown

B Y B EN A ARONOVITCH

Midnight Riot
Moon Over Soho

Moon Over Soho is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Ben Aaronovitch
Simultaneously published in Great Britain under the same title.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D EL R EY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-52460-7

www.delreybooks.com

Cover illustration: Wes Youssi/M80 Design

v3.1

For Karifa, because every father
yearns to be a hero for his son

T HANKS to everyone from the last book plus the staff of the Metropolitan Archive and Sarah for sneaking me into the Groucho.

Men have died for this music. You cant get more serious than that.

Dizzy Gillespie

I TS A sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind. If you drive northeast up the A12 you eventually come to Colchester, Britains first Roman capital and the first city to be burned down by that redheaded chavette from Norfolk known as Boudicca. I knew all this because Id been reading the Annals of Tacitus as part of my Latin training. Hes surprisingly sympathetic to the revolting Brits and scathing about the unpreparedness of the Roman generals who thought more of what was agreeable than expedient. The classically educated chinless wonders who run the British army obviously took this admonition to heart because Colchester is now the home of their toughest soldiersthe parachute regiment. Having spent many a Saturday night as a probationary PC wrestling squaddie in Leicester Square, I made sure I stayed on the main road and bypassed the city altogether.

Beyond Colchester I turned south and, with the help of the GPS on my phone, got myself onto the B1029 heading down the wedged-shaped bit of dry ground jammed between the River Colne and Flag Creek. At the end of the road lay Brightlingsealining the coast, so Leslie had always told me, like a collection of rubbish stranded at the high-water mark. Actually I didnt think it was that bad. It had been raining in London but after Colchester Id driven into clear blue skies and the sun lit up the rows of well-kept Victorian terraces that ran down to the sea.

Chez May was easy to spot, a 1970s brick-built fake Edwardian cottage that had been carriage-lamped and pebble-dashed within an inch of its life. The front door was flanked on one side by a hanging basket full of blue flowers and on the other by the house number inscribed on a ceramic plate in the shape of a sailing yacht. I paused and checked the garden; there were gnomes loitering near the ornamental birdbath. I took a breath and rang the doorbell.

There was an immediate chorus of female yelling from inside. Through the reproduction stained-glass window in the front door I could just make out blurry figures running back and forth at the far end of the hall. Somebody yelled, Its your boyfriend! which earned a shush and a sotto voce reprimand from someone else. A white blur marched up the hallway until it filled the view through the window from side to side. I took a step backward and the door opened. It was Henry MayLeslies father.

He was a large man, and driving big trucks and hauling heavy gear had given him broad shoulders and heavily muscled arms. Too many transport caf breakfasts and standing his round at the pub had put a tire around his waist. He had a square face and had dealt with a receding hairline by shaving his hair down to a brown fuzz. His eyes were blue and clever. Leslie had gotten her eyes from her dad.

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

Hello, Peter, he said.

Mr. May, I said.

He made no effort to unblock the doorway; nor did he invite me in.

Leslie will be out in a minute, he said.

She all right? I asked. It was a stupid question and Leslies dad didnt embarrass either of us by trying to answer it. I heard someone coming down the stairs and braced myself.

Thered been severe damage to the maxilla, nasal spine, ramus, and mandible, Dr. Walid had said. And although much of the underlying muscle and tendons had survived, the surgeons at UCH had been unable to save much of the skin surface. Theyd put in a temporary scaffold to allow her to breathe and ingest food, and there was a chance that she might benefit from a partial face transplantif they could find a suitable donor. Given that what was left of her jaw was currently held together by a filigree of hypoallergenic metal, talking was out of the question. Dr. Walid had said that once the bones were sufficiently fused, they might be able to restore enough functionality to the jaw to allow for speech. But it all sounded a bit conditional to me. Whatever you see, hed said, take as long a look as you need to get used to it, to accept it, and then move on as if nothing has changed.

Here she is, said Leslies dad and turned sideways to allow a slim figure to squeeze past him. She wore a blue-and-white-striped hoodie with the hood up, drawstring pulled tight so that it hid her forehead and chin. The lower face was covered by a matching blue-and-white-patterned scarf and her eyes by a pair of unfashionably large sunglasses I suspected had been looted from her mums forgotten-clothes drawer. I stared but there was nothing to see.

You should have said we were going out robbing, I said. Id have brought a balaclava.

She gave me a disgusted lookI recognized it from the tilt of her head and the way she held her shoulders. I felt a stutter in my chest and took a deep breath.