I was my dad's vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea & that's how I know my Argo from my Tempo. & it's why when Dr Walid called me to the morgue to listen to a corpse I recognised the tune it was playing. Something violently supernatural had happened to the victim strong enough to leave its imprint like a wax cylinder recording. Cyrus Wilkinson part-time jazz saxophonist & full-time accountant had apparently dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig in a Soho jazz club. He wasn't the first. No one was going to let me exhume corpses to see if they were playing my tune so it was back to old-fashioned legwork starting in Soho the heart of the scene. I didn't trust the lovely Simone Cyrus' ex-lover professional jazz kitten & as inviting as a Rubens' portrait but I needed her help: there were monsters stalking Soho creatures feeding off that special gift that separates the great musician from someone who can raise a decent tune. What they take is beauty. What they leave behind is sickness failure & broken lives. & as I hunted them my investigation got tangled up in another story: a brilliant trumpet player Richard ' Lord' Grant
- my father
- who managed to destroy his own career twice. That's the thing about policing: most of the time you're doing it to maintain public order. Occasionally you're doing it for justice. & maybe once in a career you're doing it for revenge.