The picture was confused and I couldn’t identify where it was taken, possibly the ambulance loading bay. A group of women were being led past the camera, all but one of them hunched over with blankets across their shoulders. One face was staring at the camera, the expression erased by shock into a smooth pale oval. A face that I recognized, and which I’d last seen in the green room at the Mysterioso the night Mickey the Bone had died.

She’d called herself Peggy. I wondered if that was her real name.

Chapter 8 - Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

THE CAFÉ de Paris had been built twenty feet below ground level and was considered safe by management and customers alike. Unless you took cover in the Underground system, no civilian shelter in London was built nearly as deep. Later it was determined that two bombs penetrated the building above the nightclub; one failed to detonate while the other dropped down an airshaft and exploded right in front of the band, killing the musicians and most of the dancers. Ken Johnson had his head blown clear off his shoulders and there were reports of customers killed where they sat, but remaining upright at their tables. Eyewitnesses remembered that there had been a great many Canadian nurses and servicemen in the club that night, but despite going down to the storage area with the librarian I couldn’t find anything that remotely resembled a casualty list. I found duplicates typed on paper as thin as tissue concerning an exchange of correspondence dealing with complaints that ambulances hadn’t arrived quickly enough to deal with the casualties, and a report on the shocking boldness of the looters who had steamed through the site nicking valuables.

Nothing more on the mysterious Peggy who, if it was the same person, would have to be pushing ninety. A year ago I would have considered that unlikely, but these days I was working with a guy who was born in 1900 and he wasn’t even the oldest person I’d met. Oxley had been a medieval monk and his “father” dated back to the foundation of the City in the first century AD.

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, and I was going to start with Peggy.

The archive has a whitewashed room with lockers, two coffeemakers, and one of those machines that dispenses chocolate bars and stale snacks. I got a coffee and a Mars bar and called in a PNC check on Peggy, female, IC1, eighteen to twenty-five. The civilian operator laughed at me down the line and said she wasn’t even going to tell me how big a set of nominals that returned. I asked her to limit the area to Soho and go back as far as 1941. To her credit she didn’t ask me why.