“So this is your hypothesis for what happened to Cyrus Wilkinson?”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “I think I may have stumbled upon a sort of trigger event.” I explained about Peggy and Snakehips Johnson and the Café de Paris and it all sounded thinner and thinner even as I was laying it out.

Dr. Walid finished his tea as I wound down.

“We need to find this Peggy,” I said.

“That much is certain,” said Dr. Walid.

I DIDN’T feel like doing data entry and I still couldn’t get Leslie on the phone. So I cropped a high-resolution image of Peggy in 1941 and printed out a dozen copies on the laser printer. Armed with those, I headed into Soho to see if I could find anyone who remembered her. Starting with Alexander Smith. After all, Peggy and Henry Bellrush were one of his top acts.

When he wasn’t paying women to take off their clothes in an ironic postmodernist way, Alexander Smith operated out of a small office above a sex-shop-turned-coffee-bar on Greek Street. I buzzed the intercom and a voice asked who I was.

“PC Grant to see Alexander Smith,” I said.

“Who did you say you were?” asked the voice.

“PC Grant,” I said.

“What?”

“Police,” I said. “Open the sodding door.”

The door buzzed and I stepped into another narrow communal Soho staircase with worn nylon carpet and handprints on the walls. A man was waiting for me on the landing at the top of the stairs. He seemed quite ordinary when I was at the bottom but like one of those weird corridor illusions he got bigger and bigger the farther up I got. By the time I reached the top he was four inches taller than me and appeared to fill the landing from one side to the other. He was wearing a navy blue High and Mighty suit jacket over a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt; he also had no visible neck and probably a blackjack concealed up his sleeve. Staring up his hairy nostrils made me quite nostalgic. You don’t get old-fashioned muscle like that in London anymore. These days it was all whippet-thin white guys with mad eyes and hoodies. This was a villain my dad would have recognized and I wanted to embrace him and kiss him firmly on both cheeks.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

Or maybe not.

“I just want a word with Alexander,” I said.

“Busy,” said No-Neck.

There are a number of police options at this point. My training at Hendon Police College emphasized polite firmness—“I’m afraid, sir, that I must ask you to stand aside”—while my street experience suggested that the best option would be to call in a van full of TSG and have them deal with the problem, using a taser if necessary. On top of that, generations of cockney geezers on my dad’s side were yelling at me that this was a diabolical liberty and he deserved a good kicking.