And therefore probably not one of their apprentices either—if they had apprentices.

“If it wasn’t one of your mob …”

“Our mob,” said Nightingale. “You swore an oath, that makes you one of us.”

“If it wasn’t one of our mob, who else could do it?”

Nightingale smiled. “One of your riverine friends would have the power,” he said.

That made me pause. There were two gods of the River Thames and both of them had their own fractious children, one for each tributary. They certainly had power—I’d personally witnessed Beverley Brook flooding out Covent Garden, incidentally saving my life and that of a family of German tourists in the process.

“But Father Thames wouldn’t operate below Teddington Lock,” said Nightingale. “And Mama Thames wouldn’t risk the agreement with us. If Tyburn wanted you dead she’d do it through the courts. While Fleet would humiliate you to death in the media. And Brent is too young. Finally, leaving aside that Soho is on the wrong side of the river, if Effra was going to kill you with music it wouldn’t be with jazz.”

Not when she’s practically the patron saint of UK Grime, I thought. “Are there other people?” I asked. “Other things?”

“It’s possible,” said Nightingale. “But I’d concentrate on determining how before I worried too much about whom.”

“Any advice?”

“You could start,” said Nightingale, “by visiting the scene of the crime.”

MUCH TO the frustration of the ruling class, who like their cities to be clean, ordered, and to have good lines of fire, London has never responded well to grandiose planning projects. Not even after it was razed to the ground in 1666. Mind you this hasn’t stopped people from trying, and in the 1880s the Metropolitan Board of Works constructed Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue to facilitate better communications both north and south and east and west. That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in the process, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous. Where the avenue and the road crossed became Cambridge Circus and on the west side today stands the Palace Theatre, in all its late-Victorian gingerbread glory. Next to that, and built in the same style, stands what was once the George and Dragon Public House but was now named the Spice of Life. According to its own publicity—London’s premier spot for jazz.