There was a coroner’s report on their deaths, which ruled that they had committed suicide and so the sisters won a brief moment of fame as a suicide pact. But nobody in the media was so interested that they did any investigation beyond that. Nightingale handled the follow-up inquiry with the aid of a couple of detective constables on loan from Westminster CID, one of them my favorite Somali ninja girl. They couldn’t be told that the victims were immortal jazz vampires, so it was down to me to take the story back to the war.

Simone Fitzwilliam, Cherie Mensier, and Margaret “Peggy” Brown were reported missing by their parents in 1941, and although the police carried out an investigation it had been cursory at best—and why not? The city was in flames at the time. I considered tracking down their closest relatives but what would I tell them? That some half-forgotten great-aunt had died in the famous bombing at the Café de Paris but managed to have a pretty enjoyable afterlife all the same? Right up until I came along and got her killed. Again.

I did track down their teacher, Miss Patternost, who had crossed the Atlantic after the war and had moved in with one Sadie Weintroub, a production secretary at Warner Bros., at her rather nice ranch-style bungalow in Glendale.

I found people who grew up in Soho after the war, and they remembered the three girls who lived on Berwick Street. Some thought they were tarts, others that they were dykes, but the majority paid them no real attention—Soho was like that back in the day.

I found enough evidence to tie them into fifteen other deaths, all jazz musicians, as well as another ninety-six cases where they probably contributed to chronic ill health and career collapse, my dad being one of them. Nothing I’ve discovered has convinced me that Simone and her “sisters” had the faintest idea of the pain and suffering they left behind. Dr. Walid made a half-arsed attempt to persuade me that it was possible that Simone had been entirely cognizant of her actions and that I had fallen for the clumsy deception of a diseased sociopathic monster. But I knew he was just trying to make me feel better.

I wrote out the narrative of the case with footnotes, printed it, appended the supporting documentation, put it in a box file, and put the lot in the secure filing section of the mundane library. I then erased everything off my computer and modified the case identification number on HOLMES and the PNC so that it would raise a flag if anyone came looking for it. It’s possible that some particularly gifted investigative journalist might notice that there are a number of disparate coroners’ verdicts with the same Metropolitan Police case reference tags, but given that no soccer players, pop stars, or royals were involved it’s not something I worry about.