I was my dads vinyl-wallah: I changed his records while he lounged around drinking tea and thats how I know my Argo from my Tempo. And its 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 and full-time accountant had apparently dropped dead of a heart attack just after finishing a gig in a Soho jazz club. He wasnt 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 didnt trust the lovely Simone Cyrus ex-lover professional jazz kitten and 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 and broken lives. And 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. Thats the thing about policing: most of the time youre doing it to maintain public order. Occasionally youre doing it for justice. And maybe once in a career youre doing it for revenge.
