Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch Page A

open with a couple of strips of masking tape. I didn’t need to be told what was inside.
    It’s funny how the mind processes a crime scene. For the first few seconds your eye just slides away from the horror and fixes on the mundane. He was a middle-aged white guy and he was sitting on the loo. His shoulders were slumped and his chin was resting on his chest, making it hard to see his face, but he had brown hair and the start of a bald patch at the crown of his head. He was wearing an expensive but worn tweed jacket that had been half pulled down his shoulders to reveal a rather nice blue-and-white pin-striped shirt. His trousers and underwear were around his ankles, his thighs were pale and hairy. His hands hung limply between his legs, I guessed he’d been clutching his groin right up until the point he’d lost consciousness. His palms were sticky with blood, the cuffs of his jacket and shirt soaked in it. I made myself look at the wound.
    “Jesus fucking Christ,” I said.
    Blood had poured into the toilet bowl and I really didn’t want to be the poor forensics sod who had to go fishing around in it later. Something had excised the man’s penis, right at the root just above his bollocks, and unless I was mistaken left him clutching what was left until he bled out.
    It was horrible, but I doubted that Stephanopoulis had dragged me down here for a crash course in scene-of-crime theory. There had to be something more, so I made myself look at the wound again and this time I saw the connection.I’m no expert but judging by the ragged edge of the wound I didn’t think it had been done with a knife.
    I stood up and Stephanopoulis gave me an approving look. Presumably because I hadn’t immediately clutched my groin and run whimpering from the scene.
    “Does this look familiar to you?” she asked.

T HE G ROUCHO Club, the name being taken from his famous quote, was established around the same time I was born, to cater to the kind of artists and media professionals who could afford to buy into their ironic postmodernism. It generally went under the police radar because however trendily antiestablishment its patrons were, they generally didn’t get into it on the street come Friday night. Or least not unless there was a chance of it making the papers the next day. Enough rehab-worthy celebrities went there to support a niche ecology of paparazzi on the pavement opposite the entrance. That explained why Stephanopoulis had sealed off the street. I imagined the photographers were as vexed as five-year-olds by now.
    “You’re thinking of Saint John Giles?” I asked.
    “The MO’s pretty distinctive,” said Stephanopoulis.
    St. John Giles was a putative Saturday-night date rapist whose career had been, literally, cut short in a club a few months previously when a woman, or at least something that looked like a woman, bit his penis off—with her vagina.
Vagina dentata
it’s called and no medically verified cases have ever been recorded. I know because Dr. Walid and I trawled all the way back to the seventeenth century looking for one.
    “Did you make any progress with the case?” asked Stephanopoulis.
    “No,” I said. “We have his description, his friend’s descriptions, and some fuzzy CCTV footage and that’s it.”
    “At least we can start with a comparative victimology. I want you to call Belgravia, get the case number, and port your nominals to our inquiry,” she said.
    A “nominal” is a person who has come to the attention of the investigation and been entered into the HOLMES major inquiry system. Witness statements, forensic evidence, a detective’s notes on an interview, even CCTV footage are all grist for the inquiry’s computerized mill. The original system was developed as a direct result of the Byford inquiry into the Yorkshire Ripper case. The Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, was interviewed several times before he was caught, by accident, at a routine traffic stop. The police can live with looking