Member-only story
MURDERS IN THE MIDNIGHT STREETS OF LONDON
It’s 1929, more than a decade since the end of the Great War, and George Harley, war hero and formerly doing something for someone at the Security Service, has settled into a different kind of life on the borders of society, as a private detective in Soho. He’s come up from the streets of Shoreditch, and now the kind of trench warfare he’s playing out every day is conducted in a world in which he moves about comfortably. He even has a posh girfriend who plays in an orchestra.
Hartley’s looking for a missing girl, and when he finds her, her abduction is linked to a series of gruesome murders, involving children, and he winds up working with the one straight-up inspector at Scotland Yard on the investigation, something which threatens to undo the sort of peaceful coexistence he enjoys with some of London’s worst mobsters.
The murders seem to follow a pattern set out by an Aleister Crowley type writer, but as the mystery deepens and the fog gets pea soupier, Harley starts overturning links to some oddly fitting pieces of the puzzle: drug merchants, Maltese gangsters and a group of followers of an apparently sexually based cult of magic — some of whom are well-connected, and therefore barely touchable. And there is another cop on the case, one who’s better-connected and eminently less upright than Harley’s sponsor.
