The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Do you think I should have?’ said Mr Chorley. ‘Been more of a helicopter parent?’

  Guleed gave a ‘what can you do’ sigh and looked sympathetic.

  ‘Did she ever have any trouble with her phones?’ I asked.

  This got a frown.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘Did she seem to lose or claim to have broken her phone?’ I asked. ‘More often than you’d expect?’

  ‘You think she was selling them?’ asked Martin Chorley. ‘For drug money?’

  Actually, I thought she might be destroying them through the power of her magic, but I felt that saying this might violate Seawoll’s rules about tact and diplomacy. Also, I was looking to see how Mr Chorley reacted – for some indication he might know why damaged phones were significant. But what he mostly was, was bewildered and sad.

  There’s being thorough and there’s being cruel, so I zipped through the rest of my questions. Guleed followed my cue and didn’t ask any additional questions of her own.

  ‘Did you get anything useful?’ she asked as we stepped back into the rain.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t think so.’

  Useful or not, it still had to be written up because a) empirically speaking a negative result is still a result, b) someone cleverer than you might make a connection you missed and c) in the event of a case review it’s sensible to at least look like you’re being competent. So back we went to our desk share at Belgravia and did just that.

  ‘Do you think it’s odd he only had the one?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘One what?’

  ‘One kid,’ she said. ‘These rich people usually have three or four.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s compulsory,’ I said and then thought of something. ‘Have we talked to the nannies yet?’

  According to the whiteboard the MIT had identified five of the kids at the party, leaving two unidentified – assuming we had the count right. One of them – ‘Rod Crawfish or something’ – DC Carey had tentatively pegged as Roderick Crawford, also at Westminster and in the same year as James Murray. He was heading off to Primrose Hill to TIE him with a brand new DC called Fergus Ryan.

  ‘Fergus Ryan,’ I said. ‘Really? Where’s he from?’

  ‘Redbridge, I think.’

  Three of those kids, unlike Christina, had two or more younger siblings and, consequently, the families had live-in nannies.

  ‘Told you,’ said Guleed. ‘Big families.’

  All the nannies were already actioned to be statemented, but I was thinking that Christina Chorley probably had a nanny when she was young and that ‘the slave always knows more about the master than the master knows of the slave’ – even if I couldn’t remember who’d said that. Tracking them down without alerting Mr Chorley was going to be a bit of a bastard, so I suggested it as a further action in my report in the hope that Stephanopoulos would palm it off on someone else. Once I’d dropped the report in the Inside Inquiry Office I went looking for Nightingale. I found him downstairs in Stephanopoulos’ office reading a hardcopy that some kind soul must have printed out for him.

  ‘Any luck?’ he asked, looking up.

  ‘Not really,’ I said and briefed him on the interview, my ideas about former nannies and having a look around Christina’s bedroom at the house in High Wycombe.

  ‘I’ll take care of that,’ said Nightingale. ‘I believe you have a family engagement to go to.’

  ‘What about Tyburn?’ I asked.

  ‘They released Olivia on police bail over an hour ago,’ said Nightingale. ‘She’s to return here first thing tomorrow morning. I thought Cecelia took it rather well – considering. I believe we may be safe from cataclysms along the Tyburn for tonight at least.’

  ‘Did Olivia change her story?’

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘She still claims to have supplied the fatal drugs. Although frankly I don’t believe a word of it and more to the point neither did Miriam. Not least because she’s remarkably vague about where she obtained the drugs in the first place.’ He nodded at Stephanopoulos’ desk. ‘Miriam said she’d be back later if you need her for anything.’

  It didn’t help that there wasn’t any physical evidence, beyond her presence at the party, to corroborate her confession. That had to be nagging at Stephanopoulos, but I doubted that if Olivia had been some seventeen year old off an estate somewhere we would have been spending this much time on the case. We had a confession and I suspect we would have charged her and let the Crown Prosecution Service sort it out.

  ‘I did have a moment to see if the parents were on any of our lists,’ said Nightingale.

  Meaning, to check if any of them been members of the Little Crocodiles dining club while at Oxford University. Unlike other similar clubs this one had eschewed smashing up restaurants in favour of learning magic, courtesy of a former colleague of Nightingale’s called Geoffrey Wheatcroft. In this he broke the law and, more importantly, the social conventions of the Folly – he was probably lucky he died in bed before Nightingale found out.

  We had several lists of names to work with, one of confirmed members in the early 1980s – provided by Lady Ty who’d been getting her double first at the time. And one of suspected members from the late fifties onwards – collated from various reliable sources. Then people who might have been members and/or were close associates of people we knew were members. As you can imagine, the last list was huge and pretty much covered everyone who’d gone to Oxford since the end of the Second World War. Unsurprisingly Martin Chorley and Albert Pryce were on that list. Pryce had gone to Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s old college – Magdalene – while Chorley had been at Oriel. One critical overlap was Chorley’s time with that of Robert Weil, who even now was doing life for the murder of an unidentified woman he’d been caught dumping in the woods near Crawley. We were as sure that he had a connection to the Little Crocodiles as we were that he hadn’t killed the woman, but we couldn’t prove either.

  And the Little Crocodiles had spawned Albert Woodville-Gentle, otherwise known as the First Faceless Man, who’d done unspeakable things to people in Soho during the 1960s and then in turn helped another man who kept his face hidden. I’d met the new boy on a couple of occasions and he’d nearly killed me on both. And Nightingale, who I knew for a fact had gone toe to toe with a pair of Tiger tanks, was worried about which of them would come out on top in a straight fight.

  Not that we had any intention of letting it come to a straight fight – us being coppers and all.

  The connections so far were pretty bloody tenuous. Victim’s posh dad and victim’s best friend’s posh dad both went to a posh university – hold the press. Someone was going to have spend some time drilling into the data to see if there was a deeper connection – guess who that was going to be. But not tonight.

  ‘Are you sure I’ve got time for that?’ I said to Nightingale.

  ‘I assured your mother that if you failed to arrive it wouldn’t be my fault,’ he said.

  ‘You talked to my mum?’

  Nightingale grinned – he has a surprisingly mischievous grin.

  ‘As your . . .’ he paused, he always does at this point. ‘As the one responsible for your apprenticeship, it is expected that I keep your parents informed as to your progress.’

  He saw the look on my face.

  ‘Only in the most general terms,’ he said quickly. ‘For the purpose of reassurance.’

  ‘Did you talk to my dad as well?’

  ‘I have spoken to your father, yes,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I never knew that Tubby Hayes was also a virtuoso on the vibraphone. In fact, he once played with Charles Mingus in that capacity.’

  I was relieved – at least my father was reliably uninterested in my career.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What exactly did you talk about with my mum?’

  ‘She evinced a great interest in the Thames family,’ he said.

  I resi
sted the urge to curl up and hide under Stephanopoulos’ desk.

  ‘I suppose some emergency overtime is out of the question?’ I asked.

  ‘And cross your mother?’ said Nightingale. ‘Not likely.’

  If you live beside the river, Beverley says, you’re going to get flooded – that’s the cost of doing business, the price you pay for the blessing of the waters. A lot of the London Borough of Barnes sits inside a northern loop of the Thames that stretches from Putney Bridge to where the railway crosses the river. One day, says Beverley, she and her Mama are going to pinch it off at the base and make one big island. I asked her when she thought this was going to happen and she just shrugged.

  ‘Sooner or later,’ she said.

  There’s nothing like having your girlfriend talk in geological time to make you feel insignificant.

  The Bull’s Head sits safely above, and a road width back from, an artificial embankment on the south side of the river. Just around the corner from where Holst composed The Planets – I know this because there’s a blue plaque on the house and Bev once made me wait half an hour while she checked on some nearby trolls.

  The pub itself is an early Victorian mansion with French windows and wrought iron balconies to give it that sexy New Orleans look. Despite being hemmed in by later buildings it retained its courtyard and coach house round the back, which is where, these days, they keep the jazz. Coleman Hawkins played at the Bull, as did the multi-talented Tubby Hayes, beloved of my dad and Nightingale, until the early 1970’s when he popped his clogs. Other visiting greats included Shorty Rogers, Bud Shank and Ben Webster. And during the jazz revival of the noughties, rising young stars like Jamie Cullum and Simon Spillett made The Bull’s Head the groovy place to be – man. My dad had played there in the past and now it was marking the start of his fourth attempt at jazz stardom – however far that went. It was also the debut of his brand new teeth, paid for by yours truly with the help of a Kickstarter campaign and what was left of my savings.

  I’d been there when he’d tested his new embouchure, watched him as he lifted his trumpet to his lips, paused to nervously wet them with his tongue and then blow a single pure note. I’d watched him stop and stare at his trumpet in disbelief and then at my mum who’d pinched the bridge of her nose to hide her tears. Then he smiled at me and for that moment, and just that moment, I forgave him everything – everything – because now I knew what joy looked like and I was part of it.

  It wore off fairly quickly in the days after that, but the music stayed and my mum was happy.

  I was less happy with the amount of interest my dad’s gigs were getting in the demi-monde, but as Nightingale had pointed out it was my own damned fault.

  ‘You did rather insist on that open day at Caster-brook,’ he’d said. ‘Your father’s performance there must have caught their imagination.’

  That’s the trouble with community policing – strangely, people start expecting you to be part of the community. Fortunately my dad’s brand of soul jazz wasn’t Goth enough for the wilder shores of the demimonde, so I expected the mundane to weird bollocks ratio to be quite high.

  It was dark by the time I parked on the embankment and there was a cold wind racing up the Thames bringing threats of rain. The tide was turning and I could feel the Thames pushing upstream and slapping at the exposed shingle. I was early enough that Beverley was still in the main bar.

  I spotted her by the window, waving at me. She was wearing a purple knit top with a neck wide enough to slip off her shoulder and had her dreads tied back with a matching purple woollen scarf. An oxblood leather jacket was draped over the back of her chair. She’d managed to score a table despite the crowd and even had a free seat waiting for me. As I slid in beside her a complete stranger put a half of lager down in front of me and walked away.

  ‘Do you even pay for these?’ I asked.

  She leaned close to murmur in my ear. ‘This close to high tide I’m not sure I could make them stop,’ she said and then she kissed me on the lips before introducing me to the others at the table. She’d brought a couple of her white friends from Queen Mary’s where she’d started reading — you don’t study at uni, you read — Environmental Science. She’d sold this to her mum on the basis that while it wasn’t the law or medicine it was a little bit like engineering, if you squinted. And even Lady Ty couldn’t argue with Queen Mary for university snob value. Bev’s friends included Douglas, who would have been a hipster cliché had he been able to manage the beard, and Melanie, who was one of those round perky people who give the impression that it’s only a great effort of will stopping them from bouncing around the room. I’d once asked Beverley whether she told them she was a goddess of a not-so-small river in South London and she said – sure, course she did.

  ‘And?’ I’d asked.

  ‘They think I’m some kind of New Age weirdo,’ she’d said. ‘The dreads help.’

  Beverley said that she found that people stuck the first vaguely appropriate label on, whether it fit the facts or not.

  ‘It’s too much effort to tell them otherwise, isn’t it?’ she’d said. ‘Besides, then you’ve got to explain stuff . . . And aren’t we supposed to be keeping a low profile?’ Then she’d done a Nightingale saying – ‘I’m keeping to the agreements and trying not to scare the horses.’

  Beverley had a ton of friends at uni, but these were the only two that were interested in jazz. Not enough to know who my father was without looking him up on Wikipedia, but interested all the same.

  ‘And it’s in a good cause,’ said Melanie, which was news to me so I looked at Beverley.

  ‘Help for the Ebola crisis,’ she said.

  Help for mum’s extended family, I thought. But since this seemed to constitute at least a quarter of the population of Sierra Leone, the effect was going to be much the same. It was odd, that, because for a Fula my mum didn’t half have a lot of Temne and Susu relatives.

  Melanie said that she’d always wanted to work somewhere like Sierra Leone once she was qualified – somewhere she could really make a difference – what did I think?

  ‘The beaches around Freetown are brilliant,’ I said, which got me a blank look.

  But you can only tease white people for so long before the universe punishes you for it – in this case when my mum came into the main bar, spotted me and waved me over.

  She was dressed like something out of an old photograph – black long-sleeved roll neck jumper and grey slacks. Around her neck hung a couple of thick gold ropes that I was amazed had made it through the family lean patch, and a high quality wig cut in an eighties bob. All she was missing was a beret.

  When I joined her she pecked me on either cheek – continental style – which was just disturbing.

  ‘Peter kam ya, are wan talk to you,’ she said.

  I sighed and let myself be drawn to quiet corner. When I was younger she only used to lapse into Krio with me when she was angry or she wanted me to do something like fetch her a cup of tea or go to the shops. Nowadays it’s a sign that she’s about to discuss something I don’t want to talk about.

  ‘You en Beverley don begin for lay down wit each other en?’

  ‘Mum,’ I said, with an involuntary whine.

  ‘Are hope say u dae use protection ooh.’

  ‘Of course we’re using protection,’ I said. ‘And it’s none of your business.’

  ‘U get for take tem en be careful.’

  ‘We’re always careful.’

  My mum looked suddenly disappointed.

  ‘So you want tell me say e go tay before are see me gran pekin dem?’ she said.

  ‘I’m not sure that we’re quite at that stage yet.’

  ‘But Aunty Kadie en borbor get two pekin dem already,’ said my mum.

  ‘I know – you made me go to the christening, remember?’

  ‘An you big for ram.’

  ‘He has more time on his hands,’ I said.

  ‘E bette for born pekin way you young,’
said my mum. ‘It’s scientifically proven.’

  ‘Yes mum.’

  ‘I’d look after them,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you born now are go mend dem,’ she said. ‘That way you could both be about your business.’

  I suddenly wondered if my mum could swim and whether I dared tell Beverley about the offer. Not now, I thought, not a good idea right now.

  Luckily it was time to go out through the side door and follow the black arrow painted on the white brick walls marked JAZZ ROOM. According to my dad it had just been refurbished and the acoustics were much better, though he missed the proper sized piano.

  ‘Joe Harriott would have loved it,’ he’d said.

  Despite its role in jazz history it was a small space, with its own bar and triangular stage in the corner opposite the entrance. Bev made sure she was front and centre with her friends tagging nervously behind. She cast a look over her shoulder at me, her eyes dark and sly and her beautiful wide mouth twitching up at the corners, but I wanted to stay by the door – where I could keep an eye on who was coming in.

  The wizards of the Folly, or the Society of the Wise, back when there was no chance of taking the piss out of them on Twitter, have never really got the hang of the demi-monde – that strange collection of people and things-that-are-also-people tied into the magical world. Following the predictable mania for classification that gripped them during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they spent a lot of time talking about proportions of human and good- and bad-faerie blood and then assigning names to the result. Most of it was as useful as the theory of luminiferous aether, but it did explain why calling someone a goblin in some London pubs could get you a smacking. Still, after two years and change at the Folly I knew them when I saw them – most of the time.

  I knew this one as soon as he entered. A short young white man with a pointy chin and rust coloured hair slicked back with gel. He wore a tweed countryman’s jacket over a black T-shirt, a pair of zombie hunter cargo pants and hiking boots. Not DMs, I noticed, something Swiss and military. I knew instantly that he was at least part fae and a wrong-un. Partly because of my long experience as a copper, partly because of his expression of beatific innocence, but mostly because I’d last met him trying to chat up my thirteen year old cousin and as a result had run a comprehensive record check on him.