The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Lady Helena took a sip of her tea.

  ‘You don’t think it’s based on an atavistic fear of the feminine realm?’ she asked and, when Nightingale looked politely blank, added ‘Food and sustenance traditionally being a woman’s responsibility.’

  ‘I have no idea,’ said Nightingale. ‘But I’ve always liked to err on the side of prudence.’

  They fenced along these lines for a bit while I had a slice of strawberry lattice tart and Caroline ate two pink angel cakes in quick succession.

  ‘I gather you were taught by your mother,’ said Nightingale. ‘Was this the usual practice?’

  ‘I don’t think there was such a thing as a “usual practice”,’ said Lady Helena. ‘My mother was taught by her aunt, and her aunt by a friend of the family.’

  ‘A female friend?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But I think we may have exhausted that topic – shall we get down to business?’

  ‘By all means,’ said Nightingale. ‘What would you like to discuss?’

  Lady Helena put her tea down – she’d barely touched it.

  ‘Jonathan Wild’s Ledger, The Third Principia, alchemy, the secret of eternal life.’ She smiled – a bright echo of the young woman in the photograph. ‘Is that enough to be going on with?’

  ‘We’re always interested in information leading to the recovery of stolen goods,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Is that the case here?’ asked Lady Helena.

  Nightingale glanced my way.

  ‘The Third Principia was definitely stolen in 1719,’ I said. ‘The Master of the Royal Mint at that time was one Sir Isaac Newton, who was busy sending counterfeiters and coin clippers to the gallows for crimes against the currency.’

  ‘Stolen by Jack Shepherd himself according to legend,’ said Nightingale. ‘So, yes, I believe it counts as stolen property.’

  Lady Helena held up her hand to surrender the point.

  ‘We are both the true heirs of Isaac Newton,’ she said. ‘Whether you’re willing to recognise it or not. We can’t ignore each other and I’m sure you’ll agree that any conflict between us would be both pointless and counterproductive. Which leaves us where?’

  Nightingale nodded slowly.

  ‘You think we should work together,’ he said and then he looked at me and laughed. ‘A stakeholder engagement,’ he said.

  Oh, he looks like he stands still and lets the modern world flow around him, I thought. But he’s always watching and when something useful catches his eye, he merely reaches out and takes it – things, ideas, people.

  The smile vanished as he looked back at Lady Helena.

  ‘Let’s leave the question of a common cause aside for a moment,’ he said. ‘And start by clearing the air. Have you ever heard of a wizard who conceals his identity?’

  ‘Does he use a glamour and mask to hide his face?’ asked Lady Helena.

  ‘We call him the Faceless Man,’ I said and Caroline didn’t exactly snigger, but I could tell she wanted to.

  ‘We believe there might have been two of them,’ said Nightingale. ‘One active during the sixties and seventies and a second, a successor if you like, active since the mid-nineties.’

  ‘The older one is dead,’ I said.

  ‘If we’re talking about Albert Woodville-Gentle,’ said Lady Helena, ‘Then I should bloody well hope so – since I killed him.’

  Nightingale was so stunned he looked shocked for almost half a second before moving on to ask quite when that might have happened.

  ‘August Bank Holiday, 1979,’ said Lady Helena.

  ‘And you’re sure he was dead?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Are you saying he wasn’t?’ asked Lady Helena.

  ‘He turned up alive and well and living in the Barbican Centre,’ I said. ‘Under the care of a Russian woman.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Not Varvara Sidorovna Tamonina?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ I said.

  ‘That lying witch!’ said Lady Helena and turned to her daughter. ‘You said she was lying, but I didn’t want to believe you.’

  ‘So you know each other?’ I asked.

  ‘Our paths have crossed,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But fuck her. Is Albert still alive?’

  Nightingale told her he wasn’t, which was an obvious relief. He gave some of the background, that he’d been disabled by brain damage, by hyperthaumaturgical degradation, but I noticed that he didn’t mention that Varvara Sidorovna had located and arranged for Albert Woodville-Gentle’s care on behalf of the second Faceless Man. Like me, he wanted to see if Lady Helena knew this already.

  ‘Perhaps you should start by telling us why you tried to kill him in the first place,’ said Nightingale and this, I realised, was why he had opted for tea in the Folly. In here we were all like-minded individuals of quality and learning, not police officers and suspects, and Lady Helena was about to regale us with an interesting story and not implicate herself for an attempted murder. Which was why I didn’t have my notebook out.

  But I was recording the conversation on a transistorised Dictaphone I’d picked up on eBay for exactly this purpose, and taped to the bottom of the coffee table. Transistors don’t last much longer than microprocessors when exposed to magic, but magnetic audio tape does. Which meant that even in the event of a major disagreement I’d still have a record. And that, boys and girls, is why we spend so much time in the lab doing experiments.

  ‘I grew up on a farm in Africa,’ said Lady Helena. ‘My father had inherited a title and not much else from his father and so after he was demobbed from the RAF he sought his fortune there.’

  There hadn’t been any other kids and she’d grown up ‘like a weed’ she said, the only child for a hundred miles around.

  ‘This was in the old days before the poachers decimated the local game,’ she said. ‘You still got animal attacks on the livestock, and once a leopard took a couple of village children.’ Her father had led the hunting party that had tracked it down and killed it. He’d sold the skin to help support the farm, but had kept the head as a trophy.

  ‘She still has it,’ said Caroline. ‘In a box in the attic – we used to spook ourselves by sneaking up to look at it.’

  ‘I wondered why things in the attic kept moving about,’ said Lady Helena. ‘I thought it might be a poltergeist. You lot are lucky I didn’t put down a trap.’

  I glanced over at Nightingale, who was probably thinking the same thing I was: what kind of trap, and where did you learn how to make one?

  Her mother hadn’t approved of the killing. As far as she was concerned, man was the interloper in Africa and shouldn’t be surprised when the animals merely followed their instincts.

  ‘If people aren’t willing to pay the price, my darling,’ her mum had said, ‘then perhaps people should live somewhere else.’

  Not that she feared for her daughter, who was left to explore on her own. Although generally speaking one of the houseboys would be told to keep an eye on her.

  ‘She’d already taught me the snapdragon by the time I was seven,’ said Lady Helena. Nightingale asked for a demonstration; she made a flicking gesture with her hand and there was a flash and a loud crack that echoed off the walls and caused Molly to suddenly appear behind Nightingale’s chair.

  It was too fast for me to read her signum but I got the same hint of burning candlewax that I’d felt in Harrods during the fight.

  Nightingale asked Molly if we might have a fresh pot of tea. Caroline nodded enthusiastically at this and helped herself to a Manchester Tart – or it might have been a Liverpool Tart, I can’t always tell them apart.

  ‘What did the locals think about the magic?’ I asked, thinking of my mum, who has definite views about spells, witches and where they fit into a well organised society – i.e. not around her.

  ‘These were tribesman,’ said Lady Helena. ‘They already believed in magic. I don’t think they saw anything strange in it – even if we were wa
zungu.’

  They were much more enthusiastic about her mother’s ability to set bones and treat injuries. Nightingale asked where she’d learnt those particular skills.

  ‘The basics were handed down,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But she refined the techniques working on her animals.’

  ‘What about the natives?’ I asked.

  Lady Helena glared at me and then looked away.

  ‘You have to understand,’ she said, her eyes on Nightingale. ‘There were no hospitals or clinics nearby – she couldn’t turn people away.’

  Nightingale nodded understandingly.

  There were limitations to what her mother could do. Gross physical damage, broken bones, cuts and abrasions were easy enough. But not diseases or chronic conditions.

  ‘Cancer,’ said Lady Helena bitterly. ‘Obvious tumours she could excise and then promote healing at the site. But she couldn’t reach anything systemic. Including her own leukaemia.’

  She hadn’t told her family either, until it was too late for chemotherapy.

  ‘This was after the Emergency,’ she said, ‘after we’d moved to Uganda.’

  I wanted to ask what kind of formae her mother had used to knit bones and heal tissue, but Nightingale had discussed this with me in advance.

  ‘Please try not to be distracted by the details, Peter,’ he’d said. ‘We want to know about her connection to Fossman and what she knows about the Faceless Man. If all goes well, there’ll be plenty of time to satisfy your curiosity later.’

  My curiosity? I thought, as Lady Helena talked about bones healing in days not weeks. Dr Walid’s going to break his Hippocratic oath and kill us because we didn’t invite him along. Thank god I’ll have the recording to keep him sweet.

  After her mother died, her father packed her off to posh school to finish her education. But this was London in the sixties and there was no end of mischief a fearless young woman could get up to in those days. Stripping off for David Bailey was the least of it.

  ‘You know the list, darling,’ she said to Nightingale. ‘Sex, drugs, rock and roll. But of course I found myself drawn into what they call the demi-monde.’ She looked at me. ‘French for half-world,’ she said, obviously unaware of the existence of Google. ‘A bit more exclusive in those days, less fashionable.’ She grinned. ‘Less safe.’

  She met a young man called Albert Woodville-Gentle there, who could do magic.

  ‘Not as well as me,’ she said. ‘He was all bash, bash, bash – no finesse.’

  ‘You were lovers?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘On occasion,’ said Lady Helena. ‘When the mood took us.’

  ‘Friends with benefits,’ said Caroline.

  ‘Such a vulgar term,’ said Lady Helena.

  Caroline caught my eye and mouthed fuck-buddies behind her mum’s back.

  Magic was what drew them together. They spent the summer of ’66 breaking the bank in Monte Carlo and then wintered in Tangiers spending the proceeds. All the time teaching each other magic and refining their technique.

  ‘And having spectacular sex on the roof,’ said Lady Helena. ‘With Chris Farlowe and Procol Harum on the radio.’

  Caroline winced.

  They arrived back in London on a grey day in October ’67 and found everything had changed.

  ‘You could practically feel it oozing out of the stones,’ said Lady Helena. ‘And there were new faces in the old haunts. It wasn’t the London we’d known; it felt dangerous, alienating. At least that’s how I felt.’

  Albert Woodville-Gentle seemed to find it more agreeable.

  ‘By that time I’d already set my sights on India,’ she said and off she went, although via BOAC rather than the hippy trail. ‘I studied at an ashram, got myself a guru or two.’ But she couldn’t find an indigenous magic tradition. ‘Although I got the strong sense that there was something going on under the surface. I didn’t know about the Rivers in those days, or I might have looked in somewhat different areas. They knew about your lot, though,’ she nodded at Nightingale. ‘I’m not sure you left a good impression in India.’

  ‘So you didn’t find what you were looking for?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Helena. ‘I never found an Indian magical tradition, at least not one based on what we might understand as magic.’ But she did find a vocation, a sense of purpose, in the slums of Calcutta.

  ‘Unless you’ve been there you can’t believe what it’s like,’ she said. ‘That vast press of humanity crowding in from all sides, the noise, the colour, the chaos, the smells and the pain, the suffering. If you plan to stay you either hide behind walls or you roll up your sleeves and try to help.’

  She helped set up a free clinic in a poverty stricken suburb and there she found a use for the magical techniques that her mother had developed in Africa. ‘At first I kept it simple,’ she said. ‘Broken bones and physical injuries, but in Paikpara that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You could work yourself to death just dealing with the diarrheal conditions.’ And she wanted to, because these were things that were killing the kids. But the real problem was poor sanitation and poverty.

  ‘There was nothing I could do about either, but I thought I might be able to do something about leprosy,’ she said and I almost dropped my second slice of Bakewell tart.

  ‘Did you?’ I asked, which got me a frown from Nightingale.

  ‘For the disease, no,’ she said. ‘For the symptoms, for the nerve damage, sometimes. But not remotely reliably. I thought I saw a way it might be done, but I needed money, for medical supplies and equipment.’ And to meet the huge need that pressed in around her every day.

  So she returned to London to set up a fundraising arm for her charity, and ran straight back into the arms of Albert Woodville-Gentle who was just as charming as he’d ever been. After getting reacquainted they came to an arrangement – Albert would provide seed funding and run the London end of the charity, and in exchange Helena would share the techniques she’d developed in India.

  I thought of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau where Albert Woodville-Gentle had created real cat-girls and tiger-boys and other things that Nightingale wouldn’t let me see. And I thought of the smooth new skin of Lesley May’s face, and found it suddenly hard to keep an expression of polite interest on mine.

  ‘You never suspected how he might use it,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘I received a phone call in May 1979,’ said Lady Helena. ‘The caller asked me if I knew what my “good friend” was really up to. They gave me the address of a club in Soho. I believe you know the one I’m talking about.’

  ‘On Brewer Street,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Do you know who made the call?’ I asked.

  Lady Helena did not; she’d been busy when she’d taken it and hadn’t understood the implications.

  ‘A woman,’ she said. ‘English certainly, or at least she didn’t have an accent.’

  A woman with a posh accent, I thought. Because people always think their own accent is universal.

  ‘Did you visit the club?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘I’d been due to visit London that summer, so instead of calling Albert to let him know I’d arrived I popped in on my way to my hotel,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Do you know what was in the foyer?’

  Nightingale nodded.

  I certainly remembered, the disembodied head of Larry ‘The Lark’ Piercingham, petty criminal, grass and object lesson in why you didn’t cross the Faceless Man. He’d been done up like a fortune-telling machine and, as far as Dr Walid could establish later, kept in a semi-state of aliveness for over thirty years.

  Lady Helena smacked her palm on the coffee table making the china rattle.

  ‘I developed that technique,’ she said and her face was suddenly flushed. ‘In an emergency you can use it to stave off brain death.’ She raised her hand again, but hesitated and then dropped it into her lap.

  ‘Have you taught it to anyone else?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean, why hav
en’t I given it to the drug companies?’ asked Lady Helena. ‘Because it’s difficult, dangerous to the witch, and has a one-in-twenty success rate. I’d used it in extremis and tried to refine it, but the most common result is a type of terrible half-life.’

  ‘Zombies,’ said Caroline, which got her a glare from her mother. ‘What? I’m just saying – zombies. That’s what you get when it goes wrong.’

  ‘I decided I couldn’t trust anyone with the technique,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Least of all the medical establishment. God, can you imagine what the military might do with it? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  It was after her encounter with Larry the Lark that she concluded the medical knowledge she’d developed was too dangerous to be passed on.

  ‘I’ve decided that it has to die with me,’ she said.

  ‘What about Albert?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘Quite,’ she said. ‘What about dear old Albert?’

  She’d arranged to meet him at her hotel, but he must have heard that she’d visited the club because he turned up ready to fight.

  ‘It was a sort of mutual ambush,’ said Lady Caroline. ‘He had first go, but I always was faster than him. Things got rather disagreeable and I’m afraid the hotel rather bore the brunt of it. So it’s just as well I always stayed under an assumed name.’

  ‘Was this the Pontypool Hotel on Argyle Square?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘As a matter of fact it was,’ said Lady Helena.

  ‘I was called in to investigate that,’ said Nightingale. And, to me, ‘They thought it was a gas explosion at first, then arson and then the IRA. Only once they’d exhausted those possibilities did they think of me, and the trail had grown somewhat cold by then.’ He looked at Lady Helena again. ‘Thank you for clearing that up.’

  Not to mention thank you for adding attempted murder, gross negligence and identity fraud to your charge list, I thought, or explaining your cheerfully relaxed attitude to medical ethics.

  ‘You do understand what happens when you overuse magic?’ she asked.

  ‘We call it hyperthaumaturgical degradation,’ said Nightingale.