The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  One of them had brought along a fully rugged Tough-book, presumably so they could play Angry Birds under battlefield conditions. Finula saw me looking and gave a rueful shake of her head.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

  ‘Does it self-destruct?’ I asked.

  The blondie gave me an irritated look, but DC Kittredge’s lips twitched.

  ‘No,’ said Finula. ‘But in a pinch you can beat someone to death with it.’

  ‘I’d like to know how you disabled their vehicle,’ said Blondie.

  ‘I could show you,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind me demonstrating on your laptop.’

  Finula put her hand on top of the case, an unconscious protective movement and I thought: You totally know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

  ‘I believe the purpose of this meeting,’ said Nightingale, ‘is to pool information regarding our American friends.’

  ‘What with all the new Islamist franchises springing up,’ said Finula, ‘not to mention the hardy perennials on the far right and the unrepentant Fenians, we’re a little bit too stretched to spare much attention for our closest allies.’

  ‘Do you know who they are?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘We do now,’ said Finula. ‘They’re a PMC based outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. They’ve done a few small scale contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq – which is how we know them – but nothing like as active as Blackwater. Their official name is Alderman Technical Solutions but that was registered in 2005. Before that it gets murky, but we think they were probably known as The Virginia Gentleman’s Company.’

  Nightingale stirred.

  ‘That name is familiar,’ he said. ‘I believe I met them during the war.’

  According to Nightingale, they’d formed the second wave of American practitioners who’d joined the war effort following Pearl Harbour. The first wave had consisted of a hundred or so volunteers from the University of Pennsylvania, the so-called Printer’s Men, who’d arrived in 1940 and worked directly with the Folly or in conjunction with Special Operations Executive.

  The Virginia Gentlemen, inevitably nicknamed ‘The Virgins’, had kept themselves separate from the British and Commonwealth practitioners.

  ‘They mostly operated out of Istanbul,’ said Nightingale. ‘I got the impression that they had a rather low opinion of us, and of course there was the little matter of our allying with Tecumseh in 1812.’

  Blondie perked up and asked for a clarification.

  Apparently back in 1812, when the special relationship was special in a whole different way, British policy had been to support the creation of a Native American confederacy as a buffer between an aggressively expansionist United States and the completely peace-loving and not in any way land-grabbing bit of the British Empire soon to be known as Canada.

  When the Treaty of Ghent ended the War of 1812, the British, in time-honoured fashion, abandoned their allies. Who were subsequently wiped out by the Americans along with any other tribes that happened to be in the same general vicinity – even those that had actually been allied with the US government during the war. It’s exactly this sort of thing, of course, which gives colonialism a bad name.

  Nightingale had gained the impression that the Virgins had never forgiven the Folly for its role in providing Tecumseh’s medicine men with modern Newtonian techniques.

  ‘They rather avoided having anything to do with us,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Were they involved in the attack on Ettersberg?’ asked Finula.

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘They were . . .’ he paused, looking for the right word, ‘. . . contemptuous. They didn’t believe the research the Germans were doing represented a significant threat to the Allied cause. I thought they were wrong about the threat, but right about the dangers of launching a major operation so deep into enemy territory.’

  Dangers that were realised when the cream of British wizardry was cut down in the forests of Grosser Ettersberg.

  ‘Of course we didn’t know about the Manhattan Project at that time,’ said Nightingale, ‘although I rather suspect they did.’ There was a definite note of bitterness there. Personally, I thought it was probably better that parts of Southern Germany didn’t glow in the dark . . . but then I didn’t leave most of my friends in that forest.

  Nightingale shook his head and gave the spooks a tight smile.

  ‘Of course, none of this is relevant to the present case,’ he said.

  ‘Did you know the Americans were on their way?’

  ‘I was given a heads up last week,’ I said.

  ‘This would be a phone call from Agent Kimberley Reynolds of the FBI,’ said Finula. ‘Yes?’

  I said it was and they asked if I’d been in contact with her since.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to land her in it.’

  ‘So you don’t know she boarded an American Airlines flight from New York last night,’ said Finula. ‘That can hardly be a coincidence now – can it?’

  We agreed that it probably wasn’t, but it also wasn’t anything I’d done.

  ‘Tell me, officer,’ said Nightingale. ‘Which worries you the most – the idea that we have our own channels of communication with the Americans, or that we don’t?’

  ‘What worries us,’ said Finula, putting the emphasis on the plural, ‘is that as the agency charged with the defence of the realm we are only hearing about this now.’

  ‘We didn’t feel it was required,’ said Nightingale. ‘We rather thought you had your hands full, what with the Irish Republicans and the like. And there was a clear agreement in 1948 that magic and the demi-monde would remain our responsibility.’

  ‘That was half a century ago,’ said Finula. ‘In those days we didn’t officially exist and we took a man’s word that he was playing a straight bat. Now we run recruitment ads in the Guardian and have a mission statement and everything. Things have moved on a bit, the world has changed and we with it – you have not.’ She glanced at me. ‘Or at least not noticeably. We cannot ignore the potential damage that could be inflicted by an individual armed with your suite of capabilities.’

  I squirrelled away that last phrase for my upcoming briefing document.

  ‘Especially,’ said Finula, ‘when we don’t have an effective counter.’

  ‘Shoot them in the head with a rifle,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or a pistol from close range if the practitioner is not on guard.’

  ‘Would that work on you?’ asked Finula.

  ‘It has worked on me,’ said Nightingale. ‘Twice. You see, you can train an irregular in a couple of weeks and you can learn how to make a bomb by reading a book. But it takes years to become even somewhat useful in a fight using magic.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Unless you’re a particularly gifted student and even then . . .’ he shrugged.

  ‘And its use in interrogation is limited,’ I said. ‘Because training someone to resist the glamour is easy.’

  ‘All of this is beside the point,’ said Nightingale. ‘We shall of course include you in the latest round of consultation papers, given that you are—’ he looked to me for help.

  ‘Stakeholders,’ I said and he gave me the ghost of a wink.

  ‘But unless you have anything useful to tell us, then I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us,’ said Nightingale and stood. I dutifully followed him up.

  They didn’t have anything useful to say after that, so we took ourselves off.

  ‘Another feint by Tyburn, do you think?’ asked Nightingale as we drove back to Belgravia.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re just out in the open these days. I’m amazed the media haven’t jumped on us yet.’ I’d expected Tyburn to at least think about using the media as leverage in her long running campaign to ‘reform’ the Folly. I had to assume she was being blocked by her sister Fleet, or possibly even by her mother.

  Beverley had wanted to know if the whole collapsing house thing had been down to Tyburn. She’d asked about it as we’d shared a bath
on Sunday morning – her version of tea and sympathy.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ I’d asked. ‘She’s your sister.’

  The Tyburn ran right behind Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ house, in the direction that the first burst of water had come from. And we were still waiting for the Thames Water engineering report as to where the flood had originated.

  I said I didn’t think she was that angry with me.

  ‘Maybe not with you,’ said Beverley and walked her toes up my chest. ‘But she’s been backing up pipes from Westminster to Hampstead since you arrested baby Ollie. Lesbian she can cope with, drug dealer she can cope with – Ollie grassing herself up to cover for her girlfriend? That had to piss her off big time.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, if it was her then she definitely wasn’t after you.’

  I asked how she knew.

  ‘You’re still breathing,’ she said.

  I didn’t think it was Lady Ty either – even though she’d joined her daughter as a person of interest in the house collapse, with her very own nominal node in HOLMES and a set of actions aimed at eliminating her from the inquiry.

  I figured that Phoebe Beaumont-Jones had been talking to the Faceless Man when they’d been interrupted first by Crew Cut and his American Virgins and then by me and my unfailing ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The flood had just been to cover his escape, or I doubt any of us would still be walking about. He might have hoped that Lady Ty would get the blame, although why he might have thought that was a bit of a mystery – maybe he knew something we didn’t, or perhaps he was getting bad advice?

  And if Phoebe was right – that the Faceless Man was a parent of a student at St Paul’s, even better, a parent that she’d met personally – then the haystack he was hiding in was finally getting shrunk down to a manageable size.

  Once we were at Belgravia we measured up our haystack and looked for shortcuts.

  Guleed was back at St Paul’s to gather up the names of the parents or guardians of all the students. Stephanopoulos went with her to provide some senior rankage in case they faced any upper-class fuckery. While they did that, I drilled down into the reams of stuff we had on the parents of the kids who’d attended the unfortunate MDMA-and-brain-damage party. I considered disregarding the mothers, but it occurred to me that we didn’t know for certain that the Faceless Man was male. I also started going back over all the cases with suspected links to the Faceless Man to see if any of their faces fit. So to speak.

  A year ago Richard Lewis, a planning officer with Southwark Borough Council, had thrown himself in front of a tube train at Paddington station. We’d always suspected that he jumped under the influence of a glamour and had pinpointed the moment we thought the glamour had gone in. Since it occurred just short of the ticket barrier in a London Underground station, it happened in one of the most CCTV saturated places in the world. And since glamour was not something you did from a distance, the Faceless Man must have been caught on camera. Along with about a thousand other people.

  So I reckoned it was worth a punt and I spent some time with pictures of the parents, seeing if I could match any of them to faces in the crowd. And because magical facial recognition systems have yet to be invented, it had taken me most of the weekend. Except for the bits I spent at Bev’s and the two hours magic practise that Nightingale insisted on.

  ‘We need to work on your precision,’ he’d said.

  I didn’t spot anyone on the CCTV but I did catalogue most of the likely targets to make it easier for whatever poor sod got lumbered with the job of checking them against the parents of the entire school.

  ‘Plus staff,’ said Guleed. ‘Phoebe might have confused the two – children often do.’

  That search was going to stay a low priority because we had a key time frame, the collapse of the house on Friday evening, to check alibis against. Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ dad’s alibi being that he wasn’t in the country at the time, although it turned out he had gone to Magdalene College Oxford in the early nineties. Roughly the same time as the known Little Crocodile Richard Lewis, he who threw himself under a tube train, and Christina Chorley’s father Martin had been there too.

  It would have been nice if just one of them had gone to Cambridge or, god forbid, Bristol, which was where, according to Guleed, posh students went when they failed to get into Oxbridge.

  There was always the cheerful thought that the Faceless Man, in proper Sith Lord fashion, had trained up someone as his apprentice. But I didn’t think that was likely. If he’d had a fully trained apprentice he wouldn’t have needed Varvara, and if they weren’t trained then I could probably take them.

  But if that apprentice was Lesley May?

  Which one of us would hesitate the longest, I wondered.

  Normally when you TIE a nominal you send the lowest ranking member of the team round to flat out ask the subject to account for their whereabouts. Then, usually, the same lowly minion does all the cross referencing with CCTV, mobile phone records and/or actual living breathing witnesses to verify the alibi. We couldn’t do that with the Faceless Man because we couldn’t predict what he might do if he was tipped off. Since his capability envelope stretched from levelling a house to causing luckless members of the public to throw themselves off tall buildings it was, as Nightingale said, like hunting big game. We needed to stay downwind and undetected until we’d lined up our elephant gun. Since the elephant gun in question was Nightingale, this meant I had to wait until he was free before we could beard any suspects in their lairs.

  We started with Albert Pryce. And, because there was an off-chance that Nightingale’s mere presence might spook our quarry, he would remain hidden nearby ready to rush in and put the boot in. My role in that scenario was to race for the exit as fast as possible – taking any potential collateral with me.

  Unless Lesley was there, in which case I was supposed to grab her.

  As it was, when we tooled up outside Albert Pryce’s six bedroom semi in St John’s Wood he wasn’t even there – which was a bit of an intelligence failure. Fortunately Albertina answered the door and, without prompting, invited me in. I left Nightingale in the Jag contemplating the infinite, doing the crossword in the Telegraph and keeping an ear out for screams.

  The house was early Victorian enough to retain some Regency class. Inside it still looked like a place where people actually lived, with framed prints on the walls and bookshelves and furniture that had its corners smoothed off with use. There were signs that money had taken hold in the kitchen, though, sprouting handleless brushed steel cabinets, randomly deformed sink units and work surfaces as cheerfully domestic as a pathology lab.

  Albertina was doing her best to humanise it by spreading empty cups, jars with the tops off and knives sticking out, a dealer’s shuffle of brown bread spilling out of its packet and a recyclable plastic bottle of guaranteed organic semi-skimmed milk thoughtfully left in a patch of sunlight.

  ‘He’s gone to Aberystwyth to see grandma,’ said Albertina and offered me a marmite sandwich. ‘She’s not very happy with dad at the moment.’

  I wanted to ask where her dad had been on Friday evening, on the off-chance he’d been dropping a house on me at the time, but I couldn’t think of a way of slipping it into the conversation. Instead I asked why Albertina’s grandma wasn’t happy with him.

  ‘She doesn’t like the idea of him moving to America,’ said Albertina. ‘She says that she’s only just got used to him living in London.’

  ‘When did he move to London?’ I asked.

  ‘Forever ago,’ said Albertina.

  Actually, according to my notes, it had been just after he graduated in 1972. But when you’re seventeen forever isn’t a very long time at all.

  ‘Aberystwyth is miles,’ I said. ‘That’s a bit of a drive isn’t it? Or did he take the train?’

  ‘Dad doesn’t take the train anymore,’ said Albertina. ‘He says he’s allergic to other people. He drives up –
takes him ages.’

  ‘So when did he set out for Wales, then?

  ‘Friday morning,’ she said. ‘To avoid the traffic.’ She said it so smoothly I wondered if she’d been coached – but to what end? Still, some poor sod back at Belgravia was going to be spending some time with the ANPR logs to see whether Albert Pryce’s Mercedes M-class had been spotted on the M4, and if so at what time. I hoped it wasn’t going to be me.

  ‘When are you moving to the States?’ I said, wondering whether we were going to have to ask them politely to stay in the country and what earthly pretext we were going to justify it with.

  ‘Not until the spring,’ said Albertina. ‘And I’m not going with – this is totally just for him, the Intern and the Replacements.’

  The Intern being the woman featured in her father’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel, wife number three and mother of the two ‘replacements’ – even now, hopefully, vomiting all over the back seat of their mother’s Toyota as she ferried them from playgroup to kaffeeklatsch to ballet for tiny tots.

  ‘She’s the one that’s desperate to move back to States,’ said Albertina – and had persuaded her husband that he’d be treated with the respect he deserved there. Not like in London, where no one fully appreciated his genius.

  ‘Dad’s always been a bit insecure about that,’ said Albertina.

  ‘He won the Booker prize,’ I said. And had pretty much made the shortlist every year he had a new book out.

  Albertina shrugged.

  ‘He’s haunted by a deep dark secret,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, trying not to sound overly interested.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, and then asked if I liked sci-fi.

  I suggested that I was occasionally partial to a bit of SF – you know – when the mood took me.

  ‘Then you’ll love this,’ she said and took me to see her dad’s study.