The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

If the kitchen had been colonised by the money, then the study had been irretrievably lost to literature a long time ago. Every spare centimetre of the wall space had been covered with shelves, all of which were stuffed with books. It reminded me of my dad’s record collection, which had filled up my parents’ bedroom and pushed every other activity except sleeping out into the rest of their small flat. Which was why my old bedroom was now my mum’s walk-in wardrobe and shoe store. But unlike my dad’s precious vinyl, which has to be stored vertical and absolutely upright in exactly the right sized shelves, here books spilled out onto the floor and across the big hardwood dining room table in the middle of the room that substituted for a desk. Albert Pryce wasn’t averse to using his books as coffee coasters, or to weigh down piles of hardcopy or even as an impromptu building material for shelves where they served to support even more books, an old fashioned boombox and a row of withered potted plants.

  ‘Have you spotted them yet?’ asked Albertina.

  Since I was looking for signs that her dad was an ethically challenged practitioner, I doubted I was looking for whatever she was talking about, and I was just about to say no when I did spot them.

  Most of the shelving had enough horizontal spacing to take quite tall books but one unit had clearly been custom built to take small, old fashioned paperbacks. The spines were colourful, smooth and uncracked. I knew the signs – this was a collection, not a library.

  I looked at Albertina, who grinned back and said that it was OK for me to touch them.

  ‘The Intern is totally desperate to leave these behind,’ she said. ‘She had someone in to value them – on the sly.’

  I pulled out a book at random – it had a solid yellow spine and a DAW logo. The cover looked like a classic Frazetta or a good imitation – all muscular white men and women in implausibly tight spacesuits with bubble helmets. The title was The Crystal Spires of Mazarin by T.J. Morton. I checked the next book along and found it was the same title – this time the New English Library edition with a cover depicting a strange alien landscape with globular trees and improbably low-hanging planets. A random sample of the rest of the bookcase revealed multiple first paperback editions of three SF writers I’d never heard of – although I was pretty sure I’d read at least a couple of the books – the aforementioned T.J. Morton, Allen Vincent and Carter Houston. There was a lot of Carter Houston, who apparently specialised in mighty thewed barbarians and, if the quotes on the front were to be believed, was favourably compared with Howard’s Conan and John Norman’s Gor.

  ‘Interesting choice of authors,’ I said.

  ‘Not authors,’ said Albertina. ‘Author – they’re all pen names.’

  ‘Not your dad?’ I said. It couldn’t be, because some of the books dated back to the 1950s – although he could have been a teen prodigy like my father.

  ‘Close,’ she said. ‘It was Granddad.’

  Who, according to my obviously flawed IIP report on the Pryce family, had led a blameless life teaching Military History at Aberystwyth University. And, according to Albertina, who was obviously a fan, also had a sideline as a prolific pulp SF writer until the early seventies – just about the time his son Albert had picked up his first literary award for his debut novel Cunning Men.

  And I thought of the person who had written, in Elvish script, the words If You Can Read This You Are Not Only A Nerd But Probably Dead across the face of a Demon Trap.

  I was trying to think of a way of segueing the conversation around to asking whether her dad ever talked about magic or ghosts or anything of that ilk, when my phone rang. It was a call from Bromley Crime Squad regarding Aiden Burghley.

  ‘Have you found him yet?’ I asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ said Bromley. ‘Bits of him, anyway.’

  10

  Picking Up the Pieces

  Everybody’s a slave to their habits, little behavioural tics that we’re often barely conscious of – and even if we are, we probably couldn’t change them if we wanted to. Bev always sleeps on the left side of the bed, Guleed always puts three sugars in her black Americano, and the Faceless Man has two ways of killing people he wants dead. If it’s just business then he favours the quiet and forensically invisible approach – an apparent suicide or a sudden heart attack. If he’s pissed off or wants to make an example, then it gets very messy indeed. Having your dick bitten off or your bones set on fire from the inside are only a couple of the merry ways that we know of for certain.

  We’d been reluctant to employ a forensic psychologist because of the well-founded fear that they might section us for believing in fairies. But you didn’t need a degree to figure out that the whole ‘making an example’ aspect was actually bollocks. It was simply an excuse to do horribly inventive things to his fellow human beings.

  You certainly had to wonder what poor Aiden Burghley had done to justify having his face nailed to a tree in a small park in suburban South London.

  Well, not nailed exactly. Removed from his skull and attached to the trunk at head height – my head height, I noticed – not Aiden’s, who had been shorter.

  Downham Fields was a low green mound that formed the centrepiece of Downham Estate – a 1920s housing estate in Lewisham. Built by the London County Council as a low-rent version of the then-fashionable garden city idea, it was to house the ‘respectable’ working class of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe in six thousand unremarkable semis. Unremarkable, of course, providing you’d grown up with such luxuries as indoor plumbing and back gardens. To ensure that the hoi polloi were properly appreciative of the largesse bestowed upon them, the LCC employed inspectors to enforce acceptable standards of cleanliness and order. Although this wasn’t enough reassurance for the residents of a nearby private estate, who insisted on a two metre wall topped with broken glass to maintain a suitable degree of separation.

  The low hill in the park was crowned by a Catholic church and attached school and further down the slope was a rectangular copse of trees which I totally failed to identify. Just inside the treeline, in a surprisingly compact area, was what was left of Aiden Burghley.

  Bromley MIT had already done a preliminary canvass of the area, plus house to house and CCTV, before gleefully dumping it all on Nightingale, me and Stephanopoulos and skipping away with happy cries. They wanted nothing to do with it. I could empathise – neither did I.

  According to Bromley’s timeline, the murder had taken place in a fifteen minute window between when a couple of schoolkids had walked past the trees on their way to the leisure centre next to the church and a Mr Thomas Gantry had noticed Chuck, his Irish Setter, bounding towards him with what turned out not to be a stray leg of pork.

  Chuck really hadn’t wanted to relinquish his prize, and finally had to be distracted with a piece of cheese to make him let go. Dr Jennifer Vaughan found the whole thing very educational.

  ‘I didn’t even know dogs liked cheese,’ she said, and took saliva samples from Chuck for elimination purposes.

  In that fifteen minute window Aiden Burghley had been dismembered at every major joint – ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and wrist – leaving just his head and torso lying at the base of a tree. That part was still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt he’d been wearing when I interviewed him. Later stress analysis determined that this was because his limbs had been torn out of their sockets by an extreme axial force strong enough to rip skin and snap tendons.

  ‘Not something that’s easy to do,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Particularly with a young person,’ he added, and then had a discussion with Dr Vaughan about whether the victim’s youthfully stretchy skin would have made that much difference to the level of force required.

  Aiden Burghley’s head was a nightmare, the skin of the face having been neatly removed to reveal the dried-meat coloured muscles and tendons beneath. It looked almost surgical, although later microscopic inspection revealed that the tissue had been torn rather than cut. His face had then been mounted on a tree so that it looked out over the curving row
s of identical semi-detached houses that stretched away to the horizon.

  I sighted along the direction of his gaze, but saw nothing remarkable. It had been raining off and on, and the clouds were low, so the visibility was crap. The wind kept picking at the corners of the white forensic tents that the SOCOs were trying to jockey into position to cover all the bits.

  ‘I’m not sure I like the implications of this development at all,’ said Nightingale, and I knew he was thinking of Lesley’s new face and the medical miracle magic of the Viscountess Linden-Limmer.

  ‘This is him talking directly to us, you know,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘That’s what I don’t like.’

  The Doctors Walid and Vaughan agreed that the Faceless Man might be showing off, especially when Dr Vaughan reported that the skin of the face had been fused to the bark. And, more importantly, that the wood itself had been subtly reshaped to substitute for the bones and cartilage that normally gives the face its shape.

  ‘Otherwise I seriously doubt you’d have recognised him so easily,’ she said.

  It still seemed unnecessarily flashy. And why Downham Fields, when there were half a dozen open green spaces further south – much closer to Bromley and Aiden Burghley’s old stamping ground?

  ‘There’s a chance that this may have very little to do with Mr Burghley at all,’ said Nightingale. ‘At least nothing personal, per se.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said, because if there was something the Faceless Man liked better than a dismemberment then it was creating a distraction in one place while he sneaked in and murdered whoever his real target was.

  I looked at Nightingale, who frowned back.

  ‘Reynard,’ I said.

  It’s amazing how fast you can cross London in a vintage Jag if you put on blues and twos and your governor drives like a maniac. Although there’s still nothing to be done about the gridlock on Vauxhall Bridge in the evening, except invest in a Sherman tank. We’d called ahead to Belgravia to tell the custody sergeant to put the custody suite on lockdown and I mentally added ‘Falcon Lockdown Procedures’ to the ever-growing consultation document.

  I had the Jag’s Airwave set to Belgravia’s channel and Nightingale drove in silence through the grey drizzle as we listened out for screams and lamentations. But these didn’t start until we arrived back to find half a busy Monday night’s customers piling up in the corridor, and the shift duty inspector waiting for us with a dangerous gleam in his eye and a metaphorical rolling pin in his hand. After him was the custody sergeant who pointed out that her duty of care extended to all the prisoners in her cells, thank you. She’d heard the rumours of collapsing houses, burning markets and what really happened at the Saville Row nick a couple of years back. She wanted a pretty comprehensive risk assessment or, failing that, we could take our suspect somewhere else – thank you very much.

  We couldn’t take Reynard to the Folly because, never mind that we weren’t PACE compliant, we didn’t even have any cells – although I suppose we could have put him in one of the disused servant’s rooms in the attic. The custody sergeant suggested that Paddington Green, it being where we lock up the terrorist suspects, would be a more suitable location. But Nightingale didn’t agree.

  ‘A prisoner’s always most vulnerable when he’s being moved,’ he said. ‘And, in any case, if our adversary was truly planning an attack I believe he would have done it by now.’

  But I noticed he arranged to spend the shift in the custody suite. Which meant I got sent off to fetch refs, make a formal note of our actions and catch up on the paperwork. David Carey asked if I wanted to go to the pub to celebrate his successful raid which had netted two butcher’s knives, a bag of slightly doubtful skunk and, the reason for the celebration, three thousand quid in used readies that had ‘intent to supply’ written all over them. Beverley was babysitting her sister Brent that evening so a bit of moderate police boozing seemed appropriate . . . right up until FBI Agent Kim Reynolds rang me on her disposable pay as you go.

  ‘I thought I’d finally take you up on that kebab,’ she said.

  It actually took me a couple of seconds to process that. To remember Shepherd’s Bush Market in the snow, Zach having the snot kicked out of him and me knocking Kimberley down with impello because I thought she was reaching for a gun.

  Then we’d gone round the corner for a kebab – or at least I did – Kimberley had stuck to Coca Cola despite the fact that the coffee hadn’t actually been that bad.

  ‘There’s always time for a cheeky kebab,’ I said. ‘When are you going to be hungry?’

  ‘About an hour,’ she said.

  ‘Kebab it is then,’ I said, and then popped down to tell Nightingale where I was going.

  The Uxbridge Road was full of hunched figures hurrying for the Tube station as I found a rare parking space down a side street and hunched my own way through the irritatingly persistent rain to the other side of the bridge.

  It was your classic Kurdish kebab place in that it looked exactly like the Greek kebab places I’d grown up with, only now the meat was guaranteed halal. Just to shake things up, Kimberley had gone for the coffee while I, as a mark of respect to the late Aiden Burghley, had a falafel.

  Kimberley had eschewed the mandated FBI agent-in-a-suit look for a pair of off-duty black jeans, an orange and grey sweatshirt with OSU embossed across the front, a blue quilted jacket and, as far as I could tell, no shoulder holster.

  ‘You stopped dyeing your hair,’ I said.

  ‘Since I was already knee deep in The X-Files, I gave up trying to hide the colour,’ she said.

  ‘So the X-Files are real?’

  ‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? But I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ she said.

  ‘What, no UFOs?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Kimberley and sipped her coffee with every sign of pleasure. ‘I’ll be sure to let you know if they turn up.’

  I asked what had dragged her back across the Pond.

  She waved her hand around at the worn Formica and easy-clean plastic interior of the kebab shop.

  ‘This is all your fault,’ she said.

  ‘I really don’t think it is,’ I said.

  Kimberley begged to differ.

  ‘After our little adventures underground I was curious,’ she said. ‘It didn’t seem likely that you Brits had a monopoly on . . .’ she hesitated.

  ‘Magic?’

  ‘It seemed unlikely,’ she shrugged. ‘That’s the trouble with being law enforcement – you can’t let things go.’

  So she dug around and was probably not as subtle as she thought she was, because the next thing she knew she was sitting in her supervisor’s office with a Deputy Assistant Director who’d flown in specially from Washington that very morning just to have a conversation with her.

  ‘He had my London file open on the desk and looked me in the eye and said “Do you have anything else to add to this report?” And I said I may have, but that I wasn’t sure he was going to like it.’ She grinned. ‘I’m paraphrasing here you understand. He said, “Why don’t you just tell me and I’ll be the judge of that.”’

  ‘So what did you tell him?’

  ‘Well I started out small – just testing the waters. A little bit about how you seemed to be able to do some things I wasn’t sure I could explain. He just nodded at me and asked if I’d encountered other instances of magic during my investigation.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I told him everything. About you, Nightingale, Lesley, the Folly – even the people living under the city – didn’t seem to faze him at all.’ She was offered a transfer to Washington within a week.

  ‘I say offered,’ said Kimberley. ‘It was more ordered.’

  To the Office of Partner Engagement, which handles co-operation between the FBI, ‘partner’ agencies and local law enforcement.

  ‘So is that where they keep the X-Files?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she leant back on her chair. ‘There’s a big secret ware
house.’

  Mostly she worked a regular shift engaging with the FBI’s partners.

  ‘Whether they wanted to be engaged with or not,’ she said.

  The weird shit she was supposed to deal with in her spare time.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘They’ve had me looking into the possibility of demonic possession of active shooters,’ she said. Active shooters being individuals who arm themselves and then pop out to kill as many innocent bystanders as possible. There had been a definite upward trend in both incidents and casualty rates since the turn of the century, and since gun control was off the table the FBI had been looking for other preventative measures. Kimberley had actually found literature on the subject from, of all places, the Centers for Disease Control. They’d commissioned a 1995 study that hinted, very obliquely, that some incidents of mass murder could not be solely attributed to normal criminality or psychological conditions. The study had never been officially released and no follow-up had ever been authorised. So Kimberley had gone on a road trip around the US interviewing all the surviving gunmen that would talk to her.

  I thought of Mr Punch and the trail of bloody mayhem he’d left behind him and asked if she had any confirmed cases.

  ‘That’s hard to say,’ said Kimberley. ‘Half the time the shooter kills himself or is shot dead by first responders. And the rest all have their own sad stories.’ They’d been abused or victimised or they just plain didn’t like the way the world had treated them and had decided to teach it a lesson.

  But there had been one interview Kimberley had conducted in Florence, Arizona. A thirty-six year old white male who’d inexplicably woken up one morning, shot his wife and then driven over to his mother-in-law’s house to shoot her, too, and only missed making the FBI’s list of mass killers because he’d been tackled by the postman before he could open up at the local 7-Eleven.

  He claimed, during his interview with Kimberley, that he’d been possessed by the spirit of a bear.

  ‘“An old bear,” he said. From a time before the arrival of the white man – an angry old bear,’ said Kimberley.