The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  By agreement we all paused for coffee and scheming, and I asked Guleed what she thought of Phoebe’s father.

  ‘Actually he comes across as a bit dim,’ said Guleed

  ‘A perfectly pleasant fellow,’ said Nightingale. ‘But not what you’d call a world-class brain.’

  Which just goes to show that all a degree from Oxford guarantees is that the recipient went to Oxford and turned up for some lessons.

  ‘And it was a rather poor second at that,’ said Nightingale.

  It seemed that our Mr Beaumont-Jones had been more interested in the Oxford Revue than his Philosophy, Politics and Economics, although he’d also failed to generate a career in cutting topical satire.

  By the end of the morning, while we’d confirmed that he’d been booked in at an exclusive West End hotel at the time the Faceless Man was subjecting me to an involuntary swimming lesson with the Americans, we couldn’t confirm that he’d actually been in the hotel. Not only did the hotel in question not CCTV its visitors going in and out, discretion being part of the service, but we also hadn’t managed to track down ‘Anna’ the ‘open minded blonde’ that Jeremy Beaumont-Jones claimed to have bunged a grand to for a night of if not passion then a really good simulation of it. It didn’t help that he couldn’t remember which escort agency she’d come from, and had paid in cash so there was no electronic record. He hadn’t booked this young woman of negotiable affection on his own phone, and there was no record of his making an outside call from the phone in his room.

  It was a fair bet that someone at the hotel knew exactly which agency represented the young women who came and went, and David Carey had been actioned to take ‘statements’ from the staff until such time as someone coughed. Once that happened, Carey had declared, he was willing to work all hours tracking down escort agencies and taking statements from ‘the girls’.

  ‘That’s just how dedicated I am to this job,’ he’d said.

  ‘Rather him than me,’ said Guleed. ‘That’s a dreary job.’

  Jeremy Beaumont-Jones’ alibi for this Monday afternoon’s dismemberment in the park was equally porous. But walking around without an alibi was not sufficient grounds to charge either father or daughter. Or at least, it isn’t if the suspect has a decent lawyer.

  I reported Reynard’s assertion that Olivia had introduced Christina Chorley to The Chestnut Tree, and thus to the wonders of the demi-monde.

  ‘So Olivia McAllister-Thames was lying to us,’ said Seawoll. ‘Again.’

  ‘Somebody’s lying,’ I said, which got me a look of amused indulgence from Stephanopoulos and a snort from Seawoll. Of course somebody was lying – we were the police – somebody was always lying to us.

  ‘We have Olivia’s girlfriend,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘We can always ask her.’

  ‘No,’ said Seawoll. ‘I don’t like the way these posh buggers have been pissing us about.’ He looked at me and Nightingale. ‘Do you know this place?’ he asked, meaning The Chestnut Tree.

  Nightingale said we did, and Seawoll asked if we wouldn’t mind popping over and seeing if we couldn’t scare up some witnesses who could tell us exactly who had taken whom to where and what they were doing while they were there. Armed with that information we could then go back into an interview and nail said posh buggers’ hands to the table.

  Metaphorically. Or at least I hoped he meant metaphorically.

  You can’t take Nightingale to The Chestnut Tree, because by the time you’ve walked in the front door most of the clientele will have run out the back. In fact, on the off chance that this might prove useful one day, I once spent a fun morning trying to find the back door but to no avail. Rumour was that it opened into a secret subterranean passage which emerged in the Hyde Park car park. On this visit I did take Guleed, because Seawoll was more likely to believe her report than mine, and also I don’t go into The Chestnut Tree without someone watching my back.

  The place itself is on a windswept alleyway in Marble Arch just short of, and not to be mistaken for, the famous City of Quebec pub. There’s no sign on the door, but I’ve been told that the frame is made of genuine chestnut cut from the original tree. Inside is a short corridor painted that strange green colour that I assume someone, somewhere, once persuaded the brewery chains looked wholesome, inviting and encouraged people to drink to excess.

  At the end of the corridor there’s a short flight of stairs into the main saloon bar. That’s where the actual chestnut tree that presumably gave the pub its name grows out of the wall behind the bar. Or rather doesn’t grow, because it’s been dead for more than a hundred years, but its branches spread out in a tangle of bare limbs across the width of the saloon where they merge with the wooden booths that lurk in the gloom on the other side. Amongst the branches hung dusty iron and glass lamps holding what I really hoped were fake gas mantles, because using real ones would have been a bit of a health and safety violation.

  As I walked in, I caught a whiff of old sweat and hot pie which might have been bad ventilation or the memory of the crowds that flocked to this end of the Tyburn Road to watch the felons morris at the end of the rope.

  Morris being an old word for dance, by the way – it’s amazing what you pick up on the job.

  The woman behind the bar was reassuringly Romanian and didn’t flinch when I showed her my warrant card and asked to see the manager. The barmaid explained that she was out getting her lunch, but was expected back any minute. In the meantime would we like a drink?

  Not being tied to a brewery chain, The Chestnut Tree offered a range of beers in the mid- to totally obscure CAMRA range. I had a half of Sambrook’s Junction Ale, just to keep everything friendly and relaxed you understand, and Guleed had an orange juice and Perrier.

  It wasn’t easy, but we managed to find a table from which we could keep an eye on most of the saloon bar. The table top was made from planks of wood that had grown pitted with use and warped with age, possibly before being lacquered with what looked like about half a centimetre of varnish. Despite the ancient beer rings worn into the surface there was a printed sign in a freestanding iron frame which requested patrons to preserve the natural beauty of the genuine antique furniture, thank you – the management. In front of this was a stack of mismatched beermats. When I had a flick through, I found they were all from different breweries and, where marked, from different pubs. I learnt much later that it was considered good form for patrons to nick beermats from other pubs and donate them to The Chestnut Tree. The really rare ones from places like Tibet or obscure bars in Abeokuta ended up pinned to a cork board behind the stage in the adjoining public bar.

  ‘They have live music here,’ said Guleed, who’d found a leaflet stuffed into the iron frame. ‘Someone called the “Shanren Mountain Men Band” tonight – ever heard of them?’

  I said I hadn’t, nor had I heard of Lol Robinson or Laura Marling who were headlining the coming weekend.

  Guleed used an apparent interest in the playbill to give the room the once over. Places like The Chestnut Tree don’t get much of a lunchtime crowd. As a rule, the demi-monde doesn’t work nine to five, and so doesn’t need to get them in before heading back to the office for a couple of hours of pretending to work.

  That said, there was a bunch of young men in white shirts in a nearby booth, blue pinstripe jackets flung over the backs of their chairs – two white, one darker who might have been Turkish or somewhere equally Mediterranean. They looked like they might work in an office and I wondered if they knew where they were drinking or if they had wandered in by accident.

  In another booth two middle aged women were sitting hunched over their table so that their faces almost touched. One of them was so pale as to be actually white white with platinum blonde hair swept back behind reassuringly unpointed ears. Her friend was pinker, dark haired but with an upward curve to the corner of her eyes that I recognised from some of Edward Linley Sambourne’s illustrations for Charles Kingsley’s monograph on the taxonomy of the Fae. They m
ust have spotted us watching because they both turned to frown at us – I saw their eyes were an unsettling hazel brown. The last time I’d seen eyes that colour I’d been the wrong side of the faerie veil, where I would have stayed if Bev hadn’t turned up in a traction engine and given me a lift out.

  Me and Guleed pretended to be interested in our drinks because, you know, it’s rude to stare.

  We gave it ten minutes, enough time for me to finish my half, before I went back to the bar and asked after the manageress again. While I did that, Guleed went to stand in the archway that linked the saloon bar with the public bar beyond. We’d decided that was her best position to cover what we reckoned was the door to the staff area and also the steps back-up to the street. This way, should the manageress, or anyone else, make a sudden break for it, Guleed could intercept.

  ‘She texted me,’ said the Romanian barmaid and held up her phone for me to see. ‘She says she’ll be back soon.’

  I looked back and saw that Guleed was talking to a young Chinese guy in a purple open necked shirt, pre-faded jeans and leather trainers. He was short but broad-shouldered, his black hair cut with a long fringe. In his left hand, as if glued in place, he carried a slim bamboo and leather case which I couldn’t definitely identify as a sword scabbard only because of the blue drawstring pouch covering the pommel.

  He leaned forward like a bird dipping for fish and said something that made Guleed laugh. I saw her eyes flick in my direction and so did his. He turned to look at me, grinned, and gave me a polite nod and a mocking salute before turning and walking away.

  ‘That was interesting,’ said Guleed when she joined me. She showed me his card. It was expensive in its simplicity, a good card stock and superior printing. It read MICHAEL CHEUNG in black ink and, in smaller print underneath – LEGENDARY SWORDSMAN, and under that two clusters of Chinese characters. Guleed was reluctant to hand over the card, so I took a picture to send to Postmartin for translation and analysis.

  ‘He said that he was the new guy in Chinatown,’ said Guleed. ‘And when you had a moment he’d like you guys to drop in at the usual place for dinner. He said Nightingale would know which place.’

  ‘And it took him ten minutes to say that?’

  ‘He also gave me his phone number,’ she said.

  ‘You going to call him?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Guleed.

  ‘And if he draws that sword, are you going to arrest him?’

  ‘That depends, doesn’t it,’ said Guleed. ‘On what he does with it.’

  Which was Guleed for ‘mind your own business’, but I might have pursued the matter just a little bit further in the interest of intra-collegial due diligence if the manageress of The Chestnut Tree hadn’t chosen that moment to come back from lunch.

  She was a white woman in her late thirties with an oval face atop a rather long neck which she grew her light brown hair long enough to partially disguise. She was wearing a no-nonsense, easy to clean, light pink blouse with black jeans and nice comfortable flat shoes. Her eyes were light brown, but even before I got close enough to see the flecks of hazel-gold around the iris I had her pegged as being fayer than the client list of a New Zealand casting agency.

  Her name was Wanda Pourier and she had the kind of Estuary accent that says she could have grown up in London, only her parents moved to the Thames Valley when she was young – presumably to find work in the boredom mines.

  ‘We’d better talk in my office,’ she said. ‘We don’t want you lot scaring the punters more than you have already.’

  The staff area was unkempt and vaguely depressing in the way that staff areas always are. The punters get the gloss and the staff get scabby, peeling walls and lockers that looked like they’d been salvaged from a sunken U-boat. The manager’s office was just a spare bit of space randomly separated off with drywall and fitted with a long shelf down one side that served as both desk and storage space. There was a serious looking free-standing safe as far from the door as possible and the obligatory year planner taking up the free wall. Wanda sat in a battered operator’s chair and motioned us into the two grey stackable polyurethane seats that were the only other furniture.

  One thing that was missing was a computer – or even a desk calculator. Instead, an old fashioned gunmetal blue mechanical adding machine stood next to a stack of cheap ledgers, the type with carbon paper interleaves for the keeping of multiple records.

  I realised that we didn’t actually know who or what owned The Chestnut Tree and its prime bit of super-expensive London real estate. I put finding out on the long list that I carry around in my head, about two thirds of the way down – between rustproofing the Jag and taking Toby to the vet to get his nails clipped. Fortunately I didn’t have to fish for Wanda’s background because she volunteered it upfront.

  ‘My mother was a Falloy,’ she said. ‘Do you know what a Falloy is?’

  ‘Irish surname,’ said Guleed.

  ‘That too,’ said Wanda.

  A Falloy, according to Joseph Malzeard in his work On the Natural Order of the Unnatural, was a creature one half human, one eighth unseelie fae and three eighths seelie fae. Malzeard described them as ‘pleasant fellows in the main albeit shiftless and prone to small mischiefs’. I didn’t mention this to Wanda because it’s good practice not to let on how much you know about a particular witness, and also because I know racist bollocks when I read it.

  ‘What’s a Falloy?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘We’re a little bit of this, a little bit of that,’ said Wanda. ‘My parents were originally from Brittany.’ Which explained the surname as well.

  I said that we were looking to check whether she’d noticed certain people visiting the pub in the last six months.

  ‘This is purely for elimination purposes,’ added Guleed.

  I took out my official police tablet and showed her some pictures.

  ‘That one looks familiar,’ she said when I showed her Jeremy Beaumont-Jones.

  ‘Has he been in here?’ asked Guleed.

  Wanda shook her head.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wait, I have seen him. He was much younger. Was he a student at Oxford?’

  I said he had been, but I was careful to keep it vague. Once you get them talking, witnesses like to tell you what you want to hear. It’s depressingly easy to lead them astray – just asks the inmates of any remand wing.

  ‘I did catering at Oxford College in the early nineties,’ she said. ‘I used to do silver service jobs to pay the bills. There was plenty of work around the colleges; they always seemed to be stuffing their faces for one reason or another.’

  I nodded – Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been at Oxford at that time.

  ‘I remember him because we did a couple of jobs for this dining club,’ she said. ‘And they were a bit odd, if you know what I mean?’

  ‘Scientology odd?’ asked Guleed. ‘Or My Little Pony odd?’

  ‘Our kind of odd,’ said Wanda, making a little swirling gesture with her hand that took in all three of us. Guleed frowned at that and gave me an accusing look.

  ‘Magic, right?’ I said.

  Wanda gave me a small smile and tilted her head to one side.

  ‘Or are we talking fae?’ I asked, but I knew exactly who we were talking about.

  ‘Wizard stuff,’ said Wanda. ‘You know, spells and wheels and compasses.’

  I rummaged around on the tablet until I found a student photograph of Jeremy Beaumont-Jones that I’d lifted off his Facebook Page.

  ‘Definitely him,’ said Wanda.

  I found similarly youthful pictures of Martin Chorley and a couple of other suspected Little Crocodiles, but she didn’t recognise any of them. She did identify a contemporary picture of Geoffrey Wheatcroft, DPhil, former wizard, theology lecturer and the man stupid, or wicked, enough to teach magic outside the formal structure of the Folly.

  ‘That’s one of things that made them unusual,’ said Wanda. ‘He was there for a lot of the gigs.’

/>   Wanda said it was important not to get carried away with mystique around the dining clubs.

  ‘It’s just like your average Saturday night in Reading city centre, only wrapped up in a ton of money,’ she said. ‘Well, most of them, anyway . . . not this lot – ah!’ She stopped and tapped the table. ‘Little Crocodiles,’ she said. ‘That’s what they were called.’

  And since Geoffrey Wheatcroft turned up to most of the events, that at least kept the student projectile vomiting to a minimum. Although the wandering hands were still a nuisance.

  ‘Like Greenford disco all over again,’ she said.

  ‘How did you know they were doing magic?’ asked Guleed.

  Because people were popping off spells all through dinner, especially lux which, as anyone will tell you, is the first spell you learn. And there was a drinking game where each contestant conjured a werelight and then saw how many shots they could knock back while keeping it up.

  She didn’t recognise the young Martin Chorley or Albert Pryce – which Wanda freely admitted didn’t mean they weren’t there. Silver service is hard work and, like most of the young women doing the dining club circuit, she concentrated on getting through the night with the maximum of tips and the minimum of manhandling.

  ‘But you haven’t seen Jeremy Beaumont-Jones since Oxford?’ asked Guleed, bringing us back to the case at hand.

  ‘No, sorry,’ said Wanda. But when we showed her pics of Phoebe, Olivia and Christina she sighed and said the last two had definitely been in. She didn’t know who Christina was, but she remembered Olivia’s name on account of her having to call her mum to take her away.

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Do you see where we are?’ asked Wanda. ‘Do you know what was standing here before they started hanging people behind closed doors? Do you know the real name of this place?’