The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Determining whether there was an actual genetic basis to being a fae was one of Dr Walid’s research priorities. I’m pretty certain that his keenness to employ Dr Vaughan had come from a desire to have more time to pursue it.

  I confirmed that Nightingale was right and it was indeed a genetic marker. Although, of course, it was all much more complicated than that, genetics-wise. It always is.

  ‘Should he ever find his marker,’ said Nightingale, ‘and conduct his survey, I believe he will find that fairy blood is far more widespread than previously assumed.’

  And most of them passing, I thought, like Wanda the manageress.

  ‘None of the items listed on eBay have been sold yet,’ I said. ‘So they must be stored somewhere.’

  ‘Indubitably,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think we must assume that our tricky fox has a hideaway he hasn’t told us about.’ All of Reynard Fossman’s last known addresses had already been searched over the weekend as well as a few likely lock-ups that had, as Nightingale admitted, quite tenuous connections to the man. Not to mention that we still hadn’t found the antique Renault 4 GTL that, according to the DVLA, was registered in his name.

  ‘It would be nice to find the Mary Engine,’ I said. ‘It could be the only original difference engine in existence. We could flog it to the Science Museum.’

  ‘You’d have to fight Harold for it,’ said Nightingale.

  Postmartin took his role as archivist very seriously.

  ‘But it’s not a book, is it?’ I said. ‘That means we get first dibs. Do you know if they made any more – did anyone at the Folly have one?’

  ‘There was always a rumour that Babbage had worked on a mechanical device of some kind for the Folly,’ said Nightingale. ‘One which might have had applications in the practise – but it was just a rumour.’

  ‘Was there anything about Ada Lovelace?’ I asked.

  Nightingale gave me a funny look.

  ‘Byron’s daughter?’ he asked. ‘I’m not sure I understand the connection.’

  ‘She worked with Babbage on the difference engine,’ I said.

  ‘In what capacity?’

  ‘She was a famously gifted mathematician,’ I said. Who I mostly knew about from reading Steam-punk, but I wasn’t going to mention that. ‘Generally considered to have written the first true computer program.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Nightingale. ‘So now we know who to blame.’

  ‘Reynard’s not going to tell us where his real lock-up is,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think he’s stupid enough to lead us to it. He must know we’re going to tail him once we release him. I suppose we could still charge him with whatever we’ve got lying around. Or ask for an extension.’

  ‘No,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think we let the fox run. But not before we inform him that the Faceless Man might have him in his sights.’

  ‘He might bottle it there and then, ask for protective custody.’

  ‘So much the better,’ said Nightingale with a smile. ‘Because then we can extract a price for his protection. And if he doesn’t, then fear might just drive him back to his den. Might it not?’

  ‘And if we hang him out as bait and the Faceless Man offs him?’ I asked.

  Nightingale put his hand on my shoulder and leaned forward.

  ‘I thought I might intervene before that happened,’ he said softly and then, straightening, said, ‘Besides, it will do Reynard good to play the hound not the fox for a change.’

  I was thinking that it sounded like a fucking desperate plan to me, but Nightingale was the man who had walked home from Ettersberg and struck awe into the breasts of classically educated wizards from Hereford-shire to Vladivostok.

  ‘Do you think you can take the Faceless Man?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s started making mistakes,’ said Nightingale. ‘Something has put him off his game. And, if he’s scrambling, we might be able to bring him down with a good tap.’

  He is making mistakes, I thought, but why? Yes, Reynard and Christina had pilfered his goodies from under his nose. But I couldn’t see any connection between that and Aiden Burghley. Especially not one which warranted that flashy dismemberment. And what was he doing questioning Phoebe in her underground pool? Unless the Faceless Man was her father, Jeremy Beaumont-Jones, and he thought Aiden Burghley was another link in a conspiracy that encompassed Christina Chorley and Reynard the Suspicious . . . In which case Olivia McAllister-Thames would be a target too.

  ‘We need to close down the other loose ends,’ I said.

  ‘Agreed,’ said Nightingale. ‘Let’s see how Sahra is doing.’

  So we divvied up the jobs, subject to Seawoll’s agreement of course. Guleed would action a TIE on the ‘area manager’ who’d interviewed Wanda the manageress for her job.

  ‘I’m sure Carey will have finished with his escorts by then,’ she said.

  Then both of us would head out to the fabled lands beyond High Wycombe to see whether Christina stashed her stolen goodies at her father’s house.

  ‘Isn’t Martin Chorley on the Tiger list?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Our target’s made a big thing out of his anonymity,’ I said. ‘So assuming for a minute that he is Christina’s dad – which is unlikely, but possible – then he’s not going to reveal himself just because we want a look at his daughter’s room. Especially if we let him know we’re coming up.’

  Guleed frowned – it’s bad practise to give people warning before you turn over their house, but if Martin Chorley was the Faceless Man, I reckoned the room would have been cleaned out by now anyway. It’s also bad practise to startle dangerous armed suspects – better to slowly and calmly take control of the situation. At least that’s the theory.

  ‘He’s not going to blow his cover if he thinks he can fob us off,’ I said. ‘And if he’s not our man then he won’t know what we’re looking for, so he won’t have a reason to hide it.’

  Nightingale offered to authorise Guleed to carry a taser but she claimed to have never done the training course.

  ‘In that case you might want to carry a screamer instead,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘As long as you carry one too,’ I said.

  ‘What’s a screamer?’ asked Guleed.

  I said I’d show her when we got back to the Folly, because Postmartin wanted us to cart a couple of crates over there and lock them in our secure evidence room. Actually, he meant the library because there was no way he wanted ‘his’ books stashed downstairs in the basement armoury.

  Molly came out to meet us as we drove in the back gate. She glared at me and then tilted her head up towards the top floor of the coach house where I keep my widescreen, my desktop and any other bits of the technology that, for one reason or another, don’t work well in the Folly proper.

  We left the boxes in the car and me and Guleed climbed the spiral stairs to find Caroline inside playing Shadow of Mordor on my PS4. Toby was curled up at her feet, thus once again demonstrating his true worth as a guard dog.

  ‘Thank god you’re here,’ she said, putting it down. ‘I was about to go mad with boredom.’

  I did a quick inspection of my stuff, but nothing seemed out of place. I haven’t got so paranoid that I’ve started sticking hairs across doorjambs but between Nightingale watching the rugby while I was over at Bev’s, and Molly sneaking in whenever she thought I wasn’t looking to swap recipes on Twitter, I’ve taken to securing anything important in filing cabinets.

  I asked how long she’d been hanging out on her own.

  ‘We came over to talk to your experts,’ said Caroline, who made it clear that she’d been dragged over as reluctantly as any child to an art gallery. Despite tea and cakes Caroline thought she’d just about reached peak boredom when Professor Postmartin was called away.

  ‘You’re not interested in The Third Principia?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not going to have anything about aerodynamics in it,’ she said. ‘Is it?’

  ‘Aerodynamics?’ asked Guleed.

&nb
sp; ‘Caroline wants to fly,’ I said.

  ‘Does she know about your swan dive off the top of Skygarden Tower?’ asked Guleed.

  She does now, I thought.

  ‘The one that was blown up?’ said Caroline.

  ‘As it came down,’ said Guleed, who wasn’t making any friends just then.

  I busily rooted around in the equipment rack for a couple of screamers while Caroline fished for information. Had I actually been flying, or gliding, or otherwise retarding my fall through the use of magic and if so – how?

  ‘Retarding,’ I said while I checked that the screamers were working. ‘Only it was the Faceless Man doing it, not me.’ I handed the screamer to Guleed and showed her how to use it.

  Caroline wanted to know whether I’d seen how the Faceless Man was controlling his descent, and I remembered the tower falling, the screaming, the smell of brick dust and the whole wide world rushing up to smack me in the face.

  ‘I was a bit distracted at the time,’ I said. ‘But he had to concentrate to maintain it.’

  ‘So what happened to Dr Walid and Lady Helena?’ said Guleed who always liked to keep things moving along.

  ‘After the professor rushed off, your pair of mad path ologists asked my mum whether she’d like to see their unparalleled collection of horrible things,’ said Caroline. She explained that she hadn’t really fancied it herself. She would have done a bit of exploring around the Folly, only Molly kept on following her, so she came into the yard and found the tech cave.

  ‘It wasn’t locked?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, and smiled innocently. ‘Was it supposed to be?’

  ‘Generally I keep it locked.’

  I chivvied her out and she ended up helping me and Guleed carry the boxes of books up to the library.

  ‘Anything in these for Mum?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘She can take that up with the Professor,’ I said. But that’s when I decided to take Caroline with us to check Christina Chorley’s room.

  *

  It was all going perfectly fine until I noticed Martin Chorley’s watch. After that, as Nightingale might say, it all rather went downhill.

  The Chorley house was just the other side of Lane End, itself a village just the other side of High Wycombe which could, I suppose, be described as a small town just the other side of London. Since we’d managed to catch the M40 during a rare moment of decongestion we made it there in less than an hour, not counting the stop off at Marks and Spencer’s for snacks.

  We’d checked the location on Google Earth, so unless there’d been some drastic landscaping in the last couple of years, the house had two L-shape wings and was situated just below the brow of a wooded hill that overlooked the valley and the motorway that snaked through it. It was reached by a private driveway that peeled off the main road and looped up through the woods – Martin Chorley certainly liked his privacy.

  We stopped off at the entrance to the drive for a quick pre-arrival conference and the last of the Percy Pigs.

  I didn’t want Caroline to come up to the house.

  ‘On the remote chance he is the Faceless Man,’ I said, ‘then he might know about you and your mum. Better if he doesn’t know we’re working together.’

  ‘You expect me to wait in the car?’ said Caroline

  ‘Actually, no. Because we’re going to park the car right outside,’ I said. ‘I thought you could wait in the pub we went past back there.’

  ‘Back there?’ said Caroline.

  ‘About five hundred metres,’ I said. ‘It looked like they did food.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to stop when we went past?’

  ‘I didn’t think of it until we got here,’ I said. ‘Look, we’ll drive you back down the road and come back.’

  I expected a longer argument but Caroline gave me a look, put up her hands and said she’d walk.

  ‘Can you bag us a table for when we’re finished?’ I asked as she started back down the road – she didn’t answer.

  ‘And that was in aid of what, exactly?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I don’t trust them,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust her or her mother. I couldn’t leave her rattling around the Folly and I definitely don’t want her getting first dibs on anything Christina has stashed at her dad’s house. Particularly if she had a copy of The Third Principia.’

  ‘You think Caroline’d try and steal it?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Believe it,’ I said.

  ‘What does Nightingale think?’

  ‘Maybe he just likes having someone to talk shop with, but he seems a bit too trusting to me.’

  ‘Maybe he’s picked up some bad habits,’ said Guleed.

  ‘Yeah – who from?’

  Guleed looked down the road to where, despite the curve, we could just see Caroline trudging back towards the village.

  ‘Is there some reason why we’re still standing here?’ she asked.

  ‘I want to make sure she doesn’t double back,’ I said. ‘Also, she might fly.’ I got out of the Asbo for a better look.

  ‘When you’re finished I’ll be in the car,’ said Guleed.

  Disappointingly, Caroline didn’t launch herself into the air. So I climbed back into the car and we drove up the winding drive to Chorley central.

  It was a beautiful house, if you like fine detached William and Mary villas in the middle of nowhere. Still had a lot of its original features, and I was surprised it wasn’t at least Grade II listed, but that hadn’t shown up on the IIP check during the initial stages of the investigation. It had a nice sensible tarmac drive with discreet drainage channels built into verges – not that they were going to flood this far up a hill, but Bev would have approved.

  Checking the roof, I spotted solar panels on the south facing slopes and I was willing to bet the gutters directed rain into storage barrels against the possibility of hose-pipe bans. I pulled up next to the BMW 5 series that was parked outside the garage that made up the ground floor of the barn conversion next door. Presumably the Ferrari 288 GTO also registered in Martin Chorley’s name was kept inside. I spotted what definitely looked like an office attached to one end of the garage and made a mental note to check it – if only to sneak a look at the Ferrari.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Guleed as we approached the door.

  ‘Puzzled but co-operative,’ I said.

  ‘Resigned but obstructionist in a passive-aggressive fashion,’ said Guleed.

  ‘That’s very precise.’

  ‘I’ve done more notifications than you,’ she said and rang the doorbell.

  It turned out we were both wrong.

  Martin Chorley, knowing we were coming, had had time to clean the kitchen, tidy the living room and hide his porn stash. I’m kidding about the cleaning because after five seconds in that house it’s clear he had a cleaner in three days a week at the very least.

  He looked less haggard when he opened the door, the smudges under his eyes having receded and the pain lines around his mouth seemed less prominent. It looked like he was beginning to settle into his grief, but there was a feverish aspect to his eyes that I didn’t like. He was dressed in khaki chinos and a white and black check shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. There was a smudge of something black, oil or ink I couldn’t tell which, on his left shoulder.

  ‘Please,’ he said when he saw us. ‘Come in – make yourselves at home.’

  Guleed gave him a sharp look.

  ‘Can I ask how you’re feeling, sir?’ said Guleed.

  Mr Chorley gave her a puzzled glance and then shrugged.

  ‘Bloody awful,’ he said. ‘But thank you for asking.’

  The entrance hall was low ceilinged, made lower by the original roof beams that crossed it. There was a staircase with bare wooden risers varnished a dark brown leading upstairs, a square archway into what I learnt later was called the snug, with a real fireplace, old leather furniture and the sort of worn throw rug that really needed to have an Irish wolfhound curled u
p asleep on it.

  I glanced at the staircase and Guleed took up the cue – asking whether we could see Christina’s room first. Mr Chorley was welcome to supervise, she said, although in reality we were both hoping he didn’t.

  In the end he led us upstairs to the first floor where the hallways were covered in a thick cream carpet that must have been a bugger to clean.

  ‘She pretty much had the run of this floor,’ he said, although officially the main bedroom with its en-suite was hers and the other rooms were for guests. Then he left us to it, thank god, and said that when we were finished there was coffee in the kitchen.

  The main bedroom and bathroom were far too neat, the modern reproduction brass bed was neatly made, a ghastly pink vanity and matching wardrobe had their drawers closed and when we opened them to look inside we found the clothes neatly folded – even the underwear. Guleed tutted. The room had been practically scrubbed clean, probably since Christina’s death. That was odd. Grieving parents often put off making any changes to a lost child’s things. But grief smacks everyone in the face in a different way, so I didn’t read anything into it.

  There was no school work – presumably that had all been in her dorm room back at St Paul’s – but there was an interesting collection of books. Lots of YA in the American ‘drown the sister’ school of social realism, plus various Malorie Blackmans, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll.

  ‘A bit more Goth than I was expecting,’ said Guleed, and I remembered that we’d collared Reynard in that Gothic paradise in Archway. Perhaps that’s what they had in common.

  There was nothing under the bed, inserted into the mattress or taped into an envelope under the knicker drawer. The lone stuffed animal propping up the headboard had no suspicious lumps, zips or loose seams, and valuable seventeenth century magical artefacts were definitely not lodged under any loose floorboards.

  We widened our search, softly stepping out into the corridor and moving as quietly as possible into the bathrooms and guest bedrooms. It’s not that we were creeping about, but we figured what Mr Chorley didn’t hear us doing wouldn’t worry him – us police are thoughtful that way.