The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Another couple of explosions – much further to my right.

  Sometimes courage is easy, and sometimes you have to scream at your own body to act in its own bloody best interest, and sometimes it refuses the call altogether. And the pisser is that you never know which one it’s going to be until you try.

  This time my body was in full agreement with flight mode and off we went.

  We got maybe five metres before a weight landed on my back, wrapped something solid around my chest and hoisted me into the air. I would have screamed like a little girl but whoever had a grip on me had their hand clamped over my mouth. There was the scent of saffron, the sharp bite of clean sunlight over a windswept hillside and the sight of far horizons.

  You lying little toerag, I thought, you can fly.

  The soaring effect was ruined by the leafy twigs that smacked me around my head and shoulders and then we stopped in a green space and I was dumped onto a branch next to the tree trunk which, while being alarmingly thin at this altitude, I grabbed hold of gratefully. Caroline’s hand squeezed my mouth for emphasis before letting go.

  I looked around – Caroline sat casually, legs swinging, on a branch on the opposite side of the trunk and Guleed was on a branch a metre below. We were near the top of the tree and the branches below us had been bent back and up to create a sort of natural hide. Suspiciously, none of them had broken in the process and I couldn’t see any string or wire holding them in place.

  I looked at Caroline, who gave me a bland look in return.

  Then I flinched at a nearby explosion, then another and another and then two more moving away.

  We sat in terrified silence for another half an hour, but heard nothing more.

  The likelihood was that Martin Chorley had cut his losses and scarpered, but none of us felt like betting our lives on it. Besides, he could have left booby traps and/ or weird hybrid things behind.

  So we waited quietly in the gathering dark for someone to come along and rescue us.

  13

  Angry Birds

  We waited largely in silence and stillness, except for a furious unvoiced argument about whose turn it was next to play Angry Birds on Caroline’s phone, which only really ended when the phone in question buzzed and we got a text saying – You may alight whenever you feel ready.

  ‘He took his time,’ I said.

  ‘Does this happen a lot?’ asked Caroline.

  ‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Sometimes Beverley rescues me, sometimes Lady Ty, occasionally Molly – I think there’s a rota.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Caroline. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘There isn’t really a rota – we’re not that well-organised.’

  Guleed snorted.

  Caroline carried Guleed down first – just wrapped an arm around her chest and stepped off into thin air. It was hard to tell in the dark but it looked to me like they dropped smoothly and at a steady pace. As they fell, the branches that had been curled over to hide us from the ground began to unbend and return to their original positions. When I told Bev about that later she said that was more impressive than the flying.

  ‘Wood not being notably motile,’ she said.

  When it was my turn I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the forma Caroline was using. When you’re learning a new a forma it can take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of demonstrations before you can even start to replicate it in your mind. But you can still learn something from a brief encounter, if you pay attention.

  Not that this is easy when you’re dropping twenty metres with nothing holding you up but Caroline’s contempt for the laws of motion.

  I felt it, floating in the non-space where these abstractions catch hold of the fabric of the universe – and it was different. I mean really different. Now, I knew there were different magical traditions, but I’d always assumed that they shared common characteristics. Sensing the forma Caroline invoked to defy gravity was like listening to Yusef Lateef take his flute into the pentatonic scale, still music, still beautiful, but a whole new landscape of sound.

  ‘Can you truly fly?’ I asked.

  She paused once our feet had settled and whispered in my ear.

  ‘Not yet,’ she breathed. ‘Soon, though. And then I will be away and free.’

  Away from what, I wondered, and free from who?

  Nightingale was waiting for us at the bottom of the tree, wearing the oyster coloured Burberry coat that is the closest he’s ever going to get to a high-viz jacket.

  ‘How did you find us?’ I asked.

  ‘In the first instance the screamers worked as advertised,’ said Nightingale. ‘Then there were your texts. Beyond that it was just a matter of following the trail of destruction.’

  Up the hill there were flashing blue lights visible through the trees.

  Guleed chivvied Caroline towards the waiting paramedics while she protested she was fine – which wasn’t the point. As a civilian mixed up in a police operation we had to be able to prove she was uninjured so she couldn’t sue us later.

  ‘You understand the implications of Martin Chorley being the Faceless Man,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘Which one?’ I asked and shivered.

  ‘The revenge aspect,’ he said. ‘There’s a definite cause for concern there.’

  ‘No shit,’ I said, and held my right hand in front of my face – there was definitely a tremble. ‘Did you warn everyone?’

  ‘Phoebe is with Olivia at Tyburn’s house, but I lost Reynard when the screamer alerted me and I had to divert here,’ he said. ‘Gone to ground no doubt.’

  I stopped walking towards the lights and looked around. What was left of the Orange Asbo was sitting on its roof amongst shattered wood. Nightingale stopped to wait for me.

  ‘Is anyone looking in our direction?’ I asked.

  Nightingale said he couldn’t see anyone, so I turned away, found a convenient tree trunk, leaned over and vomited. Once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop until what seemed like about a month’s worth of dinners had come back-up. I was lightheaded and hollowed out when I’d finished.

  Nightingale gave me one of his cream coloured linen handkerchiefs, monogramed and ironed by Molly to such a sharp edge I could have happily used it as a shuriken. I carefully unfolded it and used it to wipe my mouth – he didn’t ask for it back.

  The Thames Valley Police were out in force at the house, including an armed response unit who slouched against the sides of their Volvo V70 and glared at us on general principles.

  Then Stephanopoulos arrived and glared at them until they packed up and left. Allowing me a brief respite before she came and glared at me. There was the requisite three hours of milling around as we waited for SOCO and a specialist search team to go over the house and the inevitable arguments about who was going to find an all-night takeaway in High Wycombe for refs.

  Caroline’s mum roared up the drive in her MG. Me and Caroline watched from the safety of the kitchen as Lady Helena pulled up and proceeded to castigate Nightingale for putting her baby in danger. While that was going on, Caroline beckoned me over and said she’d rather her mum didn’t know about the almost-flying.

  ‘I don’t want her to worry,’ she said.

  ‘Worry about what?’ I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

  She waved at me as her mum drove her away.

  Martin Chorley’s utilitarian office turned out to be less interesting than his study. He had every OS Map of the British Isles ever published, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, plus a range of specialist maps and gazettes – some of which I recognised from my post-Herefordshire research. A couple of Edwardian earthwork surveys, the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, which confirmed that Martin Chorley was an enormous Tolkien nerd. As if the the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first edition of The Hobbit wasn’t enough proof. He hadn’t neglected the other Inklings,
though – C.S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn’t have any objection to YA either, judging by the collection of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, again first editions, but these ones far too well read to be worth much, beside similarly worn copies of The Owl Service and the rest of Alan Garner’s books.

  It wasn’t exactly screaming ‘power mad psychopath’, although it was possible that he was modern enough to keep all his vices on a USB stick.

  Over the real fireplace, with all its original farmhouse stone trimmings, was a painting that one of the SOCOs assured me was a genuine Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of the dying king surrounded by weeping queens variety. Painted by one James Archer in the late nineteenth century.

  ‘A romantic,’ said Nightingale much, much later. ‘The most dangerous people on Earth.’

  Finally me and Guleed caught a lift back to London while Nightingale stayed at the house on the off-chance its owner popped back for something he’d forgotten.

  I wanted to spend the night at Bev’s but I needed to be central in case Martin Chorley did something viciously psychopathic in the middle of the night. As it happened, I got to sleep all the way to nine thirty the next morning before the landline rang and Stephanopoulos told me that somebody had just tried to kill Olivia McAllister-Thames.

  The house opposite Tyburn’s place had obviously been built post-war, probably to replace bomb-damaged stock. Mercifully it must have been quite late on because it wasn’t the featureless box so favoured by the American modernists, and the architect had actually made an attempt to fit it in with the rest of street. It still had a touch of the gun emplacement around the ground floor and a marble floored entrance hallway that managed to be both pretentious and dark at the same time.

  Once I was safely cocooned in my noddy suit, Stephanopoulos led me upstairs to the third floor flat where the sniper had made his nest. I’d missed the body, which didn’t bother me, but Stephanopoulos had a tablet stuffed full of crime scene photographs.

  ‘We don’t know who he is yet,’ she said. ‘White, mid-thirties, fit, has a Foreign Legion tattoo but that doesn’t mean anything.’ As police we were always tripping over people with special forces tattoos that were more aspirational than indications of service.

  ‘I’m hoping for distinctive teeth,’ said Stephanopoulos, although that was no longer the reliable guide to nationality it once was. I’d been told that American dental work was still distinctively overwrought – whatever that meant with regards to teeth.

  ‘Let’s hope he wasn’t American,’ I said. We didn’t need any more about that complication thank you very much.

  The flat was unfurnished, although in a distinctively expensive way with marble flooring in the bathrooms, Italian tile in the kitchen and expensive rosewood parquet in the rest. The nest was in what I’d call a living room but was probably listed by the estate agent as the lounge. The firing position was a good three metres back from the bay windows. The central window had been opened and securely fastened, but with the curtains partly drawn he’d have been in shadow – essentially invisible from across the street.

  The lack of furniture meant that he’d had to bring his own stand to rest the rifle on, the heavy duty type serious anglers use for big fish. He’d even brought a campstool, a couple of bottles of water and a packet of Pret a Manger sandwiches. I imagined a couple of DCs were even now pulling the CCTV footage from every Pret within a kilometre.

  Damn – that was going to be a lot of Prets.

  I glanced around the empty room.

  ‘He knew there wasn’t any furniture,’ I said.

  ‘Even better, he had a legitimate set of keys,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘And this property has had the same owner for five years.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Our old friend Mr Shell Company.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Which is a close relative to A.N. Other Shell Company and a Guernsey registered investment house who bought it on behalf of one James Hodgkins, a.k.a. Martin Chorley.’

  I looked across the street to what I’d been assured was Tyburn’s bedroom – obscured now by the blue sheeting the forensic people had rigged to cover the shattered window. Less than thirty metres I thought – a good sniper would barely need a telescopic sight.

  The gun had been whisked away even before the body. An L96A1 firing a standard 7.62 mm NATO round. It was the standard British sniper rifle as used by the Army, the Navy and the Met’s own SCO19. Probably, Stephanopoulos said, one of those guns that occasionally fall off the back of a military supply lorry. A bit specialist for your basic London underworld, who tended to favour cheaper and more personal forms of assassination – although if I’d been planning to take a shot at Lady Ty myself I’d have probably opted for a drone strike from a nice air conditioned Air Force base in Arizona.

  And even then I’d do it under an assumed name.

  He’d got off only the one shot before he died. It was a bolt action weapon, but still I would have thought he’d have had time to take a second one – just to be on the safe side.

  Three hours later they still hadn’t found the bullet he’d fired.

  ‘What killed him?’ I asked.

  ‘Single stab wound to the chest with a heavy double edged blade,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Through his heart and out the other side.’

  ‘What, through the ribs?’

  ‘Sheared right through two at the front and one at the back,’ she said. ‘Clean cut.’

  ‘A sword,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what they think, but they haven’t finished the PM yet.’

  If I had to guess I’d have said a classic fourteenth century English arming sword like the one I’d once seen worn by a young man in a hallucination I’d had when I was busy suffocating under the eastbound Central Line platform. A young man who styled himself Sir William Tyburn, who had been god of the river from back when it was a wild stream rushing down to Father Thames.

  For obvious reasons I kept this intriguing observation to myself.

  ‘Chorley’s had this place for five years,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Never had any tenants in here in all that time.’

  ‘He knew about the Rivers,’ I said. ‘He must have thought it would be handy to have a way of keeping them under surveillance.’ Or perhaps he’d known that sooner or later he was going to have to go mano a dios with Lady Ty.

  ‘Still not a bad little investment over five years I suppose,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘But why a sniper? It’s not his MO.’

  ‘If he wanted Olivia dead he knew he’d have to go through her mother first,’ I said. ‘And he knew he had to take Tyburn down before she was aware of the attack. Otherwise Lady Ty, this close to her river, this close to the Thames – not going to happen.’ I looked across at the blinded window opposite.

  ‘He can’t possibly have missed at this range,’ I said.

  ‘And yet he’s the one who’s dead,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Could she have thrown a sword across that distance?’

  I tried to imagine Tyburn pivoting smartly on her heel, bringing her arm back and flinging a sword across the gap between the houses like a bad special effect. The sniper staggering back, looking down in amazement as half the blade and the pommel vibrate amusingly in his chest. Not enough style points for Tyburn. And anyway, they never found the sword.

  ‘If she threw it,’ I said, ‘then who pulled it out?’

  Stephanopoulos gave the traditional short sigh of the senior officer who is about to explain something they thought was bleeding obvious right from the start of the conversation, but obviously wasn’t.

  ‘No offence, Peter,’ she said. ‘But we were kind of relying on you to provide that information. Us just being normal run of the mill coppers none of who are versed in the mystic arts or currently shagging a supernatural creature.’

  ‘That you know of, Boss,’ I said, thinking of Wanda the manageress, who you wouldn’t spot as ‘special’ if you didn’t know what to look for. But Stephanopoulos was right. This was
the Folly’s area of expertise, and it was embarrassing that we were so bloody crap at it.

  Assume for the moment that the dead sniper had something to do with laughing Sir Tyburn – thought dead by his father and brothers these last hundred and fifty years.

  But we know that apparent remnants of normal human beings can be left behind, and under particular circumstances can physically interact with the mundane world.

  Do gods have ghosts? I wondered.

  If they did, wouldn’t they be much more powerful than those left behind by people? Or was that a typical first order assumption? Probably, I thought. And yet, if we stayed with that idea then surely the world would be full of these powerful ghosts of former gods. Now, I hadn’t come across anything like that in my literature and while my predecessors in the craft were often thicker than a bag full of custard I think even they would have noticed something like that.

  Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA – hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and – hey presto – suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a metre of cold steel through the chest.

  Perhaps that explained why the rivers of London had burst forth with new goddesses so quickly after Mama Thames took up her throne. Perhaps there was more than historical continuity between the dead sons of old Father Thames and the daughters that had taken their place.

  And a certain river on the Welsh Borders where me and Beverley had been ‘catalysts’ in the creation of a new spirit, a new genius loci, a new god.

  Shit, I thought, I’ve just invented epideism.

  ‘Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You still with us?’

  ‘Oh, god,’ I said. ‘I think I preferred being a frog,’ And then, before Stephanopoulos had a chance to clip me round the ear for being obscure, I told her I’d have to do some digging on the subject.