The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  Ahead of us was the Wellington Arch, with Europe’s largest bronze statue thoughtfully plonked on top to avoid people getting a good look at it. Nike Goddess of Victory riding the Chariot of War driven by a boy racer. There used to be a mini-police station built into the Arch, which would have been bloody useful right now, but they closed it down in the nineties.

  It was full night by the time I crossed the street and the Portland stone of the Arch was bleached white by spotlights, the bronze on top lit up in blue. I let Reynard and his party gain some distance as they passed to the right of the structure. In my earpiece I could hear Nightingale calmly positioning spotters to cover the tube station and all the crossings.

  ‘They’re heading for Hyde Park,’ I told him and then remembered Reynard’s left hand drive Renault 4 that we’d never located. Maybe because it was stashed in a car park somewhere – maybe the one beneath Hyde Park. The one with a reputed tunnel to The Chestnut Tree. I floated the idea past Nightingale and heard Guleed groan in the background. Nightingale punted it up to Seawoll to get some bodies down to the car park to check. If it had been sitting there all this time we were all going to look stupid come case review, but at least we might get there before Reynard.

  If they were going for the car park then they’d cross the road and head north up Park Lane or more likely walk along the parallel bridle path.

  I veered to the left with the idea of running through the Arch and closing the distance with Reynard, when a young white woman caught my eye. She was slender but toned with strong legs and shoulders under mauve designer jeans and a matching suede jacket. Her face was round and smooth with a snub nose and rosebud lips. Her hair was dark brown and cut into a pixie bob. A pair of pretentious round framed smoked glass spectacles hid her eyes.

  She caught me looking and tilted her head in amused recognition before turning and walking away on unexpectedly sensible flat shoes.

  I knew that walk, a brisk, business-like walk. A walk to cover the distance quickly without looking hurried or worried.

  I keyed my Airwave.

  ‘I’ve just seen Lesley at the Arch,’ I said.

  ‘Are you certain?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘The face is different but it’s definitely Lesley,’ I said.

  ‘Is it a mask?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a mask.’

  ‘Did she see you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Arrest her,’ said Nightingale. ‘Now.’

  I was wearing trainers – you can run really quietly in trainers if you have to. It’s all in the way you roll your feet. I took off as fast as I could, straight for her back. I knew sooner or later she was going to check on my position, but I was counting on her Lesley-esque sense of drama to hold the moment longer than she should. I was three metres short when a white guy in a navy suit jacket over a black Metallica T-shirt theatrically jumped out of my way and yelled, ‘Look out.’

  The woman who walked like Lesley turned and I saw the look of surprise on her face. Then I stumbled as the pale skin of her face rippled and her features changed. It started at the bridge of her nose, the skin bunching up and then flopping down horribly, like the wings of a manta or the shroud of a squid. Then suddenly it was Lesley’s face again – or rather the smooth pink version of it I’d seen in the Harrods Jazz Café. I was so shocked that I barely registered the raised hand and the shimmer in the air that signalled pain inbound. I forced myself to lengthen my stumble into a fall and a clumsy roll, taking the impact on my shoulders, as something shot through the space I would have been in, with a noise like my mum beating a carpet.

  As I climbed to my feet and dodged right on general principles, I heard yells behind me. I had the Airwave off by then and didn’t dare to turn it back it on to alert Nightingale to potential collateral. I had to trust to his professional instincts and hope that Lesley wasn’t flinging anything too lethal around.

  She knew better than to escalate in public in central London – not unless you wanted to take a run up that short ladder that ended with making a personal relationship with the Special Air Service.

  I ran through the arch, making my appearance as abrupt as I could, and spotted Lesley heading off towards the Wellington Memorial. She was walking briskly rather than running – hoping, I assumed, to avoid drawing attention to herself.

  I flicked an impello at her and felt a moment of mad satisfaction as it knocked her legs out from under her. As I ran to close the distance, I pulled my asp from the belly pocket of my hoodie and flicked it out to full length.

  But she rolled and was on her feet before I’d got halfway there. She raised her hand – I saw a flash and got my shield up in time to deflect it into the air. I’ve been training to conjure my shield with an upward slope for use amongst the general public. You don’t want anything eldritch, or even mundanely pointy, ricocheting into innocent bystanders.

  Lesley switched direction and headed for the right of the plinth that held up forty tons of mounted military legend so I went around it on the left just in case she planned an ambush – which is how we came to run smack into each other.

  I’m bigger, so she went backwards. But not before her forehead hit me hard enough in the mouth to loosen my one filling and make me taste blood. I swung my baton but missed, and she kicked me in the thigh – which was probably a lucky miss. Then she hit me with something impello-ish which knocked me over backwards, but Nightingale has trained me to accept the direction of the blow and roll up so that I regain my feet as quickly as possible.

  So far this was all suspiciously non-lethal. Not that I was complaining, mind you, but we were escalating enough for the street lights and spots around us to fizz out. I flung a water bomb in Lesley’s general direction but she’d ducked back behind the plinth and I dared not charge after her in case she was waiting around the corner with something unpleasant. I went wide and caught sight of her vaulting a waist-high stone parapet behind the monument and dropping onto the ramp below. I leaned over and watched as she ran down towards the pedestrian subway. I considered following, but instead darted back and ran down the nearby stairs instead – just in case she tried to double back that way.

  Hyde Park Corner has some of the cleanest pedestrian subways in the world – this one was decorated with colourful murals depicting the Battle of Waterloo, just in case any French tourists had some doubt about whose capital they were visiting. This time I went for speed and got within two metres. But she grabbed a startled tourist, swung him around as if dancing, and threw him down in front of me. I had to break stride to jump and that gave Lesley enough time to cut right down another passage. I cornered it myself in time to see her skid left and vanish into the ticket office. I followed slower, risking a peek around the corner to avoid any sudden surprises. Hyde Park Corner has a tiny ticket office and Lesley was already through the barrier. She turned to check whether I was following and that’s when I knew I was being played.

  Still, I charged the barriers to drive her down the escalators. But I didn’t follow. Instead, waving my warrant card to reassure the Underground staff, I veered right and back out into the subway. Turning my Airwave back on, I ran up the stairs and found myself at the entrance to Hyde Park. I did a three-sixty scan while waiting for the Airwave to boot up. We used to wait for our electronics to warm up, now it’s our software. But there was no sight of any of the targets.

  Finally the Airwave connected and I got Nightingale.

  ‘It’s a feint,’ I said. ‘Lesley was trying to draw me away – which means wherever they’re going is close.’ And then I looked down Knightsbridge to where the Oriental Hotel was painted a warm orange by its spotlights.

  ‘It’s One Hyde Park,’ I said. ‘Tell me you have spotters there already.’

  ‘But of course,’ said Nightingale. ‘And I believe you may be right.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Reynard and our friends have just walked in the front door,’ he said.

&n
bsp; We waited for screams, but none came. That was almost worse.

  All of the apartment windows were dark and Seawoll was ninety percent sure that most of the super-rich inhabitants of One Hyde Park were either temporarily not in residence or still living abroad and waiting for property prices in London to peak.

  Stephanopoulos and some uniforms in full Public Order kit had sealed off the tunnel from the Oriental Hotel, but David Carey, interviewing staff, was pretty sure at least one group had made it in before it was locked down.

  ‘Four IC1 males in suits,’ he reported.

  ‘That will be the Americans,’ said Nightingale.

  There were reports of burst water mains and flooding from Sloane Street and the Serpentine. I checked my notebook – all along the course of the Westbourne, whose genius loci was otherwise known as Chelsea Thames. I called Beverley and asked if she knew where her younger sister was.

  ‘Here at Mum’s,’ she said. ‘Hiding under Lea’s bed.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Tyburn’s popped in for a visit?’ I asked.

  Beverley said no and told me whatever I thought I was going to do next I was to be careful.

  ‘Always,’ I said.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said.

  ‘Tyburn’s probably in there as well,’ I said, after I hung up.

  ‘Full house,’ said Guleed.

  We’d escalated up to having a mobile control room, codenamed Broadway, which was parked on South Carriage Drive with a good view of the back of One Hyde Park. The key advantage of a mobile control room is that it gave Seawoll a place to shout at us while sitting in a comfy chair with a cup of tea.

  Luckily for us, the postmodern obsession with transparent walls meant that in One Hyde Park nobody could move around the access stairs or lifts without being seen by the spotter teams Nightingale had positioned in the buildings opposite. We’d closed off South Carriage Drive and pushed a perimeter back twenty metres to the south, but Seawoll was reluctant to close Knightsbridge and Old Brompton because the rush hour was still tailing off.

  We had about twenty to thirty minutes before the media twigged that a major police operation had descended on the most expensive bit of real estate in London.

  Guleed suggested that we leave them in there and arrest the survivors, which earned her a pleased smile from Seawoll. But then he shook his head.

  ‘Somebody,’ he said eyeing Nightingale, ‘is going to have go in there and clean up the mess.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Nightingale and looked at me. ‘Peter?’

  ‘Noisy or quiet?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, quiet,’ said Nightingale.

  And so it was decided. But not before me and Guleed climbed into our PSU overalls and, after a bit of an argument, donned the shin and elbow guards. We didn’t bother with the helmets, but Guleed swapped her hijab for a fire resistant hood that made her look like she was about to climb into a Soyuz rocket.

  ‘Practical and modest,’ I said and she grinned.

  Needless to say we both put our metvests on and loaded ourselves down with CS spray, speedcuffs – I even considered packing a taser which I’m now authorised and trained to carry – but they just tend to complicate things.

  Finally Nightingale handed me a stave of varnished wood, the size and shape of a pickaxe handle, one end wrapped with canvas strips, the other capped with iron. Branded into the side was a six-digit number and the hammer and anvil sigil of the Legendary Sons of Weyland.

  As I gripped it I felt the hum of the hive and sunlight amongst the hills and hedgerows.

  Once more into the breach, I thought.

  We paraded round the back of the mobile control centre. Seawoll rolled his eyes at the sight of us, but said nothing. Nightingale was dressed in a leather sapper’s coat but thank god not the breeches that went with them. He had donned a pair of serious army boots that had probably only not perished with age because Molly wasn’t going to let any of his clothes die on her watch – dammit!

  He caught Guleed’s eye.

  ‘Sahra,’ he said, ‘things are likely to get somewhat esoteric before the end, and this is not something you’re trained for. I can’t, in all conscience, ask you to join us.’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I think I’m going to have to see this through,’ she said. ‘Inshallah.’ As God wills it.

  ‘Good show,’ said Nightingale.

  This is it, I thought. We’re all going to die.

  15

  State Six

  A risk assessment is a key part of modern policing. Before diving into whatever crisis is at hand, the modern plod is expected to ask themselves: given the modalities of the current situation would any intervention by myself help promote a positive outcome going forward? And what are the chances of this going well and truly pear-shaped? And, if it does, how likely is it that I will get the blame?

  Some people think this makes us risk averse, but I like to point out that a risk assessment is what blonde teenagers don’t do before heading downstairs into the basement in a slasher movie. Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t go down to investigate . . . but I’d bloody well make sure I was wearing a stab vest first, and had some back-up. Preferably going down the stairs ahead of me.

  I reckoned that Seawoll and Nightingale’s risk assessment was sound for several reasons. We couldn’t just let them kill each other, tempting though that was, because we didn’t know how many members of the public were currently in the complex. The owners might not be in residence, but there could still be staff inside – and they counted as people too. That said, there was no point sending in TSG or even SCO19 because Martin Chorley would just hand their arses back to them. That made it a Falcon job. And, since Nightingale was the most Falcon-capable officer in the Met, I was the second and, god help her, Guleed was the third, we were the logical people to deal.

  So in we went, through the back garden past the statues of the two flattened empty heads and entered the wrong way through an emergency fire exit at the base of one of the towers.

  Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armoured personal carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.

  I keyed my Airwave one last time before shutting it down.

  ‘This is Falcon Two,’ I said. ‘Show us state six.’ Meaning, officers at the scene.

  Like I said, One Hyde Park had four pavilions with four towers containing lifts and stairs interspersed between them. Two were for residents and two were for service staff, because times might move on but the gentry still like their servants to be invisible.

  Despite the transparent walls the soundproofing was good and there was no hint of traffic noise as we stepped out into the wide curved hallway that ran the length of the ground floor. The lights were still on, a good sign, and we could see all the way down three levels of the basement and up to the top floor of pavilions one and two.

  Me and Guleed held our position while Nightingale padded off down the hallway to secure the eastern end. There were exclusive shops for the excessively over-resourced on the ground floor of each of the Pavilions. Nightingale checked the internal doors leading to them to make sure they were secure and free of supernatural taint before moving on.

  The curve meant that we lost sight of him when he reached the far end of the hallway. Me and Guleed tucked ourselves into what cover we could find amongst the rent-a-culture statuary and waited. There was a strong smell of lemon floor polish.

  Guleed looked abstracted while she listened through her earpiece to the Airwave chatter. Since she wasn’t likely to fry her own equipment, she’d been designated communications officer – or, as Nightingale put it, ‘radio man’ – for the op.

  ‘Stephanopoulos is in,’ she said.

  It was Stephanopoulos’ job to secure the service hub at the eastern end of the complex so that we could evacuate civilians out that way as well. Once Nightingale had declared the ground floor shops Falcon free,
she’d go door to door and evacuate them.

  The big debate during the planning stage had been whether to then go up to check Martin Chorley’s flat, down to check the basement and underground parking area, or head west to clear the entrance foyer.

  I signalled Guleed and pointed upstairs, but she shook her head – no reports of movement there. When Nightingale trotted back to our positon he repeated my query and, getting the same answer, led us off towards the foyer. Where we found our first casualty.

  He was stretched out, half on the shiny grey marble and half on the fine silk weave grey carpet in front of the granite reception desk.

  Nightingale caught my attention, pointed, and then put two fingers against his throat. As he watched the balcony I scuttled over to do a first aid assessment. I recognised the guy. He was the dark-skinned man in the good suit I’d seen the first time I’d visited. I’d had him pegged as security, and indeed he was holding a compact digital walkie-talkie as used by police, film crews and paramilitary death squads the world over. I shifted my staff to my left hand and found a pulse in his neck. There were no other obvious injuries, so I gently rolled him into the recovery position.

  I picked up his walkie-talkie and shook it. It sounded like a rainmaker, with loose bits and sand rattling around inside.

  Nightingale signalled Guleed, who spoke quietly into her Airwave then nodded to me. I trotted over to the main entrance to make sure it was open. Then I retreated back to Nightingale and maintained watch while a trio of TSG guys in full riot gear clattered in with a pair of London Ambulance paramedics in tow. The paramedics were public order specialists and had their own riot gear, only their helmets were painted green – presumably to confuse rioters for long enough for them to do their jobs. As the paramedics went to work Nightingale signalled to two of the TSG to take position behind the reception desk while the third escorted the paramedics.