The Hanging Tree

by Ben Aaronovitch

  The TSG were under strict instructions not to engage anyone but to contain and report.

  Satisfied that the foyer was locked down, Nightingale led us up a set of grey marble stairs and onto the first floor. Here there was another curved hallway linking the pavilions and the access towers. The flats on these levels were all one- or two-bedroom and mainly owned by shell companies and investment portfolios. What Seawoll called ‘corporate jolly pads’, and he really didn’t need to emphasise that ‘jolly’ much to illustrate his meaning. Still, they had to be cleared just like the shops. Me and Guleed held the stairwell again while Nightingale did his witch sniffing thing, before signalling Stephanopoulos that her people could go door to door.

  Now, I’d wanted to go straight downstairs to the underground car park because, apart from the thought that Reynard might have stashed his car down there, each flat came not only with its own parking space but with an underground storage locker the size of a standard shipping container. But Seawoll and had pointed out that we still had a duty of care to people in the building and that had to be our priority.

  ‘And strangely, Peter, we fucking thought to check it during the investigation.’

  ‘It’ being the storage space associated with Martin Chorley’s flat.

  But not for the Renault 4. Because we didn’t know about Reynard’s car then.

  We’d been inside One Hyde Park for over twenty minutes by now, and I’d expected screams after ten . . . the kick-off was suspiciously late. Martin Chorley had spent the last two years psyching us – from sending a Pale Lady to distract me from the murder in West End Central to Lesley’s bit of bait-and-switch that very afternoon at Hyde Park Corner. I figured the very next thing that happened was going to be a feint too.

  And so did Nightingale. Because when Seawoll told us that the spotters had seen the lights go on in the Chorley apartment three floors above, he sent me and Guleed down to check the garage while he went up.

  Had we managed to make it all the way down to the cars immediately, things might have gone differently. But we ran straight into the Americans on the first sub-level. Below ground the stairs reverted to standard concrete – they were, after all, the service stairs – with the same sort of solid fire door one would expect in any modern building. We were just minding our own business and creeping down the stairs when one of these doors opened. I saw a figure in a dark blue suit framed in the doorway, Guleed yelled – ‘Gun!’ and I raised my staff and impelloed the door shut in his face.

  There was a crack as the door trapped his arm, a loud bang as the gun went off and a clang as his pistol hit the concrete floor. I didn’t hear Guleed yell over the man’s scream – he’d sustained fractures in both bones of his forearm. I let the door loose long enough for him to clear the gap and then slammed it shut again.

  ‘Peter,’ said Guleed in a strange voice. ‘I think I’ve been shot.’

  I barely had the presence of mind to keep my impello up against the door as I turned to stare at Guleed who was plucking at the bottom of her Met Vest.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There,’ said Guleed, pointing at a spot just above her hip. ‘Have a look will you?’

  This is a thing that both Caffrey and Nightingale have impressed upon me. Most people only fall down when they’re shot because the media tells them they’re supposed to. Especially with something low calibre like a pistol round. The truth is that unless there’s immediate death or gross mechanical damage, people can function quite normally right up to the point where blood loss or shock kicks in. It’s known in the police as ‘walk, talk and die’ – although mostly we run into it when motor-cyclists get knocked off their bikes. That’s why you’ve got to check your casualties even when they’re standing there with a puzzled look on their face.

  There was a definite hole in the heavy material of Guleed’s Public Order boiler suit that widened when I stuck a finger in it to reveal a matching slice in the white t-shirt underneath.

  ‘Ow,’ said Guleed. ‘Careful.’

  It would have taken way too long to dig out my pocket knife, so I chopped the cloth with a spell Nightingale had taught me – he’d made me practice on letters and Amazon packaging. I pulled up the T-shirt to reveal a long scrape along her waist. I prodded it, which made her wince – but the skin seemed unbroken.

  ‘It’s a scrape,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have a lovely bruise.’

  There was a thump on the fire door, followed by gunshots.

  I looked at Guleed, and she looked at me, and we both stood there dithering and thinking that about now it would be nice to have a little bit of command and control, when down the stairs thumped DI Stephanopoulos with Bill Conti’s ‘Fanfare for Rocky’ playing in the background, and what looked like half a carrier of TSG piling up behind her.

  ‘Just a scrape, boss,’ said Guleed before Stephanopoulos could say anything.

  Stephanopoulos looked at the door.

  ‘The Americans?’ she asked.

  I filled her in.

  ‘But we don’t even want to be on this floor,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to be checking the garage.’

  ‘In that case we’ll secure the stairs while you go down,’ she said. ‘If the Americans try to come in, we scoop them up – otherwise we wait until we get some more bodies in here.’

  She stabbed a finger at Guleed.

  ‘You,’ she said, ‘be more careful. And you,’ she turned to glare at me, ‘just try to be a little less Peter Grant on this outing.’

  I had a witty comeback all ready to go, but at that point the whole staircase shook. There was a shower of fine grey dust all around us as the joists securing the staircase to its frame ground into the concrete.

  Stephanopoulos’ Airwave squawked and Seawoll reported that Martin Chorley’s flat had just lit up like a fireworks display. I could feel it, too, amongst the bangs and shrieks that echoed down the stairwell. Forma and counter-forma, a full-on magical duel. Nightingale was going head to head with someone formidable – Martin Chorley, at last?

  I opened my mouth, but Stephanopoulos put her hand up for silence.

  ‘Wait,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  Three gunshots from beyond the fire door, but not that close. Two more further away. Then running feet right outside, five or six shots, loud, rapid, desperate. I tensed, but Stephanopoulos shut me down with another glare.

  ‘Wait.’

  Two more shots . . . and then it was like being mugged by an old fashioned gentleman’s club – a wave of brandy, cigar smoke and pheasant that had hung too long. Then, mixed in with nutmeg and the shine of silver, the heated excitement of the mob, the creak of wood under strain and the smell of old rope, defiance and fear.

  And rising above it like a clear note in a trumpet solo, the smell of wood smoke and fresh caught fish cooked over an open fire.

  Then silence.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We need to get in there now.’

  ‘And the Americans?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, we need to go save them from a fate worse than enforced river conservation,’ I said. And then, quickly, ‘We have to rescue them from Tyburn.’

  Everyone stared at me – strangely they weren’t keen. I could tell.

  ‘I’ll go in first, check they’re okay and then you guys can secure this level and I can finally get to the garage,’ I said and Stephanopoulos nodded. Guleed came with me because it’s always good to have a witness when things get complicated – especially one that senior officers trust.

  The magical duel was still going on upstairs, I could feel it, but the crashes and bangs had abated. It was probably getting subtle – which was all the more reason for me to stick to the plan.

  Me and Guleed eased through the door and out into a long corridor that ran the length of the complex. It had a lush grey carpet, cream walls and the same hushed claustrophobia as a modern hotel. There was a haze in the air and I thought I sme
lled gun smoke.

  There was tinny music coming from our left so we went that way, past a pair of lifts and another staircase, through a fire door that had been jammed open with a fire extinguisher. There was another corridor beyond and half-way down its length a pair of open double doors. I smelt chlorine as we crept along the wall and the music, from somebody’s phone speaker I guessed, changed track – a mid-’70s band murdering a pair of guitars and a saxophone. Beside the open doors somebody had helpfully left a Waitrose bag full of Glock 17s. I kept watch while Guleed checked them out.

  ‘Three,’ she said which, plus the one in the stairwell, should account for all the Americans. Assuming they didn’t have back-up pieces strapped to their ankles.

  We slipped inside ever so quietly, into the atrium of what I guessed was the famed underground swimming pool. The music was coming from straight ahead and over it we heard water splashing, shouts and the unmistakable sound of somebody smacking a ball around.

  Guleed gave me a questioning look, but how the fuck was I supposed to know what the sounds meant?

  The pool itself was a long narrow slot with a high ceiling. Whoever had done the interior design had opted for the upmarket Death’s Domain colour scheme – all grey granite walls with ivory details and black marble floors. In the pool a trio of naked white men were batting a ball back and forth. They were all noticeably muscled in that well-fed way Americans can get when they take their training seriously. Another man, also white and naked, sat on one of the redundant purple sun loungers cheering on his friends. His right forearm had been wrapped in a white towel and stiffened with a pair of flip-flops into a makeshift splint. He didn’t seem to be feeling any pain.

  The Americans stopped as soon as they saw me and Guleed and then turned as one to look at the woman on the other sun lounger. I don’t know if I was really expecting woad or spears, or even a bin-bag dress, but it was just Lady Ty in designer jeans and a cream coloured Arran jumper – slightly blemished by grass stains on the left arm. She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.

  She waved airily at the boys in the pool and they went back to their game.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  Lady Ty propped herself up on her elbow, the better to stare down her nose at us.

  ‘I was trying to kill that bastard Chorley when I was interrupted,’ she said.

  ‘You were planning to kill Martin Chorley?’ said Guleed.

  ‘Did I say that?’ said Lady Ty. ‘I meant, of course, that I had planned to discuss his recent actions in a calm and businesslike fashion. I was just coming down the stairs when the goon squad jumped me.’ She flicked a finger at the man with broken arm. ‘That wasn’t me.’

  We knew that, of course, but the police never relinquish a psychological advantage when they have one.

  ‘I hope nothing else happened,’ I said.

  ‘They’re fine,’ she said. ‘In fact this is probably the first chance they’ve had to relax since they got here.’

  This far underground I couldn’t hear the fight upstairs, but I knew I was on a timetable. I told her that we needed to clear the area, but that just made her laugh.

  ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘You have to wait for it to wear off – then you can do what you like with them.’

  That was the unwritten and suspiciously voluntary code surrounding the glamour – if you took someone’s free will then you became responsible for them until it returned. Like loco parentis, Beverley said. That was assuming it did wear off and the victim didn’t start building their life around their new object of devotion. Some people seemed more susceptible than others. Some day we were probably going to have to set up a support group.

  My face must have shown something, because Lady Ty told me to relax.

  ‘I’m not my sister,’ she said. ‘I have some self-control – they’ll be their old all-American selves in a couple of hours.’

  As if the business with the fountain and the flowers had never happened.

  So Guleed popped back to fetch Stephanopoulos while I crept down the stairs to the garage. You really shouldn’t split up during an operation, but sometimes you have no choice. No doubt the blonde teenagers in the slasher movies feel the same way.

  It doesn’t matter if they’re speed-built brutalist tat or expensive air-conditioned stables, underground car parks always smell the same. Damp cement, paint and volatile hydrocarbons. The only variation is whether or not they also smell of wee. Unsurprisingly, the car park under One Hyde Park did not have urine stains in its dark corners – or even have any dark corners that a young man caught short after a night out on the tiles might have a quick slash in.

  There were two floors of garage proper but I was heading to the lowest because that’s where the parking spaces – plural, since the bigger the flat the more spaces you got – allocated to Martin Chorley were. As was his assigned storage space. Because although POLSA had gone through it during the initial investigation, they hadn’t known what to look for.

  The stairs I went down were for the delicate feet of residents and thus had black marble risers and pointless art hung at regular intervals. On the bottom landing was a solid fire door disguised by a black stained piano-finish veneer. In a proper, crappy car park there’d have been grimy vertical window slots to look through, but not here. I wondered who was on the other side.

  I stopped and tried to clear my mind. The uncanny creates a disturbance in the world. Everyone feels it, the trick is to distinguish it from the all the random noise, the thoughts, memories and misfiring neurons, that fill our heads from moment to moment. It’s like everything else – the more you do it, the better you get. I used to think that Nightingale was alerted to Falcon cases by his extensive network of informants. But now I think maybe he’s just listening to the city.

  Or maybe not. Because that would be freaky.

  Nobody was fighting upstairs, or at least not with magic. But beyond the fire door I could feel a little tickle, like mouse claws scrabbling in the wainscoting of the material world. It wasn’t Martin Chorley. I know the razor strop of his signare. This was more familiar, like listening to an echo of my own voice.

  Lesley.

  The question was, did she expect me to come through that door? If I went straight in I might be able to catch her off guard while she was concentrating on whatever it was she was doing. Or she might be doing the low level magic to draw me out.

  Or, I decided, I could be over-thinking things again.

  I pushed open the fire door and stepped into the garage proper.

  There were lift doors opposite and an opening to the right. I could smell old petrol and fresh carbon monoxide. Echoing off the clean concrete walls were periodic metal crunches as Lesley used impello to rip car doors open. I tucked myself behind a section of dividing wall and tried to work out where the noise was coming from.

  Once I had narrowed it down to the left I had a quick look.

  On the other side of the garage was a long row of parking spaces, each filled with a couple of tons of high status metal. It was mostly Chelsea tractors interspersed with midlife-crisis-mobiles including an Aston Martin Vanquish Volante that I wouldn’t have minded for myself. And two thirds of the way down the line, practically hidden behind an honest to god white Humvee, was Reynard Fossman’s ugly red Renault.

  Judging by the three cars with their doors open, smoke still rising from the back of one, Lesley was methodically working her way down the line. Currently she had her back to me as she wrenched open the rear door of a Jaguar F-Pace.

  I didn’t think she’d be that casual about her blind side if she was working alone, so I risked sticking my head out for a quick look left and right. Nobody else was in sight, but even so I started easing myself back towards the fire door and the stairs.

  I figured that what with this being a basement and us having all the possible e
xits covered, it was probably not a bad idea to back off and await reinforcements. If only Nightingale could finish off whatever he was doing upstairs.

  I caught movement in the corner of my eye and jumped left on general principles and suddenly found myself suddenly lying on my back with a ringing in my ears and the round white light in the ceiling above me going alarmingly in and out of focus. In policing it’s not a good idea to lie down on the job so I tried to roll over, but I’d barely shifted when a blow to my chest pinned me back down.

  ‘Stay down,’ said Lesley from outside my view. ‘Or Martin here will start breaking ribs.’

  ‘She does like to make me sound gangster, doesn’t she?’ said Martin Chorley. His voice was coming from the other side of the car park. He must have just come down the eastern set of service stairs. I heard his footsteps as he walked past me to reach Lesley. He was far too sensible to get close enough to look down on me and risk making himself a target – although I could tell he really wanted to.

  ‘We need to get a move on,’ he said to Lesley. ‘I left a trail of nasty surprises behind me but he won’t stay cautious for long.’

  Something, impello at a guess, dragged me across the concrete and I heard a clattering sound as my staff was dragged behind me by its wrist strap. We both ended up in the middle of the roadway – the decking was strangely warm under my palms.

  I felt for the handle of my staff, but it was yanked away, the strap cutting painfully into my wrist and palm until it snapped with a twang. That must have been another spell, because it should have taken my hand off at the wrist before it broke.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Martin Chorley. ‘Ah, yes. A genuine army surplus battle staff. You don’t see many of those these days, do you? I wonder if you’ve kept it charged up.’

  ‘I wouldn’t touch it,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s probably booby trapped.’

  What a good idea, I thought, let’s add that to the list.

  Another clatter as my staff was kicked or spelled off the roadway and, if the sudden echo was anything to go by, under a nearby vehicle.