The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘“An old bear,” he said. From a time before the arrival of the white man – an angry old bear,’ said Kimberley.

  I asked if she’d believed him.

  ‘Have you ever heard a bear?’ she asked. ‘One that’s really angry? Nothing else sounds like a bear. It’s got that kind of deep breathy bark. Let’s just say I have heard it twice. Once when I was out hunting with my dad and again when I was talking to the shooter in Florence.’ She paused – to see how I was taking it, I think – before continuing. ‘Not literally, but like an echo or . . . I’m not sure.’

  ‘A memory?’ I said, and Kimberley gave me a hard look.

  ‘You do you know what I’m talking about,’ she said, ‘don’t you?’

  ‘It’s called vestigia,’ I said. ‘It’s sort of like an afterglow from magic. Although, to be honest, sometimes it’s just stuff you make up in your head . . . or even a memory triggered by an association with something somebody says or does.’

  ‘So, is it real or not?’ said Kimberley.

  I told her it was real, but learning to differentiate the real from the unreal was one of the things you needed a teacher for, although an annoying dog can be of some help. When she asked what breed of dog I recommended, I realised I might have been leading her a bit astray.

  ‘Forget about the dog,’ I said.

  ‘I liked the dog,’ said Kimberley.

  ‘The dog is a distraction,’ I said.

  Kimberley’s lips twitched.

  ‘You don’t say,’ she said. ‘So do you think my active shooter was possessed or not?’

  ‘He might have been,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean that whatever got into his head made him kill those people. It might have wanted something else, but your shooter misinterpreted it. Or it might have been influenced by the shooter’s own personality. And even if it unequivocally did influence him to shoot his wife, that doesn’t mean that any of the other “active shooters” suffered the same thing.’

  ‘That’s unhelpful,’ said Kimberley.

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I can scan some of the basic textbooks we’ve got back at the Folly, but really they’re not that useful, either. At least, I haven’t found them that useful.’

  Kimberley nodded and stared at her empty coffee cup.

  ‘You know the coffee in this place is terrible,’ she said.

  So we walked further up Uxbridge Road until we found somewhere with decent coffee and Kimberley finally told me what she was doing in the UK.

  ‘Now, since I have become the Bureau’s go-to girl for things both English and supernatural, I have been tasked to try and smooth the repatriation of my fellow citizens –’ she gave me an arch look, ‘– those that are still alive, back to the United States of America where they belong.’

  ‘You could just leave them to us,’ I said. ‘They’re facing some serious charges. False imprisonment, possession of a firearm with intent.’

  ‘Intent of what?’

  ‘Just general intent at the moment,’ I said.

  Kimberley said that if it were down to her she’d be happy to let them enjoy Her Majesty’s hospitality, but there was the pesky detail of their quasi-official status and the US Government being loath to rinse out its undies in the British courts. In order to facilitate a happy outcome she’d be sent over with a grab-bag of low level secrets and concessions to tempt the palate of the British security establishment.

  ‘Not to mention save the taxpayer some money,’ she said.

  ‘Did it work?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Kimberley. ‘Everybody agreed in principle.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Only if your boss says yes,’ said Kimberley.

  ‘My boss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nightingale?’

  ‘Do you have another boss?’

  No, I thought, but I didn’t think his influence stretched that far.

  ‘Did they say why?’ I asked.

  ‘They said there was an arrangement,’ she said.

  Of course there is, I thought.

  ‘And you want me to persuade Nightingale,’ I said.

  ‘Would you?’ said Kimberley. ‘Because that would be swell.’

  ‘So what do you plan to offer us?’

  Kimberley smiled.

  ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said, and pulled out a USB pen and put it on the table between us. ‘I’ve got their names, the organisational structure and history of the Virginia Gentleman’s Company and, most importantly, details of what got them over here in the first place.’

  ‘And what was that?’ I asked.

  Kimberley said she had never driven out to Fort Meade, Maryland to gaze upon the collection of gargantuan modernist blocks that made up the headquarters of the National Security Agency. But she liked to imagine it a honeycomb of bland little cubicles. All the cubicles would be almost identical, but to the trained eye there would be subtle variations of status and purpose. Those cubicles tasked with monitoring global communications for unsuspecting terrorist suspects would have bigger, flatter monitors, nicer desk calendars, maybe the ones with a humorous daily proverb, and first crack at the sandwich trolley when it came past.

  ‘How much sleep have you had recently?’ I asked.

  ‘Bear with me,’ said Kimberley, and described the cubicles furthest from the canteen, the ones with the worrying smell from the pipes overhead, whose inhabitants walked the furthest to find their cars at home time. This was where the information gathered from open sources on the internet, twitter, eBay, Facebook, Tumblr and the like was processed. It was flagged by machine, of course, but some poor schlub still had to go through the items and decide which organ of the state might want to know who was selling a used pink bathrobe for suspiciously large sums of money – possible money laundering – or a rare mint snow globe – potential hazardous material transfer. There was a list, Kimberley imagined, and in an obscure subsection of that list, a section that had not been properly updated since George Bush was President, was the government contractee Alderman Technical Solutions, AKA the Virginia Gentleman’s Company.

  So when the right flag was triggered the cubicle jockey dutifully notified an organisation which should have been taken off that list ever since an unspecified disaster in Fallujah had got them struck off another list – that of approved contractors.

  I asked what had happened in Fallujah, but Kimberley shook her head.

  ‘That information was so redacted that I only know it happened in Fallujah because someone missed a reference in the document authorising the redaction,’ she said. She couldn’t even discover what they were doing in Iraq although there were references to something called ‘area shade suppression’ and ‘TechSub’.

  Whatever it was they were doing, Kimberley didn’t think it was very successful because their contract was terminated in 2009 with two years left to run. Given the low, low standards for success applied to private military contractors in Iraq, the fuck-up that got them fired must have been spectacular. Not that Kimberley used the words fuck-up, you understand.

  She didn’t seem surprised that they were still tangled up in the byzantine coils of the American intelligence establishment.

  ‘People still know people who know people,’ she said. ‘You should know that.’

  I asked what she thought had triggered the cubicle jockey to contact them in the first place – what had brought Alderman Technical Solutions across the pond.

  ‘Your late friend Christina Chorley tried to sell something called The Wild Ledger on eBay with a reserve price of twenty grand,’ she said.

  ‘We knew they were after that,’ I said, and wondered why Crew Cut hadn’t just paid for it – probably cheaper than flying all his guys over and smuggling their guns in, not to mention hiring the SUVs with the suitably sinister tinted windows.

  ‘Ah, but did you know about something called the Mary Engine?’ said Kimberley. ‘She was selling that on eBay too.’

  She
showed me a picture taken from eBay on her tablet – a dense cube of steel and brass gears.

  ‘A difference engine?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s the advantage of having the NSA looking at something like this,’ said Kimberley. ‘Those guys know the difference between their difference- and analytical-engines, and apparently this is neither.’

  I asked what they thought it was.

  ‘They couldn’t lift enough detail from the photographs to determine what it was supposed to do, but they think it’s genuinely Victorian. Mid 1840s they reckon. In fact, if you run it down and you want to generate some good will with the NSA you might want to send it over as a gift.’

  ‘You think I’m going to need goodwill at the NSA?’

  ‘Peter,’ said Kimberley, ‘the way your life is going you’re going to need all the goodwill you can get.’

  There were other items of interest, too. A 1920s anthology of Victor Bartholomew’s work on spirits which I recognised from a particularly tedious Latin lesson, and a Genuine Wizard’s Staff that had, according to Kimberley, a British Army serial number stencilled along its length.

  The attached NSA report indicated that there was no coherence to the collection and posited a high probability that it was just that – a collection. Items acquired by an individual who had a high degree of access but limited understanding.

  ‘Access to what?’ I asked.

  ‘They didn’t know,’ said Kimberley.

  And where it all came from was a mystery, I thought. Like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

  Kimberley and the security arm of the American military industrial complex might not know, but I thought I knew a fox who might.

  Still, I didn’t think there was any point interviewing Reynard the wannabe fox that evening. So I stopped off at Belgravia to brief Nightingale and make multiple back-ups of the USB pen. Since I was there, I also scanned the files and dumped most of them on the Inside Inquiry Office for assessment and entry into HOLMES, including the real names of our American friends. Crew Cut’s name turned out to be Dean Miller, a former reserve Captain in the 29th Infantry Division who had served in Kosovo and Iraq. The 29th was a National Guard unit, but there was no official word on what his day job had been. After leaving the National Guard he was listed as a ‘consultant’ with Alderman Technical Solutions. A sour little note appended by some anonymous security apparatchik complained that just about everybody at ATS was listed as a ‘consultant’. His military record in Iraq was heavily redacted and what wasn’t missing was written in an impenetrable mix of jargon and acronyms – I thought the Met was bad but they were as nothing compared to US Military. It was going to take some serious Google-hours to translate.

  Captain Dean Miller’s compadres all had similar backgrounds in the military and law enforcement and were noticeably from the American south and south-west. I wondered if that might be significant, but it was a small sample size. I added ‘hire a civilian analyst’ to my list of things to go into the growing Word document and moved onto the action list for what was still called operation MARIGOLD because no-one had got round to officially deactivating it yet.

  I also thought I might as well work my way through my email backlog, which was just as well because an annoyingly unflagged communication from the Border Agency informed me that Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had flown in from the Bahamas two days before his daughter thought he had. Which meant he had no alibi for our suspected Faceless Man incident involving the collapse of his own house.

  Which in turn meant that he was going to have to be TIEd all over again. And since he was back on our Tiger list, that action would fall to me and Nightingale.

  I stuck it on our long list of urgent actions before heading back to the Folly and the next morning I got in bright and early to prepare for the interview.

  So far, all the earlier interviews with Reynard had gone along the traditional lines of us saying he’d done it and him saying he hadn’t – in continuous variations. This is not an uncommon type of interview, and so over the years police have come up with a number of techniques for breaking the impasse. Some of which are still even legal. One of the techniques not outlawed by human rights legislation is the horrid surprise. So I printed up some crime scene images and took them into the interview room with me.

  We’re not allowed to let our prisoners fester, so Reynard was washed and dressed in clean clothes. He was beginning to show a little bit of that fraying around the edges that people get after a couple of nights in the cells. For all the fact that he had villain tattooed on his forehead, Reynard hadn’t put in the hours on the judicial/criminal coal face I had, hadn’t developed that dogged patience that separates the police and the professional criminal from ordinary members of the public.

  The fact that he hadn’t asked for legal representation was another dead giveaway.

  ‘When was the last time you were in Bromley?’ I asked, once we’d finished the ceremonial putting of the tapes in the machine and intoned the ritual opening litany of the police interview.

  ‘Bromley?’ said Reynard. ‘What about Bromley?’

  ‘When was the last time you went down there?’

  He smiled, showing white teeth.

  ‘Can’t say that Bromley’s the sort of place I rush to embrace,’ he said. ‘I believe I may have passed through once or twice – on my way somewhere else.’

  ‘So you never stop off to see your good friend Aiden Burghley?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Reynard.

  ‘White middle class drug dealer,’ I said. ‘Your kind of people.’

  ‘My kind of people?’

  ‘You know,’ I said. ‘Pretend-criminals, love breaking the law, hate taking the consequences.’

  ‘I think you’ve just described the human condition there,’ said Reynard smugly.

  I wasn’t going to get a better cue than that – I laid out selected pictures of the Aiden Burghley crime scene – saving the artfully framed close up of his detached face until last.

  ‘Nice,’ he said, but behind his casual tone I caught a whiff of real fear when he asked who it was.

  ‘Don’t you recognise him?’ I asked.

  He said no, shaking his head, but his gaze skittered away from the picture.

  ‘That’s Aiden Burghley,’ I said, and was surprised by a hint of relief in the set of Reynard’s shoulders. Either because he didn’t know who Aiden was, or merely because it happened to somebody else.

  ‘What about this?’ I asked and laid down a picture of the Mary Engine next to the face. Reynard glanced at it and shrugged.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You don’t recognise it?’

  ‘Puzzle box?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s one of the items Christina Chorley was selling on eBay,’ I said. ‘Along with the item you were trying to sell us.’

  ‘On eBay?’ said Reynard, too outraged to keep his mouth shut. ‘The little bitch.’

  ‘So you’re telling me you didn’t know?’ I asked – making it a challenge.

  ‘You don’t put things like this on eBay,’ said Reynard. ‘Everybody knows that.’

  ‘Everybody but Christina,’ I said. ‘And why not sell stuff on eBay? Everybody else does.’

  ‘Because there are some things that are just not done,’ said Reynard.

  ‘Even by the likes of you?’

  ‘Especially by the likes of me,’ said Reynard. ‘One does not piss in one’s own pool, after all.’

  ‘But Christina did, didn’t she?’ I said. ‘Not quite the compliant little bunny you were hoping for, was she?’

  ‘Well, they’re no fun, constable, if they don’t wriggle a bit under the claw – are they?’ His smile was vulpine and humourless, but now he was talking about the things that floated his particular boat, and once they’ve started doing that it’s just a matter of hopping on board and sailing them down the river.

  ‘You like the thrill of the chase, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t we all?’<
br />
  I gave him a half shrug that implied that I would love to agree with him, but I was constrained by the iron hand of political correctness. Which was all it took for Reynard to pick up the paddle and push us out into midstream.

  He leaned forward and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Most men do,’ he said. ‘But they’ve been conditioned not to admit it – even to themselves.’

  ‘So where do you like to go hunting?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t go looking for them, Peter,’ he said. ‘They come looking for me.’

  Presumably with torches and pitchforks.

  ‘All the little bunnies do it,’ said Reynard. ‘Even the Germaine Greer wannabes. There they go, backwards and forwards right under your nose,’ he said. ‘While making sure everything is bouncing away in the most appealing fashion.’

  ‘It’s those little fluffy tails,’ I said before I could stop myself, but fortunately Reynard was too deep into his happy place to notice.

  ‘When little Christina came hop hopping past,’ I said, ‘where were you?’

  ‘The Chestnut Tree,’ said Reynard.

  Which was a famous pub in Marble Arch where denizens of the demi-monde hung out after doing a hard day’s whatever it is members of the demi-monde do. Zach the goblin boy was a periodic patron when he wasn’t barred. I’d been in a couple of times to show my face and reassure the community that I was bloody well keeping an eye on them – the thieving gits. It wasn’t the sort of place that checked IDs once you were visibly old enough to do a paper round.

  It also wasn’t a pub you wandered into by accident – I pointed this out to Reynard.

  ‘She was there with company,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of company?’

  ‘The deified sort,’ he said. ‘Or at least one of their offspring.’

  ‘That’s quite a lot of kids,’ I said. ‘Which one?’

  He hesitated; I suspect he was considering whether he could use the name as a bargaining chip. But then, sensibly, he told me.

  ‘Lady Ty’s little girl,’ he said. ‘Olivia.’

  And round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.

  11

  Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree