The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  His name was Reynard Fossman and he was dismayingly pleased to see me.

  He raised his walking stick in salute and I saw that it was made of hickory and its head was a knot of roots smoothed down and polished to bring out the grain. I considered having him for carrying an offensive weapon, because it doesn’t have to be offensive per se – it’s the intention to use it as such that counts in law.

  ‘Mr Fossman,’ I said.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Reynard and gave me a vulpine smile, ‘you remember me.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

  ‘And how is your lovely cousin?’ he asked. ‘Still gorgeous, I hope.’

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, so many things,’ said Reynard. ‘But in this instance I bear a message for your master.’

  People don’t like it when you don’t react to this sort of shit. They can get frustrated and escalate out of their own comfort zone. You can end up with some useful information that way, or an excuse to arrest them for assaulting a police officer. I gave Reynard my blandest expression, but he just cocked his head and gave me a calculating look. He had a reputation for being cunning, as well other words starting with C.

  ‘Tell him,’ said Reynard, ‘that I can put him in touch with a certain someone who has an item he might well like to purchase.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Jonathan Wild’s final ledger,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘You do know who Jonathan Wild was?’ asked Reynard.

  Jonathan Wild – self-styled Thief Taker General who cut out the criminal middle man by arranging to have your property stolen, fenced and sold back to you inhouse. It was a wonderful scam – if you wanted your stuff back, you had to deal with him. And if you were a thief and you didn’t play ball it was a long walk to a short drop at Tyburn. Of course, this was back in the eighteenth century when a gentleman might have a good meal, a little professional company and still have enough left out of a fiver to bribe a high court judge.

  ‘Is he part of One Direction?’ I asked.

  Reynard sighed theatrically and proffered his business card.

  ‘Just make sure you tell the Nightingale,’ he said and then, pausing only to doff an imaginary top hat at my mum, he slipped back out the way he came.

  I looked at his card. White high quality stock, a stylised fox’s head in embossed red-gold and below that a single mobile number – a disposable, I found when I checked it the next morning.

  ‘Ah,’ said Nightingale when I stepped outside and called him. ‘That is indeed an item we might want to acquire.’ Which was Nightingale speak for: grab it with both hands. ‘We shall have to discuss this tomorrow.’

  Later that evening my dad and the Irregulars struck up ‘The Sidewinder’ and I got to spend a good thirty seconds admiring the way Beverley moved before she dragged me out and made me dance with her. When the set finished she put her arms around me and kissed me – she smelt of new mown grass and heated car wax, like old deckchairs and plastic hosepipes – like a hot summer’s day in a London garden.

  These days my mum doesn’t let my dad hang around after a gig, so I stuck them in an Uber and joined the Irregulars, plus girlfriends and boyfriends, plus Beverley and her friends in the bar. The manager of The Bull’s Head had been a fan of my dad’s almost as long as my mum, so we were treated to a lock-in and drinks at cost. The band, or at least Daniel and Max, predictably took this as a challenge, as did their and Beverley’s friends – musicians and students – you’d think the manager would have known better.

  ‘Given he’s such a skinny lad,’ James said after watching Daniel’s boyfriend sink yet another Guinness, ‘you’ve got to ask where it’s all going.’

  James was the drummer and so by tradition it was his van that the band tooled around in – this was causing some friction.

  ‘I don’t want to invoke national stereotypes but I’m bloody dying for a drink here,’ he said staring meaningfully at Daniel and Max. They were less than sympathetic.

  ‘You should have taken up the sax,’ said Max.

  ‘You only dare say that cause you’re pure steamin’,’ said James. ‘The world’s full of wannabe sax players, but jazz drums – that’s a vocation.’

  Bev’s friends tried to match the jazzmen drink for drink, and as a result had to be poured into the back of James’ van with the rest of the band plus hangers-on. James promised faithfully to see them safely back to their digs. As the van lurched off I noticed that it was riding well low on its suspension and hoped, ironically as it turned out for me, that they didn’t get stopped.

  It was breezy out by the river, the cold finding its way down the back of my jacket. It was high tide and I could practically feel Beverley’s mother slapping at the embankment, looking for cracks – nothing malicious, you understand, just doing what comes naturally – so it didn’t surprise me when Bev vaulted onto the parapet and started taking off her clothes.

  She turned to look at me, wearing just her knickers and the red silk bra that I knew for a fact she’d nicked from her sister Effra and was two sizes too small.

  ‘Race you home,’ she shouted and, turning, dove into the river.

  I gathered up her clothes and threw them onto the passenger seat of the Asbo before setting off down Barnes High Street at a swift but totally legal speed. I considered using my blues and twos but that would have been cheating. I’d have beaten her home, too, if I hadn’t been pulled over by a pair of uniforms on the Kingston Road ‘on suspicion’ and had to flash my warrant card.

  ‘What were you thinking?’ I asked. ‘Me in a Ford Focus – what was it? The colour?’ I’d stopped using the Orange Asbo for covert work – for obvious reasons – so it had become my off-duty transport.

  ‘To be honest,’ said one of the uniforms, ‘you just looked so bloody cheerful – it was suspicious.’

  I stayed polite, although I did make a note of their collar numbers because you never know.

  Driving while cheerful, I thought, that’s a new one.

  Still, it did mean Beverley was waiting for me in bed when I arrived.

  4

  Obligatory Audience Participation

  The next morning it was my turn to slip out of bed leaving Beverley behind, invisible under the duvet except for a spray of dreadlocks across the pillow. I had a text from Stephanopoulos – My office @ 7 briefing TST Albertina Pryce.

  The police are well aware of the subtle degrees of intimidation they can exert, from the veiled menace of the ‘friendly chat’ to turning up at dawn with a battering ram, a van full of TSG and a documentary TV camera crew. Being asked to show up at a nick first thing in the morning to ‘clarify a previous statement’ is a signal that the police have reason to believe that you are a lying little toerag, but are willing to give you a second chance to come clean. It’s also a signal that a sensible body would bring a brief – just to be on the safe side.

  So it says something about Albert Pryce, multiple Booker Prize shortlistee and a man whose appearances on Radio 4 were so frequent that Broadcasting House had given him his own entry pass, that he decided that he himself would be an elegant sufficiency with regards to legal representation for his daughter.

  Stephanopoulos and Seawoll, ever alive to the nuances of interpersonal dynamics as they pertain to screwing evidence out of potential suspects, decided to send me in alone.

  Normally when you’re handling the rich and powerful you stick them in the ABE (Achieving Best Evidence) suite, which is fitted with pastel furniture and throw cushions designed to make vulnerable witnesses feel more comfortable. But either they were all in use or Stephanopoulos had actually read A Filthy Trade – Pryce’s Booker shortlisted novel of crime and punishment. Which, according to the Times Literary Supplement, beautifully inverted Dostoyevsky’s premise in its portrayal of a man who, having murdered his wife out of sheer exasperation, proves to have a higher degree of morality than the corrupt and degraded detectives who pursue
him. By another completely unrelated coincidence we ended up in Interview Room Three which was usually reserved for Belgravia’s more fragrant customers. I’m not saying you were going to slip on sick when you walked in, but there was a marked old-hospital smell of disinfectant and wee.

  We left them in there for half an hour while we – me, Stephanopoulos and Seawoll – discussed interview strategy. ‘Go in there and be your usual charming self,’ said Stephanopoulos.

  ‘We want the dad to stay nice and smug,’ said Seawoll.

  So I made a point of carrying in a stack of papers and faffing with them for a bit before introducing myself and shaking their hands.

  I was beginning to think that there must be a factory somewhere stamping out dangerously skinny white girls with good deportment and a nervous disposition. Albertina Pryce had long blonde hair framing a narrow face with a pointed chin. She wore a pink sweat shirt that was too big for her and skinny blue jeans. Her handshake was limp and I could feel the small bones in her hand under my fingers.

  Mr Pryce was surprisingly short, but broad-shouldered. He had the same fair hair as his daughter but with a square, blunt face. He wore a well-tailored suit jacket over a crisply ironed white shirt but no tie, and his top two buttons were undone to reveal a centimetre of greying chest hair. When he stood to shake my hand I saw he was wearing pre-faded jeans. His shake was firm but the skin of his hand was soft. I knew from my notes that he was sixty-three, but he looked as if he were desperately clinging to fifty with both hands.

  ‘Grant, eh?’ he said as we settled. ‘Dad from the Caribbean, yes?’

  He waited impatiently while I gave his daughter the caution plus two, and interrupted me before I had a chance to ask my first question.

  ‘Can’t we just get on with this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m sorry sir. Legally we have to do these things,’ I said.

  Albertina glanced nervously at my pile of papers and then off to the left – away from her father – as he gave me a sympathetic nod.

  ‘Bureaucracy,’ he said sagely.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, because Stephanopoulos wanted me to encourage him but not too much.

  ‘I know it’s hard, Peter,’ she’d said. ‘But if you could contain your erudition and ready wit for just a little while we’d be most grateful.’

  ‘Am I allowed to be cheeky?’ I’d asked.

  ‘No you’re fucking not,’ said Seawoll.

  ‘I’m afraid it has to be done, sir,’ I said to Albert Pryce.

  ‘Does it? Or do we just think it does?’ he asked. ‘Did you join the police to do paperwork? Of course you didn’t.’

  I made a show of straightening my papers and looked at Albertina, who was resolutely staring at the point on the table where her phone would have been if we hadn’t asked her to leave it in her bag.

  ‘Would you say you were Christina’s best friend?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said her father, ‘you practically lived in each other’s pockets.’

  Albertina glared at him, but either long exposure had rendered him immune or, more likely I thought, it didn’t even register. Seawoll had told me not to be cheeky, but there’s cheeky and then there’s cheeky.

  ‘Did you see a lot of Christina Chorley, then, sir?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, very clever,’ he said. ‘Middle aged man, young girls, let’s have a little dig, see what we can find? Is that it?’

  ‘We’re merely looking to establish a timeline,’ I said.

  ‘Interesting that you refer to the collective “we” there,’ he said. ‘Is that why you joined the police? To find an identity? You’ve got an old fashioned working class London accent, so I’m betting your mum was a native, south of the river, maybe Deptford, maybe from an old Southwark family.’

  God help me, but I couldn’t stop myself saying, ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘So there you were, growing up stuck somewhere between black and white,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘Never really one thing or the other. I mean . . . absent a father figure for you to build your black identity around and, being a proper working class bloke, not comfortable with your feminine side. I’ll bet you didn’t do well at school – right? Bit of a rebel, acting up.’

  ‘I had my moments,’ I said, thinking of the time me and Colin Sachlaw borrowed a lump of dry ice from the chemistry lab and slid it into the girl’s toilets. I didn’t mind the week of detention, but they called mum at work. And that didn’t end well.

  ‘So, hello police,’ said Mr Pryce. ‘A nice uniform identity, a little authority and, god knows, after Macpherson they’d be desperate enough to recruit you to overlook any educational deficiencies.’

  That, as they say, is fighting talk. But, as Nightingale once told me during boxing practise, the best blow is the one your opponent doesn’t even notice until he keels over.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ said Mr Pryce, not noticing his daughter’s look of disgust. ‘Scrabbling for some structure in the wreckage of the permissive society to make a meaningful connection with other people. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? Listen to other people. The mighty Self has obliterated our ability to communicate.’

  ‘Dad,’ said Albertina.

  ‘You’re lucky, though,’ he said. ‘It could have been Islam, couldn’t it? The siren song of the mad mullahs, or the rough fellowship of the gang. Did smiting the infidel not appeal? Did you have something against drugs?’

  ‘Dad!’ screamed Albertina. ‘For god’s sake shut the fuck-up.’

  Her dad’s mouth closed with a click and he looked guiltily at his daughter in a way that suggested to me that things like parent-teacher conferences and the like might have followed a similar pattern.

  Albertina turned to me, controlled her breathing, and asked whether it was alright if she could choose her own responsible adult – thank you very much.

  Her dad was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. So the next responsible adult was a suspiciously competent criminal solicitor whose parents might have been from the Kashmir but who spoke with a Bradford accent. He also slicked his thick black hair back with gel and, I suspected, wished he could wear his aviator sunglasses indoors. We got on famously.

  Stephanopoulos took the opportunity to get a separate statement from Albert Pryce and sent in Guleed to do the honours. I wondered what she was going to make of the mad mullahs.

  ‘I’m sorry about my dad,’ Albertina said as soon as we sat down.

  I’d fetched in some coffee for me, a bottle of iced tea for her and a plate of biscuits to add to the whole we’re just having a chat vibe and Stephanopoulos gave me permission to take off my jacket and roll up my sleeves.

  ‘Mine always talks about jazz,’ I said.

  ‘You have it easy,’ she said and we both turned to the solicitor who gave a little shake of his head.

  ‘Can I remind you that we’re conducting an interview here,’ he said.

  ‘Come on,’ said Albertina. ‘You have a go, too. Then we can get all serious.’

  ‘Politics,’ said the solicitor finally. ‘He goes on and on about the partition.’

  Albertina asked what partition that was.

  ‘The partition of India,’ said the solicitor. ‘Now can we get on?’

  Albertina sighed and asked me what I wanted to know.

  ‘When was the last time Christina stayed the weekend at your place?’ I asked.

  ‘Three weeks ago,’ she said. I looked up the dates and confirmed them.

  ‘And before that?’

  Albertina had to think about it, but she thought it was probably three or four weeks before that.

  ‘Do you know if she was telling her father that she was staying with you, but then staying with somebody else?’ I asked.

  ‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I had to cover for her.’

  ‘Do you know who Christina was staying with?’

  ‘Some man,’ she said with a definite emphasis on the word man – as opposed to a boy.


  I asked if this man had a name.

  ‘Raymond,’ she said. ‘No wait. Reynard – like he was French.’

  ‘Did you ever meet him?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘So you never met him?’ I asked this to avoid the whole for the record Miss Pryce has shaken her head, which can come back to bite you in court.

  ‘I never met him,’ she said.

  ‘But you knew he was an adult?’

  ‘It’s not like Christina ever shut up about it,’ said Albertina. ‘Although, to give her her due, unlike Dad, she didn’t feel the urge to write it all down and publish it for everyone to see.’

  Albert Pryce’s last book but one, An Immovable Subject, had been a semi-autobiographical account of how he’d left his second wife – Albertina’s mother – after falling in love with an American intern half his age.

  ‘You’re sure his name is Reynard?’

  ‘Oh, definitely,’ she said.

  ‘Was there anything unusual about him?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Did anything Christina said about him strike you as unusual?’

  ‘She said he was a prince,’ said Albertina.

  I asked whether Christina had said where Reynard was a prince of.

  ‘Not that kind of prince,’ said Albertina. ‘Chris said he was a fairy tale prince.’

  ‘Interesting,’ I said, and asked if Albertina knew how Christina and her ‘prince’ had met. While I did that, I wrote the word NIGHTINGALE on my pad in large enough letters to be picked up by the camera and then I underlined it twice.

  The word ‘bollocks’ is one of the most beautiful and flexible in the English language. It can be used to express emotional states ranging from ecstatic surprise to weary resignation in the face of inevitable disaster. And Seawoll was definitely veering towards the latter when we all sat down in his office to talk about Reynard Fossman.