The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘What kind of antiquity?’ I asked. ‘A family heirloom, a genuine Chippendale, a licence to crenelate?’

  ‘Jonathan Wild’s final ledger.’

  ‘And why would you want that?’ I asked.

  ‘You know damned well why,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I want you to say it out loud.’

  ‘The Third Principia,’ said Lady Helena.

  ‘You’re that keen to turn lead into gold?’

  ‘Never mind filthy lucre,’ she said. ‘The philosopher’s stone, eternal life and therefore by extension a cure for all that ails you.’ She leant back in her seat and folded her arms. ‘And that’s enough for the starling. You want more, send in the Nightingale.’

  ‘Do you think there’s more?’ asked Nightingale.

  We’d left Lady Helena and the Right Honourable Caroline to stew, on the general police principle of when in doubt keep them waiting. You never know when something incriminating might turn up – it’s happened before, even if you sometimes have to nudge the process along.

  Nightingale and Stephanopoulos had made themselves comfortable in her office and sent me off for coffee and biscuits. Once we’d divided up the chocolate hobnobs we got down to the business

  ‘She knows who we are,’ I said. ‘Which means she probably walked in with a plan.’

  ‘To what end?’ asked Nightingale.

  ‘It can’t be to spring her daughter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Her brief’s going to have her out in less than two hours. We don’t have enough to charge her with anything more than making an affray and she’s going to maintain that she was out shopping when she was caught up in a police operation.’

  ‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Nightingale.

  ‘That’s the consequence of having a branch of the Met operating without statutory authority,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘We can’t really explain to a jury that she obstructed the police in their lawful activity by shooting smoke out of her fingertips – can we?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘Which is why I’m going to take a leaf out of Peter’s book and invite them round for tea.’

  ‘Sir?’ I said and looked at Stephanopoulos, who shrugged.

  ‘Lady Helena clearly wants something from us, and equally clearly she has information it could profit us to know,’ he said. ‘I suggest we ask her – politely – what it is.’

  ‘So, tea this afternoon then?’

  ‘Good Lord no, Peter,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow afternoon at the very earliest. For one thing we need to gather as much intelligence on Lady Helena as we can, and I need to brief Postmartin about the ledger. But, most importantly, we must give Molly time to prepare for guests. If we spring a member of the aristocracy on her without warning it could go very badly for us indeed.’

  So, in the classic manner of a swan, the top half glided effortlessly across the police work while below the surface me and Guleed scrambled to pull together a decent intelligence assessment of a woman who, if I’m any judge, learnt how to be bureaucratically invisible on her mother’s knee.

  And how to heal with magic – possibly.

  With all that implied.

  And having made sure my attention was focused in one direction the universe, which likes a good laugh, smacked me in the face from the other side. Just as I was considering calling the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, formerly the Colonial Office, to see if they had anything on Lady Helena’s activities in Kenya, my phone rang and an American voice said, ‘Hi Peter, how you doing?’

  It was Kim or, more formally, Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds of the FBI. We’d met a couple of years back when we’d engaged in competitive car tracking, suspect-losing and the world’s first three-person sewer-luge team. We’d exchanged maybe five emails apiece since then – mostly at Christmas. One had been to alert her to the change in Lesley May’s status.

  ‘Hi Kim,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘You never write me, Peter,’ she said. ‘You never call – so I thought I’d see how you were doing.’

  This seemed unlikely. Now, she couldn’t be worried about being bugged because if you’re taped then someone’s listening and probably isn’t going to fall for ‘this is a casual chat about the snow being particularly severe in Moscow this year’ – so this was more of a plausible deniability sort of phone call. Kimberley wanted to be able say it was a friendly call with no ‘policy’ implications. The question was who she would be plausibly denying it to – a question that, obviously, you couldn’t ask over the phone.

  ‘You know how it is,’ I said. ‘Fighting crime and stuff.’

  ‘Well, anyhoo,’ said Kimberley. ‘A real interesting thing happened to me the other day. I was working at my desk when a couple of gentlemen walked up and introduced themselves and started asking after you.’

  ‘Agents?’ I asked.

  ‘That was the interesting thing,’ she said, maintaining her bright tone, ‘they had visitor passes. But, you know what, their escort must have wandered off and left them to their own devices.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I said. Visitors that could wander around an FBI office without an escort had to have some official status, or at least sanction from somewhere. ‘What did they want to know about?’

  ‘Who you were. What office you work from.’ Kimberley paused. ‘Had you ever done anything extraordinary.’

  ‘Extraordinary?’

  ‘Yep, that’s what they asked.’

  Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck with extra fuck.

  ‘What did you tell them?’ I asked.

  ‘I said you were a perfectly nice young low-ranking police officer who was on the task force investigating the murder of a US citizen abroad,’ said Kimberley.

  ‘And?’

  ‘They weren’t buying.’

  ‘Did they ask about anyone else?’ I said, meaning Nightingale.

  ‘No,’ said Kimberley. ‘They only seemed to know about you.’

  Kimberley had left Nightingale out of her – already heavily edited – report when she returned to the US. Operation MATCHBOX, the investigation into the murder of James Gallagher Jr, had left him out too, along with the community of magical folk that lived under the streets of Notting Hill – that was standard policy.

  ‘Did they say why they wanted to know?’

  ‘Strangely, they didn’t,’ said Kimberly. ‘But I did get the impression that they might be coming to visit you in the near future, so I thought I’d give you a heads-up.’

  ‘Thanks for that,’ I said.

  ‘My pleasure, and you take care now,’ she said and hung up.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Guleed from the other side of our desk.

  ‘Big trouble,’ I said. ‘Right here in River City.’

  6

  On the Comparing of Watches

  Nightingale is big on the whole healthy body, healthy mind thing and, given that he looks good for a man who should have got a telegram from the queen more than a decade ago, I tend to follow his advice. Which is why when I’m working out of Belgravia I sometimes leave one of the Asbos there so I can run over the next morning. It’s a good route, down St Martin’s Lane still dirty from last night’s theatre crowd, across the top of Trafalgar Square before dropping down onto the Mall and giving her majesty a quick wave if she’s at home.

  That morning it was cool and despite the smell of rain the sky was clear and the predawn light turned the roadway a nice shade of pink. I’d just passed the ICA when Beverley rang me – she does most mornings if I don’t stay the night at her place.

  ‘I don’t want to be funny babes,’ she said without preamble, ‘but when were you going to tell me you’d run into Lesley?’

  I slowed to a walk, then stopped and took a deep breath of chill air.

  ‘Well, for a start, I wasn’t going to do it over the phone,’ I said. ‘Where did you hear that from?’

  ‘Tyburn ran into me “by accident” yesterday,’ said Beverley. ‘Couldn’t wait to tell me. And what have you done
to piss her off?

  ‘I didn’t fulfil my wool quota,’ I said.

  ‘And Lesley?’

  ‘Tried to kill me a couple of times,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think it was personal.’

  ‘Wait,’ said Beverley. ‘Was that Harrods?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘So you roughed up the top shop,’ she said. ‘No wonder Ty is pissed. Did you get me a present?’

  ‘I was busy at the time,’ I said. ‘Was there something you wanted?’

  ‘Always,’ said Beverley. ‘You chasing Lesley now?’

  ‘Not my job,’ I said. ‘The DPS is responsible for Lesley, and they don’t want me anywhere near the case. And if you like being police – and I do – then you don’t mess with the DPS.’

  ‘And the real reason?’

  ‘She’s taunting me,’ I said. ‘What with the texts last year and popping up at Harrods like that. I think she’s trying to pull me off balance.’

  The breeze down the Mall was making the sweat chill on my legs and back. I started walking again.

  ‘Maybe she’s trying to tell you something,’ said Beverley.

  ‘Then she can send me a letter,’ I said. ‘Or, better still, turn herself in.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Beverley. ‘Just saying.’

  ‘Sorry, Bev,’ I said.

  ‘Are you coming over tonight? I’ve got to do an essay on the atmospheric carbon cycle for tomorrow – you could help me with my chemistry.’

  ‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m planning to blow up some phones for science.’

  Someone had left a copy of the Sun on my desk. It had a good photograph of some TSG officers milling about under the Harrods awning – the headline read HARRODS HORROR. A quick flick through indicated that they didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened, but that wasn’t going to stop them from devoting six pages to it. It turned out to be the lead with most of the papers except for the Express which went with UKIP TO ROCK WESTMINSTER.

  I knew Stephanopoulos and Seawoll were shielding me from a ton of shit already, but after the mess at Trafalgar Square Seawoll had admitted that my career’s strange ability to survive its excursions into major property damage owed more to the fact that – should the Met actually get rid of me – they couldn’t guarantee my replacement wouldn’t be worse.

  ‘Nightingale is fucking untouchable,’ Seawoll had said. ‘And you’re the lesser of two evils.’

  Still, I happened to know for a fact that the whole of Belgravia nick were running a pool on how long I would last and how I would go – the options being death, medical discharge (physical), medical discharge (psychological), indefinite disciplinary suspension, sacked for misconduct, secondment to Interpol and, with just one vote, ascension to a higher plane of existence.

  I suspected the last one was a bit unlikely.

  Guleed turned up a few minutes later wearing her leather jacket, the Hugo Boss she said her mum had bought her, which meant she’d been out doing some serious police work.

  ‘Entry codes,’ she said when she saw me. According to their statements, the kids had gained access to One Hyde Park via the underground staff tunnel that ran from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel next door. Two of them had identified James Murray, the victim’s official boyfriend, as the one who’d possessed the passkey and security codes. There had been multiple actions including one to re-interview James Murray re: where he got the codes, but it was still pending until Guleed preempted it that morning.

  ‘Christina Chorley gave him the codes,’ said Guleed. ‘And the passkey.’

  Since James didn’t know where Christina had got them, and she was seriously dead, Guleed decided to work the other side of the problem and find out who owned the flat.

  ‘I thought all those things were actioned already?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed but just about everyone else is off working that murder in Fulham,’ said Guleed. ‘It’s basically you, me and whatever time we can bully out of David.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed,’ I said, although it did explain where everyone else was that morning.

  ‘Not surprising,’ said Guleed. ‘You were too busy blowing up Harrods.’

  ‘Are we getting leaned on?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Guleed.

  I didn’t ask who by and I was pretty certain that the ‘how’ was Deputy Assistant Commissioner Folsom, he of the unfortunate eyebrows and midlife opera crisis. He was one of Tyburn’s circle and, while he didn’t have any direct influence over Belgravia MIT, he’d know a man who did – probably the Assistant Commissioner.

  The AC would be asking whether this particular suspicious death was worth the resources, what with the current government cutting budgets and the sudden proliferation of expensive historical abuse investigations.

  And you couldn’t argue, because deciding on resource allocation is what ACPO officers are all about – and, let’s face it, there’s always more crime than budget. So Seawoll and Stephanopoulos had pulled most of their team off Operation Marigold, but left Guleed. Because, while those two liked a result as much as the next copper, they preferred it when it corresponded with your actual truth – they were very modern that way.

  So, actions were still being actioned and me and Guleed were actioning them, and the wheels of justice ground on. Albeit in first gear.

  So the low ratio wheels had taken Guleed to a civilian employee at Serious Fraud who was a friend of her brother’s who had helped her untangle the – deliberately complex – web of fronts and shell companies that surrounded the flat at One Hyde Park.

  ‘And then one name tripped a flag to a certain Operation Wentworth.’ She smiled brightly. ‘Sound familiar?’

  Wentworth was the investigation into the illegal demolition of Skygarden Tower, with me on it I might add, and the activities of County Gard Ltd which, along with County Finance Management and The County System Company, was a known front organisation for the Faceless Man.

  ‘Which ties Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman to the Faceless Man,’ I said. ‘Serious Fraud have been banging their heads against that for a year – this could be their way in.’

  ‘And it was at County Gard’s offices,’ said Guleed, ‘where you first met the Right Honourable Caroline Linden-Limmer.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who’s linked to Reynard Fossman, who is linked to Christina Chorley, who is linked back to County Gard.’

  Unless Reynard was the link to County Gard, I thought. And we knew the Faceless Man loved his hybrids, his tiger-men and cat-girls. So why not a fox?

  ‘So the Right Honourable Caroline has conveniently turned up at both ends of that trail,’ said Guleed. ‘What I’m asking is, do you really think it’s a good idea to invite her into your secret hideout?’

  But invited in they were, and at the appointed time I was in the entrance foyer in my second best suit, waiting for them to knock on the door. They were fifteen minutes late.

  The doorbell rang and I triggered the counterweight mechanism that causes the doors to swing open impressively on their own – well, it impressed me once. They opened to reveal Lady Helena waiting with a half-smile on her lips. She’d deeply invested in the ageing bohemian look, with a quilted burgundy jacket and corduroy slacks. Her daughter was dressed in a conservative navy skirt suit that fitted her tall frame too well to be anything but bespoke.

  Apart from my mum and certain senior aunts and uncles, I don’t do deference as a rule. And certainly not to inherited titles. But I also believe in making people comfortable enough to make mistakes, so I smiled and called her Lady Helena.

  I noticed that she didn’t tell me to call her ‘just Helena please’.

  I invited them inside and let the doors close behind them.

  Lady Helena paused in front of the statue of Sir Isaac Newton and read the inscription.

  Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night;

  God said ‘Let Newton be’ and all was light.

 
‘“I do not know what I may appear to the world”,’ she said and I recognised the quote, ‘“but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore”.’ She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. ‘Where would be without the “great men” of history to guide us.’ And with that she swept, unprompted, into the atrium.

  I caught Caroline’s gaze and she rolled her eyes.

  We use the atrium for afternoon tea because Molly won’t let us use the breakfast room for anything but breakfast, and the main dining hall is, despite having a high ceiling decorated with a fine Enlightenment mural of Newton bringing light to the world, actually a bit dingy.

  Still, the green leather armchairs had been artfully rearranged so that the comfy one with the severe cracking on the armrests was not amongst those arrayed in a loose u-shape around a couple of walnut coffee tables. I noticed that both the table tops and the green leather gleamed and there was a definite lingering smell of polish.

  The silver tea service, which I’d only ever seen decorating a dresser in the small dining room, was assembled upon those coffee tables. On the service were a selection of biscuits, cakes and iced delights in pink and yellow. Enough, I was to learn much later, to make a Swedish housewife proud. Molly had been baking all night and in such quantity that Toby had fallen into a diabetic coma around dawn and was currently lying in the kitchen with his legs in the air.

  Nightingale had stood as the women entered and he waved them towards the chairs. I’d been hoping that Molly would suddenly materialise behind them, but instead she came gliding in from the direction of the kitchen stairs bearing a silver tray and a squarish art deco teapot in white china with gold trim.

  Lady Helena watched Molly approach. She looked interested but not surprised. I wondered, what did she know about Molly? And what had she heard about the internal disposition of the Folly?

  Once we were seated, and Molly had poured the tea, Nightingale gave a little formal nod in the direction of our guests and invited them to eat and drink without fear of obligation.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lady Helena. ‘But I’m curious as to whether you believe that sort of thing is really necessary.’