The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  After caution plus two we could have gone straight to the business with the drugs. But our priority – as determined by the senior officers even now monitoring us from the video suite – was to find out what the fuck the Americans had wanted.

  Phoebe said she had no idea.

  ‘I was downstairs by the pool,’ she said. ‘And they just appeared.’

  ‘They’ being Crew Cut, who finally identified himself as Dean, and his merry men.

  They’d asked her about her eBay activities.

  ‘What about your eBay activities?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I never use eBay.’

  ‘Do you have a PayPal account?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘No, I have a credit card,’ said Phoebe, who was perfectly happy to buy online and perfectly happy to buy second-hand – just not at the same time.

  ‘It’s so much more fun getting clothes from charity shops,’ she said. ‘I once almost grabbed a genuine Nicole Farhi jacket in a charity shop in Chelsea but this woman beat me to it.’

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to have done on eBay, but Dean, formerly known as Crew Cut, seemed to think she’d tried to sell a book.

  We asked what kind of book.

  ‘An old book,’ she said. ‘Really old, like centuries old. A ledger – that’s what boss American called it.’

  ‘Did he mention a title?’ I asked.

  Phoebe said not, but when we pressed she thought that Dean might have referred to it as the ‘Last Ledger’. This all seemed a bit pat to me – suspects often can’t resist dropping in little bits of detail in the hope that it adds veracity to their statement, when all it actually does is make us more suspicious. I made a note to pursue this question in a later interview and we retraced the timeline leading up to the Americans’ arrival.

  ‘I was in the kitchen getting a drink and—’ Phoebe frowned. ‘Then I went downstairs. Somebody knocked on the door.’

  She didn’t know the exact time, but it wasn’t that long before the cleaner left. We’d had the door under observation by then and definitely hadn’t seen anyone. Nobody sneaks past Guleed – she says it’s a talent you acquire if you’re the eldest child in a big family.

  ‘Was the knock at the front door?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Must have been,’ said Phoebe, but she didn’t seem so sure.

  ‘Did you answer it?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Was it a knock or the doorbell?’ I asked.

  ‘It was a knock,’ she said hesitantly and then, with more confidence, ‘definitely a knock.’

  So it could have been the back door, not the front – perhaps that’s how Dean and co planned to make their escape.

  ‘What did you do next?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I went downstairs,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Did you go for a swim?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I must have done,’ said Phoebe. ‘Why else would I go down there?’

  She’d looked bone-dry to me when I’d seen her.

  ‘What were you wearing when you were in the kitchen?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Is that important?’

  ‘Helps us establish a timeline,’ said Guleed.

  ‘Jeans,’ said Phoebe. ‘Or maybe tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt.’

  ‘Not your bikini?’

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe.

  ‘Not under your other clothes?’ asked Guleed.

  Phoebe looked at me and rolled her eyes at Guleed.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Do you keep it downstairs by the pool?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Phoebe. ‘It’s a Sofia by Vix – Ollie bought it for me in Nice – I wouldn’t leave it downstairs where she could get her hands on it.’

  ‘She’ being Victoria Jones – Phoebe’s stepmother.

  ‘So you must have gone upstairs to your room before you went down to the pool,’ I said.

  Phoebe shrugged.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Must have.’

  Memory is unreliable, and it isn’t unusual for a witness to forget big chunks of the events that led to them answering your questions – even when things were fresh. Still, the obvious hole in Phoebe’s timeline was beginning to worry me.

  ‘Before the Americans turned up,’ I said, ‘was anyone in the basement with you?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Like anybody.’

  Phoebe frowned. ‘I was talking to someone,’ she said.

  ‘Do you remember who?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Someone from school, I think,’ she said.

  ‘A school friend?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe and bit her lip. ‘An old person.’

  ‘Man or a woman?’

  ‘Man.’

  ‘A teacher?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Phoebe firmly. ‘Not a teacher. You know, it’s funny, but I think he was a parent . . .’ she said.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘He was familiar – like I totally knew him from somewhere – but definitely not a teacher.’

  ‘And yet you didn’t recognise him?’ I said.

  ‘I did, but not so I could tell you who he was.’ She made a waving motion with both hands. ‘It’s like when you’re half-way to school and you can’t remember what you had for breakfast. You know you had breakfast, you know what you usually have for breakfast, but you cannot for the life of you remember what you actually had today.’

  Doing a two-hander during an interview is all about rhythm; you and your partner shift backwards and forwards to keep the interviewee ever so slightly off balance. If they don’t have time to think about their answers, then they are more likely to blurt out the truth. Or at least contradict themselves enough for you to figure out what they’re lying about. Good cop/bad cop is the Hollywood version, simplified and sexed up for maximum drama in minimum screen time. Me and Guleed had spent a year, off and on, interviewing everyone from mad mechanics to surly bouncers – not to mention the thing with the police horse which I’ve promised never to bring up on pain of ninjutsu – so she knew that the next line was mine, which would have probably been me asking what his voice sounded like.

  But my mind, ironically, went blank. Because all at once I knew who had been in the basement swimming pool with us that evening.

  ‘What did his voice sound like?’ asked Guleed.

  If Phoebe answered I wasn’t listening, because I was thinking that the subset of St Paul’s parents that Phoebe knew personally was going to be finite. Maybe as low as ten to twenty males, and they’d all be on a list at the school. And that list could be cross-referenced with the list of Little Crocodiles and whittled down by finding out who had a reliable alibi for certain important dates. He’d been good at covering his tracks. But like Nightingale had said, he’s not Moriarty. He’s just another criminal and sooner or later he’s going to make a mistake.

  And I was fairly certain that the Faceless Man had just made it.

  9

  The Tiger Hunting Committee

  The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions. That way, when the wheels come off you can’t pretend you didn’t know what was happening – because you were there, weren’t you? – when those decisions were made. And we’ve got the minutes to prove it.

  In the normal course of events a lowly PC like me, if they’re sensible, finds themselves something better to do – paperwork, house to house inquiries, searching a landfill. Anything. Unfortunately, the Folly’s flat management structure, viz there only being two of us, and its specialist nature, meant that not only was I at the meeting, but I was expected to make a valuable contribution.

  So here we were, in a sparsely furnished meeting room on the fourteenth floor of the Empress State Building at Olympia with representatives from the DPS, Belgravia MIT and the National Crime Agency. All chaired by one Deputy Assistant Commissioner
Richard Folsom, who apart from being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tyburn Preservation Society had it in for me personally on account of that business at Covent Garden.

  Ask not for whom the buck stops, I thought, it stops for thee.

  I noticed that Guleed had made herself scarce.

  Folsom glanced at me – the tic over his right eye causing a twitch – before turning to Seawoll and asking him to bring us all up to speed on the current state of the investigation and our operational posture.

  Which could be summarised as ‘confused’ and ‘ready to spring into action’ – just as soon as we had the faintest idea where to spring.

  We’d held Phoebe Beaumont-Jones on Friday night because Bromley Crime Squad wanted a word about the MDMA. But since they couldn’t lay their hands on Aiden Burghley, the guy who allegedly sold her the gear, she walked out of the nick on Saturday afternoon without a charge.

  DAC Folsom, to nobody’s surprise, suggested that since there was no indication that Christina Chorley had been coerced into taking the pills and that Olivia Thames-MacAllister had retracted her statement, not to mention the complete lack of corroboration that she or her friend Phoebe had been involved, it was probably best to close down Operation Marigold and pass the file to the CPS.

  ‘Especially given the number of other pressing concerns that have come to light,’ said Folsom.

  For a second, I thought Seawoll was going to fight it just on general principles, but then he shrugged. You don’t get to DCI without knowing a losing proposition when you see one, and Folsom was right – there were more important things to worry about.

  ‘La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain,’ said Nightingale later when we were preparing our case notes. Which is French for ‘Them that has, gets.’

  So, goodbye Operation Marigold.

  Which left Operation Carthorse, the hunt for Lesley May, Operation Wentworth, which was the fraud investigation surrounding the illegal demolition of Skygarden Tower and Operation Tinker, which was the still open murder inquiry into the unpleasant death of George Trenchard. Bromley MIT, which owned Tinker, was notably absent from the meeting, having dumped their files on us on Sunday afternoon and scarpered. The SIO had given up her Sunday just to get them off her hands.

  And then there were the Americans.

  It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’. Fortunately no other bodies were recovered and the neighbouring houses, while damaged, were declared safe. The neighbours themselves were spooked in a way that only watching three million quids’ worth of equity sink into a hole in the ground can do, and it was only a matter of time before they tried to blame us for it. Even as we met at the Empress State Building, a crack team of police lawyers were figuring out how to blame it on the contractor who’d built the basement.

  Crew Cut’s compadres refused to talk when interviewed, and even refused the routine offer to contact the American embassy. None of them had been carrying ID and those who’d joined me in the twenty metre underwater dash hadn’t been carrying weapons when they were fished out. I was pretty confident that when the weapons were recovered they would be the same scrubbed and anonymous Glocks that Teddy and the driver had been caught with.

  ‘Have we contacted the American Embassy ourselves?’ asked Folsom.

  The woman from the National Crime Agency said they’d asked Belgravia not to do that just yet.

  ‘We want to know if anyone official already knows they’re here,’ she said.

  I wondered if it was safe to contact Agent Reynolds, but I didn’t want to drop her in the shit unless I had to.

  Folsom went back over my actions in the basement.

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for back-up?’ he asked.

  ‘I had reason to believe a Falcon incident was underway and that a member of the public was at risk,’ I said. ‘I believed that a careful approach would help calm the situation until the appropriate Falcon resources could be deployed.’

  Folsom asked what ‘appropriate Falcon resources’ might be when they’re at home.

  ‘I rather think that would be me,’ said Nightingale. ‘And Peter cleared the action with me before proceeding. It was the right thing to do and I believe that had external factors not intervened then a peaceful resolution could have been effectuated.’

  Folsom nodded as if squirrelling away the word ‘effectuated’ for use at future meetings. Then he gave me a thin lipped smile.

  ‘This is not the first time Peter here has been put into a position of potential harm because of a shortfall in Falcon capable resources,’ he said and made a show of a consulting a list. ‘These incidents include a severe RTI involving an ambulance, a near drowning in the Thames, a confrontation with armed men in a sewer, being buried under rubble at Oxford Street station and, if this report is to be believed, surviving a fall from a thirty storey block of flats while it was in the process of explosive demolition.’

  I opened my mouth to say it was more complicated than that, but he held up a hand to silence me.

  ‘He was involved in an unauthorised hostage exchange in Herefordshire, an armed standoff in Essex and let’s not forget the business at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.’

  Which was totally not my fault, I might add, although I probably shouldn’t have used the word Krynoid in my official report.

  ‘Then, this week alone, there have been two confrontations with armed men. The second one culminating in yet another building collapse and fatality.’

  I noticed he hadn’t mentioned his own glorious contribution to the Bow Street riots.

  ‘All of these incidents,’ said Folsom, turning back to Nightingale, ‘were exacerbated by the current operational bottleneck caused by lack of suitable Falcon capable resources.’

  ‘It takes time to train new apprentices,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s not a process that can be rushed.’

  ‘So, you agree that there is a shortfall in appropriate resources?’ asked Folsom, who was obviously looking to get an admission from Nightingale that the Folly wasn’t up to the job – and one that was nicely minuted at an official meeting.

  ‘If I can speak to that, sir,’ I said. ‘The Special Assessment Unit has recently instituted a programme of capacity expansion in order to build greater operational robustness and provide a more efficient service to our partner OCUs when dealing with both Falcon and pseudo-Falcon incidents. The first phase of which is already underway.’

  I noticed that Stephanopoulos was hiding her mouth with her hand.

  Folsom, who should have known better, took the bait.

  ‘The first phase being?’ he asked.

  ‘Strengthening our specialist support, particularly in the forensic and medical area, with a view to providing a continuous on-call service to investigation teams that might need them, coupled with the development of a best-practice guide for use in dealing with suspected Falcon related incidents and investigations,’ I said, and heard Seawoll smother a cough – at least I assume it was a cough.

  ‘In tandem with phase one implementation, the SAU is also developing a consultation document that will be sent out to all priority Falcon stakeholders prior to being submitted to the commissioner’s office for approval.’

  ‘Why was phase one implemented without a consultation paper?’ asked Folsom or, in other words, how did you manage to spend money without clearing it with the commissioner first.

  ‘Phase one was implemented under existing Home Office guidelines,’ I said. Last updated in 1956 – during the Suez Crisis, no less, which must have been a good week to announce bits of political housekeeping you might not want to attract too much attention. ‘In addition, phase one was financed entirely from within the current SAU budget.’

  In other words, we have
our own money so you can stick your oversight in your La Traviata and smoke it.

  Folsom hesitated and then shrugged. He wasn’t happy, but he was playing a long game. Besides, he was right – the current Folly operational structure was archaic and not fit for purpose. It was just that I didn’t trust him or Lady Ty to fix it.

  Of course, now I was going to have to deliver a consultation paper pretty damn sharpish or I was going to be in major trouble.

  So we moved onto what seemed like five days, but was actually just a couple of hours, of wrangling about who was going to do what. Which in the end boiled down to deciding that the NCA would carry on investigating the Faceless Man’s shadowy commercial empire, CTC would handle the Americans and the Folly would handle the Falcon related stuff with support from Belgravia MIT.

  ‘It’s a good thing that was sorted out,’ said Seawoll. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

  We were still running short-handed because Belgravia was busy mopping up their stabbing, but at least we had Guleed who was, I felt, going to be thrilled to bits.

  Before we could escape the building a DS Kittredge from CTC took me and Nightingale aside and said that there were some people we needed to talk to first. Kittredge had had the misfortune of getting tangled up with a Folly case a couple of years previously and had obviously got himself on a list as a result. No doubt a senior officer had told him that since he’d dealt with us weirdos before, he was perfectly placed to do it again. His expression was bland but I could tell he’d much rather be out arresting medical students in Ladbroke Grove.

  He took us up to the twenty-ninth floor of ESB which, along with the twenty-eighth, was the domain of CTC – Counter Terrorism Command – which is the long spoon by which the Met deals with political crime and the security services.

  There, in a conference room, Kittredge introduced us to a couple of officers from MI5. The spooks were a man and a woman, both white, both with deliberately suppressed posh accents and carefully nondescript off the peg suits. He was in his thirties, rugby player fit, with pale blue eyes and a tendency to squint. She was a bit older with auburn hair in a neat bob, grey eyes and gave her name as Finula – no surname. Blondie didn’t give his name at all and spent most of the meeting squinting at Nightingale.