The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Do you see where we are?’ asked Wanda. ‘Do you know what was standing here before they started hanging people behind closed doors? Do you know the real name of this place?’

  ‘Tyburn,’ said Guleed, who’d obviously been paying more attention to me than I thought.

  Because back in the days of yore, when Oxford Street was the Tyburn Road and the city had only just started its mad rush to cover all the west in desirable redbrick and stucco terraces, it was the main route out of London to the little village of Tyburn that sat just beyond where the road crossed the river.

  Condemned prisoners were loaded onto tumbrils at Newgate Gaol, and would wind their way through the streets of London, past the rookeries at St Giles, before hitting the long straight road into the open countryside and the Tyburn Tree.

  And it was a busy place, the Tyburn Tree. Because markets were laissez-faire, every Englishman’s home was his castle and what passed for law and order was largely privately run. Back then the gentry lived in fear of the London mob and, to keep the masses in check, made sure that stealing bread or your employer’s linen was a topping offence.

  So they came in numbers, the tragic lads and lasses, the local boys and the immigrants from Yorkshire, Cornwall and Berkshire, from Strathclyde and County Clare. Some weeping, some defiant, and most of them pissed out of their box because the whole sad procession from Newgate Gaol would make periodic pauses for refreshments.

  ‘This was the last stop,’ said Wanda.

  A last drink under the spreading chestnut tree, perhaps a chance to unburden yourself of any secrets or things you might not be able to take into the next world. And so The Chestnut Tree became the repository of final bequests.

  Or a final offering, a tradition from back when the river ran free and its god walked amongst men.

  Jonathan Wild went to the tree in the spring of 1725. I wondered whether this was where he’d left his final ledger. And if he had, was it a coincidence that Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman happened to meet up here?

  Coincidence, I thought. Like fuck.

  So I asked about Reynard.

  ‘Oh yeah, Reynard,’ said Wanda. ‘We know all about the Reynards.’

  ‘We?’ I asked.

  ‘My family,’ said Wanda. ‘We know all about him.’

  ‘Reynards you said,’ said Guleed. ‘Reynards plural.’

  ‘And his family,’ said Wanda. ‘From France. They’re a long line of total Reynards.’

  And because in my line of business it pays to be sure, I asked – ‘Just so we’re clear, when we’re talking about a line of Reynards, are we talking multiple members of one family with the same name, or the same guy changing his identity with each generation.’

  ‘Oh he’s a nasty piece of work, but he isn’t that nasty,’ said Wanda. ‘Different guys with different names – Reynard’s more of a title, an appellation, a nom de bastard total.’

  ‘And he’s a regular here?’ I asked

  ‘Well, we can’t bar people just for being unsavoury, can we?’ said Wanda. ‘We’d be out of business.’

  I asked who, exactly, would be out of business. Wanda gave me a card with her area manager’s contact details and the name of the company who owned the business: CHIPMUNK CATERING.

  ‘Not that we see that much of them,’ she said.

  I handed the card to Guleed, and while I asked about Reynard’s comings and goings Guleed texted the Inside Inquiry Office. I’d love to claim that I’d had a gut feeling about the owners, but really it was following routine. In policing, your gut might point the way – but it’s the shoe leather that catches criminals.

  I showed Wanda Christina Chorley’s picture again and asked if she had ever seen her with Reynard. I used a different picture and made sure that I didn’t cue Wanda that this was a repeat viewing – if you can shift the context, people often remember new facts.

  This time Wanda thought it was possible that she might have seen them together, but she was hazy on the details. In just about any other pub in London I’d have asked about CCTV footage, but me and Guleed had noted the lack of cameras on the way in.

  I was going to roll the conversation back round to Olivia when Guleed showed me her phone and the answering text from the Inside Inquiry Office – CHIPMUNK CATERING DIRECTLY LINKED TO COUNTY GARD.

  And County Gard belonged to the Faceless Man – shit.

  ‘How often do you see your area manager?’ I asked.

  Wanda said she didn’t think she’d ever met him in the three years she’d been running The Chestnut Tree – which was entirely a good thing from her point of view. ‘It’s not like area managers ever have anything useful to say about running a pub,’ she said. ‘Is it? Especially a pub like this.’

  She had interviewed for the job, here in this very room, and could provide us with a name and description but she didn’t understand why. I was tempted to tell her it was just routine but literally nobody ever believes that – even when it’s true.

  ‘It’s part of an ongoing inquiry into property fraud,’ I said, which was true, as far as it went.

  ‘Are there any storage areas in here?’ asked Guleed.

  Wanda said that obviously they had food storage, dry goods, bottle storage, wine racks and a separate cool room for those casks that needed it.

  ‘Do have any storage you’ve never been in?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know about storage as such,’ said Wanda. ‘But there’s a couple of rooms we don’t use.’

  ‘You couldn’t give us a look, could you?’ I asked.

  There was a corridor that was 1930s brick down one wall and 1970s breezeblock on the other. There were two doorways in the newer wall with cheap red doors made of medium density fibreboard and the kind of stainless steel lever handle and lock combination that you find fitted to schools and council buildings from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

  Wanda opened them both with one of the keys from the bunch she kept in her pocket on a hoop key ring. Inside the first were a ton of stackable polyurethane chairs and, in the second, modular steel frame storage shelves that, judging by the dust, hadn’t held anything for years.

  ‘See,’ said Wanda locking them back-up. ‘Nothing extraordinary at all.’

  ‘What about that one?’ I asked.

  There was a third door, this one in the old side of the corridor and made of what looked like wooden planks. It looked suspiciously as if one of the artfully rustic tables from the saloon bar had been hauled upright and jammed into the doorway.

  ‘Ah,’ said Wanda, looking over at the door. ‘Yeah.’ She bit her lip and looked back at us.

  ‘Do you have a key?’ said Guleed.

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty certain we do,’ said Wanda and shuffled backward a couple of steps – away from the door. ‘But I don’t think I should let you open that door.’

  I exchanged looks with Guleed. We both knew that the words ‘search warrant’ were heading for Wanda’s lips and we’d both been around enough weird bollocks to be suspicious as to why.

  I suggested that we make our way back-up to the end of the corridor, and as we did Wanda became noticeably calmer. She asked if we’d seen everything we wanted to?

  I suggested that perhaps I might borrow her key ring, just to do a security check you know, for advice purposes you understand, can’t be too careful, can you, don’t worry about it, it’s all part of the service.

  Guleed rolled her eyes, but I got the keys and Wanda got to stay at the end of the corridor where things were less likely to disturb her. I left Guleed with her and walked back to the door, carefully, with all my electronic devices switched off and my tray in the upright position.

  After a build up like that, the old wooden door was bound to look a bit sinister. But even up close I wasn’t sensing anything unusual.

  There’s a device that Nightingale calls a demon trap, a sort of magical IED but with added animal cruelty. The Faceless Man has made use o
f them in the past, often to deadly effect – just another in a long list of things that my Governor would like to have a word with him about. A demon trap can be set to have a number of effects ranging from dead to really wishing you were dead via spending time at the secure mental institution of your choice.

  Nightingale has taught me the basics of demon trap detection – the magical equivalent of carefully sliding the blade of your knife into the ground and waiting to see if it goes ‘ting’.

  The visual inspection divulged nothing, no circles or enclosed shapes incised into the surface of the wood, no disguised metal plates inlaid underneath. The lock itself, a heavy iron thing, revealed no intaglio or pattern when I brushed my fingertips across it.

  But there it was . . . just at the cusp of sensation, a whiff of gunmetal and the strop strop strop of the straight razor against smooth leather. It was a signum I had come to recognise as belonging to the Faceless Man.

  It felt dusty and airless, like an old garden shed. Certainly I wasn’t feeling anything that would explain Wanda’s obvious psychological aversion to opening the room. Perhaps it only worked on fae . . . perhaps that’s why Wanda had been employed in the first place. That part of my mind that is forever a total bastard wondered if we could recruit some fae and map out all the places that they didn’t want to go. In the interests of science and public safety.

  The lock was the obvious seat for any defence so, after a moment to warn Guleed to stand clear, I sheared the hinges and, nipping up the corridor myself, knocked the door in with impello.

  Normally when I do a forced entry like that, the door twists as it pivots around the lock, but this door just fell inward with a crash and a backwash of dust. When I gingerly advanced to find out why, I saw that the lock’s bolt had been cleanly sheared off level with the strike plate, with the end still inside the socket. It had already been forced – and not by me.

  ‘Is it safe to come down yet?’ called Guleed.

  I told her to give us a minute while I had a look round. It wasn’t that I was worried about her coming in – I was suddenly more worried about Wanda the manageress doing a runner. I pulled on my evidence gloves and went inside – cautiously.

  Frank Caffrey, fire investigation officer, former para and Folly liaison is very clear that when entering a room you think might be rigged, the first thing you don’t do is automatically reach out and flip the light switch.

  As he points out, that’s got to be one of the cheapest and most reliable triggers an IED can have. ‘I mean, it’s even got its own power supply,’ he said. And he likes to point out that the Faceless Man may like his magical weapons, but he’s not so stupid as to rely on them alone.

  You know . . . I used to be worried that they were going to assign me to undercover work in Operation Trident – I obviously didn’t know when I was well off.

  It was another store room with metal frame variable-height shelving lining the walls from floor to ceiling. About half the shelf space was occupied – mostly those at waist height for easy access. There was a thin layer of dust over the shelves and the floor. It’s hard to tell with dust, but I’d spent enough time on the job with my mum to reckon a couple of months’ worth. On the shelf closest to the door was a row of standard seventy-five litre plastic storage boxes with red clip-down lids. Their contents were a collection of angular shadows visible through the semi-transparent sides. The dust around them had been disturbed and there were clear hand-prints on the edges of the lids.

  Staying on the fallen door to avoid contaminating the floor any more than I had to, I carefully levered the lid off the nearest box and had a peek inside. It looked suspiciously like old hardback books with stiff cloth-covered covers. The topmost book had the rough green cover I associated with the limited editions published by Russell House Press – one of the Folly’s own publishing arms. I picked it up and flipped it open to the title page.

  It was a 1912 reprint of Meric Casaubon’s A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits. And, yes, at the bottom Russell House Press. A second edition – obviously Casaubon had been popular amongst British wizards.

  I was willing to bet real money that Jonathan Wild’s last ledger had once languished in one of these boxes. The Mary Engine too, not to mention the genuine wizard’s staff and the bloody tedious Victor Bartholomew book. Which begged the question why the Bartholomew had ended up on eBay and not the Casaubon. From a magical perspective they were both about as useful, although as cures for insomnia the Bartholomew had a slight edge.

  Because the Casaubon was a second edition?

  Carefully I checked the other books in the box. All of them were either second editions from the 1920s or the 30s or had significant damage to their covers or their interior pages. I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.

  At the bottom of the box I found part of a map that had been ripped down its centrefold – a 1:40,000 scale depiction of a place called Ootacamund, which turned out on later research to be a British Hill Station in Tamil Nadu. A Hill Station being a place where colonial administrators and the like could use altitude to avoid the oppressive Indian summer heat, since the sensible solution, i.e. abandoning colonialism and moving back to Surrey, obviously never occurred to them.

  I considered checking one of the other boxes, but my mystic powers of precognition bestowed a vision upon me of a full forensic search with noddy suits and fingerprint powder and people taking their sunglasses off in a dramatic fashion.

  I did stop on my way out to examine the lock a bit more carefully. Again I felt the razor strop of the Faceless Man’s signum and it was definitely centred on the point where the bolt was sheared right through.

  A hypothesis was forming in my mind. If County Gard belonged to the Faceless Man, then The Chestnut Tree did too. Perhaps it was even an asset inherited from his predecessor, which meant that, possibly, this was his storeroom – these had been his things.

  Which had been looted by Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman.

  Did they know who they’d stolen from?

  He was bound to be a bit miffed . . . I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he didn’t seem the type to take that sort of thing with a light and forgiving heart. Which might explain why Aiden Burghley’s face got laminated to a tree and what the fucker had been doing in Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ basement . . . looking for accomplices?

  Presuming he wasn’t her dad.

  Christina and Reynard – they’d taken the stuff that looked valuable – possibly over a period of weeks. Then one day the Faceless Man pops down to check on his booty, or maybe he had a burning desire to brush up on his basic thaumatology, and finds that the door is locked.

  Let’s assume the key he’s got doesn’t work for some reason – he burns the lock, steps inside and finds half his stuff’s been jacked. So Action 1 for me – fingerprint team for the corridor and the room, because nobody wears gloves all the time.

  Next the Faceless Man’s going to go ask Wanda the manageress just who she’s been letting into the storerooms, possibly using seducere to fog her memory, or maybe she’s a much better liar then we thought. So Action 2 – re-interview Wanda, this time under caution plus two, which leads us onto Action 3, trace the rest of The Chestnut Tree’s staff and interview them as well.

  Rule of thumb for lowly constables – once you’re up to three actions it’s time to kick the buck upstairs.

  12

  The 100 Metre Nonchalant Stroll

  ‘And you didn’t think to try pushing the door open first?’ asked Professor Postmartin.

  I said nothing, mainly because he was the fourth person to ask that, after Guleed, Nightingale and Stephanopoulos.

  Postmartin looked remarkably dapper in his noddy suit and was supervising approvingly as the SOCOs carefully catalogued the evidence with their hoods up and their masks on. Mind you, the Professor probably thought all books ov
er five years old should be handled in this fashion – particularly by undergraduates.

  I stayed in the corridor and tried not to get fingerprint powder on my sleeves.

  ‘Have you found anything else interesting?’ I asked.

  ‘Interesting, yes,’ said Postmartin. ‘How significant – I don’t know. Your hypothesis that this was the repository for the last offerings of the hanged is charming, but unsupported by the evidence so far.’

  ‘Any copies of the Principia?’ I asked.

  ‘Two in fact,’ said Postmartin. ‘One of them quite rare.’

  ‘But physically damaged?’

  ‘I’ve seen better kept copies,’ said Postmartin. ‘But the marginalia in one edition is quite fascinating.’

  ‘Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman couldn’t read Latin,’ I said. The Second Principia, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis, had never been published in English – as a deliberate policy to ensure that only people of the ‘right’ sort read it. ‘They didn’t recognise it for what it was – it probably just looked like a tatty old book to them.’

  ‘They understood the importance of the ledger,’ said Postmartin.

  ‘Yeah, they did, didn’t they?’ I said. ‘Which implies an outside source of information, doesn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does,’ said Postmartin and went back to his cataloguing.

  I found Nightingale in the manageress’ office. He was leaning against the wall, arms folded, as he watched a DC from Intelligence triaging the papers on the desk and packing them into evidence boxes that looked remarkably similar to those the Faceless Man had used to store his goodies in. I hoped they didn’t get them mixed up.

  I asked where Guleed had got to.

  ‘Finishing the interview with the manageress,’ said Nightingale. ‘She seemed to think she’d get more out of the poor woman without me hovering in the doorway.’

  ‘You know she’s demi-fae,’ I said.

  ‘So Sahra explained.’

  ‘You don’t seem very surprised.’

  Nightingale shrugged.

  ‘If Abdul ever gets his wish and finds a reliable . . .’ He frowned. ‘What does he call it – a genetic marker?’