The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6)

by Ben Aaronovitch

  We also have no shame, so once we’d found nothing of note on the first floor we split up, Guleed to check the second floor, where Mr Chorley had his domain, while I went downstairs to keep an eye on the man himself and, with a bit of luck, look at his motor.

  I found him in the kitchen where he offered me tea, but I asked if I could see the garage. He asked if I liked cars and, when I said I did, he gave me a wan but genuine smile.

  ‘Then you’re going to like this,’ he said.

  The garage was clean and, judging from the perfectly balanced temperature and humidity, had the sort of environmental control system that Postmartin demands for his most fragile historical documents. The brickwork was painted a bright glossy white with just the Pirelli Calendar and an immaculate tool rack to break up the sterility. All the better for us to appreciate the car.

  The Ferrari was a ridiculously beautiful motor, fire brick red with proper sleek 70s sci-fi lines so that it looked like any second the wheels would fold down to become lift engines and the vehicle would launch itself back to the future that never was. It also had a completely insane de-bored 2.8 litre V8 engine that could do nought to a hundred in less time than it takes to say it. And, from the point of view of the magic police, no electronic transmission — which meant you couldn’t accidentally wreck your own motor when in hot pursuit. I’m not saying that Nightingale should have traded in the Jag, but would it really have killed him to lay down a couple of Italians from the golden age of supercars? Just as an investment, if nothing else.

  I asked Mr Chorley if he ever took it out for a spin.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘There’s no point owning a car like this if you never drive it.’

  I was just wondering if there was a way I could wrangle a ride or, failing that, just a go in the driving seat with the engine on when Martin Chorley checked his watch. It was a slim steel coloured Montblanc Timewalker, two grand and change from reputable stockists and the sort of high quality wind-up that any practitioner would be proud to wear.

  I literally nearly shat myself.

  I was suddenly certain that I was bonding over a motor with the Faceless Man, and if it was him then he already knew who I was. Which meant that either he was just playing with me or was still hoping to maintain his cover. I considered whether I could tackle him right then – but he was fast and ruthless, and if I didn’t take him down with the first blow I probably wasn’t going to get a second attempt.

  He didn’t turn his back on me or lift the engine cover and conveniently bend over so I could concuss him with the first blow and, to be totally honest, I bottled it – which, surprisingly, is approved police procedure.

  Evacuate, report and contain – that’s what I was going to say in the ever-expanding Falcon Operations Manual – assuming I lived long enough to finish writing it.

  I sighed, trying not to make it theatrical, and said that I would love to stay and talk about cars but we had to get back to London. He asked whether we’d found anything useful and I explained that we hadn’t but you had to cross your I’s and dot your T’s.

  ‘I’m just pathetically grateful that you haven’t closed the case,’ he said.

  I assured him that the full might and majesty of the Metropolitan Police was focused on finding the truth behind his daughter’s death. If he would like a Family Liaison Officer to be assigned to him I’d be happy to oblige.

  And I was thinking that now I understood the ferocity with which Aiden Burghley had been dismembered. Not because he was an obstacle, or as warning to others, but because Martin Chorley held him responsible for his daughter’s overdose.

  Damn, but Phoebe must have been seconds from death – the arrival of the Americans had saved her life.

  He shook my hand; his palm was warm and dry, his grip firm but not macho. A salesman’s shake, a grifter’s shake, a psychopath’s handshake. He gestured for me to proceed him through the garage door. A line of sweat ran down my back as I turned away and stepped outside.

  ‘I’ll just call my colleague and let her know we’re going,’ I said and thought, shit, shit, shit, over-thinking it, stupid, stupid, stupid. I pulled out my phone and called Guleed.

  ‘Yeah, they need us back at Belgravia,’ I told her.

  The garage was parallel to the back edge of the house and there was a good six metres of drive between me and the Asbo. I lurched at a sudden grinding sound but it was only the motorised garage door closing. I disguised it by converting it into a half turn and cheery wave for Mr Chorley who stayed by the garage and watched me go.

  Ahead of me Guleed sauntered out of the front door and over to the Asbo where she leaned against the bonnet. She raised a hand in a lazy salute, aimed behind me so presumably it was for Mr Chorley, who I deduced was still watching me go. I slipped my keys out of my pocket and, without pointing them at the car or doing anything else obvious, I pressed the unlocking remote.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried again and still no clunk or beep or flashing tail lights.

  Either the remote had chosen that exact moment to break or the electrics in my car had been nobbled – no prizes for guessing which. And that meant the fucker had disabled the Asbo while me and Guleed had been upstairs in his daughter’s room. My guess was that in his head I was going to point my fob at the car, it would fail, I would click it again and again before futilely trying the door handles.

  How he would chuckle as puzzlement turned to stricken realisation, I would look over at him and our eyes would meet. Then he would strike, nothing fatal to start with, so probably impello to knock me down, or something fancy and fifth order that I’d not even heard of.

  The way the Asbo was parked meant that there was a two metre gap between the driver’s side door and the corner of the house. So two metres to put us out of his line of sight. Once we’d managed that, I’d worry about what do next.

  I picked up my pace. I didn’t want our friend getting impatient and kicking off early.

  I called out something to Guleed but I can’t remember what I said. It was enough to get her off the bonnet and meet me in front of the car. There we stopped as if having a quick chat before leaving.

  ‘Martin Chorley is the Faceless Man,’ I said.

  Guleed’s eyes widened and her head jerked back as if trying to escape the news, but she kept her body language neutral and disguised her reaction with a tolerably convincing laugh.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Nightingale is an hour and a half away. Does Chorley know we know?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘Plan?’

  ‘I’m going to walk to the car,’ I said. ‘You keep going round the corner until you’re out of sight, then chuck the screamer and run like crazy.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing but in a different direction,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep him occupied. You organise the perimeter.’

  If Guleed was going to say anything along the lines of ‘No, no, I can’t let you sacrifice yourself for me,’ it was too late, because we’d reached the car and in any case she knew it had to be this way.

  Careful not to look, I heard the tempo of her sensible shoes as, once out of Mr Chorley’s sight, she took off towards the treeline.

  I took out my key-fob and pointed it at the car. Nothing happened. I made a show of trying it a couple of times more, tried the handle and then, with a quick prayer to Sir Samuel, the patron saint of policemen, I looked back at Mr Chorley.

  He was still standing in front of the garage, hands casually in his pockets.

  He nodded amiably at me and I saw his eyes flick to my right – he was wondering where Guleed had gone.

  And while he was distracted I gave him everything I had.

  Now, I’m not up to Nightingale’s standards and 100mm of case-hardened steel is a bit beyond me, but I have progressed a bit from that first time we met on a rooftop in Soho when the Faceless fucker snatched my fireball out of the air. The flash git. />
  What he got was a flashgun bright fireball followed by an impello palma. The idea is that the target spends all his time worrying about the bright light coming at his face and doesn’t notice the invisible wall of force rushing along at waist height.

  It might have worked, for all I know, but I didn’t stick around to find out. As soon as the spells were loosed I turned and legged it for the trees.

  You don’t run straight away from someone with a ranged weapon unless you want to get shot in the back – you’re supposed to zig-zag at random intervals to present a constantly shifting target. It’s one of those things I’ve always known intellectually but, fuck me, it’s difficult to do in practise.

  So I went left as if I was trying to get out of sight around the house and then right, picking a number at random and counting down the paces, eleven, ten, nine and then a horrid thought that maybe eleven was too high. So I turned at six and had gone one pace when something huge and orange shot past my head, close enough for the wind of it to stagger me. As I recovered, I looked up long enough to see the Asbo go tumbling into the trees, splintering branches and spinning round as the front clipped the trunk of a full grown oak.

  I thought I’d been running flat out . . . but, you know, I think now I added a couple of kph and shaved some time off the world record. I feinted right again, went left and suddenly I was in amongst the trees and the under-growth and running downhill towards the main road.

  The previous summer I’d done the exact same thing while being chased by an invisible unicorn – so at least I had form. I fumbled my screamer out of my jacket pocket, pressed my thumb hard against the activation slot and threw it as far as I could to the left.

  The hardy men of the Bow Street Runners were used to working alone and thus relied on a loud voice to raise the hue and cry, alert the populace and, occasionally, scream with pain as they were savagely beaten by a criminal gang. The new men of Peel’s innovative civilian police force were, in contrast, equipped with the latest in communications gear – the hand rattle. A Peeler could summon aid by shaking his rattle while in hot pursuit of a felon and hoping that people would stop laughing long enough to help. The rattle was soon superseded by the whistle, whose principal advantage was that, not only could you have a number of prearranged signals for a variety of situations, but you didn’t look like a total tit using it.

  Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do ‘paperwork’ and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

  Finally, radios got small enough that a constable on the beat could carry one on his person, call in back-up, report crimes and lie about how long he was taking on refs. Then we got Airwaves, which could be integrated with every other emergency service network all over the country – now a copper under threat can get help anywhere from anyone. There’s even a panic button that opens your mic and broadcasts everything it picks up over the emergency channel. It’s the sort of thing that saves the lives and, even more frequently, the tender parts of police officers.

  But then along comes magic, and suddenly we’re supposed to go back to rattles and whistles. Not this PC – I like my tender parts abrasion free.

  So I invented the screamer, patent pending. Built around the guts of a disposable mobile phone, it has a felt cover for grip and is weighted for throwing. It’s got a recessed hook slide – you thumb it sideways and release and a clockwork timer starts. Then you throw the bloody thing as far as you can, hopefully outside the area of immediate magical effect, where two minutes later it basically phones the Met control room and screams help, help, serious magic shenanigans here – send help – preferably Nightingale.

  I have a guy in Leominster who makes them for me, although he still thinks I’m using them to track UFOs.

  As the screamer went flying into the undergrowth I shifted axis again, caught my ankle on something unseen and collapsed, flailing, into the bushes. Against my instincts, I stayed down, face pressed against the layer of decomposing leaves that Beverley assures me is a vital part of the arboreal ecosystem, and forced myself to take deep and regular breaths, even as random spores made my nose tickle.

  There was wind in the treetops and I heard a vehicle go past, no more than twenty metres downhill – the main road. The trees around me were tall, with straight trunks supporting wide deciduous canopies . . . judging from the variation in colour and density there were at least two or three different species, not that I could identify them. Their lowest branches were too high up for me to climb and, apart from the bush I was lying behind, there was little ground cover.

  I considered bolting for the road, but then what?

  This wasn’t a unicorn I was dealing with. Martin Chorley wasn’t going to be stopped by any landscape feature short of a three metre concrete wall, and even then it would only slow him down for two, three seconds tops. Better, I decided, to rely on stealth – at least until I had a better idea of where he was.

  ‘Peter,’ said a voice far too close by. ‘This really is an exercise in futility.’

  It sounded like Martin Chorley, only richer and with the timbre of confidence that posh people put on to convince themselves they know what they’re talking about. There was money in that voice, and breeding, and behind it all the mace, the whip and the bowler hat. I also didn’t think it was entirely natural.

  ‘I’ve done a deal with Lesley,’ said the voice. ‘I promised that no permanent harm will come to you.’ It seemed very close now – metres, spitting distance.

  He had to know that I got a message out, and that it was only a matter of time before Nightingale descended on him in all his glory. Likewise he had to know that it was goodbye Faceless Man, hello plain old Martin Chorley, nominal and prime suspect.

  ‘Look Peter,’ said the voice. ‘I don’t have all day, so why don’t we get this over with?’

  How not to be seen, lesson number one: Don’t stand up.

  It started to rain, a persistent invisible drizzle that worked its way through the canopy and started soaking the back of my jacket and trousers. What with being overcast, it was beginning to get dark and I wondered who that would favour – me or him.

  ‘We both know the only reason you’re still alive,’ said Martin Chorley, a couple of centimetres from the back of my head, ‘is because I have a soft spot for Lesley May.’

  God, it was hard not to move. But I knew that Nightingale could throw sounds about the place. And if Chorley had really been behind me I doubted he would have been so chatty.

  ‘What I don’t understand, Peter,’ said Martin Chorley – but now his voice seemed to be coming from a spot three or four metres to my right – ‘is your loyalty to these institutions. The police, the Folly – you swore an oath to the crown for god’s sake – institutions with hardly the best track record with regards to you people.’

  Because the alternative is you, I wanted to shout back. But the second lesson on how not to be seen is: Don’t answer back.

  He knows he’s short of time, so he’s trying to provoke me, I thought. Next, escalation – threaten somebody else.

  ‘I’ve got your Muslim partner,’ he said. And this time I spotted the voice wow-wowing back and forth through the trees. I thought I might even be able to sense, just a little, the formae he was using to do it. ‘You have a reputation for gallantry – are you perpared to do the gallant thing now?’

  Now, he might have Guleed, although I doubted it. But even if he did, I knew he wasn’t going to just swap me for her. He was trying to provoke a response so he could zero in on me.

  And if he did have Guleed?

  I thought it better to establish the facts before I started worrying about that.

  I decided to give him a response.

  Lux is really the most ridiculously versatile
of the formae and it has been the subject of experimentation by literally thousands of practitioners since the Folly was a bunch of likeminded weirdos and charlatans meeting in a London coffee house. As a result, a young person with an inquiring mind can find the most extraordinary things written in the margins of his textbooks. Now, I have the advantage over my nineteenth century peers of knowing what infrared is and how it relates to imparting heat energy to a small cloud of gas so that it expands with a humorous farting sound – oh, how they must have laughed. Thus I can make my farting sound louder and funnier – to the point where it can shake the branches on a small bush.

  Ipsa scientia potestas est.

  I call them noisemakers because I haven’t thought of a decent Latin tag yet.

  So I flipped one as far to my right as I could, where it made a sound like a deflating bellows and made a bush shake.

  Let’s see what you make of that, I thought.

  A tree five metres to my right exploded. I was looking right at it when the trunk shattered at head height and blew out in a cloud of pale brown dust and splinters. Even as I clamped my arms over my head and tried to burrow my way into the leaf mould, chunks of wood were thudding down around me. I yelled into the ground as a heavy bit bounced off my back.

  Another tree exploded, closer; I knew it was a tree because I heard the top half of the trunk crash through the surrounding branches before smashing into the hillside with a sound that went vibrating up through my chest. A third explosion followed the crash so quickly that the sound became one long physical blow. A fourth and fifth followed, but further away to the right – below the pain threshold.

  I risked lifting my head a fraction. The air was full of yellow and brown dust and the sick smell of broken wood. Flames were visible through the murk, licking up the shattered stump of a tree. Less than ten centimetres from my face a rough splinter the size and pointiness of a fencepost had been driven into ground.

  I couldn’t stay where I was. Martin Chorley might not know I was here, but one more near miss by whatever he was exploding trees with and I was going to look like an involuntary hedgehog. I drew my legs up and braced to scramble towards the road.