The Hanging Tree

13 Angry Birds

We waited largely in silence and stillness, except for a furious unvoiced argument about whose turn it was next to play Angry Birds on Caroline’s phone, which only really ended when the phone in question buzzed and we got a text saying – You may alight whenever you feel ready.

‘He took his time,’ I said.

‘Does this happen a lot?’ asked Caroline.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Sometimes Beverley rescues me, sometimes Lady Ty, occasionally Molly – I think there’s a rota.’

‘Shit,’ said Caroline. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘There isn’t really a rota – we’re not that well-organised.’

Guleed snorted.

Caroline carried Guleed down first – just wrapped an arm around her chest and stepped off into thin air. It was hard to tell in the dark but it looked to me like they dropped smoothly and at a steady pace. As they fell, the branches that had been curled over to hide us from the ground began to unbend and return to their original positions. When I told Bev about that later she said that was more impressive than the flying.

‘Wood not being notably motile,’ she said.

When it was my turn I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the forma Caroline was using. When you’re learning a new a forma it can take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of demonstrations before you can even start to replicate it in your mind. But you can still learn something from a brief encounter, if you pay attention.

Not that this is easy when you’re dropping twenty metres with nothing holding you up but Caroline’s contempt for the laws of motion.

I felt it, floating in the non-space where these abstractions catch hold of the fabric of the universe – and it was different. I mean really different. Now, I knew there were different magical traditions, but I’d always assumed that they shared common characteristics. Sensing the forma Caroline invoked to defy gravity was like listening to Yusef Lateef take his flute into the pentatonic scale, still music, still beautiful, but a whole new landscape of sound.

‘Can you truly fly?’ I asked.

She paused once our feet had settled and whispered in my ear.

‘Not yet,’ she breathed. ‘Soon, though. And then I will be away and free.’

Away from what, I wondered, and free from who?

Nightingale was waiting for us at the bottom of the tree, wearing the oyster coloured Burberry coat that is the closest he’s ever going to get to a high-viz jacket.

‘How did you find us?’ I asked.

‘In the first instance the screamers worked as advertised,’ said Nightingale. ‘Then there were your texts. Beyond that it was just a matter of following the trail of destruction.’

Up the hill there were flashing blue lights visible through the trees.

Guleed chivvied Caroline towards the waiting paramedics while she protested she was fine – which wasn’t the point. As a civilian mixed up in a police operation we had to be able to prove she was uninjured so she couldn’t sue us later.

‘You understand the implications of Martin Chorley being the Faceless Man,’ said Nightingale.

‘Which one?’ I asked and shivered.

‘The revenge aspect,’ he said. ‘There’s a definite cause for concern there.’

‘No shit,’ I said, and held my right hand in front of my face – there was definitely a tremble. ‘Did you warn everyone?’

‘Phoebe is with Olivia at Tyburn’s house, but I lost Reynard when the screamer alerted me and I had to divert here,’ he said. ‘Gone to ground no doubt.’

I stopped walking towards the lights and looked around. What was left of the Orange Asbo was sitting on its roof amongst shattered wood. Nightingale stopped to wait for me.

‘Is anyone looking in our direction?’ I asked.

Nightingale said he couldn’t see anyone, so I turned away, found a convenient tree trunk, leaned over and vomited. Once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop until what seemed like about a month’s worth of dinners had come back-up. I was lightheaded and hollowed out when I’d finished.

Nightingale gave me one of his cream coloured linen handkerchiefs, monogramed and ironed by Molly to such a sharp edge I could have happily used it as a shuriken. I carefully unfolded it and used it to wipe my mouth – he didn’t ask for it back.

The Thames Valley Police were out in force at the house, including an armed response unit who slouched against the sides of their Volvo V70 and glared at us on general principles.

Then Stephanopoulos arrived and glared at them until they packed up and left. Allowing me a brief respite before she came and glared at me. There was the requisite three hours of milling around as we waited for SOCO and a specialist search team to go over the house and the inevitable arguments about who was going to find an all-night takeaway in High Wycombe for refs.

Caroline’s mum roared up the drive in her MG. Me and Caroline watched from the safety of the kitchen as Lady Helena pulled up and proceeded to castigate Nightingale for putting her baby in danger. While that was going on, Caroline beckoned me over and said she’d rather her mum didn’t know about the almost-flying.

‘I don’t want her to worry,’ she said.

‘Worry about what?’ I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

She waved at me as her mum drove her away.

Martin Chorley’s utilitarian office turned out to be less interesting than his study. He had every OS Map of the British Isles ever published, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, plus a range of specialist maps and gazettes – some of which I recognised from my post-Herefordshire research. A couple of Edwardian earthwork surveys, the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages, which confirmed that Martin Chorley was an enormous Tolkien nerd. As if the the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first edition of The Hobbit wasn’t enough proof. He hadn’t neglected the other Inklings, though – C.S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn’t have any objection to YA either, judging by the collection of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, again first editions, but these ones far too well read to be worth much, beside similarly worn copies of The Owl Service and the rest of Alan Garner’s books.

It wasn’t exactly screaming ‘power mad psychopath’, although it was possible that he was modern enough to keep all his vices on a USB stick.

Over the real fireplace, with all its original farmhouse stone trimmings, was a painting that one of the SOCOs assured me was a genuine Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of the dying king surrounded by weeping queens variety. Painted by one James Archer in the late nineteenth century.

‘A romantic,’ said Nightingale much, much later. ‘The most dangerous people on Earth.’

Finally me and Guleed caught a lift back to London while Nightingale stayed at the house on the off-chance its owner popped back for something he’d forgotten.

I wanted to spend the night at Bev’s but I needed to be central in case Martin Chorley did something viciously psychopathic in the middle of the night. As it happened, I got to sleep all the way to nine thirty the next morning before the landline rang and Stephanopoulos told me that somebody had just tried to kill Olivia McAllister-Thames.

The house opposite Tyburn’s place had obviously been built post-war, probably to replace bomb-damaged stock. Mercifully it must have been quite late on because it wasn’t the featureless box so favoured by the American modernists, and the architect had actually made an attempt to fit it in with the rest of street. It still had a touch of the gun emplacement around the ground floor and a marble floored entrance hallway that managed to be both pretentious and dark at the same time.

Once I was safely cocooned in my noddy suit, Stephanopoulos led me upstairs to the third floor flat where the sniper had made his nest. I’d missed the body, which didn’t bother me, but Stephanopoulos had a tablet stuffed full of crime scene photographs.

‘We don’t know who he is yet,’ she said. ‘White, mid-thirties, fit, has a Foreign Legion tattoo but that doesn’t mean anything.’ As police we were always tripping over people with special forces tattoos that were more aspirational than indications of service.

‘I’m hoping for distinctive teeth,’ said Stephanopoulos, although that was no longer the reliable guide to nationality it once was. I’d been told that American dental work was still distinctively overwrought – whatever that meant with regards to teeth.

‘Let’s hope he wasn’t American,’ I said. We didn’t need any more about that complication thank you very much.

The flat was unfurnished, although in a distinctively expensive way with marble flooring in the bathrooms, Italian tile in the kitchen and expensive rosewood parquet in the rest. The nest was in what I’d call a living room but was probably listed by the estate agent as the lounge. The firing position was a good three metres back from the bay windows. The central window had been opened and securely fastened, but with the curtains partly drawn he’d have been in shadow – essentially invisible from across the street.

The lack of furniture meant that he’d had to bring his own stand to rest the rifle on, the heavy duty type serious anglers use for big fish. He’d even brought a campstool, a couple of bottles of water and a packet of Pret a Manger sandwiches. I imagined a couple of DCs were even now pulling the CCTV footage from every Pret within a kilometre.

Damn – that was going to be a lot of Prets.

I glanced around the empty room.

‘He knew there wasn’t any furniture,’ I said.

‘Even better, he had a legitimate set of keys,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘And this property has had the same owner for five years.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Our old friend Mr Shell Company.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Which is a close relative to A.N. Other Shell Company and a Guernsey registered investment house who bought it on behalf of one James Hodgkins, a.k.a. Martin Chorley.’

I looked across the street to what I’d been assured was Tyburn’s bedroom – obscured now by the blue sheeting the forensic people had rigged to cover the shattered window. Less than thirty metres I thought – a good sniper would barely need a telescopic sight.

The gun had been whisked away even before the body. An L96A1 firing a standard 7.62 mm NATO round. It was the standard British sniper rifle as used by the Army, the Navy and the Met’s own SCO19. Probably, Stephanopoulos said, one of those guns that occasionally fall off the back of a military supply lorry. A bit specialist for your basic London underworld, who tended to favour cheaper and more personal forms of assassination – although if I’d been planning to take a shot at Lady Ty myself I’d have probably opted for a drone strike from a nice air conditioned Air Force base in Arizona.

And even then I’d do it under an assumed name.

He’d got off only the one shot before he died. It was a bolt action weapon, but still I would have thought he’d have had time to take a second one – just to be on the safe side.

Three hours later they still hadn’t found the bullet he’d fired.

‘What killed him?’ I asked.

‘Single stab wound to the chest with a heavy double edged blade,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Through his heart and out the other side.’

‘What, through the ribs?’

‘Sheared right through two at the front and one at the back,’ she said. ‘Clean cut.’

‘A sword,’ I said.

‘That’s what they think, but they haven’t finished the PM yet.’

If I had to guess I’d have said a classic fourteenth century English arming sword like the one I’d once seen worn by a young man in a hallucination I’d had when I was busy suffocating under the eastbound Central Line platform. A young man who styled himself Sir William Tyburn, who had been god of the river from back when it was a wild stream rushing down to Father Thames.

For obvious reasons I kept this intriguing observation to myself.

‘Chorley’s had this place for five years,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Never had any tenants in here in all that time.’

‘He knew about the Rivers,’ I said. ‘He must have thought it would be handy to have a way of keeping them under surveillance.’ Or perhaps he’d known that sooner or later he was going to have to go mano a dios with Lady Ty.

‘Still not a bad little investment over five years I suppose,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘But why a sniper? It’s not his MO.’

‘If he wanted Olivia dead he knew he’d have to go through her mother first,’ I said. ‘And he knew he had to take Tyburn down before she was aware of the attack. Otherwise Lady Ty, this close to her river, this close to the Thames – not going to happen.’ I looked across at the blinded window opposite.

‘He can’t possibly have missed at this range,’ I said.

‘And yet he’s the one who’s dead,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Could she have thrown a sword across that distance?’

I tried to imagine Tyburn pivoting smartly on her heel, bringing her arm back and flinging a sword across the gap between the houses like a bad special effect. The sniper staggering back, looking down in amazement as half the blade and the pommel vibrate amusingly in his chest. Not enough style points for Tyburn. And anyway, they never found the sword.

‘If she threw it,’ I said, ‘then who pulled it out?’

Stephanopoulos gave the traditional short sigh of the senior officer who is about to explain something they thought was bleeding obvious right from the start of the conversation, but obviously wasn’t.

‘No offence, Peter,’ she said. ‘But we were kind of relying on you to provide that information. Us just being normal run of the mill coppers none of who are versed in the mystic arts or currently shagging a supernatural creature.’

‘That you know of, Boss,’ I said, thinking of Wanda the manageress, who you wouldn’t spot as ‘special’ if you didn’t know what to look for. But Stephanopoulos was right. This was the Folly’s area of expertise, and it was embarrassing that we were so bloody crap at it.

Assume for the moment that the dead sniper had something to do with laughing Sir Tyburn – thought dead by his father and brothers these last hundred and fifty years.

But we know that apparent remnants of normal human beings can be left behind, and under particular circumstances can physically interact with the mundane world.

Do gods have ghosts? I wondered.

If they did, wouldn’t they be much more powerful than those left behind by people? Or was that a typical first order assumption? Probably, I thought. And yet, if we stayed with that idea then surely the world would be full of these powerful ghosts of former gods. Now, I hadn’t come across anything like that in my literature and while my predecessors in the craft were often thicker than a bag full of custard I think even they would have noticed something like that.

Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA – hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and – hey presto – suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a metre of cold steel through the chest.

Perhaps that explained why the rivers of London had burst forth with new goddesses so quickly after Mama Thames took up her throne. Perhaps there was more than historical continuity between the dead sons of old Father Thames and the daughters that had taken their place.

And a certain river on the Welsh Borders where me and Beverley had been ‘catalysts’ in the creation of a new spirit, a new genius loci, a new god.

Shit, I thought, I’ve just invented epideism.

‘Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You still with us?’

‘Oh, god,’ I said. ‘I think I preferred being a frog,’ And then, before Stephanopoulos had a chance to clip me round the ear for being obscure, I told her I’d have to do some digging on the subject.

‘But we still need to see if they find any metal fragments in the wound track,’ I said and reminded myself to ask Dr Vaughan to do the most sensitive test she could, because if she couldn’t find any then it was possible that the sniper had been stabbed with a sword that didn’t physically exist.

What had definitely existed was the water that had erupted out of the street in front of Lady Ty’s house. A burst water main, according to Thames Water, who said they’d get back to us as to why it had chosen to burst at just the moment Mr Sniper was getting an invisible sword stuck through his chest.

Tyburn’s street had a noticeable slope north to south and you could see from the water damage where the flood had risen outside her front door and rolled down hill, across Curzon Street, down the passage under Curzonfield House before emptying out into Shepherd Market. Much to the surprise of the shop workers who’d been sitting on the benches having a quiet fag at the time.

‘It was two feet deep,’ said Stephanopoulos.

This was confirmed by some of the eyewitnesses, especially those on the dry end of the street. Statements from witnesses downstream were, as Seawoll put it, ‘less than fucking useful’.

One woman who’d been carried away and deposited outside the RBS branch on Curzon Street said that the water had been much cleaner than she expected and that she thought she smelt meadowgrass.

‘Meadow grass?’

‘Meadowgrass,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘One word – she was very insistent, and that’s not the strangest statement.’ Amina Asad, who’d been one of the shop workers having a fag, said she’d sort of ‘had a weird vision, you know like a really vivid daydream’ that she’d been stood waist-deep in a river washing clothes by hand. ‘By hand,’ she’d said again and laughed. ‘Like that’s going to fucking happen.’

Some reported seeing fish in the water, others a young fit-looking white boy in a loin cloth.

‘He was laughing,’ said David Hantsworth of Charnwood Drive, Walthamstow, who quite fancied getting the guy’s number, you know, should we ever catch up with him. ‘He had the coolest accent,’ according to Mr Hantsworth, who was convinced he’d been part of an elaborate bit of street theatre. ‘Like an actor doing Shakespeare.’

‘Did he say whether the guy was carrying a sword?’ I asked.

‘You know,’ said Stephanopoulos, ‘we never thought to ask.’

I added asking that question and following up the stranger eyewitness accounts to my personal action list.

Martin Chorley must have waited for his chance. At a guess, he’d been downstairs in the foyer of the same building. The sniper would have been instructed to take the shot as soon as he had a clear bead on Lady Ty – the sound of the shot would have served as a signal. Then Chorley steps out onto the street and starts his attack only to, probably, get washed away in the flood.

Thankfully the media were largely ignoring the flood, mainly because of the massive explosion that had blown out the first two floors of Tyburn’s house. British Gas, who are a bit sensitive on the subject, were desperate to rule out a gas explosion, but the only alternative the Fire Brigade would commit to involved Semtex and a truly ridiculous amount of fertiliser.

To my trained eye it looked like somebody had tried to unzip the front façade and spray it left and right. They were still pulling bits of brick and rusticated stucco out of basement areas of houses fifty metres to each side. I reckoned I’d actually seen something like it once, in an old barn in Essex, from the other side. It had been terrifyingly impressive sight back then, for all that it meant rescue from certain death.

Once Stephanopoulos had finished with her tour I found Nightingale giving the damage a cool appraisal. He shook his head and looked disapproving.

‘See that,’ he pointed at a section of first floor window frame hanging suspended from what looked like a curtain rail. ‘Very shoddy. I’d say our man was not himself when he cast his opening spell.’

He’d been enough of himself to rip out the base of Tyburn’s expensive period staircase, leaving the polished balusters hanging like broken teeth from the handrail. The back wall of the parlour had been smashed into the room behind – the wall mounted TV ripped neatly in half with one part embedded in the ceiling and the other lodged at head height in a kitchen cabinet.

Olivia and Phoebe had been watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on that TV when the attack started and had only avoided serious injury because they’d both happened to be lying prone on the sofa.

‘Saved by snogging,’ had been Seawoll’s verdict. ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’

Nightingale’s lesson was slightly different.

‘He just went straight in with no thought as to where his targets might be,’ he said. ‘And if you look at the line of his effort there . . .’ Nightingale swept his hand to indicate where a wide crack had shattered the delicate Regency moulding in the corner of the room, ‘you’ll see that it lacks precision. A surefire sign of . . . what, exactly, Mr Grant?’

‘One of the underlying forma was not properly developed,’ I said.

Nightingale’s lips twitched.

‘Can you tell which one?’ he asked.

I studied the crack. I had no idea what the spell would have been, but probably fourth or fifth order given it was doing quite a number of different things at the same time. Since it was shoving masonry around, the spell had to be impello-based but not even I mess impello up. So it probably had to be one of the modifiers.

‘Temperāre,’ I said – totally guessing.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think you’re right.’

He looked at Martin Chorley’s handiwork and shook his head again.

‘Definitely off his game,’ he said.

Not so off his game that he hadn’t managed to do that much damage in the less than five seconds between his casting the spell and a fountain of water bursting up his trouser leg. I’d have loved to have had CCTV of that, but of course every camera within a hundred metres had gone phut when he cast the spell.

‘Entirely on purpose,’ in Nightingale’s professional opinion.

‘And yet no vestigia,’ I said. At least nothing I could sense. On a Regency street in central London there should have been at least the background afterglow of everyday magic. But standing in front of the ruined house I could feel nothing. Less than nothing, a vast sucking silence. A great absence of ordinary magic.

I’d felt that before.

At the Coopertown house before Punch took a father and annihilated a family.

Now, what if that was what Punch was – the ghost of a god – literally the spirit of riot and rebellion?

That was a long way to jump from a mysterious chest wound. Still, the case did give me an excuse to investigate.

I asked where Olivia and Phoebe were now.

‘At Mama Thames’ house in Wapping,’ said Nightingale.

‘And Tyburn?’

‘Still missing.’

But not dead – at least, not according to Beverley.

‘We’d know,’ she said when I called and asked. ‘Mum would know.’

But if not dead, then what?

‘Hunting,’ said Beverley. ‘In her own way.’

So I went hunting too, also in my own way, by adopting the ancient and traditional stance of the lazy copper. Which is in front of his AWARE terminal with a double shot latte and a jumbo-sized pack of prawn cocktail flavoured crisps. I had to hunch up a bit because Guleed was using her own terminal to compile a classically mealy-mouthed Falcon case report.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘We say he was armed, but what do we say he was armed with?’

‘If you put “knowing he was likely armed” that covers a multitude of sins,’ I said.

‘Armed with what?’

‘Weapons with Falcon characteristics.’

‘You know, one day this is all going to come out in the open.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll be a Chief Super by then.’

‘Not if I keep writing reports like this.’

‘Got him,’ I said.

‘Got who?’ asked Guleed.

Zachary Palmer is a skinny little white boy who is probably half something exotic, which makes him a useful contact when I want to know what’s going on in the demi-monde, e.g. where some red-headed fox might be hiding. Less useful of late, because he’s been making himself purposefully unavailable on account of him, at one time, being Lesley May’s lover. We all suspect he still is or, rather, we think she turns up every so often and bangs his brains out – she wouldn’t be stupid enough to settle into anything regular or permanent, nothing that will get her caught. There was a time when tracking him down would have involved more legwork than I’d care to expend, but since the business with the underground pigs – don’t ask – he’d become semi-respectable, working as liaison for the Quiet People with Crossrail project managers. That meant regular pay, which these days means a bank account, which we’ve had passively monitored as part of Operation Carthorse – the hunt for Lesley.

I used to worry that he’d sussed us out because of the way he’d withdraw large amounts of cash and then live off that for a couple of weeks. But soon the siren call of instant card payment caught up with him, and now he chips and pins like the rest of us. I scanned his transactions and noted some regular payments to a branch of Greggs on Kilburn High Road at the same time every afternoon. After that it was a simple matter of ‘borrowing’ a pool car and having my coffee out.

The only car available was a bloody Silver Astra which was so obviously an unmarked police car that it might as well have had an orange BILL ON BOARD sticker in the rear window. So I parked it around the corner. And, after picking up a coffee and steak slice for myself, took my place at the bus stop opposite. Bus stops are great temporary stops for surveillance since they give you a legitimate reason to be standing around looking bored and the adshell shelters you from the rain.

Despite the weather, the High Road was heaving with schoolkids, mums and buggies and people out shopping. Given the rain, I’d swapped out my suit jacket for my stakeout hoodie, which rendered me effectively invisible.

Given that Zach’s attitude towards punctuality had always been one of stunned incomprehension, the time of his daily transactions were remarkably consistent – I suspected that he was on his break from a job. If so, it was amazing he’d held it for the three weeks he’d been making the pickups. Five days having been the longest he’d previously held a job for – at least that we had records about.

Right on time I spotted him coming up the street from the direction of the station. He was the same skinny wretch, hands jammed in the pockets of his worn jeans and, like me, hoodied up against the rain and random CCTV in grey Adidas. I thought he was going to walk right past me, but before he reached the bus shelter he turned sharply and skipped across the road to the Greggs.

I scoffed the last of my steak slice as I waited for him to come back out. I had been planning to catch him in the queue, but now I was curious to know what he was up to.

Whatever it was, it seemed to involve three large carrier bags worth of food. Not even Zach, I thought, can eat that much – or at least not in one go.

I followed him around the corner and down Belsize Road, which runs beside the railway tracks and is one of those places where you can see the industrial heritage of London being swiftly gentrified into luxury offices for hire. Although this process hadn’t quite reached the ramshackle collection of one storey garages half-way down the street on the railway side.

Zach stopped outside a side door, turned and waited for me to catch up.

‘You can come in,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to keep your voice down.’

Inside it was obvious that, despite the garage doors at the front, the place had originally been built as a workshop with a pitched wrought iron and glass roof designed to let in all that thrifty late Victorian sunlight to save on gas. Age and neglect had yellowed the glass to near opacity, except at the far end where it had obviously recently been cleaned.

The bare brick walls had been whitewashed and then painted pastel shades of pink, green and yellow. There were bookshelves in one corner, a line of sinks and a wet area in another. Underfoot was industrial grade lino and easy to clean carpeting in green and brown. Munchkin sized chairs and tables sprouted in little clusters. A mural on one wall caught my eye – a depiction of an orangutan sitting at a reading lectern in the style of Paul Kidby.

The group of ten or twelve children inside was not a surprise, nor the fact that, having spotted Zach and his armfuls of goodies, they surged forward like a sugar starved tidal wave. What was a surprise was that they did it in almost total silence. They were children of the Quiet People, the people who lived under Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, pale-skinned and big-eyed and not normally seen above ground. Many of them had pale blonde hair that had not yet darkened to their usual light brown. As I watched them being marshalled into their assigned seats, all the while stealing glances at Zach as he unpacked the bags, I found myself trying really hard not to think of a brick wall.

The young woman marshalling the children was similarly slender and pale with chestnut coloured hair in a neat French plait down her back. She’d obviously discovered the joys and practicality of skinny jeans, but above the waist she wore a pale yellow high collared blouse and waistcoat. She was wearing dark glasses indoors although, I realised, her charges were not.

Zach had his bags open and was laying out neat plates of rhubarb and custard doughnuts, Belgian buns and iced fingers on undecorated earthenware plates that were beautiful in the simplicity of their curves. There was a low gurgling, rumbling – loud in the unnatural quiet of the nursery. Zach’s stomach.

A ripple ran through the children, a whisper of laughter that passed from child to child. Their teacher gave Zach an indulgent smile, and he gave a little wave back. Then I recognised her, Elizabeth Ten-Tons, whose father was King of the Quiet People, or if not king then lead gangmaster or chief mining engineer or something like that.

She was strict, she made those kids wait patiently until everything was ready and then line up neatly to receive their one goody, and one mug of milk, from Zach who beamed like Father Christmas through the whole thing.

‘The idea,’ said Zach quietly, ‘is to get them used to the sunlight.’

The kids had finished their snack and me and Zach were hoovering up the leftovers while Elizabeth Ten-Tons read them a story at the other end of the nursery.

‘Are they planning to move to the surface?’ I asked.

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Zach. ‘But they are looking at acquiring a bit of real estate to serve as an official address.’ And then no doubt connect it up to the warren of tunnels they had running under Notting Hill. It was a clever idea since it allowed the Quiet People to bureaucratically integrate themselves into society without giving up their freedom to apply Victorian health and safety standards to their work underground.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘Your mate Lady Ty’s,’ said Zach and explained that she’d also smoothed the way with OFSTED and Camden Council to get the necessary permissions and permits. I’ve had similar dealings with Camden, so I knew that couldn’t have been easy.

I looked over at the kids. It was a sensible, pragmatic solution to the problem of integrating the Quiet People into society. And if those kids started to prefer living above ground, going to uni in far off exotic places like Reading and Cambridge, and marrying out of the tribe? Well then, after a while the whole problem just fades away, doesn’t it? Along with the memories of the old people and the unwritten histories. And silence would reign in the galleries of their forefathers. Not that they were exactly noisy now.

‘I’m not going to tell you where she is,’ said Zach suddenly.

This caused me some confusion until I worked out he was talking about Lesley.

‘Is she all right?’ I asked.

‘What?’

‘Is she all right?’ I asked. ‘Is she OK?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Considering, you know, one thing or the other. All things being equal.’

Zach thought he had something to hide, which meant Zach probably was in contact with Lesley on a regular basis. Good, I thought. Because soon it will be time to pull on that thread and see where it goes.

But not today. Because first there was Mr Fossman.

‘I want to know about Reynard,’ I said.

Zach hesitated and I could practically hear him weighing up whether to pretend he didn’t know, and then thinking better of it.

‘What about him?’ he asked.

‘I need to know where he is.’

‘What for?’

‘Because the Faceless Man wants him dead.’

‘He’s probably already dead, then.’

‘Not if I can help it.’

Zach licked his lips and glanced over at Elizabeth Ten-Tons before dropping his voice so low I had to lean in to hear him.

‘Is it true you know his real name now?’

I said nothing, because if I told Zach I might as well announce it on Facebook.

‘Have you checked his gaff?’

I said that not only had we checked his gaff, we’d spun his drum and his crib as well. And that we had his ends so thoroughly staked out that street crime had dropped by twenty percent overnight.

‘I want to know where he goes as a last resort.’

Zach told me.

‘You’re shitting me,’ I said.

‘No lie.’

‘That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast,’ said Zach. ‘We are what we are.’