The Hanging Tree

15 State Six

A risk assessment is a key part of modern policing. Before diving into whatever crisis is at hand, the modern plod is expected to ask themselves: given the modalities of the current situation would any intervention by myself help promote a positive outcome going forward? And what are the chances of this going well and truly pear-shaped? And, if it does, how likely is it that I will get the blame?

Some people think this makes us risk averse, but I like to point out that a risk assessment is what blonde teenagers don’t do before heading downstairs into the basement in a slasher movie. Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t go down to investigate . . . but I’d bloody well make sure I was wearing a stab vest first, and had some back-up. Preferably going down the stairs ahead of me.

I reckoned that Seawoll and Nightingale’s risk assessment was sound for several reasons. We couldn’t just let them kill each other, tempting though that was, because we didn’t know how many members of the public were currently in the complex. The owners might not be in residence, but there could still be staff inside – and they counted as people too. That said, there was no point sending in TSG or even SCO19 because Martin Chorley would just hand their arses back to them. That made it a Falcon job. And, since Nightingale was the most Falcon-capable officer in the Met, I was the second and, god help her, Guleed was the third, we were the logical people to deal.

So in we went, through the back garden past the statues of the two flattened empty heads and entered the wrong way through an emergency fire exit at the base of one of the towers.

Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armoured personal carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.

I keyed my Airwave one last time before shutting it down.

‘This is Falcon Two,’ I said. ‘Show us state six.’ Meaning, officers at the scene.

Like I said, One Hyde Park had four pavilions with four towers containing lifts and stairs interspersed between them. Two were for residents and two were for service staff, because times might move on but the gentry still like their servants to be invisible.

Despite the transparent walls the soundproofing was good and there was no hint of traffic noise as we stepped out into the wide curved hallway that ran the length of the ground floor. The lights were still on, a good sign, and we could see all the way down three levels of the basement and up to the top floor of pavilions one and two.

Me and Guleed held our position while Nightingale padded off down the hallway to secure the eastern end. There were exclusive shops for the excessively over-resourced on the ground floor of each of the Pavilions. Nightingale checked the internal doors leading to them to make sure they were secure and free of supernatural taint before moving on.

The curve meant that we lost sight of him when he reached the far end of the hallway. Me and Guleed tucked ourselves into what cover we could find amongst the rent-a-culture statuary and waited. There was a strong smell of lemon floor polish.

Guleed looked abstracted while she listened through her earpiece to the Airwave chatter. Since she wasn’t likely to fry her own equipment, she’d been designated communications officer – or, as Nightingale put it, ‘radio man’ – for the op.

‘Stephanopoulos is in,’ she said.

It was Stephanopoulos’ job to secure the service hub at the eastern end of the complex so that we could evacuate civilians out that way as well. Once Nightingale had declared the ground floor shops Falcon free, she’d go door to door and evacuate them.

The big debate during the planning stage had been whether to then go up to check Martin Chorley’s flat, down to check the basement and underground parking area, or head west to clear the entrance foyer.

I signalled Guleed and pointed upstairs, but she shook her head – no reports of movement there. When Nightingale trotted back to our positon he repeated my query and, getting the same answer, led us off towards the foyer. Where we found our first casualty.

He was stretched out, half on the shiny grey marble and half on the fine silk weave grey carpet in front of the granite reception desk.

Nightingale caught my attention, pointed, and then put two fingers against his throat. As he watched the balcony I scuttled over to do a first aid assessment. I recognised the guy. He was the dark-skinned man in the good suit I’d seen the first time I’d visited. I’d had him pegged as security, and indeed he was holding a compact digital walkie-talkie as used by police, film crews and paramilitary death squads the world over. I shifted my staff to my left hand and found a pulse in his neck. There were no other obvious injuries, so I gently rolled him into the recovery position.

I picked up his walkie-talkie and shook it. It sounded like a rainmaker, with loose bits and sand rattling around inside.

Nightingale signalled Guleed, who spoke quietly into her Airwave then nodded to me. I trotted over to the main entrance to make sure it was open. Then I retreated back to Nightingale and maintained watch while a trio of TSG guys in full riot gear clattered in with a pair of London Ambulance paramedics in tow. The paramedics were public order specialists and had their own riot gear, only their helmets were painted green – presumably to confuse rioters for long enough for them to do their jobs. As the paramedics went to work Nightingale signalled to two of the TSG to take position behind the reception desk while the third escorted the paramedics.

The TSG were under strict instructions not to engage anyone but to contain and report.

Satisfied that the foyer was locked down, Nightingale led us up a set of grey marble stairs and onto the first floor. Here there was another curved hallway linking the pavilions and the access towers. The flats on these levels were all one- or two-bedroom and mainly owned by shell companies and investment portfolios. What Seawoll called ‘corporate jolly pads’, and he really didn’t need to emphasise that ‘jolly’ much to illustrate his meaning. Still, they had to be cleared just like the shops. Me and Guleed held the stairwell again while Nightingale did his witch sniffing thing, before signalling Stephanopoulos that her people could go door to door.

Now, I’d wanted to go straight downstairs to the underground car park because, apart from the thought that Reynard might have stashed his car down there, each flat came not only with its own parking space but with an underground storage locker the size of a standard shipping container. But Seawoll and had pointed out that we still had a duty of care to people in the building and that had to be our priority.

‘And strangely, Peter, we fucking thought to check it during the investigation.’

‘It’ being the storage space associated with Martin Chorley’s flat.

But not for the Renault 4. Because we didn’t know about Reynard’s car then.

We’d been inside One Hyde Park for over twenty minutes by now, and I’d expected screams after ten . . . the kick-off was suspiciously late. Martin Chorley had spent the last two years psyching us – from sending a Pale Lady to distract me from the murder in West End Central to Lesley’s bit of bait-and-switch that very afternoon at Hyde Park Corner. I figured the very next thing that happened was going to be a feint too.

And so did Nightingale. Because when Seawoll told us that the spotters had seen the lights go on in the Chorley apartment three floors above, he sent me and Guleed down to check the garage while he went up.

Had we managed to make it all the way down to the cars immediately, things might have gone differently. But we ran straight into the Americans on the first sub-level. Below ground the stairs reverted to standard concrete – they were, after all, the service stairs – with the same sort of solid fire door one would expect in any modern building. We were just minding our own business and creeping down the stairs when one of these doors opened. I saw a figure in a dark blue suit framed in the doorway, Guleed yelled – ‘Gun!’ and I raised my staff and impelloed the door shut in his face.

There was a crack as the door trapped his arm, a loud bang as the gun went off and a clang as his pistol hit the concrete floor. I didn’t hear Guleed yell over the man’s scream – he’d sustained fractures in both bones of his forearm. I let the door loose long enough for him to clear the gap and then slammed it shut again.

‘Peter,’ said Guleed in a strange voice. ‘I think I’ve been shot.’

I barely had the presence of mind to keep my impello up against the door as I turned to stare at Guleed who was plucking at the bottom of her Met Vest.

‘Where?’

‘There,’ said Guleed, pointing at a spot just above her hip. ‘Have a look will you?’

This is a thing that both Caffrey and Nightingale have impressed upon me. Most people only fall down when they’re shot because the media tells them they’re supposed to. Especially with something low calibre like a pistol round. The truth is that unless there’s immediate death or gross mechanical damage, people can function quite normally right up to the point where blood loss or shock kicks in. It’s known in the police as ‘walk, talk and die’ – although mostly we run into it when motor-cyclists get knocked off their bikes. That’s why you’ve got to check your casualties even when they’re standing there with a puzzled look on their face.

There was a definite hole in the heavy material of Guleed’s Public Order boiler suit that widened when I stuck a finger in it to reveal a matching slice in the white t-shirt underneath.

‘Ow,’ said Guleed. ‘Careful.’

It would have taken way too long to dig out my pocket knife, so I chopped the cloth with a spell Nightingale had taught me – he’d made me practice on letters and Amazon packaging. I pulled up the T-shirt to reveal a long scrape along her waist. I prodded it, which made her wince – but the skin seemed unbroken.

‘It’s a scrape,’ I said. ‘You’re going to have a lovely bruise.’

There was a thump on the fire door, followed by gunshots.

I looked at Guleed, and she looked at me, and we both stood there dithering and thinking that about now it would be nice to have a little bit of command and control, when down the stairs thumped DI Stephanopoulos with Bill Conti’s ‘Fanfare for Rocky’ playing in the background, and what looked like half a carrier of TSG piling up behind her.

‘Just a scrape, boss,’ said Guleed before Stephanopoulos could say anything.

Stephanopoulos looked at the door.

‘The Americans?’ she asked.

I filled her in.

‘But we don’t even want to be on this floor,’ I said. ‘We’re supposed to be checking the garage.’

‘In that case we’ll secure the stairs while you go down,’ she said. ‘If the Americans try to come in, we scoop them up – otherwise we wait until we get some more bodies in here.’

She stabbed a finger at Guleed.

‘You,’ she said, ‘be more careful. And you,’ she turned to glare at me, ‘just try to be a little less Peter Grant on this outing.’

I had a witty comeback all ready to go, but at that point the whole staircase shook. There was a shower of fine grey dust all around us as the joists securing the staircase to its frame ground into the concrete.

Stephanopoulos’ Airwave squawked and Seawoll reported that Martin Chorley’s flat had just lit up like a fireworks display. I could feel it, too, amongst the bangs and shrieks that echoed down the stairwell. Forma and counter-forma, a full-on magical duel. Nightingale was going head to head with someone formidable – Martin Chorley, at last?

I opened my mouth, but Stephanopoulos put her hand up for silence.

‘Wait,’ she said.

‘But—’

Three gunshots from beyond the fire door, but not that close. Two more further away. Then running feet right outside, five or six shots, loud, rapid, desperate. I tensed, but Stephanopoulos shut me down with another glare.

‘Wait.’

Two more shots . . . and then it was like being mugged by an old fashioned gentleman’s club – a wave of brandy, cigar smoke and pheasant that had hung too long. Then, mixed in with nutmeg and the shine of silver, the heated excitement of the mob, the creak of wood under strain and the smell of old rope, defiance and fear.

And rising above it like a clear note in a trumpet solo, the smell of wood smoke and fresh caught fish cooked over an open fire.

Then silence.

‘What was that?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We need to get in there now.’

‘And the Americans?’ she said.

‘Yeah, we need to go save them from a fate worse than enforced river conservation,’ I said. And then, quickly, ‘We have to rescue them from Tyburn.’

Everyone stared at me – strangely they weren’t keen. I could tell.

‘I’ll go in first, check they’re okay and then you guys can secure this level and I can finally get to the garage,’ I said and Stephanopoulos nodded. Guleed came with me because it’s always good to have a witness when things get complicated – especially one that senior officers trust.

The magical duel was still going on upstairs, I could feel it, but the crashes and bangs had abated. It was probably getting subtle – which was all the more reason for me to stick to the plan.

Me and Guleed eased through the door and out into a long corridor that ran the length of the complex. It had a lush grey carpet, cream walls and the same hushed claustrophobia as a modern hotel. There was a haze in the air and I thought I smelled gun smoke.

There was tinny music coming from our left so we went that way, past a pair of lifts and another staircase, through a fire door that had been jammed open with a fire extinguisher. There was another corridor beyond and half-way down its length a pair of open double doors. I smelt chlorine as we crept along the wall and the music, from somebody’s phone speaker I guessed, changed track – a mid-’70s band murdering a pair of guitars and a saxophone. Beside the open doors somebody had helpfully left a Waitrose bag full of Glock 17s. I kept watch while Guleed checked them out.

‘Three,’ she said which, plus the one in the stairwell, should account for all the Americans. Assuming they didn’t have back-up pieces strapped to their ankles.

We slipped inside ever so quietly, into the atrium of what I guessed was the famed underground swimming pool. The music was coming from straight ahead and over it we heard water splashing, shouts and the unmistakable sound of somebody smacking a ball around.

Guleed gave me a questioning look, but how the fuck was I supposed to know what the sounds meant?

The pool itself was a long narrow slot with a high ceiling. Whoever had done the interior design had opted for the upmarket Death’s Domain colour scheme – all grey granite walls with ivory details and black marble floors. In the pool a trio of naked white men were batting a ball back and forth. They were all noticeably muscled in that well-fed way Americans can get when they take their training seriously. Another man, also white and naked, sat on one of the redundant purple sun loungers cheering on his friends. His right forearm had been wrapped in a white towel and stiffened with a pair of flip-flops into a makeshift splint. He didn’t seem to be feeling any pain.

The Americans stopped as soon as they saw me and Guleed and then turned as one to look at the woman on the other sun lounger. I don’t know if I was really expecting woad or spears, or even a bin-bag dress, but it was just Lady Ty in designer jeans and a cream coloured Arran jumper – slightly blemished by grass stains on the left arm. She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.

She waved airily at the boys in the pool and they went back to their game.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

Lady Ty propped herself up on her elbow, the better to stare down her nose at us.

‘I was trying to kill that bastard Chorley when I was interrupted,’ she said.

‘You were planning to kill Martin Chorley?’ said Guleed.

‘Did I say that?’ said Lady Ty. ‘I meant, of course, that I had planned to discuss his recent actions in a calm and businesslike fashion. I was just coming down the stairs when the goon squad jumped me.’ She flicked a finger at the man with broken arm. ‘That wasn’t me.’

We knew that, of course, but the police never relinquish a psychological advantage when they have one.

‘I hope nothing else happened,’ I said.

‘They’re fine,’ she said. ‘In fact this is probably the first chance they’ve had to relax since they got here.’

This far underground I couldn’t hear the fight upstairs, but I knew I was on a timetable. I told her that we needed to clear the area, but that just made her laugh.

‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘You have to wait for it to wear off – then you can do what you like with them.’

That was the unwritten and suspiciously voluntary code surrounding the glamour – if you took someone’s free will then you became responsible for them until it returned. Like loco parentis, Beverley said. That was assuming it did wear off and the victim didn’t start building their life around their new object of devotion. Some people seemed more susceptible than others. Some day we were probably going to have to set up a support group.

My face must have shown something, because Lady Ty told me to relax.

‘I’m not my sister,’ she said. ‘I have some self-control – they’ll be their old all-American selves in a couple of hours.’

As if the business with the fountain and the flowers had never happened.

So Guleed popped back to fetch Stephanopoulos while I crept down the stairs to the garage. You really shouldn’t split up during an operation, but sometimes you have no choice. No doubt the blonde teenagers in the slasher movies feel the same way.

It doesn’t matter if they’re speed-built brutalist tat or expensive air-conditioned stables, underground car parks always smell the same. Damp cement, paint and volatile hydrocarbons. The only variation is whether or not they also smell of wee. Unsurprisingly, the car park under One Hyde Park did not have urine stains in its dark corners – or even have any dark corners that a young man caught short after a night out on the tiles might have a quick slash in.

There were two floors of garage proper but I was heading to the lowest because that’s where the parking spaces – plural, since the bigger the flat the more spaces you got – allocated to Martin Chorley were. As was his assigned storage space. Because although POLSA had gone through it during the initial investigation, they hadn’t known what to look for.

The stairs I went down were for the delicate feet of residents and thus had black marble risers and pointless art hung at regular intervals. On the bottom landing was a solid fire door disguised by a black stained piano-finish veneer. In a proper, crappy car park there’d have been grimy vertical window slots to look through, but not here. I wondered who was on the other side.

I stopped and tried to clear my mind. The uncanny creates a disturbance in the world. Everyone feels it, the trick is to distinguish it from the all the random noise, the thoughts, memories and misfiring neurons, that fill our heads from moment to moment. It’s like everything else – the more you do it, the better you get. I used to think that Nightingale was alerted to Falcon cases by his extensive network of informants. But now I think maybe he’s just listening to the city.

Or maybe not. Because that would be freaky.

Nobody was fighting upstairs, or at least not with magic. But beyond the fire door I could feel a little tickle, like mouse claws scrabbling in the wainscoting of the material world. It wasn’t Martin Chorley. I know the razor strop of his signare. This was more familiar, like listening to an echo of my own voice.

Lesley.

The question was, did she expect me to come through that door? If I went straight in I might be able to catch her off guard while she was concentrating on whatever it was she was doing. Or she might be doing the low level magic to draw me out.

Or, I decided, I could be over-thinking things again.

I pushed open the fire door and stepped into the garage proper.

There were lift doors opposite and an opening to the right. I could smell old petrol and fresh carbon monoxide. Echoing off the clean concrete walls were periodic metal crunches as Lesley used impello to rip car doors open. I tucked myself behind a section of dividing wall and tried to work out where the noise was coming from.

Once I had narrowed it down to the left I had a quick look.

On the other side of the garage was a long row of parking spaces, each filled with a couple of tons of high status metal. It was mostly Chelsea tractors interspersed with midlife-crisis-mobiles including an Aston Martin Vanquish Volante that I wouldn’t have minded for myself. And two thirds of the way down the line, practically hidden behind an honest to god white Humvee, was Reynard Fossman’s ugly red Renault.

Judging by the three cars with their doors open, smoke still rising from the back of one, Lesley was methodically working her way down the line. Currently she had her back to me as she wrenched open the rear door of a Jaguar F-Pace.

I didn’t think she’d be that casual about her blind side if she was working alone, so I risked sticking my head out for a quick look left and right. Nobody else was in sight, but even so I started easing myself back towards the fire door and the stairs.

I figured that what with this being a basement and us having all the possible exits covered, it was probably not a bad idea to back off and await reinforcements. If only Nightingale could finish off whatever he was doing upstairs.

I caught movement in the corner of my eye and jumped left on general principles and suddenly found myself suddenly lying on my back with a ringing in my ears and the round white light in the ceiling above me going alarmingly in and out of focus. In policing it’s not a good idea to lie down on the job so I tried to roll over, but I’d barely shifted when a blow to my chest pinned me back down.

‘Stay down,’ said Lesley from outside my view. ‘Or Martin here will start breaking ribs.’

‘She does like to make me sound gangster, doesn’t she?’ said Martin Chorley. His voice was coming from the other side of the car park. He must have just come down the eastern set of service stairs. I heard his footsteps as he walked past me to reach Lesley. He was far too sensible to get close enough to look down on me and risk making himself a target – although I could tell he really wanted to.

‘We need to get a move on,’ he said to Lesley. ‘I left a trail of nasty surprises behind me but he won’t stay cautious for long.’

Something, impello at a guess, dragged me across the concrete and I heard a clattering sound as my staff was dragged behind me by its wrist strap. We both ended up in the middle of the roadway – the decking was strangely warm under my palms.

I felt for the handle of my staff, but it was yanked away, the strap cutting painfully into my wrist and palm until it snapped with a twang. That must have been another spell, because it should have taken my hand off at the wrist before it broke.

‘What’s this?’ asked Martin Chorley. ‘Ah, yes. A genuine army surplus battle staff. You don’t see many of those these days, do you? I wonder if you’ve kept it charged up.’

‘I wouldn’t touch it,’ said Lesley. ‘It’s probably booby trapped.’

What a good idea, I thought, let’s add that to the list.

Another clatter as my staff was kicked or spelled off the roadway and, if the sudden echo was anything to go by, under a nearby vehicle.

Great, I thought, that turned out to be useful in the end, didn’t it?

‘Did you find Reynard?’ asked Lesley.

‘No,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘He’s a slippery little shit, isn’t he? I’m hoping he’ll run into Nightingale or the plod and get himself shot.’

I risked turning my head, slowly, to see if I could locate either him or Lesley. He was standing three or four metres away in the centre of the roadway. He was wearing a tailored charcoal pinstripe suit cut in the modern style. He stood, legs slightly apart for balance, arms held loosely by his side – ready for action. I was happy to note that the suit jacket’s sartorial perfection had been marred by scorch mark that ran diagonally from shoulder to waist and his trousers were soaked through from the thighs downwards. Nightingale was obviously handing out lessons in appropriate work attire.

Lesley was to his right, continuing her search of the parked cars. I couldn’t see the Renault from here but the white Humvee it was hiding behind stuck out half a metre over the line. She continued her search of each vehicle in turn, going round to the back of every car and blowing the lock off the boot, checking inside with a quick scan of the front and rear footwells to ensure nothing was stowed in there. About thirty seconds a car, counting walking time.

‘So apart from the face,’ I said, ‘why are you working with this guy?’

Lesley ignored me, but the question obviously irritated Martin Chorley.

‘Because she’s properly English,’ he said.

‘And I’m not?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that I blame you for that, you understand. Your mother was no doubt enticed over to fill some vacancy in the NHS or to drive a bus, or some other job that the working man was too feckless to do himself.’

Or because she was jazz mad and couldn’t get a ticket to New York, I thought. He must have known a bit of my family history. I know he’d checked up on me, and had to have asked Lesley what she knew. My mum, who’d had a good job at the American library in Freetown, had unfortunately caught jazz off the radio and headed for the bright lights of the city, any city, and had found London and my father.

Or perhaps he thought being a jazz mad groupie was something only young white women did, or even more likely he just couldn’t be bothered to fit his intelligence together into a proper assessment. Thank god, because if he had he would have known about the Renault that was six cars down the line from where Lesley was currently, and carefully, blowing the bloody doors off a rather tasty silver Porsche.

‘But Lesley is a proper Brit,’ said Martin Chorley, who I realised had probably been waiting years for an audience. ‘That wonderful blend of Romano-Celt and Anglo-Saxon with a flavouring of Dane and a pinch of Norman French. That happy breed that conquered the world and could again if all their children were kind and natural.’

‘Henry the Fifth,’ I said. ‘You’re doing the bit where Derek Jacobi introduces the traitors.’

‘There was a time when the monarchy meant something more than tea parties and sex scandals,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘Before the Saxe-Coburgs or the Tudors or anyone else American TV has done a miniseries about.’

‘Alfred the Great?’ I asked.

‘I’ve always thought you were suspiciously well-educated for a boy from a sink estate,’ he said.

‘What can I say – I watched a lot of Time Team growing up.’

‘That’s not real archaeology,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘Talk to any proper professional archaeologist and they’ll tell you Time Team was a joke.’

‘You know a lot of archaeologists, then?’ I asked.

‘I’ve read widely,’ he said – suddenly cagey, which made me immediately curious.

‘What’s your favourite period?’ I asked.

‘What’s yours?’ he said, dodging the question.

‘I like the Romans,’ I said.

‘But you’re a policeman,’ said Martin Chorley. ‘Of course you’d like your brutality systemic and carefully licenced.’

Actually, I thought, it was the underfloor heating and the regular baths.

‘I like the Dark Ages,’ said Martin Chorley rolling the syllables around in his mouth. ‘When a man could make himself a myth.’

I could have talked archaeology and Victorian romanticism all day, but alas work had to take precedence. So while I let Martin Chorley monologue away, I laid my plans against him.

Anyone can sense another person doing magic, if they’re close enough and they know what to look out for. In fact you can’t learn magic without someone to demonstrate the formae first. Right from the start I’d wondered whether some forms were ‘louder’ than others and it’s not a hard experiment to set up. For once Nightingale didn’t object, partly because sensing formae is the key to winning a magical duel. But mostly, I think, because it forced me to practise producing a consistent effect, which he is very big on.

So we discovered that you can sense loud splashy spells such as impello or a fireball from as much as ten metres away. It’s down to two to three for normal were-lights and things like raising a shield, but less than a metre for certain variations on lux – particularly those that pushed the wavelength into the infrared. So while Martin Chorley indulged his strange need to confide in me, I slowly and carefully created a little invisible heat sphere, which I’m really going to have to come up with a name for, and nudged it in the direction of the nearest sprinkler head.

It was a top-of-the-line system and the reaction was almost instantaneous.

A good sprinkler system is gravity fed. The water comes from a big tank mounted as high as is practical and when the valves on the sprinkler heads activate, down that water comes. It’s a robust system with a minimum of moving parts and no pumps to malfunction at the wrong moment. The water keeps coming until the reservoir is exhausted.

I knew that and, judging by the peeved expression on Martin Chorley’s face, so did he.

I’d love to say I had a plan for what followed, but I’d be lying.

I used the distraction to ease myself into a slightly better position, palms down on the decking ready to lever myself over and up, but Martin Chorley wasn’t that distracted.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ he said. ‘Face down, hands on your head.’

I complied, linking my fingers in the wet hair at back of my head. When someone’s threatening you, you tend to pay attention. Which is why I was looking in the right direction when the Tesla S came drifting around the far corner of the garage and raced towards us.

At first it just appeared, as if a silver shape was silently growing amongst the artificial rain, and I assumed it was someone else doing a spell. But then I registered the distinctive frowny face emoticon grille and realised what it was coming our way.

You’d be amazed how fast you can get to your feet when you have to, and I didn’t even bother to go fully upright. I scrambled hand-and-foot to the side like a chimp. I like to think that any remote human ancestors watching from that big savannah in the sky would have given me full points for speed and agility, if not for style.

‘Not so fast,’ said Martin Chorley before he realised that something was behind him. He spun round to look and that was almost the last thing he ever did. I think he got some kind of barrier up before the Tesla hit him – and I’m certain that the driver corrected their course to make sure they hit him full on. I saw a flash of red hair in the driver’s seat – left hand, I noticed, so it was an import – and guessed that Reynard Fossman had wisely decided to get his retaliation in early.

I completely understood his logic – if you go after the Faceless Man you want to make sure he goes down with the first strike. Not that that would stop us from charging Reynard with attempted murder if we thought we could make it stick.

Lesley emerged from the line of cars – she was only one short of the white Humvee – and glanced down the length of the garage just in time to see the Tesla plough into the far wall, the crash strangely muted by the falling water.

Lesley turned to frown at me.

‘What have you done this time?’ she asked.

I saved my breath for diving sideways, aiming for the gap between a red Mercedes and a forest green Range Rover, where I could just see my staff poking out behind a rear wheel.

I felt Lesley start a spell, but before she could release it Reynard came running out of the falling water and jumped on her back. I tried to change direction but lost my footing on the wet tarmac and bounced face first off the Range Rover. I managed to slide down the side as if that was what I’d planned from the start and scooped up my staff.

Reynard had gone feral, his burgundy button down shirt in strips and rags to reveal the thick russet hair covering his back and shoulders. His legs were wrapped around Lesley’s waist and he had his left arm around her neck while he pounded her head with his other hand. He was snarling, his lips pulled back to reveal his teeth, so that for a moment I thought he might actually be growing a muzzle and I was going to get my first look at a shape shifter.

Still, science had to wait, and I levelled my staff and the wood hummed under my palm as I flattened the pair of them. Lesley twisted going down, throwing Reynard off onto his back. Neither was going to stay down for long, so I had my follow-up ready. But before I could release it, Reynard rolled back on his shoulders and then kicked himself up onto his feet. Lesley was slower and she was still my primary target, so I knocked her down again.

She swore, rolled and I lost track of Reynard as I tried to close my distance with her.

Then I heard Nightingale shout – ‘Down!’ and threw myself flat on my face.

I only saw it coming because of the rain from the sprinklers. It was a like a lens, an optical distortion whirling through the air – a circular saw three metres across, droplets spraying off the top. Even as I was dropping I saw it slice horizontally through the front of the Humvee. And it was fast. I barely got my face to the concrete before it passed over me with a sound like tearing cloth. I looked up and saw Lesley had dropped as well.

‘Stay down!’ shouted Nightingale as something zigzagged over my head from behind me, with a noise like a hummingbird . . . if hummingbirds weighed twenty kilos and ate rats for dinner.

A second and third super-hummingbird passed me to the left and right. I managed to catch a glimpse of one – it looked like a drill head made of silver snowflakes. Whatever they did when they hit a target, it wasn’t going to be a joy forever. I decided to stay down and started wriggling towards Lesley, who was making a spirited crawl for the shelter of the Humvee.

‘Get to cover,’ yelled Nightingale, which just goes to show that great minds think alike. This obviously applied to Lesley as well, because she scrambled to her feet even as I did. But not to Guleed, who came barrelling out of the rain and smacked Lesley down into the gap between the cars.

I made it into my own gap between a BMW 5 series and a Jaguar XJ, whose resale value Lesley had recently lowered by ripping open the doors, just before a chunk of the ceiling collapsed onto the spot where I’d been lying.

I peered through the windows of the BMW and saw Guleed grappling with Lesley on the other side. I couldn’t risk the crossfire on the roadway, so I clambered awkwardly around the back and arrived just in time to see Guleed snap her head forward and land as sweet a Glaswegian kiss as was ever administered outside the National Club in Kilburn. Lesley staggered back, clutching her nose, and before she could recover Guleed had her spun around with her right arm in an elbow lock and I, upholding the fine tradition of the Metropolitan Police Service, piled in behind. I’m sure, had she thought about it, Lesley would have approved.

I hooked her feet out from under her, she went face down and I pulled the speedcuffs off my belt. It wasn’t that easy while trying to hang on to my staff, and I only had one of her wrists snapped when the white Humvee lurched half a metre over and squashed us up against the side of the BMW.

‘God, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘Why are you so clumsy with the cuffs?’ And she elbowed me in the nuts. It hurt, but it would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been wearing the box that’s part of my PSU kit. I’ve been smacked in the bollocks before, and try to learn from my mistakes.

The Humvee lurched again, and we would have been crushed if it hadn’t been for its high clearance, which allowed all three of us to slide underneath it.

‘Shit,’ said Lesley, ‘he’s getting away!’

I followed her gaze and saw a pair of legs climbing into Reynard’s Renault. It was Reynard himself – I recognised the skinny hipster jeans as they climbed through the passenger door. The engine started, no microprocessors to fry on that car, and it started to pull out of the parking spot.

‘Where does he think he’s going?’ asked Guleed, which was a good question because there was no ramp up to the surface. Only the two vehicle lifts, and they were in lock-down.

Lesley wriggled and I was trying to get a grip on her other wrist when she was dragged out from under the Humvee and into the roadway. Since me and Guleed were hanging onto to her, we went too.

The sprinklers had finally stopped, leaving the decking a wet cold slick and the air full of the smell of stale water. I noticed that some serious puddles had accumulated in some of the parking bays and around the entrance to the lifts. Whoever had put the nice resin coating down had skimped on the drainage system.

We had a good view of the Renault as it accelerated past us towards the far side of the garage. And an equally good look at the bonnet when it exploded in a ball of fire. Exactly the way cars in films do, and cars in real life don’t. It scraped forward for a couple of metres before grinding to a stop. Oily smoke poured from the ruined front of the car and, had there been any water left, that would have been a good time for the sprinklers to activate.

Lesley kicked and twisted, but I think me and Guleed had both decided that our operational priority was arresting her which, unlike everything else going on around us, seemed within our performance envelope.

The back of the Renault blew open of its own accord and a couple of storage crates, the same make as the ones back at The Chestnut Tree, bounced out onto the wet tarmac. Lesley made a lunge forward and then recoiled as Guleed sprayed her in the face with her CS aerosol.

‘Sahra!’ she spluttered.

In the still underground air the smoke was quickly rolling over our heads. According to Frank Caffrey, about a third of fire deaths are down to smoke inhalation and he’s a professional so he should know. I wanted out of that basement. Fortunately, so did Guleed.

‘The stairwell,’ she shouted and we each kept one hand on Lesley as we crawled towards the atrium with the lifts and stairs. Also, I was thinking of those nice thick fire doors and the strong possibility that Stephanopoulos would be available nearby for tea, sympathy and first aid.

Lesley didn’t co-operate.

She somehow managed to roll herself sideways, right over my back, wrenching the speedcuffs out of my left hand and smashing her elbow into the side of my face so that my skull smacked the ground. I really wasn’t any good to man or police officer for what seemed like half an hour, but was probably more like ten seconds. The smoke had boiled down to ground level by then and I came to with Lesley gone and Guleed trying to drag me towards where she hoped the stairs were.

I couldn’t see more than half a metre and every breath burnt the back of my throat. I was beginning to get seriously worried when I smelt dust and sandalwood and what might have been the hot wind off the desert, or possibly just the car burning a few metres away. Then the smoke blew away like the parting of the Red Sea and Lady Helena walked calmly past us down a lengthening corridor of clear air towards the Renault. She lifted her right hand and made a clenching gesture and the fire that engulfed the engine block snuffed out.

Now that was a spell I definitely wanted to learn.

Me and Guleed took advantage of the fresh air to clamber to our feet and start coughing. I was so busy attempting to expel my lungs that I didn’t follow Lady Helena to the back of the Renault. One of the storage boxes was open and on its side and she squatted down and starting picking through the spray of manuscripts and plastic folders.

After a few moments I had enough breath to ask whether she’d seen Nightingale.

She didn’t look up from her search but she did shrug.

‘I think I might have been fighting him at one point,’ she said. ‘It all got rather confused. Ah!’ She stood up brandishing a package the size of a family sized box of Sainsbury’s own cornflakes. ‘Not a total waste of my time after all,’ she said and then strolled past me back towards the stairs. ‘If you’re looking to stop our friend Mr Chorley, my best guess is that he’ll try break out via the vehicle lifts.’

I briefly considered trying to arrest her. Guleed caught my eye, waiting to follow my lead, but I shook my head. With the fire out the smoke wasn’t getting any thicker, but the dense haze remained pretty toxic and whatever air spell Lady Helena had cast we couldn’t count on it lasting forever. So me and Guleed gathered up the spilled loot, plonked it back in the storage container and carried it, and the one with the lid still on, back to the stairwell.

There we found Stephanopoulos and a bunch of irate London Fire Brigade in breathing gear. She wanted to know if the garage was clear of Falcon, so she could let the fire officers in. But I couldn’t give her that assurance. It took us half an hour to locate Nightingale, who’d chased Martin Chorley through a brand new hole in the vehicle lifts but hadn’t dared continue the pursuit beyond the secure perimeter.

‘Far too high a risk of civilian casualties,’ he said later.

Stephanopoulos didn’t look happy.

‘We have not exactly covered ourselves with glory,’ she said.

‘On the other hand,’ said Guleed, ‘none of us are dead.’

‘Just you wait until the Commissioner sees the bill,’ said Stephanopoulos.