The Hanging Tree

16 Pleased to Meet You

And so it ended like most Police operations do, not with a bang but with us whimpering over the paperwork. Or at least it would have for me and Guleed, if we hadn’t been whisked off to UCH where we snaffled up oxygen and tried not to listen while Dr Walid explained terms like tissue hypoxia to us in more detail than either of us would have liked. Fortunately we responded well to treatment and weren’t kept overnight. Beverley popped over to keep me company and then, typically, spent most of the time in Guleed’s cubicle gossiping – and not even about me. My mum turned up with a care package which I ate one-handed while fending off Bev, Guleed and Nightingale with the other. Once we were out, Beverley drove me back to her house in her sad little Kia and we shared a bath and then bed.

The next morning Nightingale picked me up from Bev’s in the Jag so he could brief me on the way back to Belgravia nick. I was going to take over as Falcon liaison in the hunt for Martin Chorley and Lesley May while he headed back to the Folly to catch up on his sleep.

‘He almost got me, you know,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’d prepared a number of booby traps in the flat upstairs and tried to lure me into the killing zone.’

Fortunately Nightingale still remembered the lessons he’d learnt fighting the Germans.

‘They were expert at combining conventional weapons with magical ones,’ he said. ‘You never knew if you were going to be facing a fireball or a Panzerfaust.’

Martin Chorley was clever and ruthless but his lack of combat experience told against him.

‘Set off his first device a fraction too early,’ said Nightingale. ‘Once I was tipped off it was just a matter of being careful where I stepped.’

Which explained why he’d been slow getting down to the basement. Otherwise both Martin Chorley and Lesley would now be enjoying the simple elegance of our magic-resistant cells.

That they had both managed to get away was the primary failure of the operation, the property damage to One Hyde Park being secondary. Although the fact that we could prove that one of their tenants – Martin Chorley – had instigated the fire was definitely going to help us in the upcoming legal fight.

It would have been even better if we actually had Martin Chorley in custody, or Lesley May for that matter – though we did have Reynard Fossman, who CTC were holding under anti-terrorism legislation at Paddington right across the corridor from Lady Ty’s Americans. I know Seawoll would have liked to arrest Lady Helena and Caroline as well, if only on general principles, but Nightingale argued against it even after we’d discovered that they’d run off with the manuscript of the Magni Operis Principia Chemica, ‘Chymical Principles of the Great Work’.

Nightingale seemed remarkably relaxed about Lady Helena half-inching The Third Principia, given the grief we’d been through to get it in the first place. Postmartin would have cheerfully sentenced them to a life breaking rocks for crimes against scholarship, but Nightingale merely smiled and said that they were probably better suited to the job of interpreting it.

‘I never was one for academic study. And even if you did have time, your Latin isn’t up to the job.’

‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

‘Speaking as one who was obliged to memorise large sections of The Second Principia, I think I can say with some confidence that you are not losing out. In any case, while Lady Helena will no doubt do a splendid job teasing out its secrets, I believe relying on the wisdom of the ancients, so to speak, is a mistake.’ Nightingale gave a crooked grin I’d never seen before – it made him look all of fourteen. Suddenly I could see him standing on the playing fields of Casterbrook, hands in pockets, school cap pulled down at a rakish angle and looking into a future untroubled by anything more than a couple of world wars, atomic bombs and the loss of everything he held dear.

‘In any event, I rather think that Lady Helena is looking to the past whereas I prefer to look to the future,’ he said. ‘I’m sure if she does discover something worth knowing she’ll be only too happy to share.’

I expressed a certain amount of doubt about that, but Nightingale pointed out that Lady Helena had returned to her place in the Montgomeryshire and should we want it, we could always drive out and ask to borrow the bloody book.

‘And see if her daughter has learned to fly yet,’ said Nightingale.

I asked about Martin Chorley’s Ferrari GTO and Nightingale said it was temporarily impounded.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘I thought they might auction it.’

‘And you were thinking of bidding?’

‘Just a thought,’ I said.

‘Alas,’ said Nightingale. ‘That car will never be sold.’

‘Oh.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I declared it a “magical device” under the terms of the agreement. At least until such time as we can declare it safe for mundane use.’

And he’d stashed it in the coach house where the Orange Asbo used to live.

‘How long do you think that will take?’

‘Well such an evaluation can take a considerable amount of time,’ said Nightingale. ‘Especially given our current work load.’

‘And we wouldn’t want to cut corners, would we?’

‘To do so would be irresponsible,’ he said.

‘Respect,’ I said and raised my fist which Nightingale stared at for a moment before raising his own and bumping mine.

Over the next couple of days it became clear that Martin Chorley and Lesley May had gone to ground. We’ve always supposed he had resources beyond County Gard and its related companies. Seawoll suspects links to organised crime, people smugglers and the like. I assume that he has links to the shadier parts of the demi-monde as well.

Despite Nightingale’s assertion that he’s just an ordinary criminal at heart, I think there’s something more. There was something of the fanatic about him. I’m sure he has a plan . . . I wish I knew what it was.

We did pick up Reynard, though, and charged him with a miscellany of offences ranging from resisting arrest to handling stolen goods. We’re not pushing the Crown Prosecution Service very hard on this case, though. We don’t want our fox in prison. We want him to be out and about like a walking lightning rod.

As I promised Beverley I helped Maksim install some herringbone pattern baffles on a stretch of her river. The idea, Bev said, was to break up the flow and ultimately erode the banks into a more natural shape.

‘I thought you liked a fast flow?’ I asked later that evening.

‘It’s not the volume,’ she said between pants. ‘It’s how it flows.’

Phoebe and Olivia had joined Beverley on the river bank to watch as we worked and afterwards we had a slightly damp picnic under the protection of a weeping willow. Olivia said that she thought her mum might have forgiven me a little, or at least she’d stopped scowling whenever my name came up. When they left I found myself watching them walking away, hand in hand, and wondering what having kids must be like. Once you’re past the nappies and training wheels.

I turned to find Beverley watching me.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said and took me home.

Did I mention the paperwork? It took us a couple of days just to pull all the material together, not helped by having DAC Folsom descend on us for a review with the rest of the Tiger Hunting Committee in tow. So it didn’t really come as much of a surprise when Lady Ty asked if I could pop in to see her.

‘Any time in the next hour would be convenient,’ she said.

We met in the saloon bar at The Chestnut Tree which Lady Ty said she was in the middle of acquiring on behalf of her mother’s property portfolio. Judging by the way the manageress waited on our table, and hovered attentively until dismissed, that acquisition was a done deal in more ways than one.

Lady Ty had ordered a bottle of red and two glasses, but I shook my head when she went to fill mine.

‘Is it true you’re writing a briefing document regarding the expansion of the Folly?’ she asked after taking a sip.

‘Modernisation,’ I said. ‘To make it fit for purpose.’

‘Is there any chance of getting a sneak preview?’ she asked.

‘You were always on the stakeholder list,’ I said. ‘And part of the initial round of consultation going forward.’

‘Stop that,’ she said.

‘Stop what?’

‘You know what.’

I shrugged and waited to find out what this was really all about.

‘Peter,’ she said, ‘we need to talk about you and Beverley.’

‘Is this going to be the big sister talk?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ she said.

‘Have you had it with Beverley?’

‘Many times,’ she said. ‘But I promise that this will be the only time I will have it with you.’

‘You don’t like me seeing Bev – right?’

‘It’s not the seeing I mind, or the shagging, or the fact that she keeps introducing you to mysteries that you shouldn’t be party to,’ said Lady Ty.

‘Really? Like what?’

Lady Ty grimaced. ‘Nice try,’ she said. ‘You’re both young and stupid and nothing I say is going to make you stop. But you need to listen to me carefully. Whatever you think this thing you’ve got with Beverley is, it’s got to be strictly short-term. It can’t get serious. And if you’re thinking about getting married, it is right out of the question.’

‘What the fuck?’

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

I felt myself flush.

‘You don’t think I’m good enough?’ I said.

Lady Ty sighed and held up a hand.

‘You seem to have got the impression that I don’t like you,’ she said. ‘As a person, that is – rather than a fucking impediment to everything I’ve been trying to build for the last twenty years.’ She hesitated and then sighed again. ‘Where was I?’

‘Fucking impediment,’ I said.

‘Look, this isn’t going to work unless you have a drink,’ said Lady Ty and pushed a wine glass across the table at me and picked up the bottle. ‘I can’t do this with you staring at me like a Methodist preacher.’

‘Tyburn,’ I said.

She gave me a weary look and then intoned that she, Lady Ty, held me to no obligation and that I could partake freely of her hospitality without obligation.

‘Satisfied?’ she asked.

I nodded and she poured the wine.

‘You remember that Christmas I dug you out from under Oxford Circus?’

‘How could I forget?’ I said.

‘That’s what I wondered all last week,’ said Lady Ty.

I sipped my wine. It tasted like, well, red wine. Despite Nightingale and Molly’s best efforts that’s still as far as my palette goes.

‘After that Christmas, George and I went on holiday,’ she said. ‘Stephen was away at uni and we packed Olivia off to go skiing in the French Alps. With Phoebe’s family, as it happens.’ She shook her head. ‘All that needless worry about chalet Romeos – oblivious, that’s me. Anyway, we hadn’t been on holiday alone together since the kids were born and it was glorious.’

I asked where she went.

‘Barbados,’ she said. ‘I know the Island quite well – he did a sabbatical at Oxford while I was there.’

I drank some more wine while that sank in. I wanted to ask what the Island was like as a person. I really did. But sometimes even I’ve got to stay focused. Not to mention, you’ve got to suspect that someone who read Machiavelli in the original Italian is going to be looking to distract you – even if it’s only out of force of habit.

‘So, you had a good time?’ I asked.

‘When I came back I felt like was twenty again,’ said Lady Ty.

I had a horrible feeling I knew what was coming next.

‘You’re young, reasonably fit and not bad looking, so the reality of getting older hasn’t sunk in yet,’ she said. ‘As you get older gravity starts to take its toll, especially if you’re a woman, especially if you have two kids and then breast feed them.’

I must have squirmed ever so slightly, because she laughed.

‘I’m not saying they were heading for my waist,’ said Lady Ty. ‘Let’s just say I wasn’t going to go topless on the beach. This is really making you uncomfortable, isn’t it?’ She pronounced it innit – she was definitely taking the piss. ‘Scaring you with the thought of my old lady tits.’

‘Truthfully,’ I said, because sometimes people want a bit of honesty, ‘yeah, a bit.’

‘Good,’ said Lady Ty. ‘Then there’s stretch marks and moles and these weird flaps of skin and cellulite – let’s not forget the cellulite. There’s nothing you can do about it and if you’re sensible you learn to be comfortable in your skin.’

‘And are you?’

‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘Until we were getting ready for our last night out on the Island and I decided to wriggle into my emergency little black dress and I’m hoiking everything into place when George looks at me and says “Hey, we should do this every year. It really seems to agree with you”. And I was feeling pretty damn hot, even if I say so myself, so I sashayed over to the mirror and found my twenty five year old self staring back at me.’

‘You’d physically changed?’ I asked.

‘I closed the bathroom door and had a good feel,’ said Tyburn. ‘It was all real.’

‘You must have known it was a possibility,’ I said. ‘I mean, look at Oxley and Isis.’

‘Peter,’ said Tyburn. ‘I need you to stop just pretending to be clever and actually be clever. Of course I knew it, intellectually – Mum’s looked basically the same since I can remember, and there’s Father Thames who doesn’t look a day over a thousand. But that’s not the same as staring it in the face.’ She shook her head.

I nodded my understanding, but she wasn’t convinced.

‘So when we came back to London I sort of let myself fall back into middle age.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Well, I stayed away from mirrors and watched a lot of Antiques Roadshow – that helped.’

‘How quickly did it happen?’ I asked.

‘A couple of months,’ she said. ‘Crow’s feet, fat thighs and all.’

Fairly unobtrusive crow’s feet, I thought.

‘And it all just reverted?’

Lady Ty shrugged.

‘I may have left out the stretch marks,’ she said

‘Did he notice?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘When you’re married you get used to each other – you really only see the person you expect to see.’

‘Can Beverley make herself look older?’ I asked, and then I thought of her sister Nicky who was allegedly nine years old and might just have drowned a man on dry land. ‘Can Nicky?’

‘There’s no manual, Peter,’ said Lady Ty. ‘There’s no self-help group with a Tumblr page and an easy-to-access FAQ. And I’m the oldest, which means everything happens to me first – of course. I have to make all the mistakes, and my first one was thinking I was human and could have a human life.’

I felt a cold clutching in my chest. It must have shown on my face.

‘I’m going to outlive my babies, Peter,’ she said. ‘I’m going to outlive my babies’ babies. Barring some radically unforeseen circumstance I’m going to outlive everyone I love, except my family.’ She made a strange head bob. ‘I want to save my sister some pain – so sue me.’

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

‘Are you at least going to think about what I’ve said?’

‘Who stabbed the sniper?’ I asked. ‘Do you know?’

Lady Ty stiffened and she took another sip of her wine before answering with a question. ‘Do you have any theories?’ she asked.

‘I think it was Sir William Tyburn, late of this parish,’ I said. ‘Do you know who I’m talking about?’

‘The son of old Father Thames,’ she spoke the phrase in a formal manner, as if invoking a spirit or introducing a judge.

I waited, but she sipped more wine and looked at me over the rim of her glass.

‘Was it him?’

Lady Ty shrugged.

‘Is he associated with you in some way?’ I asked. ‘At a spiritual level?’

Lady Ty snorted into her wine, put the glass down and quickly covered her nose and mouth with her hand.

‘Spiritual, Peter? Having difficulty integrating this within your rationalist schema, are we?’

‘Only because nobody ever gives me a straight answer,’ I said.

‘That’s because they don’t know,’ said Tyburn. ‘It’s like economics. Everybody’s got a theory, and some people make it their religion.’

‘Is he part of you or not?’ I asked, louder than I meant to. ‘I need to know.’

Lady Ty snorted again, so I defiantly lifted my wine-glass and drained it in one go. I grabbed the bottle and poured myself the last of the wine.

‘There,’ I said. ‘Now I’ve met you half-way .’

‘You and Bev are so suited,’ she said. ‘It’s such a pity you’re going to wear out so quickly.’

‘Got any Red Stripe?’ I asked. ‘Kronenberg? Tsingtao? Star? Come on, you must have some Star Beer left.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said Lady Ty. ‘But you haven’t seen my mum’s friends drink yet.’ She sighed. ‘Okay. He’s there, is Mr William Tyburn Esquire – like a memory, like a story I made up when I was a kid and repeated so often that it’s become the truth. He’s real, like a photograph of a grandfather who died before you were born.’

‘Did he kill the sniper?’

‘Well, I sure as shit didn’t,’ said Lady Ty. ‘You know, I’ve done business with the Public Policy Foundation. They did a study on increasing passenger traffic along the Thames. I must have attended half a dozen meetings and presentations with them, and I never once met Martin Chorley.’

‘He was avoiding you,’ I said. ‘He didn’t want you sniffing him out.’

‘I nearly got him, you know,’ said Lady Ty with a wicked smile. ‘I’d have drowned the little fucker if the bloody Americans hadn’t got in the way.’ She frowned. ‘What have you done with them, by the way?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘I have an overdeveloped sense of responsibility,’ she said.

‘We’re flying them home tomorrow,’ I said.

There had been a deal, but nobody bothered to tell us what it was.

‘A couple of quid for our quo pro,’ said Seawoll when I asked him.

I asked Agent Kimberley Reynolds when I saw her and her charges off at Brize Norton, but she said she couldn’t tell me. She did ask whether we’d recovered everything on the NSA list. I didn’t tell her about Lady Helena walking off with The Third Principia, but I did tell her that Babbage’s Mary Engine hadn’t been recovered.

‘We don’t even know if it was in the car,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got it?’

‘Didn’t it weigh like two hundred pounds?’ she asked, and offered to let me carry her luggage.

We agreed to stay in touch and I promised to send her some books. I asked how we might keep our discussions private and she just laughed.

‘What do you propose we use – a magic decoder ring?’ she said. ‘Just don’t say anything you don’t want the NSA to know.’

I added establishing relations with other national magical policing bodies to the great big fun file of things the Folly needed to do.

Which left a certain hook nosed bastard who didn’t know when to shut up.

Early the next morning I drove out to London Bridge and stood about where I judged the centre to be, turned my back on the river and leaned against the parapet. Even at six in the morning the commuters were streaming past me in the darkness, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets or clutching umbrellas against the chill drizzle.

‘You’ve been bugging me for a year now,’ I said. ‘You want to talk? Let’s talk.’

A couple of people gave me a strange look but, I suspect the majority thought I was on my phone, hands free. Of course some of them detoured to avoid me, but they would have done that even if I’d been silent.

‘You see, the thing is I’m still alive,’ I said. ‘Martin Chorley could have killed me a number of times during the fight in the garage. Fuck, he could have killed me at Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ house. Now he says that he’s got a deal with Lesley, which he doesn’t want to break. But, you know what? I think there’s more. Because there’s half a dozen ways that Mr Chorley could have offed me and gone “Whoops, total accident, wrong place, wrong time”. And he didn’t. Which he means he doesn’t dare risk pissing Lesley off, which means she’s not just important. She’s vital to his plans.’

And there, very faint, like a whiff of shit in a posh restaurant, I caught the off-key jangle of bells, the rustle of jester’s motley and a snatch of familiar verse – He lives, while he can, upon clover. And when he dies it’s only all over.

‘It can’t be access to the Black Library,’ I said. ‘Because she’s off the guest list and she’s picking up magic. But I reckon he could find a replacement without too much trouble. Shit, he could train someone himself if he needed to. It’s not to get a psychological advantage over the opposition. Because I might hesitate when it comes to Lesley, but Nightingale will not – trust me.’

The press of commuters crossing the bridge grew until it was a continuous hurrying river of people streaming past.

‘So, I wondered what might be special about Lesley,’ I said. ‘Beyond all the things I think are special about her. And, you know what? And this is going to make you laugh . . . the answer is you, isn’t it? Some special knowledge she got while you were in her head. Or maybe a connection to you. Is that it? A connection.’

And then a voice, like a breath in my ear.

If I had all the wives of wise King Sol, I’d kill them all for my Pretty Pol.

‘You better watch it, bruv,’ I said. ‘Because you and I ain’t finished.’

And I thought I heard laughter echoing out of the city, but it might have just been the traffic.