Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘She gave her name as Awa Shambir,’ I said.

‘I seriously doubt that,’ said Guleed and then spoke to the woman in a language I assumed was Somali or a dialect thereof.

The woman kept her face down but I could tell she was smiling.

‘You couldn’t repeat that, but a smidge slower,’ she said. ‘I’m a little rusty.’

‘Not Somali,’ said Guleed. ‘Ethiopian maybe.’

Pure Home Counties, I thought, with a side order of posh school. Not the accent she’d used to talk to me when we last met.

‘What’s your real name?’ I asked, but the woman kept her head down and refused to speak. Nightingale and I left her with Guleed and retreated into the café for a quick bit of post incident assessment.

‘There are undoubtedly going to be consequences,’ he said. Which was Nightingale for: Look out, here comes the shit avalanche. ‘We need to make good use of our available time.’

We decided that I would stay with our mysterious not-Somali and bang her up in one of the special cells back at Belgravia.

‘Be careful,’ said Nightingale. ‘I didn’t recognise the formae per se, but her technique was very clean – I’d say she’s been training for a long time.’

I asked how long.

‘Difficult to say,’ he said. ‘But since she was a child for certain. Stay behind her and keep your hand on the cuffs.’ During the war, the Folly had developed techniques for dealing with captured practitioners – Nightingale had dusted off an old manual, I kid you not, complete with cheap khaki cardboard covers and line drawings. Basically it amounted to keep an eye on them and don’t let them get anything started.

‘I don’t think she’s going to be very co-operative,’ I said.

‘You don’t get that well trained without a master,’ said Nightingale. ‘Let’s keep her under lock and key and see who comes to fetch her.’

So while Nightingale and Stephanopoulos stayed to face the music, me and Guleed took our prisoner and legged it back to Belgravia to see whether a Sith lord turned up to bail her out.

The custody sergeant gave us a strange look when we booked her in.

‘How many more of these posh young ladies are you planning to bring in?’ she asked. ‘Or are we going to have start sending out to Fortnum and Masons for refs?’

‘This one has to go in a Falcon cell,’ I said, which wiped the smile off her face.

The same wartime manual with the prisoner management rules also contained instructions for creating cells for magical POWs. Nightingale decided that it would be an interesting way to combine training and necessity if we were to enchant the ‘wards’ together. These proved to be strips of iron inlaid with a crude copper filigree in loops and whirls. You enchant them as you beat them into shape – it’s very therapeutic and good for your upper body strength. We selected two cells in Belgravia’s custody suite and fused the strips across the front of the doors and then painted them over with institutional blue paint. Nightingale did the fusing and I did the painting.

I then spent a fun afternoon locked in one of the cells trying to magic my way out – followed by an unpleasant evening when I realised that I’d been abandoned by Nightingale, who’d put the fix in with the custody sergeant. I had just resigned myself to a night in the cells and was wondering what time refs were up when Guleed took pity on me and let me out.

When the custody sergeant asked for a name I expected our suspect to refuse but to my surprise she gave the sergeant a cheerful smile and said – ‘Lady Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer’. She turned that smile on me and Guleed. ‘Mum’s a viscountess.’

‘Very nice,’ said the custody sergeant. ‘And mine’s a Jaffa Cake.’

Thirty seconds looking for Caroline’s mother on Google led to the Lady Helena Louise Linden-Limmer, or rather to a famous picture of her wearing nothing but a leopard skin fur coat taken by David Bailey in 1964. After that in the listing came her autobiography, Growing up Wild: A Childhood in Africa , and a scanned article from the Observer Colour Supplement circa 1988 about her menagerie – as she called it – of adopted and fostered kids. There had been six at that point. All girls. I looked at the photographs. Two were black, one was brown, one was possibly Chinese or South East Asian. Of the white girls one had cerebral palsy and other had been a victim of thalidomide. According to the article, Lady Linden-Limmer had run a health clinic in Goa and then in Calcutta, and had worked with people suffering from leprosy.

You can’t just return home and stop caring, she told the interviewer.

One of the black girls in the photographs was about four, wearing a grubby blue smock and a sly expression that was an echo of the woman we had in the cells – Caroline, I presumed.

I attached the article to Caroline’s HOLMES nominal and was about to request an IIP on her mother when Guleed kicked me under the desk and jerked her head in the direction of the door. Just coming in was a tall white DI from the Department of Professional Standards called William Pollock – SIO for Operation Carthorse, the hunt for Lesley May. He saw me, made sure he’d caught my eye and beckoned me over. I gave Guleed a cheery wave and off I went. Guleed, who knew she was going to be next, sighed and turned back to her work.

In the initial months following Lesley’s defection to the dark side I was treated with a certain amount of suspicion. Yes, she had tasered me in the back of the neck just as I was about to arrest the Faceless Man. But they only had my word for it that things had gone down the way they had, and the ABC of policing literally goes: Assume nothing, Believe no-one, Check everything. Still, about a year of continuous suspicion had convinced DI Pollock that it was just possible I wasn’t as bent as a threepenny bit and so instead of an ‘interview’ in an interview room, I got what’s known as a hot briefing in a meeting room. I’d know my rehabilitation was complete when DI Pollock had me in the local for a chat over a pint.

He asked me whether we’d had any prior intelligence that Lesley might turn up at the meeting or even that FAM ONE, which was how Operation Carthorse referred to the Faceless Man, had an interest in Reynard Fossman.

I told him that had we had any fucking inkling whatsoever we probably would have revised our operational plan for the meeting.

‘In what way?’ asked DI Pollock.

‘We would have held it in a more secure location,’ I said.

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked DI Pollock.

‘Our assessment was that any potential additional security provided by a new venue was outweighed by the risk that Fossman wouldn’t show,’ I said. ‘In which case we would have had to mount a resource intensive search for him – particularly since he’d become a person of interest to Operation Marigold.’

‘And you received no intelligence, no intelligence at all, that Fossman was connected to Lesley May or FAM ONE?’ asked Pollock.

‘None whatsoever,’ I said.

‘And you’re certain Lesley May wasn’t there because of you?’ he asked.

‘Sir?’

‘Perhaps she was there to see you,’ he said. ‘Have you considered that?’

‘She went after Reynard at every opportunity,’ I said. ‘She was there for him.’

‘And you yourself have had no contact with Lesley May since Herefordshire,’ said DI Pollock.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Were you aware of any links between Reynard Fossman and Lesley May?’

Round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows.

He was particularly interested in my identification of Lesley – was I sure about her face or was I unconsciously picking up cues from her voice or body language.