Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

Lady Helena made an airy gesture.

‘He offered to sell us something,’ she said. ‘An antiquity.’

‘What kind of antiquity?’ I asked. ‘A family heirloom, a genuine Chippendale, a licence to crenelate?’

‘Jonathan Wild’s final ledger.’

‘And why would you want that?’ I asked.

‘You know damned well why,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I want you to say it out loud.’

‘ The Third Principia ,’ said Lady Helena.

‘You’re that keen to turn lead into gold?’

‘Never mind filthy lucre,’ she said. ‘The philosopher’s stone, eternal life and therefore by extension a cure for all that ails you.’ She leant back in her seat and folded her arms. ‘And that’s enough for the starling. You want more, send in the Nightingale.’

‘Do you think there’s more?’ asked Nightingale.

We’d left Lady Helena and the Right Honourable Caroline to stew, on the general police principle of when in doubt keep them waiting. You never know when something incriminating might turn up – it’s happened before, even if you sometimes have to nudge the process along.

Nightingale and Stephanopoulos had made themselves comfortable in her office and sent me off for coffee and biscuits. Once we’d divided up the chocolate hobnobs we got down to the business

‘She knows who we are,’ I said. ‘Which means she probably walked in with a plan.’

‘To what end?’ asked Nightingale.

‘It can’t be to spring her daughter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Her brief’s going to have her out in less than two hours. We don’t have enough to charge her with anything more than making an affray and she’s going to maintain that she was out shopping when she was caught up in a police operation.’

‘That’s unfortunate,’ said Nightingale.

‘That’s the consequence of having a branch of the Met operating without statutory authority,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘We can’t really explain to a jury that she obstructed the police in their lawful activity by shooting smoke out of her fingertips – can we?’

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale. ‘Which is why I’m going to take a leaf out of Peter’s book and invite them round for tea.’

‘Sir?’ I said and looked at Stephanopoulos, who shrugged.

‘Lady Helena clearly wants something from us, and equally clearly she has information it could profit us to know,’ he said. ‘I suggest we ask her – politely – what it is.’

‘So, tea this afternoon then?’

‘Good Lord no, Peter,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow afternoon at the very earliest. For one thing we need to gather as much intelligence on Lady Helena as we can, and I need to brief Postmartin about the ledger. But, most importantly, we must give Molly time to prepare for guests. If we spring a member of the aristocracy on her without warning it could go very badly for us indeed.’

So, in the classic manner of a swan, the top half glided effortlessly across the police work while below the surface me and Guleed scrambled to pull together a decent intelligence assessment of a woman who, if I’m any judge, learnt how to be bureaucratically invisible on her mother’s knee.

And how to heal with magic – possibly.

With all that implied.

And having made sure my attention was focused in one direction the universe, which likes a good laugh, smacked me in the face from the other side. Just as I was considering calling the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, formerly the Colonial Office, to see if they had anything on Lady Helena’s activities in Kenya, my phone rang and an American voice said, ‘Hi Peter, how you doing?’

It was Kim or, more formally, Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds of the FBI. We’d met a couple of years back when we’d engaged in competitive car tracking, suspect-losing and the world’s first three-person sewer-luge team. We’d exchanged maybe five emails apiece since then – mostly at Christmas. One had been to alert her to the change in Lesley May’s status.

‘Hi Kim,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

‘You never write me, Peter,’ she said. ‘You never call – so I thought I’d see how you were doing.’

This seemed unlikely. Now, she couldn’t be worried about being bugged because if you’re taped then someone’s listening and probably isn’t going to fall for ‘this is a casual chat about the snow being particularly severe in Moscow this year’ – so this was more of a plausible deniability sort of phone call. Kimberley wanted to be able say it was a friendly call with no ‘policy’ implications. The question was who she would be plausibly denying it to – a question that, obviously, you couldn’t ask over the phone.

‘You know how it is,’ I said. ‘Fighting crime and stuff.’

‘Well, anyhoo,’ said Kimberley. ‘A real interesting thing happened to me the other day. I was working at my desk when a couple of gentlemen walked up and introduced themselves and started asking after you.’

‘Agents?’ I asked.

‘That was the interesting thing,’ she said, maintaining her bright tone, ‘they had visitor passes. But, you know what, their escort must have wandered off and left them to their own devices.’

‘Is that so?’ I said. Visitors that could wander around an FBI office without an escort had to have some official status, or at least sanction from somewhere. ‘What did they want to know about?’

‘Who you were. What office you work from.’ Kimberley paused. ‘Had you ever done anything extraordinary.’

‘Extraordinary?’

‘Yep, that’s what they asked.’

Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck with extra fuck.

‘What did you tell them?’ I asked.

‘I said you were a perfectly nice young low-ranking police officer who was on the task force investigating the murder of a US citizen abroad,’ said Kimberley.

‘And?’

‘They weren’t buying.’

‘Did they ask about anyone else?’ I said, meaning Nightingale.

‘No,’ said Kimberley. ‘They only seemed to know about you.’

Kimberley had left Nightingale out of her – already heavily edited – report when she returned to the US. Operation MATCHBOX, the investigation into the murder of James Gallagher Jr, had left him out too, along with the community of magical folk that lived under the streets of Notting Hill – that was standard policy.

‘Did they say why they wanted to know?’

‘Strangely, they didn’t,’ said Kimberly. ‘But I did get the impression that they might be coming to visit you in the near future, so I thought I’d give you a heads-up.’

‘Thanks for that,’ I said.

‘My pleasure, and you take care now,’ she said and hung up.

‘What was that?’ asked Guleed from the other side of our desk.

‘Big trouble,’ I said. ‘Right here in River City.’

Nightingale is big on the whole healthy body, healthy mind thing and, given that he looks good for a man who should have got a telegram from the queen more than a decade ago, I tend to follow his advice. Which is why when I’m working out of Belgravia I sometimes leave one of the Asbos there so I can run over the next morning. It’s a good route, down St Martin’s Lane still dirty from last night’s theatre crowd, across the top of Trafalgar Square before dropping down onto the Mall and giving her majesty a quick wave if she’s at home.

That morning it was cool and despite the smell of rain the sky was clear and the predawn light turned the roadway a nice shade of pink. I’d just passed the ICA when Beverley rang me – she does most mornings if I don’t stay the night at her place.

‘I don’t want to be funny babes,’ she said without preamble, ‘but when were you going to tell me you’d run into Lesley?’