Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

She helped set up a free clinic in a poverty stricken suburb and there she found a use for the magical techniques that her mother had developed in Africa. ‘At first I kept it simple,’ she said. ‘Broken bones and physical injuries, but in Paikpara that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You could work yourself to death just dealing with the diarrheal conditions.’ And she wanted to, because these were things that were killing the kids. But the real problem was poor sanitation and poverty.

‘There was nothing I could do about either, but I thought I might be able to do something about leprosy,’ she said and I almost dropped my second slice of Bakewell tart.

‘Did you?’ I asked, which got me a frown from Nightingale.

‘For the disease, no,’ she said. ‘For the symptoms, for the nerve damage, sometimes. But not remotely reliably. I thought I saw a way it might be done, but I needed money, for medical supplies and equipment.’ And to meet the huge need that pressed in around her every day.

So she returned to London to set up a fundraising arm for her charity, and ran straight back into the arms of Albert Woodville-Gentle who was just as charming as he’d ever been. After getting reacquainted they came to an arrangement – Albert would provide seed funding and run the London end of the charity, and in exchange Helena would share the techniques she’d developed in India.

I thought of the Strip Club of Doctor Moreau where Albert Woodville-Gentle had created real cat-girls and tiger-boys and other things that Nightingale wouldn’t let me see. And I thought of the smooth new skin of Lesley May’s face, and found it suddenly hard to keep an expression of polite interest on mine.

‘You never suspected how he might use it,’ said Nightingale.

‘I received a phone call in May 1979,’ said Lady Helena. ‘The caller asked me if I knew what my “good friend” was really up to. They gave me the address of a club in Soho. I believe you know the one I’m talking about.’

‘On Brewer Street,’ said Nightingale.

‘Do you know who made the call?’ I asked.

Lady Helena did not; she’d been busy when she’d taken it and hadn’t understood the implications.

‘A woman,’ she said. ‘English certainly, or at least she didn’t have an accent.’

A woman with a posh accent, I thought. Because people always think their own accent is universal.

‘Did you visit the club?’ asked Nightingale.

‘I’d been due to visit London that summer, so instead of calling Albert to let him know I’d arrived I popped in on my way to my hotel,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Do you know what was in the foyer?’

Nightingale nodded.

I certainly remembered, the disembodied head of Larry ‘The Lark’ Piercingham, petty criminal, grass and object lesson in why you didn’t cross the Faceless Man. He’d been done up like a fortune-telling machine and, as far as Dr Walid could establish later, kept in a semi-state of aliveness for over thirty years.

Lady Helena smacked her palm on the coffee table making the china rattle.

‘I developed that technique,’ she said and her face was suddenly flushed. ‘In an emergency you can use it to stave off brain death.’ She raised her hand again, but hesitated and then dropped it into her lap.

‘Have you taught it to anyone else?’ I asked.

‘You mean, why haven’t I given it to the drug companies?’ asked Lady Helena. ‘Because it’s difficult, dangerous to the witch, and has a one-in-twenty success rate. I’d used it in extremis and tried to refine it, but the most common result is a type of terrible half-life.’

‘Zombies,’ said Caroline, which got her a glare from her mother. ‘What? I’m just saying – zombies. That’s what you get when it goes wrong.’

‘I decided I couldn’t trust anyone with the technique,’ said Lady Helena. ‘Least of all the medical establishment. God, can you imagine what the military might do with it? It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

It was after her encounter with Larry the Lark that she concluded the medical knowledge she’d developed was too dangerous to be passed on.

‘I’ve decided that it has to die with me,’ she said.

‘What about Albert?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Quite,’ she said. ‘What about dear old Albert?’

She’d arranged to meet him at her hotel, but he must have heard that she’d visited the club because he turned up ready to fight.

‘It was a sort of mutual ambush,’ said Lady Caroline. ‘He had first go, but I always was faster than him. Things got rather disagreeable and I’m afraid the hotel rather bore the brunt of it. So it’s just as well I always stayed under an assumed name.’

‘Was this the Pontypool Hotel on Argyle Square?’ asked Nightingale.

‘As a matter of fact it was,’ said Lady Helena.

‘I was called in to investigate that,’ said Nightingale. And, to me, ‘They thought it was a gas explosion at first, then arson and then the IRA. Only once they’d exhausted those possibilities did they think of me, and the trail had grown somewhat cold by then.’ He looked at Lady Helena again. ‘Thank you for clearing that up.’

Not to mention thank you for adding attempted murder, gross negligence and identity fraud to your charge list, I thought, or explaining your cheerfully relaxed attitude to medical ethics.

‘You do understand what happens when you overuse magic?’ she asked.

‘We call it hyperthaumaturgical degradation,’ said Nightingale.

Lady Helena nodded.

‘Useful term,’ she said. ‘That’s what happened to dear Albert. Which I thought a fitting punishment. I didn’t have time for a coup de grace – the police were practically knocking on what was left of the front door when I made myself scarce.’

Nightingale nodded thoughtfully in a way that made me think that somebody was going to be digging out incident reports from 1979, and just for a change it wasn’t going to be me. There was a good chance it would be a big box full of papers – which would suit Nightingale much better anyway.

Without Albert, the charity funding evaporated and, in any case, she’d begun to have doubts about the ethics of her work.

‘But you must have saved lives,’ I said.

‘World ill-health is like world hunger,’ said Lady Helena. ‘We could end both tomorrow if we wanted to.’ And she’d become terrified of the potential abuse. ‘Imagine what the military industrial complex would do with animal hybrids,’ she said. ‘Better that the knowledge dies with me.’

Nightingale glanced my way and gave his head the almost imperceptible tilt that meant it was time for the children to wander off and entertain themselves. I had a number of incentives lined up to coax Caroline away, but in the end I just asked if she wanted a tour and she said yes.

We were followed by Toby, who’d shaken off his sugar induced lethargy and had obviously decided that he wanted a bit of attention.

I started with the lecture hall, where generations of practitioners had snoozed their way through demonstrations and lectures, then the smoking room with its art nouveau trimmings and into the mundane library where we could slip up the ladder to the top stacks and step through a concealed doorway onto the landing. Then up another flight of stairs to the main lab.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Caroline.

I had a pile of modified first generation smartphones at one end of the lab and a noticeably scorched sheet of metal on a bench at the other end. I’d painted distance markers on the metal and on the floor around it. The remains of a couple of cheap pocket calculators were still welded to the innermost markers – I hadn’t had a chance to scrape them off yet.

‘Remember when the lights went out at Harrods?’ I asked.