Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘I remember your master knocking me off my feet,’ she said.

‘He’s not my master,’ I said.

‘Well he’s not your dad, is he?’ said Caroline and then looked at me sharply. ‘He’s not, is he?’

‘He’s my boss,’ I said. ‘My governor.’

‘I see,’ she said. She looked at the bench. ‘Magic interferes with technology – do you know why?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ she looked at the pile of smartphones. ‘But I think you know more than I do.’

So I explained that, as far as I could tell, magic had a serious degrading effect on microprocessors, and a lesser effect on transistors. ‘But not on thermionic valves,’ I said, ‘or simple circuit boards.’

‘I know about that,’ she said and held up her wrist to show off a silver stainless steel Classic Ladies Fireman from Balls – which was at least eight hundred quids’ worth of watch.

‘I’ve shown you mine,’ she said, so I held my wrist to show my black and silver Omega.

‘Damn,’ she said and grabbed my forearm and pulled it up for a closer look, ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Christmas present,’ I said.

‘What about your boss?’ asked Caroline. ‘Your guvnor ? What’s he got?’

‘Depends on what he’s wearing,’ I said. ‘I think he’s got a drawer full of them alongside the cufflinks.’

‘Sharp dressed man,’ she said. ‘Bit old fashioned for my taste.’

Oh, you don’t know, I thought, but you suspect. And you can just go on suspecting.

‘It’s hard to stay current working in a place like this,’ I said. ‘What’s your mum have on her wrist?’

‘Just skin,’ said Caroline. ‘She says “clock time is an imposition of industrial capitalism and should be resisted if not ignored”. Besides, she thinks it interferes with the flow of energy around her chakra points. And you still haven’t said what all the phones are for.’

‘Somebody,’ I said, meaning Lesley May, ‘has found a way to tap directly into the energy potential of a smartphone.’

‘Does it have to be an Apple or will an Android do?’

‘Anything with a chip-set,’ I said.

‘Wait,’ said Caroline. ‘Are you saying magic doesn’t just destroy the chips – you can actually get power out of it as well? How do you know that?’

Because I’d trained myself to do a very consistent were-light for testing purposes and then measured the output while feeding calculators, phones and, once, an obsolete laptop into the spell. Then I measured it with an antique optical spectrometer that I’d found in a storeroom. It was a beautiful brass and enamel thing that looked like someone had bolted two telescopes to an early turntable. It had taken me another two weeks to find the prism which was in a different box with some notes handwritten in Latin which I hadn’t dared show Nightingale in case he confiscated them. I hadn’t translated them yet, but from the diagrams I was pretty sure the author had been conducting experiments similar to mine.

‘How do you feed a calculator to a spell?’ asked Caroline.

‘Same way you’d do a ritual animal sacrifice, except without the animal,’ I said.

This amazed Caroline, not least because she hadn’t known you could do ritual animal sacrifice – which really shouldn’t have surprised me, what with her mum being her mum.

‘Ten points to Ravenclaw,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘I always fancied Gryffindor.’

‘Dream on,’ she said. ‘Definitely Ravenclaw.’

‘I think,’ I said, ‘that it might be possible to trigger a sort of magic chain reaction that feeds off the chipset without the practitioner having to do anything else.’ I nearly said it was like setting a phaser to overload, but I’ve learnt to keep that kind of joke to myself, even with people who make Harry Potter references – especially with people who make Harry Potter references.

‘To do what exactly?’ asked Caroline.

‘Magically it just makes a lot of “noise”, but the side effect is to dust every microprocessor in about twenty metres.’ I’d gone over the Harrods crime scene that morning with a laser rangefinder and a pocket microscope and found that every chip within ten metres was toast, damaged beyond repair out to twenty, and showing signs of damage out to thirty. I was hoping that further research would reveal it was following the inverse square law, because otherwise I was going to have to call CERN and tell them to take a tea break.

‘I’ve got a similar spell I use to knock out electronic ignitions,’ I said. ‘I call it the car killer.’

‘Oh, that’s a great name,’ said Caroline.

‘Alright,’ I said. ‘What do you call the smoke rope thing that you do?’

She said it had a name in Sanskrit or Bengali or one of those but she just called it the smoke trick.

‘We’ve got a firing range downstairs,’ I said. ‘Want to show me how it’s done?’

And it wasn’t as easy as she made it look. I showed her the car killer and the skinny grenade but I kept the water balloons to myself, because a man’s got to have a few secrets. We both managed to do some serious damage to the NATO standard cardboard cutouts and we might have moved on to the paintball gun but the grownups came looking for us and said it was time for Caroline to go home.

I walked them round the corner to where their car was parked. It was an honest to god early model MG MGB, a 1968 judging from the dashboard instruments, although at some point it had been re-sprayed a hideous lime-flower green, once again proving that nine out of ten classic motors are wasted on their owners. As I waved them off I made a note of the car’s index to add to their nominal file.

Nightingale said he’d come to an arrangement with Lady Helena. They would track down Fossman while I worked Operation Marigold to see if I could firm up his involvement from that direction. And, if I could discover who’d supplied the fatal drugs to Christina Chorley and get Tyburn’s daughter off the hook at the same time, so much the better.

‘Just to clarify one thing,’ I said. ‘When you find Fossman, he’s going to be cautioned and interviewed on the record – right?’

‘Do you think that’s wise?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Considering?’

‘Either we’re the law or we’re not,’ I said.

Nightingale nodded gravely and then he looked away and smiled.

‘Agreed,’ he said.

‘Right,’ I said, but the smile worried me.

I’d expected there to be some cake left over, but I’d arrived back in the Folly to find Molly packing up anything that didn’t have a bite out of it into professional looking cake boxes. She couldn’t possibly be planning to store them – we’d never finish them before they went stale – and Molly never froze anything.

‘Homeless shelters,’ said Nightingale when I thought to ask. ‘I found out when a nice young woman turned up at the gate with a van.’

‘We should find out who she’s liaising with there,’ I said.

‘Whatever for?’ asked Nightingale.

‘Basic security?’

‘But Peter,’ said Nightingale, ‘if we do that Molly might discover that we know what she’s up to.’ He picked up a forlorn slice of Liverpool Tart. ‘She’s enjoying sneaking around behind our backs far too much for us to spoil it.’

I arrived back at the Belgravia Outside Inquiry Office to find everyone else working the Hammersmith stabbing.

‘Poor sod was standing outside a pub having a drink,’ said Carey. ‘And a bunch of guys just stroll up and stab him.’

There was already a row of white faces pinned to the whiteboard because, while they’d been sensible enough to wear hoodies to mask their identities from the CCTV, somebody in the pub had recognised them.