Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

So here we were, in a sparsely furnished meeting room on the fourteenth floor of the Empress State Building at Olympia with representatives from the DPS, Belgravia MIT and the National Crime Agency. All chaired by one Deputy Assistant Commissioner Richard Folsom, who apart from being a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tyburn Preservation Society had it in for me personally on account of that business at Covent Garden.

Ask not for whom the buck stops, I thought, it stops for thee.

I noticed that Guleed had made herself scarce.

Folsom glanced at me – the tic over his right eye causing a twitch – before turning to Seawoll and asking him to bring us all up to speed on the current state of the investigation and our operational posture.

Which could be summarised as ‘confused’ and ‘ready to spring into action’ – just as soon as we had the faintest idea where to spring.

We’d held Phoebe Beaumont-Jones on Friday night because Bromley Crime Squad wanted a word about the MDMA. But since they couldn’t lay their hands on Aiden Burghley, the guy who allegedly sold her the gear, she walked out of the nick on Saturday afternoon without a charge.

DAC Folsom, to nobody’s surprise, suggested that since there was no indication that Christina Chorley had been coerced into taking the pills and that Olivia Thames-MacAllister had retracted her statement, not to mention the complete lack of corroboration that she or her friend Phoebe had been involved, it was probably best to close down Operation Marigold and pass the file to the CPS.

‘Especially given the number of other pressing concerns that have come to light,’ said Folsom.

For a second, I thought Seawoll was going to fight it just on general principles, but then he shrugged. You don’t get to DCI without knowing a losing proposition when you see one, and Folsom was right – there were more important things to worry about.

‘ La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain ,’ said Nightingale later when we were preparing our case notes. Which is French for ‘Them that has, gets.’

So, goodbye Operation Marigold.

Which left Operation Carthorse, the hunt for Lesley May, Operation Wentworth, which was the fraud investigation surrounding the illegal demolition of Skygarden Tower and Operation Tinker, which was the still open murder inquiry into the unpleasant death of George Trenchard. Bromley MIT, which owned Tinker, was notably absent from the meeting, having dumped their files on us on Sunday afternoon and scarpered. The SIO had given up her Sunday just to get them off her hands.

And then there were the Americans.

It took the Fire Brigade a day and a half to secure the remains of the house enough to recover Crew Cut’s body, which was described by Dr Jennifer Vaughan as ‘suffering from crush trauma’ and by Dr Walid as ‘mostly flat’. Fortunately no other bodies were recovered and the neighbouring houses, while damaged, were declared safe. The neighbours themselves were spooked in a way that only watching three million quids’ worth of equity sink into a hole in the ground can do, and it was only a matter of time before they tried to blame us for it. Even as we met at the Empress State Building, a crack team of police lawyers were figuring out how to blame it on the contractor who’d built the basement.

Crew Cut’s compadres refused to talk when interviewed, and even refused the routine offer to contact the American embassy. None of them had been carrying ID and those who’d joined me in the twenty metre underwater dash hadn’t been carrying weapons when they were fished out. I was pretty confident that when the weapons were recovered they would be the same scrubbed and anonymous Glocks that Teddy and the driver had been caught with.

‘Have we contacted the American Embassy ourselves?’ asked Folsom.

The woman from the National Crime Agency said they’d asked Belgravia not to do that just yet.

‘We want to know if anyone official already knows they’re here,’ she said.

I wondered if it was safe to contact Agent Reynolds, but I didn’t want to drop her in the shit unless I had to.

Folsom went back over my actions in the basement.

‘Why didn’t you wait for back-up?’ he asked.

‘I had reason to believe a Falcon incident was underway and that a member of the public was at risk,’ I said. ‘I believed that a careful approach would help calm the situation until the appropriate Falcon resources could be deployed.’

Folsom asked what ‘appropriate Falcon resources’ might be when they’re at home.

‘I rather think that would be me,’ said Nightingale. ‘And Peter cleared the action with me before proceeding. It was the right thing to do and I believe that had external factors not intervened then a peaceful resolution could have been effectuated.’

Folsom nodded as if squirrelling away the word ‘effectuated’ for use at future meetings. Then he gave me a thin lipped smile.

‘This is not the first time Peter here has been put into a position of potential harm because of a shortfall in Falcon capable resources,’ he said and made a show of a consulting a list. ‘These incidents include a severe RTI involving an ambulance, a near drowning in the Thames, a confrontation with armed men in a sewer, being buried under rubble at Oxford Street station and, if this report is to be believed, surviving a fall from a thirty storey block of flats while it was in the process of explosive demolition.’

I opened my mouth to say it was more complicated than that, but he held up a hand to silence me.

‘He was involved in an unauthorised hostage exchange in Herefordshire, an armed standoff in Essex and let’s not forget the business at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.’

Which was totally not my fault, I might add, although I probably shouldn’t have used the word Krynoid in my official report.

‘Then, this week alone, there have been two confrontations with armed men. The second one culminating in yet another building collapse and fatality.’

I noticed he hadn’t mentioned his own glorious contribution to the Bow Street riots.

‘All of these incidents,’ said Folsom, turning back to Nightingale, ‘were exacerbated by the current operational bottleneck caused by lack of suitable Falcon capable resources.’

‘It takes time to train new apprentices,’ said Nightingale. ‘It’s not a process that can be rushed.’

‘So, you agree that there is a shortfall in appropriate resources?’ asked Folsom, who was obviously looking to get an admission from Nightingale that the Folly wasn’t up to the job – and one that was nicely minuted at an official meeting.

‘If I can speak to that, sir,’ I said. ‘The Special Assessment Unit has recently instituted a programme of capacity expansion in order to build greater operational robustness and provide a more efficient service to our partner OCUs when dealing with both Falcon and pseudo-Falcon incidents. The first phase of which is already underway.’

I noticed that Stephanopoulos was hiding her mouth with her hand.

Folsom, who should have known better, took the bait.

‘The first phase being?’ he asked.

‘Strengthening our specialist support, particularly in the forensic and medical area, with a view to providing a continuous on-call service to investigation teams that might need them, coupled with the development of a best-practice guide for use in dealing with suspected Falcon related incidents and investigations,’ I said, and heard Seawoll smother a cough – at least I assume it was a cough.

‘In tandem with phase one implementation, the SAU is also developing a consultation document that will be sent out to all priority Falcon stakeholders prior to being submitted to the commissioner’s office for approval.’