Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘So you don’t know she boarded an American Airlines flight from New York last night,’ said Finula. ‘That can hardly be a coincidence now – can it?’

We agreed that it probably wasn’t, but it also wasn’t anything I’d done.

‘Tell me, officer,’ said Nightingale. ‘Which worries you the most – the idea that we have our own channels of communication with the Americans, or that we don’t?’

‘What worries us,’ said Finula, putting the emphasis on the plural, ‘is that as the agency charged with the defence of the realm we are only hearing about this now.’

‘We didn’t feel it was required,’ said Nightingale. ‘We rather thought you had your hands full, what with the Irish Republicans and the like. And there was a clear agreement in 1948 that magic and the demi-monde would remain our responsibility.’

‘That was half a century ago,’ said Finula. ‘In those days we didn’t officially exist and we took a man’s word that he was playing a straight bat. Now we run recruitment ads in the Guardian and have a mission statement and everything. Things have moved on a bit, the world has changed and we with it – you have not.’ She glanced at me. ‘Or at least not noticeably. We cannot ignore the potential damage that could be inflicted by an individual armed with your suite of capabilities.’

I squirrelled away that last phrase for my upcoming briefing document.

‘Especially,’ said Finula, ‘when we don’t have an effective counter.’

‘Shoot them in the head with a rifle,’ said Nightingale. ‘Or a pistol from close range if the practitioner is not on guard.’

‘Would that work on you?’ asked Finula.

‘It has worked on me,’ said Nightingale. ‘Twice. You see, you can train an irregular in a couple of weeks and you can learn how to make a bomb by reading a book. But it takes years to become even somewhat useful in a fight using magic.’ He nodded in my direction. ‘Unless you’re a particularly gifted student and even then . . .’ he shrugged.

‘And its use in interrogation is limited,’ I said. ‘Because training someone to resist the glamour is easy.’

‘All of this is beside the point,’ said Nightingale. ‘We shall of course include you in the latest round of consultation papers, given that you are—’ he looked to me for help.

‘Stakeholders,’ I said and he gave me the ghost of a wink.

‘But unless you have anything useful to tell us, then I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse us,’ said Nightingale and stood. I dutifully followed him up.

They didn’t have anything useful to say after that, so we took ourselves off.

‘Another feint by Tyburn, do you think?’ asked Nightingale as we drove back to Belgravia.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re just out in the open these days. I’m amazed the media haven’t jumped on us yet.’ I’d expected Tyburn to at least think about using the media as leverage in her long running campaign to ‘reform’ the Folly. I had to assume she was being blocked by her sister Fleet, or possibly even by her mother.

Beverley had wanted to know if the whole collapsing house thing had been down to Tyburn. She’d asked about it as we’d shared a bath on Sunday morning – her version of tea and sympathy.

‘Don’t you know?’ I’d asked. ‘She’s your sister.’

The Tyburn ran right behind Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ house, in the direction that the first burst of water had come from. And we were still waiting for the Thames Water engineering report as to where the flood had originated.

I said I didn’t think she was that angry with me.

‘Maybe not with you,’ said Beverley and walked her toes up my chest. ‘But she’s been backing up pipes from Westminster to Hampstead since you arrested baby Ollie. Lesbian she can cope with, drug dealer she can cope with – Ollie grassing herself up to cover for her girlfriend? That had to piss her off big time.’

‘Seriously?’ I asked.

‘Well, if it was her then she definitely wasn’t after you.’

I asked how she knew.

‘You’re still breathing,’ she said.

I didn’t think it was Lady Ty either – even though she’d joined her daughter as a person of interest in the house collapse, with her very own nominal node in HOLMES and a set of actions aimed at eliminating her from the inquiry.

I figured that Phoebe Beaumont-Jones had been talking to the Faceless Man when they’d been interrupted first by Crew Cut and his American Virgins and then by me and my unfailing ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The flood had just been to cover his escape, or I doubt any of us would still be walking about. He might have hoped that Lady Ty would get the blame, although why he might have thought that was a bit of a mystery – maybe he knew something we didn’t, or perhaps he was getting bad advice?

And if Phoebe was right – that the Faceless Man was a parent of a student at St Paul’s, even better, a parent that she’d met personally – then the haystack he was hiding in was finally getting shrunk down to a manageable size.

Once we were at Belgravia we measured up our haystack and looked for shortcuts.

Guleed was back at St Paul’s to gather up the names of the parents or guardians of all the students. Stephanopoulos went with her to provide some senior rankage in case they faced any upper-class fuckery. While they did that, I drilled down into the reams of stuff we had on the parents of the kids who’d attended the unfortunate MDMA-and-brain-damage party. I considered disregarding the mothers, but it occurred to me that we didn’t know for certain that the Faceless Man was male. I also started going back over all the cases with suspected links to the Faceless Man to see if any of their faces fit. So to speak.

A year ago Richard Lewis, a planning officer with Southwark Borough Council, had thrown himself in front of a tube train at Paddington station. We’d always suspected that he jumped under the influence of a glamour and had pinpointed the moment we thought the glamour had gone in. Since it occurred just short of the ticket barrier in a London Underground station, it happened in one of the most CCTV saturated places in the world. And since glamour was not something you did from a distance, the Faceless Man must have been caught on camera. Along with about a thousand other people.

So I reckoned it was worth a punt and I spent some time with pictures of the parents, seeing if I could match any of them to faces in the crowd. And because magical facial recognition systems have yet to be invented, it had taken me most of the weekend. Except for the bits I spent at Bev’s and the two hours magic practise that Nightingale insisted on.

‘We need to work on your precision,’ he’d said.

I didn’t spot anyone on the CCTV but I did catalogue most of the likely targets to make it easier for whatever poor sod got lumbered with the job of checking them against the parents of the entire school.

‘Plus staff,’ said Guleed. ‘Phoebe might have confused the two – children often do.’

That search was going to stay a low priority because we had a key time frame, the collapse of the house on Friday evening, to check alibis against. Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ dad’s alibi being that he wasn’t in the country at the time, although it turned out he had gone to Magdalene College Oxford in the early nineties. Roughly the same time as the known Little Crocodile Richard Lewis, he who threw himself under a tube train, and Christina Chorley’s father Martin had been there too.

It would have been nice if just one of them had gone to Cambridge or, god forbid, Bristol, which was where, according to Guleed, posh students went when they failed to get into Oxbridge.