Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘Interesting choice of authors,’ I said.

‘Not authors,’ said Albertina. ‘Author – they’re all pen names.’

‘Not your dad?’ I said. It couldn’t be, because some of the books dated back to the 1950s – although he could have been a teen prodigy like my father.

‘Close,’ she said. ‘It was Granddad.’

Who, according to my obviously flawed IIP report on the Pryce family, had led a blameless life teaching Military History at Aberystwyth University. And, according to Albertina, who was obviously a fan, also had a sideline as a prolific pulp SF writer until the early seventies – just about the time his son Albert had picked up his first literary award for his debut novel Cunning Men .

And I thought of the person who had written, in Elvish script, the words If You Can Read This You Are Not Only A Nerd But Probably Dead across the face of a Demon Trap.

I was trying to think of a way of segueing the conversation around to asking whether her dad ever talked about magic or ghosts or anything of that ilk, when my phone rang. It was a call from Bromley Crime Squad regarding Aiden Burghley.

‘Have you found him yet?’ I asked.

‘Sort of,’ said Bromley. ‘Bits of him, anyway.’

Everybody’s a slave to their habits, little behavioural tics that we’re often barely conscious of – and even if we are, we probably couldn’t change them if we wanted to. Bev always sleeps on the left side of the bed, Guleed always puts three sugars in her black Americano, and the Faceless Man has two ways of killing people he wants dead. If it’s just business then he favours the quiet and forensically invisible approach – an apparent suicide or a sudden heart attack. If he’s pissed off or wants to make an example, then it gets very messy indeed. Having your dick bitten off or your bones set on fire from the inside are only a couple of the merry ways that we know of for certain.

We’d been reluctant to employ a forensic psychologist because of the well-founded fear that they might section us for believing in fairies. But you didn’t need a degree to figure out that the whole ‘making an example’ aspect was actually bollocks. It was simply an excuse to do horribly inventive things to his fellow human beings.

You certainly had to wonder what poor Aiden Burghley had done to justify having his face nailed to a tree in a small park in suburban South London.

Well, not nailed exactly. Removed from his skull and attached to the trunk at head height – my head height, I noticed – not Aiden’s, who had been shorter.

Downham Fields was a low green mound that formed the centrepiece of Downham Estate – a 1920s housing estate in Lewisham. Built by the London County Council as a low-rent version of the then-fashionable garden city idea, it was to house the ‘respectable’ working class of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe in six thousand unremarkable semis. Unremarkable, of course, providing you’d grown up with such luxuries as indoor plumbing and back gardens. To ensure that the hoi polloi were properly appreciative of the largesse bestowed upon them, the LCC employed inspectors to enforce acceptable standards of cleanliness and order. Although this wasn’t enough reassurance for the residents of a nearby private estate, who insisted on a two metre wall topped with broken glass to maintain a suitable degree of separation.

The low hill in the park was crowned by a Catholic church and attached school and further down the slope was a rectangular copse of trees which I totally failed to identify. Just inside the treeline, in a surprisingly compact area, was what was left of Aiden Burghley.

Bromley MIT had already done a preliminary canvass of the area, plus house to house and CCTV, before gleefully dumping it all on Nightingale, me and Stephanopoulos and skipping away with happy cries. They wanted nothing to do with it. I could empathise – neither did I.

According to Bromley’s timeline, the murder had taken place in a fifteen minute window between when a couple of schoolkids had walked past the trees on their way to the leisure centre next to the church and a Mr Thomas Gantry had noticed Chuck, his Irish Setter, bounding towards him with what turned out not to be a stray leg of pork.

Chuck really hadn’t wanted to relinquish his prize, and finally had to be distracted with a piece of cheese to make him let go. Dr Jennifer Vaughan found the whole thing very educational.

‘I didn’t even know dogs liked cheese,’ she said, and took saliva samples from Chuck for elimination purposes.

In that fifteen minute window Aiden Burghley had been dismembered at every major joint – ankle, knee, hip, shoulder, elbow and wrist – leaving just his head and torso lying at the base of a tree. That part was still dressed in the jeans and sweatshirt he’d been wearing when I interviewed him. Later stress analysis determined that this was because his limbs had been torn out of their sockets by an extreme axial force strong enough to rip skin and snap tendons.

‘Not something that’s easy to do,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Particularly with a young person,’ he added, and then had a discussion with Dr Vaughan about whether the victim’s youthfully stretchy skin would have made that much difference to the level of force required.

Aiden Burghley’s head was a nightmare, the skin of the face having been neatly removed to reveal the dried-meat coloured muscles and tendons beneath. It looked almost surgical, although later microscopic inspection revealed that the tissue had been torn rather than cut. His face had then been mounted on a tree so that it looked out over the curving rows of identical semi-detached houses that stretched away to the horizon.

I sighted along the direction of his gaze, but saw nothing remarkable. It had been raining off and on, and the clouds were low, so the visibility was crap. The wind kept picking at the corners of the white forensic tents that the SOCOs were trying to jockey into position to cover all the bits.

‘I’m not sure I like the implications of this development at all,’ said Nightingale, and I knew he was thinking of Lesley’s new face and the medical miracle magic of the Viscountess Linden-Limmer.

‘This is him talking directly to us, you know,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘That’s what I don’t like.’

The Doctors Walid and Vaughan agreed that the Faceless Man might be showing off, especially when Dr Vaughan reported that the skin of the face had been fused to the bark. And, more importantly, that the wood itself had been subtly reshaped to substitute for the bones and cartilage that normally gives the face its shape.

‘Otherwise I seriously doubt you’d have recognised him so easily,’ she said.

It still seemed unnecessarily flashy. And why Downham Fields, when there were half a dozen open green spaces further south – much closer to Bromley and Aiden Burghley’s old stamping ground?

‘There’s a chance that this may have very little to do with Mr Burghley at all,’ said Nightingale. ‘At least nothing personal, per se .’

‘Shit,’ I said, because if there was something the Faceless Man liked better than a dismemberment then it was creating a distraction in one place while he sneaked in and murdered whoever his real target was.

I looked at Nightingale, who frowned back.

‘Reynard,’ I said.

It’s amazing how fast you can cross London in a vintage Jag if you put on blues and twos and your governor drives like a maniac. Although there’s still nothing to be done about the gridlock on Vauxhall Bridge in the evening, except invest in a Sherman tank. We’d called ahead to Belgravia to tell the custody sergeant to put the custody suite on lockdown and I mentally added ‘Falcon Lockdown Procedures’ to the ever-growing consultation document.