Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘Ah, but did you know about something called the Mary Engine?’ said Kimberley. ‘She was selling that on eBay too.’

She showed me a picture taken from eBay on her tablet – a dense cube of steel and brass gears.

‘A difference engine?’ I asked.

‘That’s the advantage of having the NSA looking at something like this,’ said Kimberley. ‘Those guys know the difference between their difference- and analytical-engines, and apparently this is neither.’

I asked what they thought it was.

‘They couldn’t lift enough detail from the photographs to determine what it was supposed to do, but they think it’s genuinely Victorian. Mid 1840s they reckon. In fact, if you run it down and you want to generate some good will with the NSA you might want to send it over as a gift.’

‘You think I’m going to need goodwill at the NSA?’

‘Peter,’ said Kimberley, ‘the way your life is going you’re going to need all the goodwill you can get.’

There were other items of interest, too. A 1920s anthology of Victor Bartholomew’s work on spirits which I recognised from a particularly tedious Latin lesson, and a Genuine Wizard’s Staff that had, according to Kimberley, a British Army serial number stencilled along its length.

The attached NSA report indicated that there was no coherence to the collection and posited a high probability that it was just that – a collection. Items acquired by an individual who had a high degree of access but limited understanding.

‘Access to what?’ I asked.

‘They didn’t know,’ said Kimberley.

And where it all came from was a mystery, I thought. Like the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

Kimberley and the security arm of the American military industrial complex might not know, but I thought I knew a fox who might.

Still, I didn’t think there was any point interviewing Reynard the wannabe fox that evening. So I stopped off at Belgravia to brief Nightingale and make multiple back-ups of the USB pen. Since I was there, I also scanned the files and dumped most of them on the Inside Inquiry Office for assessment and entry into HOLMES, including the real names of our American friends. Crew Cut’s name turned out to be Dean Miller, a former reserve Captain in the 29th Infantry Division who had served in Kosovo and Iraq. The 29th was a National Guard unit, but there was no official word on what his day job had been. After leaving the National Guard he was listed as a ‘consultant’ with Alderman Technical Solutions. A sour little note appended by some anonymous security apparatchik complained that just about everybody at ATS was listed as a ‘consultant’. His military record in Iraq was heavily redacted and what wasn’t missing was written in an impenetrable mix of jargon and acronyms – I thought the Met was bad but they were as nothing compared to US Military. It was going to take some serious Google-hours to translate.

Captain Dean Miller’s compadres all had similar backgrounds in the military and law enforcement and were noticeably from the American south and south-west. I wondered if that might be significant, but it was a small sample size. I added ‘hire a civilian analyst’ to my list of things to go into the growing Word document and moved onto the action list for what was still called operation MARIGOLD because no-one had got round to officially deactivating it yet.

I also thought I might as well work my way through my email backlog, which was just as well because an annoyingly unflagged communication from the Border Agency informed me that Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had flown in from the Bahamas two days before his daughter thought he had. Which meant he had no alibi for our suspected Faceless Man incident involving the collapse of his own house.

Which in turn meant that he was going to have to be TIEd all over again. And since he was back on our Tiger list, that action would fall to me and Nightingale.

I stuck it on our long list of urgent actions before heading back to the Folly and the next morning I got in bright and early to prepare for the interview.

So far, all the earlier interviews with Reynard had gone along the traditional lines of us saying he’d done it and him saying he hadn’t – in continuous variations. This is not an uncommon type of interview, and so over the years police have come up with a number of techniques for breaking the impasse. Some of which are still even legal. One of the techniques not outlawed by human rights legislation is the horrid surprise. So I printed up some crime scene images and took them into the interview room with me.

We’re not allowed to let our prisoners fester, so Reynard was washed and dressed in clean clothes. He was beginning to show a little bit of that fraying around the edges that people get after a couple of nights in the cells. For all the fact that he had villain tattooed on his forehead, Reynard hadn’t put in the hours on the judicial/criminal coal face I had, hadn’t developed that dogged patience that separates the police and the professional criminal from ordinary members of the public.

The fact that he hadn’t asked for legal representation was another dead giveaway.

‘When was the last time you were in Bromley?’ I asked, once we’d finished the ceremonial putting of the tapes in the machine and intoned the ritual opening litany of the police interview.

‘Bromley?’ said Reynard. ‘What about Bromley?’

‘When was the last time you went down there?’

He smiled, showing white teeth.

‘Can’t say that Bromley’s the sort of place I rush to embrace,’ he said. ‘I believe I may have passed through once or twice – on my way somewhere else.’

‘So you never stop off to see your good friend Aiden Burghley?’

‘Who?’ asked Reynard.

‘White middle class drug dealer,’ I said. ‘Your kind of people.’

‘My kind of people?’

‘You know,’ I said. ‘Pretend-criminals, love breaking the law, hate taking the consequences.’

‘I think you’ve just described the human condition there,’ said Reynard smugly.

I wasn’t going to get a better cue than that – I laid out selected pictures of the Aiden Burghley crime scene – saving the artfully framed close up of his detached face until last.

‘Nice,’ he said, but behind his casual tone I caught a whiff of real fear when he asked who it was.

‘Don’t you recognise him?’ I asked.

He said no, shaking his head, but his gaze skittered away from the picture.

‘That’s Aiden Burghley,’ I said, and was surprised by a hint of relief in the set of Reynard’s shoulders. Either because he didn’t know who Aiden was, or merely because it happened to somebody else.

‘What about this?’ I asked and laid down a picture of the Mary Engine next to the face. Reynard glanced at it and shrugged.

‘What is it?’

‘You don’t recognise it?’

‘Puzzle box?’ he asked.

‘It’s one of the items Christina Chorley was selling on eBay,’ I said. ‘Along with the item you were trying to sell us.’

‘On eBay?’ said Reynard, too outraged to keep his mouth shut. ‘The little bitch.’

‘So you’re telling me you didn’t know?’ I asked – making it a challenge.

‘You don’t put things like this on eBay,’ said Reynard. ‘Everybody knows that.’

‘Everybody but Christina,’ I said. ‘And why not sell stuff on eBay? Everybody else does.’

‘Because there are some things that are just not done,’ said Reynard.

‘Even by the likes of you?’

‘Especially by the likes of me,’ said Reynard. ‘One does not piss in one’s own pool, after all.’

‘But Christina did, didn’t she?’ I said. ‘Not quite the compliant little bunny you were hoping for, was she?’