Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

Me and Guleed knew all this, of course, because not only had we asked for an IIP check before we’d arrived, and not only do I, as a matter of routine, keep dossiers on all the Rivers these days, but also because Beverley had got pissed a couple of weeks previously and spent all night bending my ear about Lady Ty and her ‘perfect bloody husband’. According to Bev there were only two things that could improve George McAllister-Thames in her mum’s eyes, one was a medical degree and the other was a bit more of a suntan.

‘And what do you do?’ asked Guleed.

‘Detective,’ said the lawyer, staring at her. ‘Really?’

‘I’m curious,’ said Guleed.

‘Hasn’t the starling told you?’ asked Lady Ty.

‘The starling?’

Lady Ty tilted her head in my direction.

‘Your colleague,’ she said.

‘She sits on a bunch of quangos,’ said Olivia, staring at a point on the table midway between us. ‘And is a director on like a gazillion boards.’

‘Five,’ said Lady Ty. ‘I’m a non-executive director for five firms.’

‘So not the Goddess of the River Tyburn then?’ asked Guleed.

I winced and Olivia rolled her eyes, but fortunately Lady Ty was in a whimsical mood.

‘That’s not precisely a job, now is it?’ she asked. ‘And rather beside the point.’

The lawyer opened his mouth to speak, but Guleed quickly turned to Olivia and asked how many people had been in the flat.

‘Don’t know,’ said Olivia.

‘I see,’ said Guleed. ‘Why don’t we start with the people you do know were there.’

Olivia squirmed in her seat like a five year old – this is why your brief tells you to keep your mouth shut during an interview. She made Guleed work for it, but in the end she confirmed that she along with several others had been in the flat. She hadn’t known the dead girl, Christina Chorley, and she didn’t know how the party had gained access to One Hyde Park.

‘We went through the hotel next door,’ she said. The Mandarin Oriental Hotel provided a complete package of services for the denizens of One Hyde Park, ranging from cleaning and catering to dog walking and aromatherapy, and there was an underground tunnel from the hotel to the estate. From there, the kids travelled up the segregated service core and into the flat.

‘I was just following everyone else,’ she said and claimed to have been a bit squiffy. One of the guys might have known the codes to the security doors – she thought his name was James, but she didn’t know his surname. So it could have been James Murray, the unfortunate Christina’s boyfriend, but you can’t afford to make assumptions like that. She did know the names of Albertina Pryce, a fellow student at St Paul’s, and her boyfriend Alasdair somebody or other who was at Westminster, Maureen who was someone’s older sister and Rod, whatever that was short for, Crawfish or something like that – definitely Scottish.

‘He had one of those posh Scottish accents,’ said Olivia.

Guleed circled around the names and the timeline for twenty minutes, twenty minutes being about the amount of time it takes your average suspect – sorry, I mean witness – to forget the details of the lies they’ve just told you, before asking about the drugs.

‘What drugs?’ asked Olivia, her eyes flicking towards the walnut reproduction French farmhouse cupboard with, I was pleased to note, one shelf that displayed a 1977 Jubilee commemoration plate along with two more plates with photographs custom printed on them – one each for Olivia and her brother from at least three years ago. Judging by the pained expressions, formal pose and school uniforms they’d been reproduced from school photographs. My mum has a shelf like that in the living room with, amongst others, a Lady Diana commemorative plate set and my Hendon graduation photo.

‘These,’ said Guleed and showed Olivia a picture on her tablet – a spray of small pink pills lay across a sheet of white paper. Each one was marked with a smiling elephant’s head – Magic Babars.

Olivia glanced at the picture, then sideways at her mother, and I saw her make the wrong decision. But, before I could say anything, she opened her mouth and stuck her future in it.

‘Yeah, I bought those,’ she said. ‘What about it?’

Guleed had to arrest her; she had no choice. The brief knew it, too, but before he could get his mouth open Guleed was on her feet and doing the caution. Lady Ty, who’d been staring disbelievingly at her daughter, snapped her head around to look at Guleed — and there was an expression I never thought to see on her face. Abject fear. It was gone in an instant, replaced by a look of calm determination which is the signal for any sensible son of West Africa that it is way past time to be vacating the area. She stood up, and as she did I felt a sudden drag, as if I’d been caught in an icy undertow. I swear the mugs on the drying rack by the sink started to rattle.

I followed her up and said her name as loudly and as forcefully as I dared.

‘Tyburn.’

She glared at me and then down at her daughter, who was looking up at all the grown-ups with a shocked expression that showed that only now, at the end, did she understand the sheer depth of the shit she’d just dropped herself in. Looking back, I reckon the only reason it didn’t all go pear-shaped right there in the kitchen was because Lady Ty couldn’t figure out which one of us she was more pissed off with.

‘Why don’t we all sit down,’ said Guleed, ‘while I arrange some transportation?’

Me and Tyburn took our seats but I noticed Guleed fade out the kitchen door, the better to demand shitloads of back-up. We were going to need transportation back to Belgravia, a search team for the house plus, please god, some Falcon back-up for me and a senior officer to throw the warm comforting blanket of rank over the whole proceedings.

‘Am I really under arrest?’ asked Olivia.

The brief cleared his throat.

‘You,’ said Lady Ty to her daughter. ‘Not one more word. You,’ she said to the solicitor. ‘I want the best criminal solicitor you know waiting for us at the police station when we get there.’

The solicitor gulped, bobbed his head, and opened his mouth to speak before thinking better of it. Pausing only to gather up his briefcase and papers he made a speedy exit from the kitchen.

‘I—’ said Olivia.

‘Shut up, you stupid little girl,’ said Tyburn.

And so we sat in silence for the ten minutes it took Guleed to rustle up some official transport, whereupon she returned to the kitchen and told Olivia that she would have to accompany her to the station. We all stood up again, but this time Lady Ty had herself under control and she watched her daughter being led away without any major property damage.

Although I did make a mental note to check with Thames Water that afternoon – just in case.

‘Is this your idea of three bags full?’ she said once we were alone. ‘I should have left you under the ground.’

And it was while I’d been underground that I’d had what I thought at the time was hallucination. A waking dream that I’d stood on the Oxford Road when it was a ribbon of dust through the countryside and talked to a young man with a sword at his hip and a gleam in his eye. The locals called him Sir William and he wanted me to stay to have a chat but I had business in the land of the living. When I was done with that I enlisted the help of the Folly’s official archivist, Dr Harold Postmartin, to see what the histories said. We tracked down a reference to him in the Rotuli Parliamentorum which as any fule kno is all in Latin – he was listed as Sir William of Tyburn, although the translation could have been read as ‘of the Tyburn’.