Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

Nothing happened.

I tried again and still no clunk or beep or flashing tail lights.

Either the remote had chosen that exact moment to break or the electrics in my car had been nobbled – no prizes for guessing which. And that meant the fucker had disabled the Asbo while me and Guleed had been upstairs in his daughter’s room. My guess was that in his head I was going to point my fob at the car, it would fail, I would click it again and again before futilely trying the door handles.

How he would chuckle as puzzlement turned to stricken realisation, I would look over at him and our eyes would meet. Then he would strike, nothing fatal to start with, so probably impello to knock me down, or something fancy and fifth order that I’d not even heard of.

The way the Asbo was parked meant that there was a two metre gap between the driver’s side door and the corner of the house. So two metres to put us out of his line of sight. Once we’d managed that, I’d worry about what do next.

I picked up my pace. I didn’t want our friend getting impatient and kicking off early.

I called out something to Guleed but I can’t remember what I said. It was enough to get her off the bonnet and meet me in front of the car. There we stopped as if having a quick chat before leaving.

‘Martin Chorley is the Faceless Man,’ I said.

Guleed’s eyes widened and her head jerked back as if trying to escape the news, but she kept her body language neutral and disguised her reaction with a tolerably convincing laugh.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Nightingale is an hour and a half away. Does Chorley know we know?’

‘I think so,’ I said.

‘Plan?’

‘I’m going to walk to the car,’ I said. ‘You keep going round the corner until you’re out of sight, then chuck the screamer and run like crazy.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to do exactly the same thing but in a different direction,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep him occupied. You organise the perimeter.’

If Guleed was going to say anything along the lines of ‘No, no, I can’t let you sacrifice yourself for me,’ it was too late, because we’d reached the car and in any case she knew it had to be this way.

Careful not to look, I heard the tempo of her sensible shoes as, once out of Mr Chorley’s sight, she took off towards the treeline.

I took out my key-fob and pointed it at the car. Nothing happened. I made a show of trying it a couple of times more, tried the handle and then, with a quick prayer to Sir Samuel, the patron saint of policemen, I looked back at Mr Chorley.

He was still standing in front of the garage, hands casually in his pockets.

He nodded amiably at me and I saw his eyes flick to my right – he was wondering where Guleed had gone.

And while he was distracted I gave him everything I had.

Now, I’m not up to Nightingale’s standards and 100mm of case-hardened steel is a bit beyond me, but I have progressed a bit from that first time we met on a rooftop in Soho when the Faceless fucker snatched my fireball out of the air. The flash git.

What he got was a flashgun bright fireball followed by an impello palma . The idea is that the target spends all his time worrying about the bright light coming at his face and doesn’t notice the invisible wall of force rushing along at waist height.

It might have worked, for all I know, but I didn’t stick around to find out. As soon as the spells were loosed I turned and legged it for the trees.

You don’t run straight away from someone with a ranged weapon unless you want to get shot in the back – you’re supposed to zig-zag at random intervals to present a constantly shifting target. It’s one of those things I’ve always known intellectually but, fuck me, it’s difficult to do in practise.

So I went left as if I was trying to get out of sight around the house and then right, picking a number at random and counting down the paces, eleven, ten, nine and then a horrid thought that maybe eleven was too high. So I turned at six and had gone one pace when something huge and orange shot past my head, close enough for the wind of it to stagger me. As I recovered, I looked up long enough to see the Asbo go tumbling into the trees, splintering branches and spinning round as the front clipped the trunk of a full grown oak.

I thought I’d been running flat out . . . but, you know, I think now I added a couple of kph and shaved some time off the world record. I feinted right again, went left and suddenly I was in amongst the trees and the under-growth and running downhill towards the main road.

The previous summer I’d done the exact same thing while being chased by an invisible unicorn – so at least I had form. I fumbled my screamer out of my jacket pocket, pressed my thumb hard against the activation slot and threw it as far as I could to the left.

The hardy men of the Bow Street Runners were used to working alone and thus relied on a loud voice to raise the hue and cry, alert the populace and, occasionally, scream with pain as they were savagely beaten by a criminal gang. The new men of Peel’s innovative civilian police force were, in contrast, equipped with the latest in communications gear – the hand rattle. A Peeler could summon aid by shaking his rattle while in hot pursuit of a felon and hoping that people would stop laughing long enough to help. The rattle was soon superseded by the whistle, whose principal advantage was that, not only could you have a number of prearranged signals for a variety of situations, but you didn’t look like a total tit using it.

Once the telephone had been invented, it was only a matter of time before the police got in on the new technology and, first in Glasgow and then in London, the police box was born. Here a police officer in need of assistance could find a telephone link to Scotland Yard, a dry space to do ‘paperwork’ and, in certain extreme cases, a life of adventure through space and time.

Finally, radios got small enough that a constable on the beat could carry one on his person, call in back-up, report crimes and lie about how long he was taking on refs. Then we got Airwaves, which could be integrated with every other emergency service network all over the country – now a copper under threat can get help anywhere from anyone. There’s even a panic button that opens your mic and broadcasts everything it picks up over the emergency channel. It’s the sort of thing that saves the lives and, even more frequently, the tender parts of police officers.

But then along comes magic, and suddenly we’re supposed to go back to rattles and whistles. Not this PC – I like my tender parts abrasion free.

So I invented the screamer, patent pending. Built around the guts of a disposable mobile phone, it has a felt cover for grip and is weighted for throwing. It’s got a recessed hook slide – you thumb it sideways and release and a clockwork timer starts. Then you throw the bloody thing as far as you can, hopefully outside the area of immediate magical effect, where two minutes later it basically phones the Met control room and screams help, help, serious magic shenanigans here – send help – preferably Nightingale.

I have a guy in Leominster who makes them for me, although he still thinks I’m using them to track UFOs.

As the screamer went flying into the undergrowth I shifted axis again, caught my ankle on something unseen and collapsed, flailing, into the bushes. Against my instincts, I stayed down, face pressed against the layer of decomposing leaves that Beverley assures me is a vital part of the arboreal ecosystem, and forced myself to take deep and regular breaths, even as random spores made my nose tickle.

There was wind in the treetops and I heard a vehicle go past, no more than twenty metres downhill – the main road. The trees around me were tall, with straight trunks supporting wide deciduous canopies . . . judging from the variation in colour and density there were at least two or three different species, not that I could identify them. Their lowest branches were too high up for me to climb and, apart from the bush I was lying behind, there was little ground cover.