Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘He took his time,’ I said.

‘Does this happen a lot?’ asked Caroline.

‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Sometimes Beverley rescues me, sometimes Lady Ty, occasionally Molly – I think there’s a rota.’

‘Shit,’ said Caroline. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’

‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘There isn’t really a rota – we’re not that well-organised.’

Guleed snorted.

Caroline carried Guleed down first – just wrapped an arm around her chest and stepped off into thin air. It was hard to tell in the dark but it looked to me like they dropped smoothly and at a steady pace. As they fell, the branches that had been curled over to hide us from the ground began to unbend and return to their original positions. When I told Bev about that later she said that was more impressive than the flying.

‘Wood not being notably motile,’ she said.

When it was my turn I closed my eyes and tried to get a sense of the forma Caroline was using. When you’re learning a new a forma it can take dozens, sometimes hundreds, of demonstrations before you can even start to replicate it in your mind. But you can still learn something from a brief encounter, if you pay attention.

Not that this is easy when you’re dropping twenty metres with nothing holding you up but Caroline’s contempt for the laws of motion.

I felt it, floating in the non-space where these abstractions catch hold of the fabric of the universe – and it was different. I mean really different. Now, I knew there were different magical traditions, but I’d always assumed that they shared common characteristics. Sensing the forma Caroline invoked to defy gravity was like listening to Yusef Lateef take his flute into the pentatonic scale, still music, still beautiful, but a whole new landscape of sound.

‘Can you truly fly?’ I asked.

She paused once our feet had settled and whispered in my ear.

‘Not yet,’ she breathed. ‘Soon, though. And then I will be away and free.’

Away from what, I wondered, and free from who?

Nightingale was waiting for us at the bottom of the tree, wearing the oyster coloured Burberry coat that is the closest he’s ever going to get to a high-viz jacket.

‘How did you find us?’ I asked.

‘In the first instance the screamers worked as advertised,’ said Nightingale. ‘Then there were your texts. Beyond that it was just a matter of following the trail of destruction.’

Up the hill there were flashing blue lights visible through the trees.

Guleed chivvied Caroline towards the waiting paramedics while she protested she was fine – which wasn’t the point. As a civilian mixed up in a police operation we had to be able to prove she was uninjured so she couldn’t sue us later.

‘You understand the implications of Martin Chorley being the Faceless Man,’ said Nightingale.

‘Which one?’ I asked and shivered.

‘The revenge aspect,’ he said. ‘There’s a definite cause for concern there.’

‘No shit,’ I said, and held my right hand in front of my face – there was definitely a tremble. ‘Did you warn everyone?’

‘Phoebe is with Olivia at Tyburn’s house, but I lost Reynard when the screamer alerted me and I had to divert here,’ he said. ‘Gone to ground no doubt.’

I stopped walking towards the lights and looked around. What was left of the Orange Asbo was sitting on its roof amongst shattered wood. Nightingale stopped to wait for me.

‘Is anyone looking in our direction?’ I asked.

Nightingale said he couldn’t see anyone, so I turned away, found a convenient tree trunk, leaned over and vomited. Once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop until what seemed like about a month’s worth of dinners had come back-up. I was lightheaded and hollowed out when I’d finished.

Nightingale gave me one of his cream coloured linen handkerchiefs, monogramed and ironed by Molly to such a sharp edge I could have happily used it as a shuriken. I carefully unfolded it and used it to wipe my mouth – he didn’t ask for it back.

The Thames Valley Police were out in force at the house, including an armed response unit who slouched against the sides of their Volvo V70 and glared at us on general principles.

Then Stephanopoulos arrived and glared at them until they packed up and left. Allowing me a brief respite before she came and glared at me. There was the requisite three hours of milling around as we waited for SOCO and a specialist search team to go over the house and the inevitable arguments about who was going to find an all-night takeaway in High Wycombe for refs.

Caroline’s mum roared up the drive in her MG. Me and Caroline watched from the safety of the kitchen as Lady Helena pulled up and proceeded to castigate Nightingale for putting her baby in danger. While that was going on, Caroline beckoned me over and said she’d rather her mum didn’t know about the almost-flying.

‘I don’t want her to worry,’ she said.

‘Worry about what?’ I asked, but she wouldn’t say.

She waved at me as her mum drove her away.

Martin Chorley’s utilitarian office turned out to be less interesting than his study. He had every OS Map of the British Isles ever published, going all the way back to the nineteenth century, plus a range of specialist maps and gazettes – some of which I recognised from my post-Herefordshire research. A couple of Edwardian earthwork surveys, the Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins and The Real Middle Earth: Magic and Mystery in the Dark Ages , which confirmed that Martin Chorley was an enormous Tolkien nerd. As if the the five or six different editions of The Lord of the Rings and the signed first edition of The Hobbit wasn’t enough proof. He hadn’t neglected the other Inklings, though – C.S. Lewis had a shelf. And he didn’t have any objection to YA either, judging by the collection of Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence, again first editions, but these ones far too well read to be worth much, beside similarly worn copies of The Owl Service and the rest of Alan Garner’s books.

It wasn’t exactly screaming ‘power mad psychopath’, although it was possible that he was modern enough to keep all his vices on a USB stick.

Over the real fireplace, with all its original farmhouse stone trimmings, was a painting that one of the SOCOs assured me was a genuine Pre-Raphaelite masterpiece of the dying king surrounded by weeping queens variety. Painted by one James Archer in the late nineteenth century.

‘A romantic,’ said Nightingale much, much later. ‘The most dangerous people on Earth.’

Finally me and Guleed caught a lift back to London while Nightingale stayed at the house on the off-chance its owner popped back for something he’d forgotten.

I wanted to spend the night at Bev’s but I needed to be central in case Martin Chorley did something viciously psychopathic in the middle of the night. As it happened, I got to sleep all the way to nine thirty the next morning before the landline rang and Stephanopoulos told me that somebody had just tried to kill Olivia McAllister-Thames.

The house opposite Tyburn’s place had obviously been built post-war, probably to replace bomb-damaged stock. Mercifully it must have been quite late on because it wasn’t the featureless box so favoured by the American modernists, and the architect had actually made an attempt to fit it in with the rest of street. It still had a touch of the gun emplacement around the ground floor and a marble floored entrance hallway that managed to be both pretentious and dark at the same time.

Once I was safely cocooned in my noddy suit, Stephanopoulos led me upstairs to the third floor flat where the sniper had made his nest. I’d missed the body, which didn’t bother me, but Stephanopoulos had a tablet stuffed full of crime scene photographs.