Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

‘We don’t know who he is yet,’ she said. ‘White, mid-thirties, fit, has a Foreign Legion tattoo but that doesn’t mean anything.’ As police we were always tripping over people with special forces tattoos that were more aspirational than indications of service.

‘I’m hoping for distinctive teeth,’ said Stephanopoulos, although that was no longer the reliable guide to nationality it once was. I’d been told that American dental work was still distinctively overwrought – whatever that meant with regards to teeth.

‘Let’s hope he wasn’t American,’ I said. We didn’t need any more about that complication thank you very much.

The flat was unfurnished, although in a distinctively expensive way with marble flooring in the bathrooms, Italian tile in the kitchen and expensive rosewood parquet in the rest. The nest was in what I’d call a living room but was probably listed by the estate agent as the lounge. The firing position was a good three metres back from the bay windows. The central window had been opened and securely fastened, but with the curtains partly drawn he’d have been in shadow – essentially invisible from across the street.

The lack of furniture meant that he’d had to bring his own stand to rest the rifle on, the heavy duty type serious anglers use for big fish. He’d even brought a campstool, a couple of bottles of water and a packet of Pret a Manger sandwiches. I imagined a couple of DCs were even now pulling the CCTV footage from every Pret within a kilometre.

Damn – that was going to be a lot of Prets.

I glanced around the empty room.

‘He knew there wasn’t any furniture,’ I said.

‘Even better, he had a legitimate set of keys,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘And this property has had the same owner for five years.’

‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘Our old friend Mr Shell Company.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Which is a close relative to A.N. Other Shell Company and a Guernsey registered investment house who bought it on behalf of one James Hodgkins, a.k.a. Martin Chorley.’

I looked across the street to what I’d been assured was Tyburn’s bedroom – obscured now by the blue sheeting the forensic people had rigged to cover the shattered window. Less than thirty metres I thought – a good sniper would barely need a telescopic sight.

The gun had been whisked away even before the body. An L96A1 firing a standard 7.62 mm NATO round. It was the standard British sniper rifle as used by the Army, the Navy and the Met’s own SCO19. Probably, Stephanopoulos said, one of those guns that occasionally fall off the back of a military supply lorry. A bit specialist for your basic London underworld, who tended to favour cheaper and more personal forms of assassination – although if I’d been planning to take a shot at Lady Ty myself I’d have probably opted for a drone strike from a nice air conditioned Air Force base in Arizona.

And even then I’d do it under an assumed name.

He’d got off only the one shot before he died. It was a bolt action weapon, but still I would have thought he’d have had time to take a second one – just to be on the safe side.

Three hours later they still hadn’t found the bullet he’d fired.

‘What killed him?’ I asked.

‘Single stab wound to the chest with a heavy double edged blade,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Through his heart and out the other side.’

‘What, through the ribs?’

‘Sheared right through two at the front and one at the back,’ she said. ‘Clean cut.’

‘A sword,’ I said.

‘That’s what they think, but they haven’t finished the PM yet.’

If I had to guess I’d have said a classic fourteenth century English arming sword like the one I’d once seen worn by a young man in a hallucination I’d had when I was busy suffocating under the eastbound Central Line platform. A young man who styled himself Sir William Tyburn, who had been god of the river from back when it was a wild stream rushing down to Father Thames.

For obvious reasons I kept this intriguing observation to myself.

‘Chorley’s had this place for five years,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Never had any tenants in here in all that time.’

‘He knew about the Rivers,’ I said. ‘He must have thought it would be handy to have a way of keeping them under surveillance.’ Or perhaps he’d known that sooner or later he was going to have to go mano a dios with Lady Ty.

‘Still not a bad little investment over five years I suppose,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘But why a sniper? It’s not his MO.’

‘If he wanted Olivia dead he knew he’d have to go through her mother first,’ I said. ‘And he knew he had to take Tyburn down before she was aware of the attack. Otherwise Lady Ty, this close to her river, this close to the Thames – not going to happen.’ I looked across at the blinded window opposite.

‘He can’t possibly have missed at this range,’ I said.

‘And yet he’s the one who’s dead,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘Could she have thrown a sword across that distance?’

I tried to imagine Tyburn pivoting smartly on her heel, bringing her arm back and flinging a sword across the gap between the houses like a bad special effect. The sniper staggering back, looking down in amazement as half the blade and the pommel vibrate amusingly in his chest. Not enough style points for Tyburn. And anyway, they never found the sword.

‘If she threw it,’ I said, ‘then who pulled it out?’

Stephanopoulos gave the traditional short sigh of the senior officer who is about to explain something they thought was bleeding obvious right from the start of the conversation, but obviously wasn’t.

‘No offence, Peter,’ she said. ‘But we were kind of relying on you to provide that information. Us just being normal run of the mill coppers none of who are versed in the mystic arts or currently shagging a supernatural creature.’

‘That you know of, Boss,’ I said, thinking of Wanda the manageress, who you wouldn’t spot as ‘special’ if you didn’t know what to look for. But Stephanopoulos was right. This was the Folly’s area of expertise, and it was embarrassing that we were so bloody crap at it.

Assume for the moment that the dead sniper had something to do with laughing Sir Tyburn – thought dead by his father and brothers these last hundred and fifty years.

But we know that apparent remnants of normal human beings can be left behind, and under particular circumstances can physically interact with the mundane world.

Do gods have ghosts? I wondered.

If they did, wouldn’t they be much more powerful than those left behind by people? Or was that a typical first order assumption? Probably, I thought. And yet, if we stayed with that idea then surely the world would be full of these powerful ghosts of former gods. Now, I hadn’t come across anything like that in my literature and while my predecessors in the craft were often thicker than a bag full of custard I think even they would have noticed something like that.

Perhaps, I thought, the dead god gets folded into the existence of the new god, the way a dormant genetic variation can exist within an organism’s DNA – hanging about like an actor’s understudy until the right environmental conditions give it expression and – hey presto – suddenly a bacteria is heat resistant, our Chloe gets her big break on Broadway and a sniper for hire gets an unexpected half a metre of cold steel through the chest.

Perhaps that explained why the rivers of London had burst forth with new goddesses so quickly after Mama Thames took up her throne. Perhaps there was more than historical continuity between the dead sons of old Father Thames and the daughters that had taken their place.