Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

And a certain river on the Welsh Borders where me and Beverley had been ‘catalysts’ in the creation of a new spirit, a new genius loci, a new god.

Shit, I thought, I’ve just invented epideism .

‘Peter,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘You still with us?’

‘Oh, god,’ I said. ‘I think I preferred being a frog,’ And then, before Stephanopoulos had a chance to clip me round the ear for being obscure, I told her I’d have to do some digging on the subject.

‘But we still need to see if they find any metal fragments in the wound track,’ I said and reminded myself to ask Dr Vaughan to do the most sensitive test she could, because if she couldn’t find any then it was possible that the sniper had been stabbed with a sword that didn’t physically exist.

What had definitely existed was the water that had erupted out of the street in front of Lady Ty’s house. A burst water main, according to Thames Water, who said they’d get back to us as to why it had chosen to burst at just the moment Mr Sniper was getting an invisible sword stuck through his chest.

Tyburn’s street had a noticeable slope north to south and you could see from the water damage where the flood had risen outside her front door and rolled down hill, across Curzon Street, down the passage under Curzonfield House before emptying out into Shepherd Market. Much to the surprise of the shop workers who’d been sitting on the benches having a quiet fag at the time.

‘It was two feet deep,’ said Stephanopoulos.

This was confirmed by some of the eyewitnesses, especially those on the dry end of the street. Statements from witnesses downstream were, as Seawoll put it, ‘less than fucking useful’.

One woman who’d been carried away and deposited outside the RBS branch on Curzon Street said that the water had been much cleaner than she expected and that she thought she smelt meadowgrass.

‘Meadow grass?’

‘Meadowgrass,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘One word – she was very insistent, and that’s not the strangest statement.’ Amina Asad, who’d been one of the shop workers having a fag, said she’d sort of ‘had a weird vision, you know like a really vivid daydream’ that she’d been stood waist-deep in a river washing clothes by hand. ‘By hand,’ she’d said again and laughed. ‘Like that’s going to fucking happen.’

Some reported seeing fish in the water, others a young fit-looking white boy in a loin cloth.

‘He was laughing,’ said David Hantsworth of Charnwood Drive, Walthamstow, who quite fancied getting the guy’s number, you know, should we ever catch up with him. ‘He had the coolest accent,’ according to Mr Hantsworth, who was convinced he’d been part of an elaborate bit of street theatre. ‘Like an actor doing Shakespeare.’

‘Did he say whether the guy was carrying a sword?’ I asked.

‘You know,’ said Stephanopoulos, ‘we never thought to ask.’

I added asking that question and following up the stranger eyewitness accounts to my personal action list.

Martin Chorley must have waited for his chance. At a guess, he’d been downstairs in the foyer of the same building. The sniper would have been instructed to take the shot as soon as he had a clear bead on Lady Ty – the sound of the shot would have served as a signal. Then Chorley steps out onto the street and starts his attack only to, probably, get washed away in the flood.

Thankfully the media were largely ignoring the flood, mainly because of the massive explosion that had blown out the first two floors of Tyburn’s house. British Gas, who are a bit sensitive on the subject, were desperate to rule out a gas explosion, but the only alternative the Fire Brigade would commit to involved Semtex and a truly ridiculous amount of fertiliser.

To my trained eye it looked like somebody had tried to unzip the front façade and spray it left and right. They were still pulling bits of brick and rusticated stucco out of basement areas of houses fifty metres to each side. I reckoned I’d actually seen something like it once, in an old barn in Essex, from the other side. It had been terrifyingly impressive sight back then, for all that it meant rescue from certain death.

Once Stephanopoulos had finished with her tour I found Nightingale giving the damage a cool appraisal. He shook his head and looked disapproving.

‘See that,’ he pointed at a section of first floor window frame hanging suspended from what looked like a curtain rail. ‘Very shoddy. I’d say our man was not himself when he cast his opening spell.’

He’d been enough of himself to rip out the base of Tyburn’s expensive period staircase, leaving the polished balusters hanging like broken teeth from the handrail. The back wall of the parlour had been smashed into the room behind – the wall mounted TV ripped neatly in half with one part embedded in the ceiling and the other lodged at head height in a kitchen cabinet.

Olivia and Phoebe had been watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine on that TV when the attack started and had only avoided serious injury because they’d both happened to be lying prone on the sofa.

‘Saved by snogging,’ had been Seawoll’s verdict. ‘Let that be a lesson to you.’

Nightingale’s lesson was slightly different.

‘He just went straight in with no thought as to where his targets might be,’ he said. ‘And if you look at the line of his effort there . . .’ Nightingale swept his hand to indicate where a wide crack had shattered the delicate Regency moulding in the corner of the room, ‘you’ll see that it lacks precision. A surefire sign of . . . what, exactly, Mr Grant?’

‘One of the underlying forma was not properly developed,’ I said.

Nightingale’s lips twitched.

‘Can you tell which one?’ he asked.

I studied the crack. I had no idea what the spell would have been, but probably fourth or fifth order given it was doing quite a number of different things at the same time. Since it was shoving masonry around, the spell had to be impello -based but not even I mess impello up. So it probably had to be one of the modifiers.

‘ Temperāre ,’ I said – totally guessing.

‘Yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘I think you’re right.’

He looked at Martin Chorley’s handiwork and shook his head again.

‘Definitely off his game,’ he said.

Not so off his game that he hadn’t managed to do that much damage in the less than five seconds between his casting the spell and a fountain of water bursting up his trouser leg. I’d have loved to have had CCTV of that, but of course every camera within a hundred metres had gone phut when he cast the spell.

‘Entirely on purpose,’ in Nightingale’s professional opinion.

‘And yet no vestigia ,’ I said. At least nothing I could sense. On a Regency street in central London there should have been at least the background afterglow of everyday magic. But standing in front of the ruined house I could feel nothing. Less than nothing, a vast sucking silence. A great absence of ordinary magic.

I’d felt that before.

At the Coopertown house before Punch took a father and annihilated a family.

Now, what if that was what Punch was – the ghost of a god – literally the spirit of riot and rebellion?

That was a long way to jump from a mysterious chest wound. Still, the case did give me an excuse to investigate.

I asked where Olivia and Phoebe were now.

‘At Mama Thames’ house in Wapping,’ said Nightingale.

‘And Tyburn?’

‘Still missing.’

But not dead – at least, not according to Beverley.

‘We’d know,’ she said when I called and asked. ‘Mum would know.’

But if not dead, then what?