Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

Luckily for us, the postmodern obsession with transparent walls meant that in One Hyde Park nobody could move around the access stairs or lifts without being seen by the spotter teams Nightingale had positioned in the buildings opposite. We’d closed off South Carriage Drive and pushed a perimeter back twenty metres to the south, but Seawoll was reluctant to close Knightsbridge and Old Brompton because the rush hour was still tailing off.

We had about twenty to thirty minutes before the media twigged that a major police operation had descended on the most expensive bit of real estate in London.

Guleed suggested that we leave them in there and arrest the survivors, which earned her a pleased smile from Seawoll. But then he shook his head.

‘Somebody,’ he said eyeing Nightingale, ‘is going to have go in there and clean up the mess.’

‘Quite,’ said Nightingale and looked at me. ‘Peter?’

‘Noisy or quiet?’ I asked.

‘Oh, quiet,’ said Nightingale.

And so it was decided. But not before me and Guleed climbed into our PSU overalls and, after a bit of an argument, donned the shin and elbow guards. We didn’t bother with the helmets, but Guleed swapped her hijab for a fire resistant hood that made her look like she was about to climb into a Soyuz rocket.

‘Practical and modest,’ I said and she grinned.

Needless to say we both put our metvests on and loaded ourselves down with CS spray, speedcuffs – I even considered packing a taser which I’m now authorised and trained to carry – but they just tend to complicate things.

Finally Nightingale handed me a stave of varnished wood, the size and shape of a pickaxe handle, one end wrapped with canvas strips, the other capped with iron. Branded into the side was a six-digit number and the hammer and anvil sigil of the Legendary Sons of Weyland.

As I gripped it I felt the hum of the hive and sunlight amongst the hills and hedgerows.

Once more into the breach, I thought.

We paraded round the back of the mobile control centre. Seawoll rolled his eyes at the sight of us, but said nothing. Nightingale was dressed in a leather sapper’s coat but thank god not the breeches that went with them. He had donned a pair of serious army boots that had probably only not perished with age because Molly wasn’t going to let any of his clothes die on her watch – dammit!

He caught Guleed’s eye.

‘Sahra,’ he said, ‘things are likely to get somewhat esoteric before the end, and this is not something you’re trained for. I can’t, in all conscience, ask you to join us.’

‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I think I’m going to have to see this through,’ she said. ‘ Inshallah .’ As God wills it.

‘Good show,’ said Nightingale.

This is it, I thought. We’re all going to die.

A risk assessment is a key part of modern policing. Before diving into whatever crisis is at hand, the modern plod is expected to ask themselves: given the modalities of the current situation would any intervention by myself help promote a positive outcome going forward? And what are the chances of this going well and truly pear-shaped? And, if it does, how likely is it that I will get the blame?

Some people think this makes us risk averse, but I like to point out that a risk assessment is what blonde teenagers don’t do before heading downstairs into the basement in a slasher movie. Now, I’m not saying I wouldn’t go down to investigate . . . but I’d bloody well make sure I was wearing a stab vest first, and had some back-up. Preferably going down the stairs ahead of me.

I reckoned that Seawoll and Nightingale’s risk assessment was sound for several reasons. We couldn’t just let them kill each other, tempting though that was, because we didn’t know how many members of the public were currently in the complex. The owners might not be in residence, but there could still be staff inside – and they counted as people too. That said, there was no point sending in TSG or even SCO19 because Martin Chorley would just hand their arses back to them. That made it a Falcon job. And, since Nightingale was the most Falcon-capable officer in the Met, I was the second and, god help her, Guleed was the third, we were the logical people to deal.

So in we went, through the back garden past the statues of the two flattened empty heads and entered the wrong way through an emergency fire exit at the base of one of the towers.

Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armoured personal carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one.

I keyed my Airwave one last time before shutting it down.

‘This is Falcon Two,’ I said. ‘Show us state six.’ Meaning, officers at the scene.

Like I said, One Hyde Park had four pavilions with four towers containing lifts and stairs interspersed between them. Two were for residents and two were for service staff, because times might move on but the gentry still like their servants to be invisible.

Despite the transparent walls the soundproofing was good and there was no hint of traffic noise as we stepped out into the wide curved hallway that ran the length of the ground floor. The lights were still on, a good sign, and we could see all the way down three levels of the basement and up to the top floor of pavilions one and two.

Me and Guleed held our position while Nightingale padded off down the hallway to secure the eastern end. There were exclusive shops for the excessively over-resourced on the ground floor of each of the Pavilions. Nightingale checked the internal doors leading to them to make sure they were secure and free of supernatural taint before moving on.

The curve meant that we lost sight of him when he reached the far end of the hallway. Me and Guleed tucked ourselves into what cover we could find amongst the rent-a-culture statuary and waited. There was a strong smell of lemon floor polish.

Guleed looked abstracted while she listened through her earpiece to the Airwave chatter. Since she wasn’t likely to fry her own equipment, she’d been designated communications officer – or, as Nightingale put it, ‘radio man’ – for the op.

‘Stephanopoulos is in,’ she said.

It was Stephanopoulos’ job to secure the service hub at the eastern end of the complex so that we could evacuate civilians out that way as well. Once Nightingale had declared the ground floor shops Falcon free, she’d go door to door and evacuate them.

The big debate during the planning stage had been whether to then go up to check Martin Chorley’s flat, down to check the basement and underground parking area, or head west to clear the entrance foyer.

I signalled Guleed and pointed upstairs, but she shook her head – no reports of movement there. When Nightingale trotted back to our positon he repeated my query and, getting the same answer, led us off towards the foyer. Where we found our first casualty.

He was stretched out, half on the shiny grey marble and half on the fine silk weave grey carpet in front of the granite reception desk.

Nightingale caught my attention, pointed, and then put two fingers against his throat. As he watched the balcony I scuttled over to do a first aid assessment. I recognised the guy. He was the dark-skinned man in the good suit I’d seen the first time I’d visited. I’d had him pegged as security, and indeed he was holding a compact digital walkie-talkie as used by police, film crews and paramilitary death squads the world over. I shifted my staff to my left hand and found a pulse in his neck. There were no other obvious injuries, so I gently rolled him into the recovery position.