Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

Then silence.

‘What was that?’ asked Stephanopoulos.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We need to get in there now.’

‘And the Americans?’ she said.

‘Yeah, we need to go save them from a fate worse than enforced river conservation,’ I said. And then, quickly, ‘We have to rescue them from Tyburn.’

Everyone stared at me – strangely they weren’t keen. I could tell.

‘I’ll go in first, check they’re okay and then you guys can secure this level and I can finally get to the garage,’ I said and Stephanopoulos nodded. Guleed came with me because it’s always good to have a witness when things get complicated – especially one that senior officers trust.

The magical duel was still going on upstairs, I could feel it, but the crashes and bangs had abated. It was probably getting subtle – which was all the more reason for me to stick to the plan.

Me and Guleed eased through the door and out into a long corridor that ran the length of the complex. It had a lush grey carpet, cream walls and the same hushed claustrophobia as a modern hotel. There was a haze in the air and I thought I smelled gun smoke.

There was tinny music coming from our left so we went that way, past a pair of lifts and another staircase, through a fire door that had been jammed open with a fire extinguisher. There was another corridor beyond and half-way down its length a pair of open double doors. I smelt chlorine as we crept along the wall and the music, from somebody’s phone speaker I guessed, changed track – a mid-’70s band murdering a pair of guitars and a saxophone. Beside the open doors somebody had helpfully left a Waitrose bag full of Glock 17s. I kept watch while Guleed checked them out.

‘Three,’ she said which, plus the one in the stairwell, should account for all the Americans. Assuming they didn’t have back-up pieces strapped to their ankles.

We slipped inside ever so quietly, into the atrium of what I guessed was the famed underground swimming pool. The music was coming from straight ahead and over it we heard water splashing, shouts and the unmistakable sound of somebody smacking a ball around.

Guleed gave me a questioning look, but how the fuck was I supposed to know what the sounds meant?

The pool itself was a long narrow slot with a high ceiling. Whoever had done the interior design had opted for the upmarket Death’s Domain colour scheme – all grey granite walls with ivory details and black marble floors. In the pool a trio of naked white men were batting a ball back and forth. They were all noticeably muscled in that well-fed way Americans can get when they take their training seriously. Another man, also white and naked, sat on one of the redundant purple sun loungers cheering on his friends. His right forearm had been wrapped in a white towel and stiffened with a pair of flip-flops into a makeshift splint. He didn’t seem to be feeling any pain.

The Americans stopped as soon as they saw me and Guleed and then turned as one to look at the woman on the other sun lounger. I don’t know if I was really expecting woad or spears, or even a bin-bag dress, but it was just Lady Ty in designer jeans and a cream coloured Arran jumper – slightly blemished by grass stains on the left arm. She was staring at us over the top of a pair of completely pointless sunglasses and her phone was playing what I now recognised as The Day the World Turned Day-Glo by X-Ray Specs.

She waved airily at the boys in the pool and they went back to their game.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

Lady Ty propped herself up on her elbow, the better to stare down her nose at us.

‘I was trying to kill that bastard Chorley when I was interrupted,’ she said.

‘You were planning to kill Martin Chorley?’ said Guleed.

‘Did I say that?’ said Lady Ty. ‘I meant, of course, that I had planned to discuss his recent actions in a calm and businesslike fashion. I was just coming down the stairs when the goon squad jumped me.’ She flicked a finger at the man with broken arm. ‘That wasn’t me.’

We knew that, of course, but the police never relinquish a psychological advantage when they have one.

‘I hope nothing else happened,’ I said.

‘They’re fine,’ she said. ‘In fact this is probably the first chance they’ve had to relax since they got here.’

This far underground I couldn’t hear the fight upstairs, but I knew I was on a timetable. I told her that we needed to clear the area, but that just made her laugh.

‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘You have to wait for it to wear off – then you can do what you like with them.’

That was the unwritten and suspiciously voluntary code surrounding the glamour – if you took someone’s free will then you became responsible for them until it returned. Like loco parentis , Beverley said. That was assuming it did wear off and the victim didn’t start building their life around their new object of devotion. Some people seemed more susceptible than others. Some day we were probably going to have to set up a support group.

My face must have shown something, because Lady Ty told me to relax.

‘I’m not my sister,’ she said. ‘I have some self-control – they’ll be their old all-American selves in a couple of hours.’

As if the business with the fountain and the flowers had never happened.

So Guleed popped back to fetch Stephanopoulos while I crept down the stairs to the garage. You really shouldn’t split up during an operation, but sometimes you have no choice. No doubt the blonde teenagers in the slasher movies feel the same way.

It doesn’t matter if they’re speed-built brutalist tat or expensive air-conditioned stables, underground car parks always smell the same. Damp cement, paint and volatile hydrocarbons. The only variation is whether or not they also smell of wee. Unsurprisingly, the car park under One Hyde Park did not have urine stains in its dark corners – or even have any dark corners that a young man caught short after a night out on the tiles might have a quick slash in.

There were two floors of garage proper but I was heading to the lowest because that’s where the parking spaces – plural, since the bigger the flat the more spaces you got – allocated to Martin Chorley were. As was his assigned storage space. Because although POLSA had gone through it during the initial investigation, they hadn’t known what to look for.

The stairs I went down were for the delicate feet of residents and thus had black marble risers and pointless art hung at regular intervals. On the bottom landing was a solid fire door disguised by a black stained piano-finish veneer. In a proper, crappy car park there’d have been grimy vertical window slots to look through, but not here. I wondered who was on the other side.

I stopped and tried to clear my mind. The uncanny creates a disturbance in the world. Everyone feels it, the trick is to distinguish it from the all the random noise, the thoughts, memories and misfiring neurons, that fill our heads from moment to moment. It’s like everything else – the more you do it, the better you get. I used to think that Nightingale was alerted to Falcon cases by his extensive network of informants. But now I think maybe he’s just listening to the city.

Or maybe not. Because that would be freaky.

Nobody was fighting upstairs, or at least not with magic. But beyond the fire door I could feel a little tickle, like mouse claws scrabbling in the wainscoting of the material world. It wasn’t Martin Chorley. I know the razor strop of his signare . This was more familiar, like listening to an echo of my own voice.

Lesley.

The question was, did she expect me to come through that door? If I went straight in I might be able to catch her off guard while she was concentrating on whatever it was she was doing. Or she might be doing the low level magic to draw me out.