Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

I hooked her feet out from under her, she went face down and I pulled the speedcuffs off my belt. It wasn’t that easy while trying to hang on to my staff, and I only had one of her wrists snapped when the white Humvee lurched half a metre over and squashed us up against the side of the BMW.

‘God, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘Why are you so clumsy with the cuffs?’ And she elbowed me in the nuts. It hurt, but it would have hurt a lot more if I hadn’t been wearing the box that’s part of my PSU kit. I’ve been smacked in the bollocks before, and try to learn from my mistakes.

The Humvee lurched again, and we would have been crushed if it hadn’t been for its high clearance, which allowed all three of us to slide underneath it.

‘Shit,’ said Lesley, ‘he’s getting away!’

I followed her gaze and saw a pair of legs climbing into Reynard’s Renault. It was Reynard himself – I recognised the skinny hipster jeans as they climbed through the passenger door. The engine started, no microprocessors to fry on that car, and it started to pull out of the parking spot.

‘Where does he think he’s going?’ asked Guleed, which was a good question because there was no ramp up to the surface. Only the two vehicle lifts, and they were in lock-down.

Lesley wriggled and I was trying to get a grip on her other wrist when she was dragged out from under the Humvee and into the roadway. Since me and Guleed were hanging onto to her, we went too.

The sprinklers had finally stopped, leaving the decking a wet cold slick and the air full of the smell of stale water. I noticed that some serious puddles had accumulated in some of the parking bays and around the entrance to the lifts. Whoever had put the nice resin coating down had skimped on the drainage system.

We had a good view of the Renault as it accelerated past us towards the far side of the garage. And an equally good look at the bonnet when it exploded in a ball of fire. Exactly the way cars in films do, and cars in real life don’t. It scraped forward for a couple of metres before grinding to a stop. Oily smoke poured from the ruined front of the car and, had there been any water left, that would have been a good time for the sprinklers to activate.

Lesley kicked and twisted, but I think me and Guleed had both decided that our operational priority was arresting her which, unlike everything else going on around us, seemed within our performance envelope.

The back of the Renault blew open of its own accord and a couple of storage crates, the same make as the ones back at The Chestnut Tree, bounced out onto the wet tarmac. Lesley made a lunge forward and then recoiled as Guleed sprayed her in the face with her CS aerosol.

‘Sahra!’ she spluttered.

In the still underground air the smoke was quickly rolling over our heads. According to Frank Caffrey, about a third of fire deaths are down to smoke inhalation and he’s a professional so he should know. I wanted out of that basement. Fortunately, so did Guleed.

‘The stairwell,’ she shouted and we each kept one hand on Lesley as we crawled towards the atrium with the lifts and stairs. Also, I was thinking of those nice thick fire doors and the strong possibility that Stephanopoulos would be available nearby for tea, sympathy and first aid.

Lesley didn’t co-operate.

She somehow managed to roll herself sideways, right over my back, wrenching the speedcuffs out of my left hand and smashing her elbow into the side of my face so that my skull smacked the ground. I really wasn’t any good to man or police officer for what seemed like half an hour, but was probably more like ten seconds. The smoke had boiled down to ground level by then and I came to with Lesley gone and Guleed trying to drag me towards where she hoped the stairs were.

I couldn’t see more than half a metre and every breath burnt the back of my throat. I was beginning to get seriously worried when I smelt dust and sandalwood and what might have been the hot wind off the desert, or possibly just the car burning a few metres away. Then the smoke blew away like the parting of the Red Sea and Lady Helena walked calmly past us down a lengthening corridor of clear air towards the Renault. She lifted her right hand and made a clenching gesture and the fire that engulfed the engine block snuffed out.

Now that was a spell I definitely wanted to learn.

Me and Guleed took advantage of the fresh air to clamber to our feet and start coughing. I was so busy attempting to expel my lungs that I didn’t follow Lady Helena to the back of the Renault. One of the storage boxes was open and on its side and she squatted down and starting picking through the spray of manuscripts and plastic folders.

After a few moments I had enough breath to ask whether she’d seen Nightingale.

She didn’t look up from her search but she did shrug.

‘I think I might have been fighting him at one point,’ she said. ‘It all got rather confused. Ah!’ She stood up brandishing a package the size of a family sized box of Sainsbury’s own cornflakes. ‘Not a total waste of my time after all,’ she said and then strolled past me back towards the stairs. ‘If you’re looking to stop our friend Mr Chorley, my best guess is that he’ll try break out via the vehicle lifts.’

I briefly considered trying to arrest her. Guleed caught my eye, waiting to follow my lead, but I shook my head. With the fire out the smoke wasn’t getting any thicker, but the dense haze remained pretty toxic and whatever air spell Lady Helena had cast we couldn’t count on it lasting forever. So me and Guleed gathered up the spilled loot, plonked it back in the storage container and carried it, and the one with the lid still on, back to the stairwell.

There we found Stephanopoulos and a bunch of irate London Fire Brigade in breathing gear. She wanted to know if the garage was clear of Falcon, so she could let the fire officers in. But I couldn’t give her that assurance. It took us half an hour to locate Nightingale, who’d chased Martin Chorley through a brand new hole in the vehicle lifts but hadn’t dared continue the pursuit beyond the secure perimeter.

‘Far too high a risk of civilian casualties,’ he said later.

Stephanopoulos didn’t look happy.

‘We have not exactly covered ourselves with glory,’ she said.

‘On the other hand,’ said Guleed, ‘none of us are dead.’

‘Just you wait until the Commissioner sees the bill,’ said Stephanopoulos.

And so it ended like most Police operations do, not with a bang but with us whimpering over the paperwork. Or at least it would have for me and Guleed, if we hadn’t been whisked off to UCH where we snaffled up oxygen and tried not to listen while Dr Walid explained terms like tissue hypoxia to us in more detail than either of us would have liked. Fortunately we responded well to treatment and weren’t kept overnight. Beverley popped over to keep me company and then, typically, spent most of the time in Guleed’s cubicle gossiping – and not even about me. My mum turned up with a care package which I ate one-handed while fending off Bev, Guleed and Nightingale with the other. Once we were out, Beverley drove me back to her house in her sad little Kia and we shared a bath and then bed.

The next morning Nightingale picked me up from Bev’s in the Jag so he could brief me on the way back to Belgravia nick. I was going to take over as Falcon liaison in the hunt for Martin Chorley and Lesley May while he headed back to the Folly to catch up on his sleep.

‘He almost got me, you know,’ said Nightingale. ‘He’d prepared a number of booby traps in the flat upstairs and tried to lure me into the killing zone.’

Fortunately Nightingale still remembered the lessons he’d learnt fighting the Germans.