Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

I sat on the bed, took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

I hadn’t found any controlled substances, or drug paraphernalia. It might have been hidden away, but if it was the follow-up POLSA team would find it. I couldn’t feel any vestigia in the room either. I’d always felt something with the various gods and goddesses of the rivers – even when they were reining it back on purpose – but there was nothing here apart from the usual background.

What did the child of a river and a mortal inherit, and from whom? Fleet was married to a Fae but Beverley said all her children were adopted. Oxley had Isis who had obviously caught longevity from somewhere and Effra had Oberon who Nightingale called an Old Soldier – note the capital letters.

And if I had kids with Beverley, not that kids were on the table, what would they be like – apart from staggeringly good looking of course? Would they be riverlets, streams, storm drains or just ordinary?

Which reminded me to phone Beverley.

‘Hi babes,’ she said. In the background I could hear water slapping against a vertical surface, the hull of a boat or more likely a piling of some sort. I asked her where she was.

‘Up at Eel Pie Island,’ she said. ‘Sorting out a dispute – these people are cheeky, you know. They think buying a house on an island is just another investment opportunity.’

‘Isn’t it?’ I asked. That end of Richmond/Twickenham had become hipster central since the big money had started pushing all the TV producers and literary editors out of Hampstead and Primrose Hill.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘Live on an island in the middle of a river, especially this river, you’ve got to put out some signs and favours if you want to prosper. You still at my house?’

‘I’m on a shout,’ I said – obviously Beverley hadn’t heard about her niece yet.

‘Pity,’ she said. ‘I was hoping you’d be keeping the bed warm for me.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Listen, the job I’m on, I can’t say anything right now, but you need to contact your mum.’

‘Is this like a job job?’ asked Beverley, ‘or a magic job job?’

‘I don’t know and I’m not supposed to tell you anyway,’ I said.

‘You might be able to tell her yourself later,’ said Beverley. ‘She said she might be turning up for your dad’s gig.’

Which I’d forgotten about.

‘Just call your mum,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’

Beverley promised she would just as soon as she’d sorted out some recalcitrant islanders.

And our kids would be . . . ? I thought after we’d hung up. Good at swimming?

I wasn’t going to learn anything more in this room – it was time to hit the factory floor.

What with the jazz thing, the underground thing, the business with the haunted car, the Russians and let’s not forget the mould – however hard we try to – Belgravia MIT had bowed to the inevitable and given me my own desk in the Outside Inquiry Office. I say my own desk, but actually I shared it with Guleed and a white DC called David Carey. Neither of them were that happy with the arrangement, not least because it was a two person desk.

‘Oh, it’s going to be one of those jobs,’ said Carey when I settled in beside him. ‘Is it too late to put in for a holiday?’

I told him it was, but if he was lucky Guleed would do all the heavy lifting.

‘So long as I don’t have to deal with any more weird cars,’ he said.

The job had acquired an operational name, MARIGOLD, and a quick call to the case manager in the Inside Inquiry Office got me access to HOLMES. I entered the results of my preliminary search of Olivia’s bedroom and downloaded the pictures I’d taken of the collage on the wall. Then I went hunting to see if anyone had developed a definitive list of the kids who’d been at the party, to see if I could match them up. I did that until Carey pointed out that the current list was on the whiteboard – along with photos. I matched up Albertina Pryce to one of the pictures in Olivia’s collage but none of the others. I asked Carey whether this was the confirmed party list, but he said they were still waiting on statements.

Down the corridor in an interview room Olivia, now sitting next to a solicitor with a properly expensive suit and a suitably belligerent Scouse accent, had sensibly decided to keep her mouth shut. Guleed was pissed off, because not only had the preliminary search of the Tyburns’ house not turned up anything useful, but of the six separate sets of prints lifted from the pill packets none had matched Olivia’s. Nor, in fact, had any of the prints recovered from the flat at One Hyde Park. Guleed wanted to know if Tyburn could magic away fingerprints, but I said probably not without wiping everything else. She asked me to check with Nightingale, and I said I was sure because I’d made a point of coming up with a list of modern forensic techniques and then going through them one by one to see if Nightingale could counter them.

‘Did anything work?’ asked Guleed.

‘So far nothing,’ I said. ‘You can burn the top surfaces off a scene, but it’s pretty obvious that you’ve done it.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Guleed, who’d once seen me roast a duck by accident.

Since Olivia was seventeen she was allowed an adult to remain with her as well as her solicitor. Naturally she chose her mum, which meant that for safety’s sake Nightingale had to be in the interview room, too. Given the circumstances, DI Stephanopoulos had decided she’d better sit in too – although whether that was to maintain status for the MIT or out of sheer curiosity, no one knew or dared to ask. Stephanopoulos was a short white woman with a brown flat top haircut that had never been fashionable, even in the 1980s, and a face that relaxed into a scowl. It was rumoured that out in the suburbs there was a big house, a wife, and a garden full of chickens and tulips and rainbows and the novels of Terry Pratchett. But if there was, none of that ever made it south of the North Circular. And certainly never as far as Belgravia nick.

In the normal course of events inspectors never conduct interviews, yet Olivia merited two – I wondered if she felt special. Though she didn’t say anything useful over the course of three hours, demonstrating exactly why inspectors have better things to do than interviews. It was also why Nightingale was still in the interview room when Dr Walid called and said that he had something to show us at the mortuary.

When I told Guleed where I was going, she asked to tag along.

I asked her if she was sure.

‘It’s going to be Falcon stuff,’ I said.

‘Since I can’t seem to escape it,’ she said, ‘I figure I might as well learn a bit about it.’

‘Can’t argue with that.’

In the far off days of last year, Nightingale would have expected me to discourage her from coming, but our policy framework had changed. Earlier in the year we’d had what would have been called a ‘Multi-Agency Forward Strategy Planning Session’ if it wasn’t for the fact that it was me, Nightingale, Dr Walid and Dr Postmartin sitting down for tea in the atrium and hashing out how on earth we were going to cope with the increase in magic. The reason for the meeting was mainly that Dr Walid wanted to train up an assistant, someone with a background in your actual pathology.

‘Someone who knows more about brains than the lower intestine,’ said Dr Walid, world famous gastroenterologist.

He had his eye on a promising doctor at UCH. His problem was that he would have to come up with a budget in order to cover the salary because, strangely, after six years of continuous study, freshly minted doctors like to get paid.

‘Golf clubs not being cheap,’ I’d said.

‘Never mind golf,’ said Dr Walid. ‘Think of the overdraft.’