Бен Ааронович - The Hanging Tree

The result was Dr Jennifer Vaughan, a ferociously clever white woman from Newport who had entered medical school with high hopes of becoming a healer only to find that the puzzle was more interesting than the person, and she found herself gravitating downwards towards the morgue and a career in pathology. I knew way more about her life than she would have been comfortable with, including the time she’d nearly been cautioned for breaching the peace at the Supakart Centre in Newport, because I was the one who’d had to carry out the vetting process. It was your basic Baseline Personal Security Standard (BPSS) vetting that all civil servants had to undergo, plus a few extra bits we’d tacked on to cover what coppers like Seawoll liked to call ‘weird bollocks’.

I didn’t actually ask whether she herself or any member of her family had ever been a fairy, but I skated pretty close. It didn’t help that she had the kind of Welsh accent that made her sound like she was being sarcastic even when she wasn’t.

‘Are my swimming habits really a concern to the Metropolitan Police?’ she’d asked during one of the three interviews I’d conducted. I told her she’d be surprised.

‘I certainly hope so,’ she’d said. ‘Otherwise this will all have been a bit of a waste of time, won’t it?’

If you want to get the full force of her actual sarcasm, for comparative purposes, get her started on the mischaracterisation of hyperthaumaturgical degradation as a cerebrovascular disorder, strokes, aneurysms and the like, when it was quite obviously caused by direct physical trauma to the brain.

‘Admittedly, many of the signs do mirror those we see in stroke victims,’ she’d said. ‘But that’s no reason to be making assumptions, see. Especially when you have such nicely prepared brain sections to examine.’

Luckily me and Guleed weren’t subjected to your actual slices of Christina Chorley’s brain, because Dr Vaughan had already prepared a series of images which she showed us on her tablet. Even better, we were at the Ian West Memorial Forensic Suite at Westminster Mortuary which had a glassed-off observation room which meant that we didn’t have to smell the bodies either. Trust me, this is a bonus even with a nice fresh corpse like Ms Chorley.

I introduced Guleed to the doctors Vaughan and Walid. They shook hands and then Dr Walid leant casually against a work surface with his arms folded and watched while Dr Vaughan took us through her findings.

‘This was the cause of death,’ she said pointing to a smudge.

I caught Dr Walid’s eye and asked if it was a cerebral aneurysm.

‘No,’ said Dr Vaughan slowly. ‘It is not an aneurysm because an aneurysm is caused by a weakening in a blood vessel which distends over time and then, if one is unlucky, ruptures causing an intracranial bleed. Which as we know is not very good for the brain, is it?’

‘But that’s intracranial bleeding,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen slides like this before.’

‘That may be so, but it is not caused by an aneurysm,’ she said and Guleed gave me a pitying look.

Guleed always knew how to keep her mouth shut, and had this mad way of just fading into the background whenever she wanted to. Well, we all have our ways of dealing with difficulties – mine is to ask stupid questions.

‘It’s not natural causes, though,’ I said. ‘Is it?’

‘Well,’ said Dr Vaughan, ‘here’s the thing. If you look at this close-up here – see where the brain looks spongy? These are indications of tiny points of tissue damage to the brain.’

‘Caused by what?’ I asked.

Dr Walid chuckled and Dr Vaughan sighed.

‘To be honest, my guess would be that somebody sliced open her brain, pricked it with narrow bore needles and then reassembled the brain – seamlessly mind you – and then popped it back in her head with her none the wiser.’

‘That seems an unlikely scenario,’ I said.

‘It does, doesn’t it,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘In any case, one of these pinpricks also jabbed a blood vessel, which led to the intracranial bleeding, which was the ultimate cause of death.’

I asked what caused the pinpricks, if not narrow bore needles, and Dr Vaughan gave me a sunny smile.

‘As you know, I’ve been reviewing Dr Walid’s casework,’ she said. ‘And reviewing the “literature” he’s supplied on related subjects. Now, to be fair to the colleagues that came before us, these gentlemen didn’t have access to modern imaging techniques, but even so they can be remarkably vague as to the distinction between cerebrovascular and physical trauma. However, they did leave some excellent specimens behind.’

A room full of them, I knew, some of them dating back to the eighteenth century. Apparently it was good form in the old days for a wizard to leave his body to the Folly along with his notebooks, unreturned library books and any spare valuables he had lying around – cash, antiques, good quality arable land in the Midlands or home counties. It was the land bequests that underpinned the charitable fund that was paying Dr Vaughan’s salary.

‘You’d better not tell the Hunterian you’ve got these,’ Dr Vaughan had said when she was introduced to the Folly’s collection. ‘Or they’d be down here backing up a lorry to your front door and no mistake.’

Now she studied her tablet. ‘Many of them show the same pattern of pinprick injury,’ she said. ‘It’s too early to reach a firm conclusion, but this pattern of organic brain damage matches the early stages of hyperthaumaturgical degradation.’

‘She was a practitioner?’ I asked.

‘Or the victim of sequestration,’ said Dr Walid.

Sequestration . . . There were some terrible things that could get inside your head and make you do stuff both physically and magically. Such things had no compunction about using you up and letting you die, as the overuse of magic turns your brain into Swiss cheese.

Mr Punch was one such thing.

Still they appeared to be quite rare, so Christina being a practitioner was more likely. There’s no such thing as magical talent – anyone can learn magic the way anyone can learn to play the guitar. It’s just that trying to tackle the opening to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ isn’t going to kill you. Well, not directly anyway. You also don’t learn it spontaneously. Somebody’s got to teach you the basics, even if that’s just three chords and a vigorous strumming action.

Dr Vaughan concurred that sequestration was unlikely.

‘Self-taught?’ I asked.

‘The pathology can’t really tell us how,’ he said. ‘But according to the pre-war literature, fully trained practitioners rarely injured themselves to this degree.’

After all, not killing yourself was the point of quite a lot of the training.

‘So,’ said Guleed. ‘Does this mean she was doing magic when she died?’

‘You said the M-word,’ I said, but Guleed ignored me.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Dr Vaughan. ‘The PMA she took could have raised her blood pressure to the point where a blood vessel, weakened by the organic damage, gave way. The seizures and other symptoms would have been incidental to the cause of death.’

A pre-existing medical condition wasn’t going to help Olivia McAllister-Thames, because supplying the drugs was in and of itself an unlawful act. So it wouldn’t serve as defence in law. Still manslaughter. Still a maximum sentence of life imprisonment for Olivia, and a lifetime in the shit for me.

‘If Christina was a trainee witch . . .’ said Guleed.

‘Wizard,’ said Dr Walid – just as I said, ‘Practitioner.’

Guleed exchanged a look with Dr Vaughan.

‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘If she was. And if she wasn’t self-taught, who taught her?’