The Hanging Tree (PC Peter Grant Book 6), Page 4

  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.’

  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?’

  ‘Good que
stion.’ I said. ‘Perhaps we should go ask her father.’

  3

  Driving While Cheerful

  Contrary to what you see on the TV, you don’t just waltz up to a grieving relative and start asking them difficult questions – well not unless you think they did it, and even then you’re expected to have some evidence to back you up. First you have to clear the interview with the SIO or the DI in tactical charge – which in this case was Stephanopoulos. And she wanted to know why.

  ‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s findings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.

  Stephanopoulos sent us over to Seawoll’s office.

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ he said. ‘But this had better be done with some fucking tact and diplomacy.’

  *

  Martin Chorley didn’t actually live in London, but out beyond the M25 in a two million quid eighteenth century rectory near High Wycombe. Fortunately me and Guleed were saved a schlepp up the M40 because Mr Chorley, having formally identified his daughter that morning, had moved on to his place of work in the City. He’d outright refused a Family Liaison Officer – plenty do – but had already been statemented as soon as he’d made the identification. Because, for police officers, ‘close relative’ frequently rhymes with ‘prime suspect’, Mr Chorley had already accumulated quite a large section in HOLMES. From that me and Guleed got all the salient details — birth, school, degree, work history, the big family home and the complimentary chairman’s flat above the office in Little Britain.

  ‘What, no villa in Tuscany?’ I asked.

  ‘He prefers America,’ said Guleed, who was going through twenty years’ worth of travel documentation. ‘Washington, New York, Miami, couple of trips to Atlanta – most of these are going to be work related.’

  As were the trips to Berlin, Paris and Geneva – in his capacity as chairman of something called the Public Policy Foundation. There’d been a helpful note from whoever had run the initial check – Influential think tank, watch it. I checked the address and me and Guleed headed off to put our sensitivity training to the test.

  The wind had picked up by the afternoon and on Ludgate Hill the tea-break smokers were huddled under the inadequate awnings – designed that way on modern buildings to discourage rough sleepers – trying to get their nicotine fix before hypothermia set in.

  City traffic is always grumpy in the rain, and so was Guleed when my shortcut to avoid St Paul’s put us behind an Ocado delivery van for twenty minutes. Fortunately it peeled off before we hit the Rotunda and we did a quick spin around the Museum of London and into the bit of Little Britain that runs beside Postman’s Park.

  The trees in the park still had most of their leaves, and the street was narrow and shaded and smelt of wet grass rather than the busy cement smell you get in the rest of the City. The office was based in a Mid-Victorian pile whose Florentine flourishes were not fooling anyone but itself. There was a brass plaque by the door engraved with ‘Public Policy Foundation’ and beyond the doors a cool blue marble foyer and a young and strangely elongated white woman behind a reception desk. Because it’s not good policy to, we hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment. Which gave Guleed a chance to tease the receptionist by not showing her warrant card when she identified herself.

  The receptionist’s expression did a classic three point turn from alarm to suspicion and finally settling on professional friendliness as she picked up the phone and informed someone at the other end that the ‘police’ had arrived to talk to Mr Chorley. We agreed later that while she’d lost points for the hesitant way she’d identified us as police, it was good effort overall.

  ‘Definitely in the top half of the leaderboard,’ said Guleed while we were waiting for someone to show us upstairs.

  Martin Chorley’s office was carefully designed to be unpretentious with varnished floorboards, mismatched throw rugs, a John Lewis leather sofa set and a glass-topped desk which I happened to know came from Ikea because I’d considered getting it for the tech cave.

  Chorley himself was my height, generally slender but with a spare tyre that was going to see him spending much more time in the gym in future. His hair was dark brown and conservatively cut, his eyes a pale grey and closely set. Judging from the rumples he was wearing yesterday’s suit trousers – no time to change – but a fresh pale blue shirt with packing creases. Mint in its wrapper, I guessed, and kept in the office for emergencies.

  He offered us coffee and we declined. Generally you only accept a beverage if the subject is going to make it themselves – creating a sense of normality – or if you’re going to make it, giving you a good chance to snoop around their kitchen. He himself scooped up a bottle of Highland Spring from his desk and waved us onto the black leather sofa while he lowered himself carefully into the matching armchair. His face, I saw, was grey and there were smudges under his eyes so I started gently enough – explaining that this was a routine follow-up interview, blah blah blah, and got about half a sentence in before he cut me off.

  ‘I heard you made an arrest,’ he said. He spoke with that deliberately toned down posh accent that, before they allowed regional dialects on the radio, used to be known as BBC standard.

  The law of the police interview is inviolable – information is only supposed to flow in one direction. But you’ve got to handle grieving parents carefully, otherwise they might write to the Telegraph. Or, in the case of someone like Martin Chorley, call the editor at home.

  ‘An arrest has been made,’ I said. ‘How it relates to your daughter’s death remains unclear.’

  He nodded glumly at this and took a sip of water.

  I waited to see if he’d ask who, exactly, had been arrested. When he didn’t, I went back to asking the routine questions that disguised the real reason I was there.

  Nightingale’s definition of a rogue practitioner was essentially ‘one that is practising magic without the sanction of the Folly’. Since the only currently sanctioned practitioners were me and him, I’d pointed out that this was not a very useful definition. Besides, there were still a number of wizards of the old school who, despite having ‘rusticated’ themselves, could still practise if they had to. Not to mention all the Rivers, Russian night-witches, fae, demi-fae – and who knew what other kinds of fae – running around doing stuff that looked suspiciously like magic to me.

  So we refined our definition down to ‘someone who practised magic in breach of the Queen’s Peace’, and started developing a series of sophisticated tools for determining whether someone’s nearest and dearest might have been dabbling in the metaphysical equivalent of sticking their head in a microwave for fun and profit.

  ‘Had you noticed any recent changes in Christina’s behaviour?’ I asked. ‘Any sudden new interests?’

  ‘She’s seventeen,’ he said. ‘So yes, lots of sudden interests.’

  He turned his head to look out the window and took a deep breath.

  ‘Any of them particularly noteworthy?’ I asked.

  ‘Any of what?’ He turned back to face us.

  ‘Any of the new interests,’ said Guleed with a note of respectful curiosity – it was her party trick. According to legend she’d once got a confession out of a rapist just by looking sympathetic and nodding occasionally.

  ‘Me personally,’ Stephanopoulos had said, ‘I’d have nailed his testicles to the chair.’

  Ah, the good old days, I’d thought.

  Martin Chorley succumbed.

  ‘History,’ he said. ‘She started reading a great deal of history.
I did find it a little bit odd because she wasn’t taking history at A-level.’ He was hazy about exactly when and where her interest had been focused, and I could see that pressing him was just going to make him angry. So I let it go. Tact and fucking diplomacy and all that.

  A specialist POLSA team had already turned over Christina Chorley’s room at St Paul’s – I made a note to go over their report and see what she’d had on her shelves.

  Martin Chorley said that most of his daughter’s interests had seemed to centre around her phone.

  ‘I never thought to ask,’ he said. ‘I was just glad—’ He stopped and his lips turned up in a humourless smile. ‘I just never thought to ask.’

  ‘Was it unusual for Christina to stay in town over the weekend?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘I believe I’ve already been asked these questions,’ said Mr Chorley.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ said Guleed. ‘Narrowing down the timeline is crucial and we find that people sometimes remember more once they get further away from an incident – every little detail helps.’

  We also find that people tend to forget exactly what lies they told the last set of coppers they talked to. But either Mr Chorley had an exceptional memory or his earlier statement – that he thought his daughter had been staying with her friend Albertina Pryce – was true.

  ‘She generally stayed with Albertina when she spent the weekend in town,’ he said.

  ‘Did she ever stay with anyone else?’ asked Guleed.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Mr Chorley. ‘There were sleepovers, you know. Girls’ stuff. I did consider tracking her phone, but one doesn’t want to hover – do you? Since her mother died I found it quite difficult to find the right balance to be father and mother at the same time.’

  Guleed nodded understandingly.

  Christina’s mother had died three years previously in an RTC on the A355 just short of the junction with the M40, having lost control of her Mercedes C-Class and drifted into oncoming traffic. According to the accident report, she’d been four times over the legal alcohol limit at the time but since she’d hadn’t killed anyone else the coroner went easy on her and ruled it as death by misadventure.