The Hanging Tree

11 Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree

While I was talking to Reynard the Unreliable, Nightingale had popped out with Guleed to extend Jeremy Beaumont-Jones, and his lovely daughter Phoebe, an invitation to help the police with their inquiries. That way they could run the whole Trace Implicate or Eliminate routine free from the fear that he’d turn up and drop another building on us. And, should that or any other equally gruesome thing happen elsewhere while he was with us, we could safely eliminate him from our inquiries.

By agreement we all paused for coffee and scheming, and I asked Guleed what she thought of Phoebe’s father.

‘Actually he comes across as a bit dim,’ said Guleed

‘A perfectly pleasant fellow,’ said Nightingale. ‘But not what you’d call a world-class brain.’

Which just goes to show that all a degree from Oxford guarantees is that the recipient went to Oxford and turned up for some lessons.

‘And it was a rather poor second at that,’ said Nightingale.

It seemed that our Mr Beaumont-Jones had been more interested in the Oxford Revue than his Philosophy, Politics and Economics, although he’d also failed to generate a career in cutting topical satire.

By the end of the morning, while we’d confirmed that he’d been booked in at an exclusive West End hotel at the time the Faceless Man was subjecting me to an involuntary swimming lesson with the Americans, we couldn’t confirm that he’d actually been in the hotel. Not only did the hotel in question not CCTV its visitors going in and out, discretion being part of the service, but we also hadn’t managed to track down ‘Anna’ the ‘open minded blonde’ that Jeremy Beaumont-Jones claimed to have bunged a grand to for a night of if not passion then a really good simulation of it. It didn’t help that he couldn’t remember which escort agency she’d come from, and had paid in cash so there was no electronic record. He hadn’t booked this young woman of negotiable affection on his own phone, and there was no record of his making an outside call from the phone in his room.

It was a fair bet that someone at the hotel knew exactly which agency represented the young women who came and went, and David Carey had been actioned to take ‘statements’ from the staff until such time as someone coughed. Once that happened, Carey had declared, he was willing to work all hours tracking down escort agencies and taking statements from ‘the girls’.

‘That’s just how dedicated I am to this job,’ he’d said.

‘Rather him than me,’ said Guleed. ‘That’s a dreary job.’

Jeremy Beaumont-Jones’ alibi for this Monday afternoon’s dismemberment in the park was equally porous. But walking around without an alibi was not sufficient grounds to charge either father or daughter. Or at least, it isn’t if the suspect has a decent lawyer.

I reported Reynard’s assertion that Olivia had introduced Christina Chorley to The Chestnut Tree, and thus to the wonders of the demi-monde.

‘So Olivia McAllister-Thames was lying to us,’ said Seawoll. ‘Again.’

‘Somebody’s lying,’ I said, which got me a look of amused indulgence from Stephanopoulos and a snort from Seawoll. Of course somebody was lying – we were the police – somebody was always lying to us.

‘We have Olivia’s girlfriend,’ said Stephanopoulos. ‘We can always ask her.’

‘No,’ said Seawoll. ‘I don’t like the way these posh buggers have been pissing us about.’ He looked at me and Nightingale. ‘Do you know this place?’ he asked, meaning The Chestnut Tree.

Nightingale said we did, and Seawoll asked if we wouldn’t mind popping over and seeing if we couldn’t scare up some witnesses who could tell us exactly who had taken whom to where and what they were doing while they were there. Armed with that information we could then go back into an interview and nail said posh buggers’ hands to the table.

Metaphorically. Or at least I hoped he meant metaphorically.

You can’t take Nightingale to The Chestnut Tree, because by the time you’ve walked in the front door most of the clientele will have run out the back. In fact, on the off chance that this might prove useful one day, I once spent a fun morning trying to find the back door but to no avail. Rumour was that it opened into a secret subterranean passage which emerged in the Hyde Park car park. On this visit I did take Guleed, because Seawoll was more likely to believe her report than mine, and also I don’t go into The Chestnut Tree without someone watching my back.

The place itself is on a windswept alleyway in Marble Arch just short of, and not to be mistaken for, the famous City of Quebec pub. There’s no sign on the door, but I’ve been told that the frame is made of genuine chestnut cut from the original tree. Inside is a short corridor painted that strange green colour that I assume someone, somewhere, once persuaded the brewery chains looked wholesome, inviting and encouraged people to drink to excess.

At the end of the corridor there’s a short flight of stairs into the main saloon bar. That’s where the actual chestnut tree that presumably gave the pub its name grows out of the wall behind the bar. Or rather doesn’t grow, because it’s been dead for more than a hundred years, but its branches spread out in a tangle of bare limbs across the width of the saloon where they merge with the wooden booths that lurk in the gloom on the other side. Amongst the branches hung dusty iron and glass lamps holding what I really hoped were fake gas mantles, because using real ones would have been a bit of a health and safety violation.

As I walked in, I caught a whiff of old sweat and hot pie which might have been bad ventilation or the memory of the crowds that flocked to this end of the Tyburn Road to watch the felons morris at the end of the rope.

Morris being an old word for dance, by the way – it’s amazing what you pick up on the job.

The woman behind the bar was reassuringly Romanian and didn’t flinch when I showed her my warrant card and asked to see the manager. The barmaid explained that she was out getting her lunch, but was expected back any minute. In the meantime would we like a drink?

Not being tied to a brewery chain, The Chestnut Tree offered a range of beers in the mid- to totally obscure CAMRA range. I had a half of Sambrook’s Junction Ale, just to keep everything friendly and relaxed you understand, and Guleed had an orange juice and Perrier.

It wasn’t easy, but we managed to find a table from which we could keep an eye on most of the saloon bar. The table top was made from planks of wood that had grown pitted with use and warped with age, possibly before being lacquered with what looked like about half a centimetre of varnish. Despite the ancient beer rings worn into the surface there was a printed sign in a freestanding iron frame which requested patrons to preserve the natural beauty of the genuine antique furniture, thank you – the management. In front of this was a stack of mismatched beermats. When I had a flick through, I found they were all from different breweries and, where marked, from different pubs. I learnt much later that it was considered good form for patrons to nick beermats from other pubs and donate them to The Chestnut Tree. The really rare ones from places like Tibet or obscure bars in Abeokuta ended up pinned to a cork board behind the stage in the adjoining public bar.

‘They have live music here,’ said Guleed, who’d found a leaflet stuffed into the iron frame. ‘Someone called the “Shanren Mountain Men Band” tonight – ever heard of them?’

I said I hadn’t, nor had I heard of Lol Robinson or Laura Marling who were headlining the coming weekend.

Guleed used an apparent interest in the playbill to give the room the once over. Places like The Chestnut Tree don’t get much of a lunchtime crowd. As a rule, the demi-monde doesn’t work nine to five, and so doesn’t need to get them in before heading back to the office for a couple of hours of pretending to work.

That said, there was a bunch of young men in white shirts in a nearby booth, blue pinstripe jackets flung over the backs of their chairs – two white, one darker who might have been Turkish or somewhere equally Mediterranean. They looked like they might work in an office and I wondered if they knew where they were drinking or if they had wandered in by accident.

In another booth two middle aged women were sitting hunched over their table so that their faces almost touched. One of them was so pale as to be actually white white with platinum blonde hair swept back behind reassuringly unpointed ears. Her friend was pinker, dark haired but with an upward curve to the corner of her eyes that I recognised from some of Edward Linley Sambourne’s illustrations for Charles Kingsley’s monograph on the taxonomy of the Fae. They must have spotted us watching because they both turned to frown at us – I saw their eyes were an unsettling hazel brown. The last time I’d seen eyes that colour I’d been the wrong side of the faerie veil, where I would have stayed if Bev hadn’t turned up in a traction engine and given me a lift out.

Me and Guleed pretended to be interested in our drinks because, you know, it’s rude to stare.

We gave it ten minutes, enough time for me to finish my half, before I went back to the bar and asked after the manageress again. While I did that, Guleed went to stand in the archway that linked the saloon bar with the public bar beyond. We’d decided that was her best position to cover what we reckoned was the door to the staff area and also the steps back-up to the street. This way, should the manageress, or anyone else, make a sudden break for it, Guleed could intercept.

‘She texted me,’ said the Romanian barmaid and held up her phone for me to see. ‘She says she’ll be back soon.’

I looked back and saw that Guleed was talking to a young Chinese guy in a purple open necked shirt, pre-faded jeans and leather trainers. He was short but broad-shouldered, his black hair cut with a long fringe. In his left hand, as if glued in place, he carried a slim bamboo and leather case which I couldn’t definitely identify as a sword scabbard only because of the blue drawstring pouch covering the pommel.

He leaned forward like a bird dipping for fish and said something that made Guleed laugh. I saw her eyes flick in my direction and so did his. He turned to look at me, grinned, and gave me a polite nod and a mocking salute before turning and walking away.

‘That was interesting,’ said Guleed when she joined me. She showed me his card. It was expensive in its simplicity, a good card stock and superior printing. It read MICHAEL CHEUNG in black ink and, in smaller print underneath – LEGENDARY SWORDSMAN, and under that two clusters of Chinese characters. Guleed was reluctant to hand over the card, so I took a picture to send to Postmartin for translation and analysis.

‘He said that he was the new guy in Chinatown,’ said Guleed. ‘And when you had a moment he’d like you guys to drop in at the usual place for dinner. He said Nightingale would know which place.’

‘And it took him ten minutes to say that?’

‘He also gave me his phone number,’ she said.

‘You going to call him?’

‘Probably,’ said Guleed.

‘And if he draws that sword, are you going to arrest him?’

‘That depends, doesn’t it,’ said Guleed. ‘On what he does with it.’

Which was Guleed for ‘mind your own business’, but I might have pursued the matter just a little bit further in the interest of intra-collegial due diligence if the manageress of The Chestnut Tree hadn’t chosen that moment to come back from lunch.

She was a white woman in her late thirties with an oval face atop a rather long neck which she grew her light brown hair long enough to partially disguise. She was wearing a no-nonsense, easy to clean, light pink blouse with black jeans and nice comfortable flat shoes. Her eyes were light brown, but even before I got close enough to see the flecks of hazel-gold around the iris I had her pegged as being fayer than the client list of a New Zealand casting agency.

Her name was Wanda Pourier and she had the kind of Estuary accent that says she could have grown up in London, only her parents moved to the Thames Valley when she was young – presumably to find work in the boredom mines.

‘We’d better talk in my office,’ she said. ‘We don’t want you lot scaring the punters more than you have already.’

The staff area was unkempt and vaguely depressing in the way that staff areas always are. The punters get the gloss and the staff get scabby, peeling walls and lockers that looked like they’d been salvaged from a sunken U-boat. The manager’s office was just a spare bit of space randomly separated off with drywall and fitted with a long shelf down one side that served as both desk and storage space. There was a serious looking free-standing safe as far from the door as possible and the obligatory year planner taking up the free wall. Wanda sat in a battered operator’s chair and motioned us into the two grey stackable polyurethane seats that were the only other furniture.

One thing that was missing was a computer – or even a desk calculator. Instead, an old fashioned gunmetal blue mechanical adding machine stood next to a stack of cheap ledgers, the type with carbon paper interleaves for the keeping of multiple records.

I realised that we didn’t actually know who or what owned The Chestnut Tree and its prime bit of super-expensive London real estate. I put finding out on the long list that I carry around in my head, about two thirds of the way down – between rustproofing the Jag and taking Toby to the vet to get his nails clipped. Fortunately I didn’t have to fish for Wanda’s background because she volunteered it upfront.

‘My mother was a Falloy,’ she said. ‘Do you know what a Falloy is?’

‘Irish surname,’ said Guleed.

‘That too,’ said Wanda.

A Falloy, according to Joseph Malzeard in his work On the Natural Order of the Unnatural, was a creature one half human, one eighth unseelie fae and three eighths seelie fae. Malzeard described them as ‘pleasant fellows in the main albeit shiftless and prone to small mischiefs’. I didn’t mention this to Wanda because it’s good practice not to let on how much you know about a particular witness, and also because I know racist bollocks when I read it.

‘What’s a Falloy?’ asked Guleed.

‘We’re a little bit of this, a little bit of that,’ said Wanda. ‘My parents were originally from Brittany.’ Which explained the surname as well.

I said that we were looking to check whether she’d noticed certain people visiting the pub in the last six months.

‘This is purely for elimination purposes,’ added Guleed.

I took out my official police tablet and showed her some pictures.

‘That one looks familiar,’ she said when I showed her Jeremy Beaumont-Jones.

‘Has he been in here?’ asked Guleed.

Wanda shook her head.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Wait, I have seen him. He was much younger. Was he a student at Oxford?’

I said he had been, but I was careful to keep it vague. Once you get them talking, witnesses like to tell you what you want to hear. It’s depressingly easy to lead them astray – just asks the inmates of any remand wing.

‘I did catering at Oxford College in the early nineties,’ she said. ‘I used to do silver service jobs to pay the bills. There was plenty of work around the colleges; they always seemed to be stuffing their faces for one reason or another.’

I nodded – Jeremy Beaumont-Jones had been at Oxford at that time.

‘I remember him because we did a couple of jobs for this dining club,’ she said. ‘And they were a bit odd, if you know what I mean?’

‘Scientology odd?’ asked Guleed. ‘Or My Little Pony odd?’

‘Our kind of odd,’ said Wanda, making a little swirling gesture with her hand that took in all three of us. Guleed frowned at that and gave me an accusing look.

‘Magic, right?’ I said.

Wanda gave me a small smile and tilted her head to one side.

‘Or are we talking fae?’ I asked, but I knew exactly who we were talking about.

‘Wizard stuff,’ said Wanda. ‘You know, spells and wheels and compasses.’

I rummaged around on the tablet until I found a student photograph of Jeremy Beaumont-Jones that I’d lifted off his Facebook Page.

‘Definitely him,’ said Wanda.

I found similarly youthful pictures of Martin Chorley and a couple of other suspected Little Crocodiles, but she didn’t recognise any of them. She did identify a contemporary picture of Geoffrey Wheatcroft, DPhil, former wizard, theology lecturer and the man stupid, or wicked, enough to teach magic outside the formal structure of the Folly.

‘That’s one of things that made them unusual,’ said Wanda. ‘He was there for a lot of the gigs.’

Wanda said it was important not to get carried away with mystique around the dining clubs.

‘It’s just like your average Saturday night in Reading city centre, only wrapped up in a ton of money,’ she said. ‘Well, most of them, anyway . . . not this lot – ah!’ She stopped and tapped the table. ‘Little Crocodiles,’ she said. ‘That’s what they were called.’

And since Geoffrey Wheatcroft turned up to most of the events, that at least kept the student projectile vomiting to a minimum. Although the wandering hands were still a nuisance.

‘Like Greenford disco all over again,’ she said.

‘How did you know they were doing magic?’ asked Guleed.

Because people were popping off spells all through dinner, especially lux which, as anyone will tell you, is the first spell you learn. And there was a drinking game where each contestant conjured a werelight and then saw how many shots they could knock back while keeping it up.

She didn’t recognise the young Martin Chorley or Albert Pryce – which Wanda freely admitted didn’t mean they weren’t there. Silver service is hard work and, like most of the young women doing the dining club circuit, she concentrated on getting through the night with the maximum of tips and the minimum of manhandling.

‘But you haven’t seen Jeremy Beaumont-Jones since Oxford?’ asked Guleed, bringing us back to the case at hand.

‘No, sorry,’ said Wanda. But when we showed her pics of Phoebe, Olivia and Christina she sighed and said the last two had definitely been in. She didn’t know who Christina was, but she remembered Olivia’s name on account of her having to call her mum to take her away.

‘Why was that?’ asked Guleed.

‘Do you see where we are?’ asked Wanda. ‘Do you know what was standing here before they started hanging people behind closed doors? Do you know the real name of this place?’

‘Tyburn,’ said Guleed, who’d obviously been paying more attention to me than I thought.

Because back in the days of yore, when Oxford Street was the Tyburn Road and the city had only just started its mad rush to cover all the west in desirable redbrick and stucco terraces, it was the main route out of London to the little village of Tyburn that sat just beyond where the road crossed the river.

Condemned prisoners were loaded onto tumbrils at Newgate Gaol, and would wind their way through the streets of London, past the rookeries at St Giles, before hitting the long straight road into the open countryside and the Tyburn Tree.

And it was a busy place, the Tyburn Tree. Because markets were laissez-faire, every Englishman’s home was his castle and what passed for law and order was largely privately run. Back then the gentry lived in fear of the London mob and, to keep the masses in check, made sure that stealing bread or your employer’s linen was a topping offence.

So they came in numbers, the tragic lads and lasses, the local boys and the immigrants from Yorkshire, Cornwall and Berkshire, from Strathclyde and County Clare. Some weeping, some defiant, and most of them pissed out of their box because the whole sad procession from Newgate Gaol would make periodic pauses for refreshments.

‘This was the last stop,’ said Wanda.

A last drink under the spreading chestnut tree, perhaps a chance to unburden yourself of any secrets or things you might not be able to take into the next world. And so The Chestnut Tree became the repository of final bequests.

Or a final offering, a tradition from back when the river ran free and its god walked amongst men.

Jonathan Wild went to the tree in the spring of 1725. I wondered whether this was where he’d left his final ledger. And if he had, was it a coincidence that Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman happened to meet up here?

Coincidence, I thought. Like fuck.

So I asked about Reynard.

‘Oh yeah, Reynard,’ said Wanda. ‘We know all about the Reynards.’

‘We?’ I asked.

‘My family,’ said Wanda. ‘We know all about him.’

‘Reynards you said,’ said Guleed. ‘Reynards plural.’

‘And his family,’ said Wanda. ‘From France. They’re a long line of total Reynards.’

And because in my line of business it pays to be sure, I asked – ‘Just so we’re clear, when we’re talking about a line of Reynards, are we talking multiple members of one family with the same name, or the same guy changing his identity with each generation.’

‘Oh he’s a nasty piece of work, but he isn’t that nasty,’ said Wanda. ‘Different guys with different names – Reynard’s more of a title, an appellation, a nom de bastard total.’

‘And he’s a regular here?’ I asked

‘Well, we can’t bar people just for being unsavoury, can we?’ said Wanda. ‘We’d be out of business.’

I asked who, exactly, would be out of business. Wanda gave me a card with her area manager’s contact details and the name of the company who owned the business: CHIPMUNK CATERING.

‘Not that we see that much of them,’ she said.

I handed the card to Guleed, and while I asked about Reynard’s comings and goings Guleed texted the Inside Inquiry Office. I’d love to claim that I’d had a gut feeling about the owners, but really it was following routine. In policing, your gut might point the way – but it’s the shoe leather that catches criminals.

I showed Wanda Christina Chorley’s picture again and asked if she had ever seen her with Reynard. I used a different picture and made sure that I didn’t cue Wanda that this was a repeat viewing – if you can shift the context, people often remember new facts.

This time Wanda thought it was possible that she might have seen them together, but she was hazy on the details. In just about any other pub in London I’d have asked about CCTV footage, but me and Guleed had noted the lack of cameras on the way in.

I was going to roll the conversation back round to Olivia when Guleed showed me her phone and the answering text from the Inside Inquiry Office – CHIPMUNK CATERING DIRECTLY LINKED TO COUNTY GARD.

And County Gard belonged to the Faceless Man – shit.

‘How often do you see your area manager?’ I asked.

Wanda said she didn’t think she’d ever met him in the three years she’d been running The Chestnut Tree – which was entirely a good thing from her point of view. ‘It’s not like area managers ever have anything useful to say about running a pub,’ she said. ‘Is it? Especially a pub like this.’

She had interviewed for the job, here in this very room, and could provide us with a name and description but she didn’t understand why. I was tempted to tell her it was just routine but literally nobody ever believes that – even when it’s true.

‘It’s part of an ongoing inquiry into property fraud,’ I said, which was true, as far as it went.

‘Are there any storage areas in here?’ asked Guleed.

Wanda said that obviously they had food storage, dry goods, bottle storage, wine racks and a separate cool room for those casks that needed it.

‘Do have any storage you’ve never been in?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know about storage as such,’ said Wanda. ‘But there’s a couple of rooms we don’t use.’

‘You couldn’t give us a look, could you?’ I asked.

There was a corridor that was 1930s brick down one wall and 1970s breezeblock on the other. There were two doorways in the newer wall with cheap red doors made of medium density fibreboard and the kind of stainless steel lever handle and lock combination that you find fitted to schools and council buildings from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

Wanda opened them both with one of the keys from the bunch she kept in her pocket on a hoop key ring. Inside the first were a ton of stackable polyurethane chairs and, in the second, modular steel frame storage shelves that, judging by the dust, hadn’t held anything for years.

‘See,’ said Wanda locking them back-up. ‘Nothing extraordinary at all.’

‘What about that one?’ I asked.

There was a third door, this one in the old side of the corridor and made of what looked like wooden planks. It looked suspiciously as if one of the artfully rustic tables from the saloon bar had been hauled upright and jammed into the doorway.

‘Ah,’ said Wanda, looking over at the door. ‘Yeah.’ She bit her lip and looked back at us.

‘Do you have a key?’ said Guleed.

‘Yeah, I’m pretty certain we do,’ said Wanda and shuffled backward a couple of steps – away from the door. ‘But I don’t think I should let you open that door.’

I exchanged looks with Guleed. We both knew that the words ‘search warrant’ were heading for Wanda’s lips and we’d both been around enough weird bollocks to be suspicious as to why.

I suggested that we make our way back-up to the end of the corridor, and as we did Wanda became noticeably calmer. She asked if we’d seen everything we wanted to?

I suggested that perhaps I might borrow her key ring, just to do a security check you know, for advice purposes you understand, can’t be too careful, can you, don’t worry about it, it’s all part of the service.

Guleed rolled her eyes, but I got the keys and Wanda got to stay at the end of the corridor where things were less likely to disturb her. I left Guleed with her and walked back to the door, carefully, with all my electronic devices switched off and my tray in the upright position.

After a build up like that, the old wooden door was bound to look a bit sinister. But even up close I wasn’t sensing anything unusual.

There’s a device that Nightingale calls a demon trap, a sort of magical IED but with added animal cruelty. The Faceless Man has made use of them in the past, often to deadly effect – just another in a long list of things that my Governor would like to have a word with him about. A demon trap can be set to have a number of effects ranging from dead to really wishing you were dead via spending time at the secure mental institution of your choice.

Nightingale has taught me the basics of demon trap detection – the magical equivalent of carefully sliding the blade of your knife into the ground and waiting to see if it goes ‘ting’.

The visual inspection divulged nothing, no circles or enclosed shapes incised into the surface of the wood, no disguised metal plates inlaid underneath. The lock itself, a heavy iron thing, revealed no intaglio or pattern when I brushed my fingertips across it.

But there it was . . . just at the cusp of sensation, a whiff of gunmetal and the strop strop strop of the straight razor against smooth leather. It was a signum I had come to recognise as belonging to the Faceless Man.

It felt dusty and airless, like an old garden shed. Certainly I wasn’t feeling anything that would explain Wanda’s obvious psychological aversion to opening the room. Perhaps it only worked on fae . . . perhaps that’s why Wanda had been employed in the first place. That part of my mind that is forever a total bastard wondered if we could recruit some fae and map out all the places that they didn’t want to go. In the interests of science and public safety.

The lock was the obvious seat for any defence so, after a moment to warn Guleed to stand clear, I sheared the hinges and, nipping up the corridor myself, knocked the door in with impello.

Normally when I do a forced entry like that, the door twists as it pivots around the lock, but this door just fell inward with a crash and a backwash of dust. When I gingerly advanced to find out why, I saw that the lock’s bolt had been cleanly sheared off level with the strike plate, with the end still inside the socket. It had already been forced – and not by me.

‘Is it safe to come down yet?’ called Guleed.

I told her to give us a minute while I had a look round. It wasn’t that I was worried about her coming in – I was suddenly more worried about Wanda the manageress doing a runner. I pulled on my evidence gloves and went inside – cautiously.

Frank Caffrey, fire investigation officer, former para and Folly liaison is very clear that when entering a room you think might be rigged, the first thing you don’t do is automatically reach out and flip the light switch.

As he points out, that’s got to be one of the cheapest and most reliable triggers an IED can have. ‘I mean, it’s even got its own power supply,’ he said. And he likes to point out that the Faceless Man may like his magical weapons, but he’s not so stupid as to rely on them alone.

You know . . . I used to be worried that they were going to assign me to undercover work in Operation Trident – I obviously didn’t know when I was well off.

It was another store room with metal frame variable-height shelving lining the walls from floor to ceiling. About half the shelf space was occupied – mostly those at waist height for easy access. There was a thin layer of dust over the shelves and the floor. It’s hard to tell with dust, but I’d spent enough time on the job with my mum to reckon a couple of months’ worth. On the shelf closest to the door was a row of standard seventy-five litre plastic storage boxes with red clip-down lids. Their contents were a collection of angular shadows visible through the semi-transparent sides. The dust around them had been disturbed and there were clear hand-prints on the edges of the lids.

Staying on the fallen door to avoid contaminating the floor any more than I had to, I carefully levered the lid off the nearest box and had a peek inside. It looked suspiciously like old hardback books with stiff cloth-covered covers. The topmost book had the rough green cover I associated with the limited editions published by Russell House Press – one of the Folly’s own publishing arms. I picked it up and flipped it open to the title page.

It was a 1912 reprint of Meric Casaubon’s A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and Some Spirits. And, yes, at the bottom Russell House Press. A second edition – obviously Casaubon had been popular amongst British wizards.

I was willing to bet real money that Jonathan Wild’s last ledger had once languished in one of these boxes. The Mary Engine too, not to mention the genuine wizard’s staff and the bloody tedious Victor Bartholomew book. Which begged the question why the Bartholomew had ended up on eBay and not the Casaubon. From a magical perspective they were both about as useful, although as cures for insomnia the Bartholomew had a slight edge.

Because the Casaubon was a second edition?

Carefully I checked the other books in the box. All of them were either second editions from the 1920s or the 30s or had significant damage to their covers or their interior pages. I was pleased to see that even back in the glory days of the Folly people left their mugs of tea on their magical textbooks.

At the bottom of the box I found part of a map that had been ripped down its centrefold – a 1:40,000 scale depiction of a place called Ootacamund, which turned out on later research to be a British Hill Station in Tamil Nadu. A Hill Station being a place where colonial administrators and the like could use altitude to avoid the oppressive Indian summer heat, since the sensible solution, i.e. abandoning colonialism and moving back to Surrey, obviously never occurred to them.

I considered checking one of the other boxes, but my mystic powers of precognition bestowed a vision upon me of a full forensic search with noddy suits and fingerprint powder and people taking their sunglasses off in a dramatic fashion.

I did stop on my way out to examine the lock a bit more carefully. Again I felt the razor strop of the Faceless Man’s signum and it was definitely centred on the point where the bolt was sheared right through.

A hypothesis was forming in my mind. If County Gard belonged to the Faceless Man, then The Chestnut Tree did too. Perhaps it was even an asset inherited from his predecessor, which meant that, possibly, this was his storeroom – these had been his things.

Which had been looted by Christina Chorley and Reynard Fossman.

Did they know who they’d stolen from?

He was bound to be a bit miffed . . . I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he didn’t seem the type to take that sort of thing with a light and forgiving heart. Which might explain why Aiden Burghley’s face got laminated to a tree and what the fucker had been doing in Phoebe Beaumont-Jones’ basement . . . looking for accomplices?

Presuming he wasn’t her dad.

Christina and Reynard – they’d taken the stuff that looked valuable – possibly over a period of weeks. Then one day the Faceless Man pops down to check on his booty, or maybe he had a burning desire to brush up on his basic thaumatology, and finds that the door is locked.

Let’s assume the key he’s got doesn’t work for some reason – he burns the lock, steps inside and finds half his stuff’s been jacked. So Action 1 for me – fingerprint team for the corridor and the room, because nobody wears gloves all the time.

Next the Faceless Man’s going to go ask Wanda the manageress just who she’s been letting into the storerooms, possibly using seducere to fog her memory, or maybe she’s a much better liar then we thought. So Action 2 – re-interview Wanda, this time under caution plus two, which leads us onto Action 3, trace the rest of The Chestnut Tree’s staff and interview them as well.

Rule of thumb for lowly constables – once you’re up to three actions it’s time to kick the buck upstairs.