The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Blind?’ she said. ‘He’s blind?’

  The doctor was saying something about the benefits of counselling but Pat Whitestone wasn’t listening. She was gone, calling her son’s name, out of the waiting room and into the corridor.

  ‘Just! Just! Just!’

  ‘You can’t—’ a nurse said at their station.

  ‘He’s resting after the operation,’ said another nurse outside her son’s room. ‘You mustn’t—’

  But she must and she did.

  I followed her.

  The room was in darkness and so was her boy, still unconscious from the general anaesthetic. There were white bandages over his eyes that covered half his face.

  ‘My beautiful son,’ Pat Whitestone said, sinking to her knees beside the bed, and then the tears came, hopeless tears that seemed as if they would never stop.

  ‘I’m here now,’ she said.

  I stood by her side but I did not touch her and I did not speak.

  And I wished there was a father and grandparents and siblings in this room to help her carry a weight that she should never have to carry alone. But there was only me.

  ‘Those bastards,’ she said. ‘Those fucking bastards.’

  She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth and her mouth tightened with a rage and a violence that I had never seen in her before. And as I watched her she gasped, as if she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and lifted her face, her eyes still screwed tight, as if she could actually see the bastards who had done this to her son, as if she could see their faces, as if she could see them getting what they deserved.

  As if – and the thought came unbidden – she could see them screaming for mercy as they swung from the end of a rope.

  12

  When I got to 27 Savile Row in the morning I was hoping to see Pat’s familiar figure running the show up in MIR-1, but she was clearly still at the hospital with her son.

  TDC Billy Greene was putting a photograph of Hector Welles on the whitewall that he must have downloaded from Welles’ company’s website – one of those official portraits that big corporations take of their staff, Welles smiling with shrewd, bright-eyed confidence, as though your money would be safe with him.

  It sat next to the police mugshot of Mahmud Irani.

  Colin Cho and a couple of his people from the Police Central e-crime Unit were hunkered down around a laptop. Dr Joe was eating a frozen yogurt as he contemplated the giant map of London that covered one wall. And the voice analyst – Tara Jones – was at a workstation, replaying the one line of dialogue from the hanging of Hector Welles, repeatedly stopping and starting the film as her black hair swung across her face and she pushed it away.

  But no DCI Whitestone.

  ‘No word from the boss?’ I said.

  Billy shook his head. ‘Should I try to contact her?’

  I thought of the blinded boy in his hospital bed.

  ‘Leave her,’ I said.

  I was acting SIO now.

  ‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution? Do you know – do you know – do you know?’

  The graph on her laptop jumped and fell in time to the words.

  ‘How’s it going?’ I said, but Tara Jones ignored me, and continued to pore over that solitary line of dialogue.

  ‘Do you know – do you know – do you know?’

  Still looking sickened from his viewing of Hector Welles, our history man, Professor Hitchens, stood before the giant map of the city.

  ‘So the spot where Hector Welles’ body was discovered,’ Dr Joe asked him. ‘That was Tyburn?’

  ‘As far as we can ascertain,’ said Hitchens. ‘But it’s not quite so simple. DC Wolfe was correct – this was Tyburn. But the reason Tyburn’s exact location is disputed is because Tyburn’s Triple Tree was portable.’ Hitchens glanced at me. ‘Tyburn was certainly here – though the gallows was probably in twenty different places over the course of the centuries. But the area seems to have deep significance for the – what’s the word? – the perps.’

  ‘And what did they do?’ Edie said. ‘Back in the day. They just assembled their moveable gallows like an IKEA flat-pack and then strung them up?’

  ‘The condemned stood on the back of a horse-drawn cart,’ Hitchens said. ‘The rope was attached around their neck to the cross-beam of the Tyburn tree. The cart drove off and death was by strangulation rather than broken neck. The condemned were mostly drawn from the ranks of the poor, but Samuel Pepys saw one of his closest friends – a gentleman – hanged at Tyburn. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t pretty. And it wasn’t meant to be.’

  ‘So if we want to stake out the area,’ I said, ‘what counts as Tyburn?’

  Hitchens traced a large area on the map that seemed to cover Hyde Park and a hefty chunk of the West End.

  ‘The area just north of Marble Arch probably saw most of the fifty thousand executions. But all roads in this area lead to Tyburn. Until the eighteenth century, Park Lane was called Tyburn Lane and Oxford Street was called Tyburn Road.’

  ‘So they could dump a body anywhere from Hyde Park Corner to Oxford Street and still call it Tyburn?’ I said.

  Professor Hitchens shrugged. ‘Theoretically,’ he said.

  ‘You really think they’d come back here with every plain clothes copper in the Met looking for them?’ Edie asked me.

  I looked at Dr Joe for the answer.

  ‘I think they’ll find the temptation to stick to their ritual almost impossible to resist,’ he said. ‘If they kill again.’

  ‘And you think they will, Dr Joe?’

  ‘I don’t think they can stop themselves. I think they have set themselves the task of punishing all the wicked in the world.’

  ‘And who are they, Dr Joe? What kind of men are we after?’

  ‘They are men who clearly believe that justice has been thwarted. They’re obsessive about the judicial process – or at least their version of the judicial process. The Albert Pierrepoint obsession, the kangaroo court, the reading of charges. I would guess they have some experience of the law and they didn’t much like it.’

  I waited for him to say what we were both thinking. But he just finished his frozen yogurt, because it would have sounded like blasphemy in here. So I said it for him.

  ‘They could be cops,’ I said.

  ‘Possible,’ said Dr Joe.

  I turned to the woman with the swinging hair. She had her back to me.

  ‘How we doing on the voice recognition, Tara?’

  She ignored me, and stood up to pitch an empty coffee cup into a wastepaper bin. She was a tall woman in flat shoes. One of those tall women who are never really comfortable with their height. Leggy. Slim. At first I had thought she was shy or self-contained. Now she just seemed indifferent to the people in this office. Especially me. She sat down and played the same piece of tape.

  ‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’

  I felt a surge of irritation.

  ‘Max?’ Edie said. ‘I don’t think that you were ever properly introduced. Tara is—’

  And Tara Jones turned and looked up at me, as if seeing me for the first time as she pushed back her swinging black hair that fell across her pale and serious fabulous face.

  And I finally realised that Tara Jones was deaf.

  ‘This is what I’ve found,’ she said. ‘It is the same voice on both the Mahmud Irani and the Hector Welles tape. The voice has the glottal stops of a London or southeast England accent, but there are distinct signs of modification – think of it as an Estuary accent that has learned Received Pronunciation. In other words, the subject is not speaking with the voice that he grew up with. Either he has had elocution lessons or, more likely, moved to a social strata beyond the environment of his parents. It happens a lot. For most people, a university education will do it.’

  And I thought about her own voice.

  There was nothing wrong with it. But now I knew of her deafness it was as
if she was saying the words but not hearing them.

  ‘And there’s something else,’ she said. ‘There is an unusual cadence to some of his sentences, as if there was a foreign language spoken in his home. And he can speak it too.’

  I was impressed.

  ‘And you know all that from one sentence?’ I said.

  I smiled at her.

  She didn’t smile back.

  ‘Voice biometrics – the digital analysis of speech patterns – is all done by software,’ Tara Jones said. She gave me a cool look. ‘So I think you’ll find that my deafness is no impediment to my job.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, my face flushing with shame.

  The door to MIR-1 opened and DCI Whitestone walked in. She seemed ten years older and ten pounds thinner than when I had seen her last night. She looked shattered. She stared at us and we stared back.

  The silence was broken by Billy Greene.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘We’ve got another one!’

  Then it was on the big screen.

  A young man with tightly cropped hair was being led into that room where the sun did not reach, as the dark figures hovered in the background pinning something to the white brickwork stained green with the ages.

  ‘There’s no time-and-date stamp,’ Edie said.

  I turned to Colin Cho.

  ‘Is this live?’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, Max.’

  ‘Is it live?’ I shouted.

  ‘I don’t fucking know, Max!’ Colin shouted back. ‘Give us a chance!’

  The PCeU team desperately huddled around a single laptop. The phones all began to ring at once because they were about to reach the magic number. Three is the magic number.

  The Hanging Club were about to become serial killers.

  I looked at DCI Whitestone for guidance. But she had slumped down into a workstation as if she was tired beyond belief, as if she had not slept for days.

  And her eyes never left the big screen.

  ‘Marble Arch, Edie,’ I said. ‘Go with her, Billy. I’ll call CTC and get some bodies down there in case they’re dumb enough to dump the body in the same place.’

  CTC – also known as SO15 – is Counter Terrorism Command, a special operations branch in the Met. They have over a thousand surveillance officers at their call. Before I came to 27 Savile Row, I had been one of them.

  I looked at Whitestone to see that I had made the right move. But she was still staring at the screen.

  Edie Wren and Billy Greene went out of the door just as up on the big screen the noose was placed around the young man’s head.

  ‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’

  He did not reply.

  He blinked back tears and I saw the track marks of the long-term heroin addict on his arms.

  ‘I wonder who he killed?’ Whitestone said, her voice small and far away, as if she was talking to herself.

  ‘It appears to be live,’ Colin Cho said. ‘Thank you all for your patience.’

  There were photographs on the white-brick walls that had been stained green by time.

  Two photographs.

  A smiling soldier, in black and white, a British soldier of the war against Nazi Germany.

  And a colour photograph of the same man, some sixty years later, an old man now, leaning back in an armchair and grinning with a modest Christmas tree behind him.

  ‘According to the online community,’ Colin Cho said, ‘the old gentleman is Bert Page, a Normandy veteran and a retired Fleet Street printer, who is still in a coma after being mugged by Darren Donovan, a heroin addict.’ A pause. ‘And Metcall has received numerous confirmations that the young man in these images is Darren Donovan . . .’

  ‘So – if that’s true – they’re not just hanging murderers now,’ Dr Joe said.

  ‘And it was never only murderers that were hanged at Tyburn,’ Professor Hitchens said. ‘In the eighteenth century there were two hundred offences punishable with death in this country. Vagrancy. Theft. Sacrilege. Being in the company of gypsies for one month . . . They hanged seven-year-old children who stole a letter, and they hanged highwaymen, and they hanged the men who executed Charles I.’

  ‘I want these identities confirmed,’ I said. ‘The old man in the photos and the young man they’re hanging. I’m not taking the word of the online mob.’ But, deep in my bones, I already believed it. Darren Donovan, a drug addict, had attacked and robbed an elderly man for a few coins. And now he was going to pay for his crime. With his life.

  ‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’

  This was the most leisurely hanging.

  Darren Donovan did not plead for mercy as Mahmud Irani had pleaded for mercy.

  Darren Donovan did not fight for his life as Hector Welles had fought for his life.

  He was pathetically passive as he was helped up onto the kitchen stool. He meekly inclined his head as the noose was placed around his neck. The only sign of his abject terror was the way he could not stop shaking.

  And then there was a noise.

  A single sound just before they kicked the stool away.

  I looked at Tara Jones. And I saw the screen before her, with the sudden spike at that single sound.

  ‘What was that, Pat?’ I said. ‘A name? Did somebody say a name?’

  Whitestone gave no sign she had heard me.

  I looked at Tara Jones.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the voice analyst said. ‘But I can work with it.’

  And then they hanged him.

  ‘Dear God,’ Dr Joe said, and he turned his face away.

  But the rest of us in MIR-1 watched as the stool flew away and Darren Donovan’s legs kicked out at eternity, his tongue lolling, his eyes bulging in his head and the dark stain spreading on the crotch of his ragged jeans.

  And when the life had been strangled out of him, the camera cut away to the smiling face of a young soldier who was off to storm the beaches of Normandy.

  I looked at Whitestone as she stared at the screen, her face a mask of indifference, watching it all with a terrible calm, as if some people deserve to die.

  13

  Mrs Murphy was dozing on the sofa with Stan on her lap when I got home.

  Our loft was silent because Mrs Murphy always watched TV with the sound turned down when Scout was sleeping. As I kicked off my shoes and padded to Scout’s room, Stan half-opened his eyes, yawned widely and snuggled back down.

  It was another night when the heat would not quit and Scout had kicked off the single sheet that covered her. She stirred as I pulled it back up.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Sleep now, angel, it’s late.’

  ‘But Jackson went to work.’

  ‘They have to work at night in the market.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  She buried her sleepy face in the pillow and it made me smile.

  ‘You enjoying your summer holiday?’

  ‘It lasts forever.’

  I laughed.

  ‘It feels that way when you’re little. The bigger you get, the faster the time goes. Sleep now, angel.’

  ‘And you too.’

  ‘I will.’

  But after Mrs Murphy had gone home, I sat in the window, looking at the blaze of Smithfield meat market. Dozens of white-coated porters were unloading vans and trucks, but I couldn’t see Jackson.

  At midnight the five-ton clock bell of St Paul’s Cathedral – Great Tom, they call it – struck the hour and I called Edie. SO15 had sent a dozen surveillance officers to Marble Arch.

  ‘I can’t see the others,’ Edie said. ‘But then I guess that’s the point.’ I could feel her frustration. ‘Do you really think they’re going to leave a third body here, Max?’

  ‘It feels like a long shot because I don’t see how they can do it without getting collared. They must know we’ll be waiting for them. But at the same time, I don’t see how the crazy bastards can re
sist it.’

  I told Edie to go home.

  My old colleagues at SO15 would be out there all night. They would be the homeless man sleeping in Hyde Park, and they would be the courting couple snogging in the doorway of a closed department store, and they would be the late-night dog walker and they would be the dark figures sitting unnoticed in parked cars.

  And they would be waiting.

  I turned off the lights and was about to go to bed when I saw my MacBook Air on the kitchen table, exactly where I had left it. But the laptop was closed now and I was sure I had left it open. Stan stirred in his basket as I powered up.

  I went on Safari and hit Show History.

  And it wasn’t my history.

  Last visited today

  The Hanging Club – Google search

  @AlbertPierrepointUK – Twitter

  Mahmud Irani – YouTube

  Hector Welles – YouTube

  Tyburn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  The Hanging Club – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Albert Pierrepoint – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Bringing Back the Death Penalty – Daily Mail Online

  ‘Let ’em dangle!’ – Sun Online

  Public executions are back – Guardian

  @albertpierrepoint – Twitter

  Darren Donovan – YouTube

  Darren Donovan – YouTube

  Darren Donovan – YouTube

  Darren Donovan – YouTube

  Darren Donovan – YouTube

  Vigilantes Hang Third Man – Daily Telegraph – Sunday Telegraph – Telegraph Online

  There was more. Much more. Reams of the stuff. I glanced towards the big windows where the lights of Smithfield shone. I had told my old friend that he could use my laptop whenever he needed it. It looked as though he had spent all day on it, reading about just one thing.

  I closed the laptop and went to bed. But when sleep came it seemed to abruptly jerk just out of reach, jolting me awake, and I spent hours trying to get comfortable, trying to empty my mind, trying too hard to fall asleep. I must have dropped off at some point because in the light period of sleep, the last part of sleep, when dreams come in the shallows, I found myself waking from a dream of Marble Arch in the darkness and slipping from my bed and walking to the window.