The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?’ said the judge.

  The jury spokesman cleared his throat. I felt Alice’s fingernails digging into my palm once more, deeper now. The faces of the three defendants – immobile with a kind of surly stupidity through most of the trial – now registered the first stirrings of fear.

  ‘Yes, Your Honour, we have,’ said the jury spokesman.

  Juries don’t give reasons. Juries don’t have to give reasons. Juries just give verdicts.

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Guilty.’

  And juries have no say in sentencing. We all looked at the judge, a papery-faced old man who peered at us from under his wig and over his reading glasses as if he knew the secrets of our souls.

  ‘Involuntary manslaughter is a serious offence,’ intoned the judge, glowering at the court, his voice like thunder. ‘It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.’

  A cry of, ‘No!’ from the public gallery. It was a woman with a barbed-wire tattoo on her bare arms. She must be one of the boy’s mothers, I thought, because none of their fathers had been spotted for nearly twenty years.

  The judge rapped his gavel and demanded order or he would clear the court.

  ‘Public concern and the need for deterrence must be reflected in the sentence passed by the court,’ he continued. ‘But the Criminal Justice Act requires a court addressing seriousness to consider the offender’s culpability in committing the offence. And I accept the probability that the deceased was dead before he hit the ground due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage, making this a single punch manslaughter case.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ the youngest child, the boy – called Steve, like his dad – murmured to his mother, and she shushed him, clinging on to good manners even in this place, even now.

  It meant they would be home by Christmas, I thought, my stomach falling away.

  It meant the bastards would get away with it.

  It meant that it didn’t matter that they had kicked Steve Goddard’s head when he lay on the ground. It did not matter that they had urinated on his body and posted it on YouTube.

  None of that mattered because the judge had swallowed the defence’s evidence that the man who attacked three unarmed boys was dead before he hit the ground due to a pre-existing medical condition.

  Get the right brief and you can worm your way out of anything.

  ‘I am also obliged to accept the mitigating factor of self-defence, as the deceased was attempting to assault the defendants,’ said the judge. ‘I note you are all of good character. And I therefore sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’

  It was over.

  I looked at Alice Goddard’s face. She didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t understand why her husband was dead thirty years before his time. She did not understand what the judge had said or why the defendants were laughing while her two children were quietly weeping. I wanted to say something to them but there was nothing to say. I had no words to offer and no comfort to give.

  Alice Goddard let go of my hand. It was over for everybody apart from her and her two children. It would never be over for them.

  Alice was smiling, and it tore at my heart. A tight, terrible smile.

  ‘It’s all right, Max,’ she said. ‘Really. Nothing was going to bring my Steve back, was it?’

  She was anxious to make it clear that she did not blame me.

  I looked at the defendants. They knew me. I knew them. I had seen one of them weeping for his mother in the interview room. I saw another one of them wet his pants at the prospect of imprisonment. And I saw the other one empty-eyed and indifferent through the entire process, beyond recall, beyond hope.

  When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, the three young men had seemed very different.

  A coward. A weakling. And a bully.

  Now they were one again. Now they were a gang again. Yes, they were going down, but they would be home in six months. Taking a life would have no real impact on their own lives. It would no doubt give them a certain status in the cruel little world they lived in.

  The anger unfurled inside me and suddenly I was out of my seat and walking towards them. But the court bailiff blocked my path, his hands slightly raised to show me his meaty palms, but saying nothing and offering no threat if I dropped it right here.

  ‘Leave it, sir,’ he said.

  So I did the smart thing. I did nothing.

  He was a typical Old Bailey bailiff with a demeanour somewhere between a diplomat and a bouncer, and he looked at me sympathetically with the faintest hint of a smile – sad, not mocking – and I let the moment pass, choking down the sickness that came with the rage.

  And my face was hot with shame.

  The three youths in the dock smirked at me before they were taken down.

  I had seen that look before.

  Too many times.

  It was the look of someone who knows they just got away with murder.

  2

  Later that day we watched the man hang.

  We saw the film of his death on the big HDTV screen that’s on the wall of Major Incident Room One in West End Central, at first not sure what we were seeing, not even convinced it was real, still stunned by the fact that you can watch a man being executed online.

  It was early evening and we were standing at our workstations, ignoring the phones that were ringing all over MIR-1, as the man was helped onto the kitchen step stool and a noose was slipped round his neck.

  And the terrible exchange between the two men.

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

  ‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—’

  The voice of the first man muffled by some sort of mask. The voice of the second man choked with terror.

  ‘Who is he?’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.

  ‘IC4,’ said DC Edie Wren, running a hand through her red hair, her eyes not leaving the giant screen. IC4 meant the man – the one we could see, the one with the noose around his neck – was of South Asian descent. ‘Maybe forty years old. Unshaven. Jeans. Polo shirt. Lacoste.’

  ‘A Lacoste knock-off,’ I said. ‘The little crocodile’s looking in the wrong direction.’

  ‘Where is that place, Max?’ said Whitestone.

  I took a few steps closer to the screen. The film was sharp but the room was dark. In the shadows I could glimpse white tiles or bricks, stained green and yellow by time and the weather.

  I felt I had seen it before. It was some part of London that was just round the corner, and yet a hundred years away, and beyond the reach of memory. I took a step back.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘What are they doing to him?’ said Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene.

  Then the stool was kicked away and we did not speak as we watched the man hang, his body twisting and squirming in the air, and there was no sound but the strangled gurgling coming from his throat. When the hanging man began to soil himself the cameraman turned away and I caught glimpses – nothing more – of two or three figures in dark clothes, their faces covered in black masks, only their eyes showing, their backs pressed against those yellowing walls.

  ‘There’s three or four of them,’ I said. ‘Maybe more. Wearing ski masks. No, not ski masks – they’re tactical Nomex face masks, or something similar.’ A pause. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  The man’s face began to change colour as the life was strangled out of him. Then he was still and it ended. A film lasting ten minutes and twenty-one seconds that was suddenly trending all over the world.

  ‘You seen this hashtag?’ Edie said, hunched over her laptop. ‘It’s everywhere: #bringitback.’

  ‘Bring what back?’ said TDC Greene.

  ‘Play it again,’ said Whitestone. ‘Answer the phones, Billy. Find out where the hashtag comes from, Edie.’


  Edie began tapping on her keyboard.

  ‘Does that look like a hate crime to you, Max?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘It looks like a lynching,’ I said. ‘So – yes, maybe.’

  ‘Here,’ Edie said, and then a panel appeared in a corner of the big screen.

  There was a black-and-white picture of a smiling rabbit-faced man from the middle of the last century. The account was called @AlbertPierrepointUK. No message. Just the hashtag – #bringitback – and a link to the film.

  ‘It’s got just under twenty-five thousand followers,’ Edie said. ‘No – over seventy-eight thousand followers. Wait—’ She leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘Wow, popular guy, this Albert Pierrepoint. Why is the name so familiar?’

  ‘Albert Pierrepoint was the most famous hangman this country ever had,’ I said. ‘He carried out more than four hundred executions, including a lot of the Nazis in Nuremberg.’

  ‘Metcall have had a 999,’ Billy said, putting down the phone. ‘From a woman who recognises the victim.’ He looked up at the screen and winced at the man once more locked in the final throes of agony. ‘The woman’s a Fatima Irani from Bethnal Green. The man is Mahmud Irani. Her husband.’

  ‘How do you spell his name?’ Whitestone said. ‘Got a DOB? Got a description of what he was wearing?’

  Greene read from his notes. Then he looked up at the screen.

  ‘She said her husband was wearing jeans and one of those shirts with the little crocodile,’ he said, and stooped to retch into a wastepaper basket. It took him a moment to recover. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Play it again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Have a drink of water, Billy. Are you looking on the PNC, Edie?’

  Edie Wren was running the name of Mahmud Irani through the Police National Computer.

  ‘He’s been away,’ she said, meaning the man had done time. ‘Did six years of a twelve-year sentence. He was part of the Hackney grooming gang. They targeted girls as young as eleven. A lot of the girls – but not all of them – were in care. Some of the gang got life. This Mahmud Irani was found guilty of trafficking – he’s a taxi driver. He was a taxi driver. He got off relatively lightly.’

  We watched him hang for the third time.

  ‘Maybe not that lightly,’ I said. ‘If this is connected.’

  A young Chinese man appeared in the doorway of MIR-1. He was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, jointly funded by the Home Office to provide a national response to the most serious crimes on the Internet.

  ‘We’re looking for Albert Pierrepoint,’ he told Whitestone, nodding at the big screen. ‘He – they – seem to be using exactly the same tech as terrorists, pornographers and whistle blowers. The account is running through an anonymiser designed to hide all digital footprints. But it’s not Tor or 12P. It’s something we have never seen before. The site’s under a lot of pressure – political, media, users, concerned parents – to take the film down in the name of decency, but we’ve persuaded them to leave it up there while we try to trace the sender’s IP address. Off the record, of course.’

  ‘Thanks, Colin,’ Whitestone said, glancing at her phone. ‘Metcall tell us we’ve got a body. In the middle of Hyde Park. No positive ID yet.’ She looked at the screen and then at me. ‘But the responding officer says the deceased is wearing one of those shirts with the little crocodile.’

  ‘Hyde Park?’ I said. ‘The body was found in the actual park?’ I looked up at the screen, at the subterranean space with the stained white tiles. ‘They didn’t do this in Hyde Park.’

  I thought of the underground car parks of the big hotels on Park Lane, running down the east side of Hyde Park. But none of them looked anything like the room where they strung up Mahmud Irani. That place was from some other century.

  In the panel of the TV screen we could see that @AlbertPierrepointUK had gone viral.

  TRENDS

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  ‘I think somebody just brought back the death penalty,’ I said.

  Edie pressed play and on the screen Mahmud Irani was about to hang again.

  ‘But who’d want to do that to him?’ said the new boy, TDC Greene, and I remembered that Hackney grooming gang and the thought came unbidden as I headed for the door.

  Who the hell wouldn’t?

  3

  There was something strangely peaceful about standing in the middle of Hyde Park on a warm summer night, nothing moving out here but the Specialist Search Team doing their fingertip search off in the darkness, and the CSIs quietly getting kitted up as DCI Whitestone and I contemplated the corpse.

  You could tell it was him.

  There was enough moonlight to show the crocodile on his polo shirt was still facing in the wrong direction and what looked like severe burn marks around his neck.

  So even before the divisional surgeon had arrived to officially pronounce death, and long before his next of kin had the chance to formally identify the body in the morgue, we knew the identity of the body lying under the trees of Hyde Park.

  ‘Mahmud Irani,’ Whitestone said quietly.

  ‘So it’s not a hate crime,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t killed because of his race or religion.’

  ‘All murder is a hate crime. Do you know what that gang did to those girls? They branded them, Max. Can you believe that grown men would do that to children?’ She shook her head. ‘Some people deserve to be hated.’

  I looked away from the dead man and inhaled clean air. Hyde Park stretched on forever. Londoners always complain about how cramped and crowded their city is, but Henry VIII used to hunt wild boar right here. Even today, London was still a city with fields. The white lights of the West End burned bright from far away, an orange glow rising high above them, like the sun coming up on another planet.

  Whitestone stared silently at the corpse.

  She was a small, fair-haired woman in glasses, neither young nor old, and if you saw her on the train you would not think that she was one of the most experienced homicide detectives in London. I would not speak again until she spoke to me first, for these were the crucial minutes when the Senior Investigating Officer takes a look at the pristine scene, the body exactly where it had been found, letting it all sink in, learning what she can before we start filming, photographing and bagging evidence. Those last moments when the scene is untouched.

  Even the blue lights of our response vehicles seemed very distant, as though they were waiting for a sign from the SIO; a large circle of blue lights in the darkness of the massive park, sealing us off from the outside world. I could see DC Edie Wren and TDC Billy Greene interviewing the Romanian men who had discovered the body while preparing for an illegal barbecue.

  ‘OK,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  I raised a hand to the Crime Scene Manager and on her word the CSIs moved. I saw that our POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape now ran down the length of Park Lane and was patrolled every twenty metres or so by uniformed officers.

  ‘You’ve locked down all of Hyde Park?’ I said.

  ‘Because I can always bring the perimeter in later,’ Whitestone said quietly, her eyes not leaving the body. ‘But I can’t extend it later. Better to make the crime scene too big than too small. Let’s take a closer look.’

  We wore blue nitrile gloves and white face masks and under the plastic baggies over our shoes we stood on forensic stepping plates that were invisible to the naked eye.

  Whitestone and I both carried a small stack of the stepping plates – transparent, lightweight – and we carefully placed them on the grass before us as we created an uncontaminated pathway to the body. We crouched down either side of Mahmud Irani.

  ‘First hanging?’ Whitestone said.

  I nodded.

  She pointed with a gloved index finger at the livid, lopsided markings around his neck.

  ‘You only get that mark from
hanging,’ she said. ‘Any other ligature strangulation will leave horizontal marks.’

  ‘But this is diagonal,’ I said. ‘It runs from low on the neck on one side to just below the ear on the other.’

  Whitestone nodded.

  ‘Because the rope – or belt, or bed sheet, or wire, or whatever it is – angles towards the knot. See how deep it is? He was strangled by his own body weight. The rope compresses the carotid arteries, turns off the supply of blood to the brain. In judicial hangings, they used to snap the second cervical vertebra – the hangman’s fracture, they call it. More humane. These guys didn’t bother with any of that. They just strung him up. But hangings always look like this – the angled strangulation mark. What’s unusual about this one is that it’s not a suicide.’ She stood up. ‘Every hanging I ever saw until tonight – and I’ve had my share – was either deliberate or accidental suicide.’

  ‘Accidental suicide?’

  ‘Autoerotic asphyxia. You know. Sex games that kill you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It tends to be a male pastime, like doing DIY or watching cricket. Women seem less keen on autoerotic asphyxia. But strangulation apparently heightens the intensity of orgasm. And what could possibly go wrong?’ She nodded at the body. ‘What’s unique about Mahmud Irani is that his hanging was not for the purposes of masturbation or ending his life. It was murder. Who uses hanging to murder someone?’

  I thought about it.

  ‘Somebody who wants revenge?’

  ‘No – somebody who wants justice.’ Her eyes scanned the park. ‘This is not the killing ground, is it? He didn’t die here.’

  I thought of the white-tiled room where no light seemed to shine. And I thought of the underground car parks that were in this area, not just by Hyde Park but also under the grand hotels and the fancy car dealerships of Park Lane. None of them, as far as I knew, looked even remotely like the room in the film, which looked like somewhere that should have been torn down a hundred years ago.

  ‘So they chose to move him from the kill site to the dumping ground,’ I said. ‘Why would they do that?’