The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  ‘I do appreciate how much you’ve suffered,’ I said. ‘But this is a murder investigation and we are obliged to make enquiries.’

  I turned to her husband.

  ‘Did you have any contact with Mahmud Irani after he was sentenced?’ I said.

  But Jean Wilder spoke for him.

  ‘Barry didn’t do it,’ she said. ‘When was it? He was here. He’s here every night. We all are. The three of us. Where would we go? Why would we want the neighbours and people we don’t even know staring at us – pointing at us – looking at Sofi as if she was less than human. Yes, my husband said those things. Screamed those things at the top of his voice. No doubt he meant it at the time. Because when they were in the dock, they were laughing at us. Those stinking Paki bastards who wrecked our lives.’

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  But she would not let it go.

  ‘You say you have a daughter,’ she said, as if there was the possibility that I might be lying. ‘What would you say if they treated your daughter like a sex toy and then they laughed at you?’

  She was very close to me now. I could smell the unfiltered Camels and the Jimmy Choo and the Juicy Fruit.

  ‘I’ve had no contact with the man,’ Barry Wilder said quietly. No doubt he had been a violent youth when he was running riot at the football, but I could see no violence in the man now, only a bottomless sadness, and a grief that was never-ending.

  He looked at the floor and washed his hands with each other.

  ‘I said those things, yes, I did say them, I don’t deny it, but I didn’t see the man since the trial, not until they showed that film on the Internet.’ At last he looked me in the eyes. ‘The film of him being hung,’ he said.

  We stared at each other in silence.

  And then I thanked him and stood up.

  Jean Wilder followed us to the door.

  ‘You useless bastards!’ she said. ‘You tiptoe around these gangs because you’re terrified of looking racist.’

  I turned to look at her.

  ‘Mrs Wilder, I don’t tiptoe around anyone,’ I said quietly. ‘I was not a part of the investigation into Mahmud Irani and the Hackney grooming gang that abused your daughter and neither was DC Wren here. Those men were criminals and they got what they deserved.’

  She pushed her face close to mine. Too many cigarettes, I thought. And too much Jimmy Choo.

  ‘She could have loved someone,’ she said. ‘My Sofi. And she could have gone to college and she could have had a normal life, but that’s all gone now.’

  I opened the door. Jean Wilder reached across me and closed it. She had not finished with us yet.

  ‘Do you know what they did to her?’ she said ‘To all those girls? You think you know – because you skimmed some report or you caught it on the news. But you don’t know. They flattered these children, and gave them attention, then filled them with booze and drugs and took them to rooms where men were waiting. Dozens of the leering, stinking bastards. They gang-raped these children. They filmed them. They invited their friends round. All their stinking Paki cousins and Paki brothers. They branded them.’ A rage and grief swelled up inside her and it was no different from vomit. She choked it back down. ‘They put cigarettes out on their bodies and laughed about it. They fucking laughed. My daughter – my little girl – my baby – has cigarette burns on her breasts and buttocks—’

  Barry Wilder roared.

  ‘ENOUGH!’

  Jean Wilder’s eyes were shining as she watched her husband lumber towards us. She placed a hand on her husband’s arm, and patted it once.

  ‘He had nothing to do with it,’ she said, suddenly very tired. ‘But you know what? I wish he did!’

  I gently opened the door.

  And this time she let me.

  ‘And what would you do, Detective?’ she said, laughing at my eagerness to get out of that broken-hearted home. ‘If it was your daughter – in those rooms – with those men – what would you do about it?’

  I said nothing.

  I couldn’t look at her.

  She followed us to the door.

  ‘You catch them?’ she said. ‘The men that hanged Mahmud Irani? Give them a medal.’

  We were walking to the car when I looked up and saw the face of the girl at the window. Sofi. The curtain closed and she was gone. Edie and I didn’t speak until we were back in the car.

  ‘You didn’t answer her question,’ Edie said. ‘What would you do if it was Scout, Max?’

  ‘Oh, give me a break, Edie.’

  We both knew what I would do.

  6

  There is a hanging tree in the Black Museum.

  It is a horizontal wooden triangle supported by three legs and it rests in a quiet corner of what is officially known as the Crime Museum. It is draped with perhaps two dozen hangman’s nooses, all individually labelled with the name of the man or woman they executed.

  ‘It’s a replica of the triple-tree at Tyburn,’ said Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum. ‘The gallows was portable, and that’s one of the reasons that nobody can ever agree about where Tyburn actually stood, although they were hanging people there for centuries.’ He sipped from a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘They moved it about, see.’

  I touched one of the nooses.

  It was just four thin strands of rope running through a metal eyelet to form the noose. Other ropes were much thicker, twice the size, strands of heavy rope woven together and running through a big brass thimble to form the noose.

  ‘The thin ones date from the eighteenth century,’ Sergeant Caine said. ‘The thicker ones are more modern. They go all the way to 1969, when the death penalty was abolished in this country.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of ropes in here, John. I never noticed before.’

  ‘We’ve hanged a lot of people in this country. You could fill a stadium with the people they hanged at Tyburn alone. Some of these nooses date back to 1810 when there were 222 offences that were punishable by hanging, including robbing a rabbit warren and shoplifting.’

  ‘But why would anyone use hanging to murder someone?’ I said, touching one of the nooses as if it would reveal the answer. ‘Why not just shoot them or stab them?’

  ‘Because they want revenge,’ said Sergeant John Caine. ‘Let me show you something.’

  It was a battered black leather suitcase. Inside was a length of rope, a leg strap and a hood that had once been white but was now yellow with age, folded as neatly as a handkerchief.

  ‘This is Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase,’ John Caine said. ‘People misunderstand Pierrepoint. They forget how important he was to this country. He didn’t simply represent punishment. He represented justice – right up until capital punishment started being seen as wicked and cruel and not very nice. But before that, Pierrepoint was a national hero. Who do you think hanged all those Nazi war criminals after the Second World War? Old Albert went to Germany twenty-five times in four years and strung up over two hundred Nazis. Not that he enjoyed it much, because they were making him do job lots – a dozen or so at a time. Old Albert was a bit of a perfectionist, with a lot of professional pride in his work.’ He had a sip of his tea. ‘The people who killed this child abuser – they use a picture of Pierrepoint online, don’t they?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So they want justice,’ I said. ‘They want revenge.’

  John gently closed Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase. ‘And what’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’ he said.

  My phone began to vibrate. EDIE WREN CALLING, said the display. Her voice was tight with adrenaline.

  ‘We’ve got another hanging,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it.’

  ‘I’ll be back in the office in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch it then.’

  ‘Max,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it now.’ Edie Wren took a breath. ‘This one is live.’

  We watched the second man hang on John Caine’s computer.

  At first
it looked like exactly the same set-up with the camera aimed up at a terrified man standing on some kind of stool as the same voice asked the same question.

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

  But the picture was far sharper, and there was a date and time stamp running in the bottom right-hand corner, as if they wanted the world to know that this public execution was going out live.

  It was the same room. You could see the walls more clearly this time, and they seemed to be rotting with age, brickwork that was once white crumbling to yellow and green and brown.

  ‘Where’s that look like, John?’

  We leaned in closer. I heard John Caine quietly curse.

  ‘I feel like I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t remember.’

  The condemned man on the stool was babbling with terror. There was a rope being placed around his neck and it snaked off out of shot to the ceiling. He was a much younger man than Mahmud Irani, and dressed in a suit and tie. And white.

  ‘Do you know—’

  And then suddenly it all went wrong. The man in the suit was half jumping, half falling from the stool, and the noose could not have been secured to the ceiling because although it was around his neck it didn’t stop him falling from the stool and then the camera was dropped and there was nothing to see and only the sounds of a furious struggle and the soft thud of punches thrown into flesh and bone and the weeping of a man who was suddenly aware that there was no escape.

  As the camera was picked up, I saw some dark figures taking their places against a wall, standing like masked sentries under a single 8 x 10 inch photograph that had been attached to the wall of a smiling boy, perhaps eleven years old, wearing school uniform as he posed happily for the photographer.

  I looked at the boy’s smile and I knew with total certainty that the man being forced onto the back of the stool had somehow killed him.

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

  Someone was kicking at the stool. The man flapped his arms and I saw that his hands were not tied. But the noose was still around his neck and now it was secured to the ceiling.

  ‘There’s four of them,’ John Caine said. ‘At least. Four that I can see. Black tracksuits – I think I saw a Nike logo. They’re all wearing tactical Nomex face masks – that’s what those masks are. The one who held the camera is the one who did the heavy lifting when the victim tried to do a bunk. A very big geezer. Can’t see much of the others.’

  The man on the hanging stool screamed once.

  ‘No!’

  ‘But who is he?’ John Caine said. ‘And who’s the kid?’

  The man in the suit hung.

  With his hands unbound, he fought against the rope tightening around his neck more fiercely than Mahmud Irani had fought it, he clawed at his neck, he ripped and tore at it, he lashed wildly with his legs and he tried to scream in protest, although no sound was possible other than the terrible noise that a man makes when he is being strangled to death. But he fought more fiercely and so it was over more quickly.

  The man stopped kicking. The screen froze, one spot of fresh blood on the eye of the lens.

  ‘Why don’t they just stab him in the eye?’ I said, getting out my mobile phone.

  ‘Because that would look like murder,’ John Caine said. ‘And – I’m just guessing here – they think that murder is too good for him.’

  I watched the digital world react.

  #bring it back

  #bring it back

  #bring it back

  #bring it back

  #bring it back

  ‘You want me to drive you to West End Central?’ John Caine said.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But it’s faster to run.’

  He was still staring at the screen.

  ‘Where is that place?’ he said, as if he should know.

  7

  I ran all the way to 27 Savile Row.

  It was early in the evening but the heat was sticking to the city and I was soaked in sweat by the time I climbed the stairs to the top floor of West End Central. Major Incident Room One was already crowded.

  DCI Whitestone was deep in conversation with our boss, DCS Swire, the Chief Super, as the two women stood before the giant TV screen, watching the man in the suit and tie hang one more time.

  I realised with a jolt that they seemed relieved.

  ‘But are we sure?’ DCS Swire was saying in her hushed Margaret Thatcher voice. ‘Are we absolutely sure, Pat?

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘The victim is definitely an IC1.’

  IC stands for identity codes and it is the system our people use to describe ethnicity. IC1 meant the man who had just been hanged was a white man of North European stock.

  Mahmud Irani had been an IC4.

  ‘Good,’ said the Chief Super. ‘Then whatever the motive – it’s not race. Thank God for that!’

  Edie Wren was furiously pounding her laptop as she conducted a conversation with Colin Cho of the Police Central e-crime Unit. TDC Billy Greene was on the phone fending off a reporter who had somehow been put through from the switchboard. And there was a shockingly attractive young woman I had never seen before who had her laptop plugged into one of the MIR-1 workstations. She was watching the same segment of the new film over and over again.

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

  She had a long pale face, very serious, and the kind of hair that doesn’t move so much as swing. When she leaned forward to stare at the screen her hair swung forward, like a long black veil falling over her serious face, and she pushed it back, biting at her lip with concentration.

  ‘DC Wolfe,’ I introduced myself to her. ‘Are you running some kind of voice analysis on that dialogue?

  But she just glanced at me for a second and then turned back to the screens, pushing back the long black veil of hair, a glint of gold on the third finger of her left hand. So that was the end of that conversation.

  Edie Wren looked up from her workstation. On the screen before her I could see the online traffic reacting to the second hanging.

  United Kingdom Trends

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  #bringitback

  ‘It feels like it never went away,’ Edie said.

  ‘Who is she?’ I said, nodding towards the woman with the swinging hair.

  ‘Tara Jones. Speech analyst. Voice biometrics, they call it.’

  ‘Is she any good?’

  Edie shrugged. ‘Tara’s meant to be the best. But she hasn’t given us anything yet.’

  Then a mid-Atlantic voice called me.

  ‘Max? Come and have a look at this.’

  Dr Joe Stephen, a forensic psychologist from King’s College London, was at a workstation with someone else I didn’t recognise, a bald but bearded middle-aged man with a sweat patch in the shape of Australia on the back of his corduroy jacket. They were also watching the hanging. And I saw that the man with Dr Joe was not middle-aged at all. Beyond the bald head and the beard he was perhaps only thirty but there was something prematurely aged about him. His head was remarkable – so oval that it looked like a rugby ball impersonating a hard-boiled egg.

  ‘Murder by hanging is almost unknown, isn’t it?’ the strange young man said.

  Dr Joe nodded. ‘But the unsubs – sorry, the unidentified subjects – don’t think of it as murder.’ He had an American accent softened and smoothed by half a lifetime in London. ‘They clearly believe they are carrying out the death penalty for what they consider a capital crime.’

  The young man nodded thoughtfully.

  ‘Capital from the Latin capitalis, of course,’ he said. ‘Literally regarding the head – a reference to execution by beheading.’

  ‘Max,’ Dr Joe said. ‘This is Professor Adrian Hitchens. He lectures in history at King’s College.’


  I held out my hand but Professor Hitchens ignored it. He was looking at the frozen image on the screen before him, the last frame of this latest online execution – a glimpse of the worn, ruined brickwork of the kill site.

  I took my hand away.

  Perhaps he was thinking very deeply about where the kill site could be. Or perhaps he thought I was the janitor.

  But my feelings were not too hurt. The Met are always wheeling in these experts for a bit of specialist advice. Some of them – like our resident psychologist Dr Joe – stick around for years. But most of them are wheeled straight out again when they prove to be no help with our enquiries. There was a very good chance that I would never see Professor Hitchens again.

  Or the woman with the swinging hair.

  The history man jabbed a fat finger at the screen. It was stained yellow with nicotine.

  ‘The building looks late Victorian,’ he said, more to himself than Dr Joe or me. ‘I’m guessing some kind of public works.’ He nodded at the dank white walls, stained green and yellow with the rot of a hundred years. ‘A madhouse? A prison? Yes, almost certainly late Victorian.’

  DCS Swire and DCI Whitestone joined us.

  ‘Hitch,’ the Chief Super said to the history man, as if they were old buddies. ‘I understand DC Wolfe here has a theory about where the first body was dumped.’

  Whitestone nodded encouragement at me. ‘You thought it could be significant that the body was left in Hyde Park, right, Max?’

  I nodded. Professor Hitchens still wasn’t looking at me.