The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Tyburn,’ I said. ‘We found the first victim on the Park Lane side of Hyde Park. Not far from the site of Tyburn.’

  He looked at me at last.

  ‘Where this country hanged people for a thousand years,’ I said.

  Professor Hitchens grinned at me, though there was no warmth in his smile. His chipped teeth also looked old beyond their years. I wasn’t crazy about him, to tell you the truth.

  ‘I know what Tyburn was, Detective Wood.’

  ‘Wolfe.’

  ‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said, and he turned in his swivel chair to address the room at large. Fat yellow fingers tapped the armrests of his chair. ‘But Tyburn was most emphatically not in Hyde Park.’

  ‘No, I know that, but—’

  ‘The location was further north – according to the Rocque map of London in 1746. Are you familiar with Rocque’s map of 1746?’

  I briefly shook my head to confirm I was not familiar with Rocque’s map of eighteenth-century London.

  ‘The actual location of the Tyburn Tree was on the traffic island where the Edgware Road, Oxford Street and Bayswater Road all meet,’ Hitchens said.

  ‘But they’re not going to dump a body in the middle of a traffic island, are they?’ I said, and watched him bristle, unused to being contradicted. I suppose these big-shot academics get used to students hanging on their every word. ‘What about that kitchen step stool, Professor?’ I said. ‘That look late Victorian to you?’

  Whitestone shouted across the room to Wren. ‘Still no ID of the vic, Edie?’

  Wren shook her head. ‘Colin’s monitoring the online traffic and Billy’s got an open line to Metcall, but nothing yet.’

  Metcall, also known as Central Communications Command, is responsible for public contact. If someone hit 999 because they knew the man who had just been hanged online, it would come through to them first.

  ‘Play it one more time,’ the Chief Super said.

  TDC Greene hit the button and we watched in silence as the scene unfolded again. Somehow repeated viewing had not drained the hanging of its power to shock.

  The man in the suit and tie fighting for his life. The desperate struggle before he was dragged onto the stool they used for a makeshift scaffold. The last words he would ever hear: ‘Do you know why you’ve been brought to this place of execution?’ His strangulation on the end of a rope. His hands unbound, tearing at his throat.

  And the boy. The picture on the wall of the smiling young boy, who smiled just as sweetly and innocently as the girls had smiled when Mahmud Irani died. Smiling from beyond the grave, smiling for all eternity.

  ‘What the hell are they doing, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said quietly to our psychologist.

  ‘The ceremony is everything,’ Joe said. ‘The ritual seems to be at least as important as the punishment. Both of these killings have been as choreographed as anything you would see at the Old Bailey. But instead of wigs they wear black masks. Instead of a judge and jury it’s the unsubs. And in the dock, you have the accused.’

  ‘With no chance of getting a suspended sentence,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘But the ritual – the ceremony – whatever you want to call it – is a statement and a warning. And, above all, it’s an expression of power,’ Dr Joe said. ‘That’s the crucial thing. It’s an expression – and a reaffirmation – of power. In a normal court of law it is a reaffirmation of the power of the state. The unsubs no doubt see what they’re doing as a reaffirmation of – I’m guessing here – some higher form of justice, some higher and more noble and less fallible law. A reaffirmation of the power of the people.’

  ‘Got it!’ Wren shouted. ‘The name of the victim!’ She listened to her phone and I saw her face register something that I could not read. ‘And the name of the kid on the wall,’ she said, all the euphoria suddenly leaving her. She ran her hands through her red hair and slowly hung up the phone.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘The victim of the hanging is – was – Hector Welles. Thirty-five years old. Single. A trust fund manager in the City. Sent down for causing an accidental death while driving.’

  ‘The boy on the wall,’ I said.

  Edie nodded. ‘Welles was driving his Porsche 911 when the kid rode his bike into the street.’ She hit her keyboard and the same photograph of the smiling boy filled the giant TV screen.

  ‘The child was killed outright?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘He was in a coma for six months. In the end the parents switched off the life-support machine. The boy’s name was . . .’ She glanced down at her notes. ‘Daniel Warboys,’ she said.

  I took a breath.

  ‘Daniel Warboys? What part of the world was he from?’

  ‘West London. Hammersmith.’

  ‘Do you know this child, Max?’ Whitestone said.

  ‘I think I’ve met his grandfather,’ I said. ‘Paul Warboys.’

  There was silence in MIR-1.

  ‘The Paul Warboys?’ the Chief Super said.

  I nodded.

  Paul and Danny Warboys ran West London back in the day when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were running the East End while Charlie and Eddie Richardson ruled the roost in South London.

  I could easily believe that Paul Warboys had a grandson named after his beloved brother Danny.

  ‘How long did Hector Welles go down for?’ Whitestone asked.

  ‘He was sentenced to five years for dangerous driving,’ Edie said. ‘Also fined ten grand and banned from driving for three years. Let off with a slap on the wrist because there was not a trace of drugs or booze in his bloodstream. And also because he had the best brief that his employers could buy and apparently he wept a lot in the dock. In the end, he served just under two years. And they even gave him his old job back.’

  We were silent. The phones had stopped ringing. The only sound was the low drone of the cars down on Savile Row and the laptop of the voice analyst with the swinging hair.

  ‘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 . . .’

  ‘Two years for knocking down a little kid,’ I said. ‘It’s not enough, is it?’

  8

  Paul Warboys was the last of the line.

  The last of those old gangsters whose names were known to the general public. The last of the career villains who wore suits and ties and had a short back and sides even when everyone else in the Sixties was growing their hair, wearing flares and dropping acid.

  The very last of the true crime celebrities.

  Back in the Sixties and Seventies, Paul Warboys and his brother Danny held court in West London, from their Hammersmith home to the massage parlours, knocking shops and drinking dens of old Soho. While Ronnie and Reggie Kray nursed their grievances in dingy East End boozers and Charlie and Eddie Richardson rattled around their South London scrapyards dreaming of striking gold in Africa, the Warboys brothers sucked the juice from the West End.

  Paul and Danny Warboys had made more money than all of them.

  ‘Nice gaff,’ said Edie Wren as I steered the BMW X5 down the great sweeping driveway of the Essex mansion where Paul Warboys and his wife lived when they were not in Spain.

  I could see staff dotted all around the grounds. A man trying to capture a solitary leaf that glided on the pristine swimming pool. A team of gardeners fussing around the flower beds and mowing the lawn. A maid in traditional black-and-white uniform giving strict instructions to a supermarket delivery driver.

  But Paul Warboys opened his front door himself.

  ‘I’ve been expecting you, Max,’ he told me, almost smiling. ‘Come in.’

  Paul Warboys was dressed for the beach and had a deep tan that did not come from a spray can. Polo shirt, khaki shorts, flip-flops. Chunky gold jewellery clinked on his thick muscled arms. No tattoos. His thinning patch of hair was dyed an unbelievable shade of blond but he looked like what he was: an extremely fit old man who had not had to worry about money for
a long time.

  ‘I thought you might come alone,’ he said, squinting over my shoulder at Edie Wren.

  ‘I can’t do that, Paul,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘Right, Max?’

  ‘DC Wren, Homicide and Serious Crime Command,’ Edie said, holding out her warrant card.

  Paul Warboys’ smile grew bigger. His teeth were the dazzling white of a game-show presenter. Then he nodded.

  ‘Put it away, sweetheart,’ he told Edie. ‘I believe you.’

  We followed him into the living room. An English Bull Terrier padded across the carpet towards me, wagging his stumpy tail. I held out the back of my hand and the dog bent his magnificent sloping head towards me, confirming we had met before.

  ‘Bullseye remembers you,’ Paul Warboys laughed, scratching the dog behind his ears.

  Bullseye had once belonged to an old face called Vic Masters, who I had found dead in a ditch on Hampstead Heath. Bullseye had stayed with me, Scout and Stan until Paul Warboys had come to claim his dead friend’s dog.

  ‘I never knew about your grandson,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He nodded briefly, folding up something within himself. He wasn’t from the generation that needed to share every emotion with the rest of the world.

  ‘Yeah. Well. Thanks. No reason why you should have known, is there? A little boy getting knocked down by a car. It’s not news, is it? The story got a paragraph here and there. But nobody was holding the front page.’

  ‘But I would have thought it was news,’ I said, as gently as I could make it. ‘The grandson of Paul Warboys . . .’

  He laughed. ‘It’s news now!’ he said. ‘Now that bastard got hanged by the neck until dead.’ Another laugh, harder this time, and it was laughter in the dark, full of something bitter and raw. ‘Now it’s news!’

  A woman came into the room.

  A tiny blonde woman, maybe fifteen years younger than her husband, and she also seemed dressed for some beach far away, with the blue-and-gold batik wrap she was wearing and a tan the colour of teak.

  ‘Doll,’ Paul Warboys said. ‘This is DC Wolfe.’

  ‘The young man who looked after our Bullseye?’ she said. ‘Of course. Thank you.’

  Doll Warboys shook my hand, and the chains on her tanned arms made the same sound as her husband made when he moved, a soft clinking sound, the sound of money in a life that had not been born into money.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said to Edie, and I was reminded of the London I knew when I was growing up, where love was almost a punctuation mark, an endearment casually bestowed on total strangers. But when Doll Warboys smiled she seemed very tired, as if she had been awake all night tormented by old wounds.

  Her grandson had been killed many years ago, but the execution of the man who did it was still trending online. All the old pain had been awakened. She smiled and left us. Edie and I took the chairs across from the sofa where Paul Warboys sat with Bullseye’s monstrous head in his lap.

  ‘Someone killed Hector Welles,’ I said.

  He shot me a ferocious look. Paul Warboys had always been friendly to me, thanks to our connection to Bullseye, but I was under no illusion that we were anything resembling friends. And even now, even after all these years since the Warboys brothers had been almost as famous as the Krays, I could still see the serious violence in the man.

  He got his rage under control.

  ‘We don’t say that name in this house,’ he said very quietly, his fingers deep in Bullseye’s fur. The dog whimpered with something between pleasure and pain. ‘We never say that name, Max.’

  It was a threat as much as a statement.

  ‘But I have to talk to you about him,’ I said.

  ‘I understand that you have to run your fucking Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘But this is my house and we never say the name of the man who killed my grandson in this house.’ He waited for me to contradict him. ‘OK?’

  Edie had her notebook out. ‘Where were you when Hector Welles was being hanged?’

  Under the deep tan, his face flushed with fury, the kind of fury that once enabled him to order the amputation of an informer’s tongue. But then he laughed.

  ‘I was home with Doll,’ he said, and I was reminded that he had been answering police questions since before Edie Wren and I were born.

  ‘How did you hear about it?’ Edie said.

  ‘How do you think?’ he said. ‘The phones started ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing they were. Friends. Family. Former colleagues. Some of them were laughing. Some of them were crying. And they all said the same thing. Go online, they said. Go online, Paul, because someone is stringing up the bastard that killed your Danny.’

  ‘And you can corroborate your alibi?’ Edie said.

  ‘Darling, I can give you all the corroboration you need. But let me ask you a question.’

  She held up her notebook as if to protect herself.

  ‘Mr Warboys—’

  ‘Do you know how long ago it was that I last hurt someone for profit or pleasure?’ he said. ‘A lifetime. When people talk about the Krays and the Richardsons and the Warboys, they forget that it was all over before most people in this country had colour television. They came after us, love. Your lot. Your mob. And we all went down hard. Charlie Richardson got twenty-five years in 1966 – when England won the World Cup! A couple of years later, Reggie and Ronnie went down for thirty years – the longest sentence ever passed at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘And you and your brother both served life sentences for murder,’ Edie said. ‘For removing your lawyer’s tongue.’

  ‘The evidence was circumstantial,’ he said. ‘But my point is that our generation – those days when family firms ran London – ended fifty years ago. We all went away for a long time, and we either died inside or we came out into a changed world. You know – lovely modern multicultural Britain, where the blackies, the Pakis and the Iraqis all deserve their slice of the pie or it violates their human rights.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Edie. ‘If only we could go back to the good old days when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were helping little old ladies across the street.’

  He waved a dismissive hand.

  ‘Now you’re just taking the piss,’ he said, sounding almost bored. ‘But if you honestly think that the world is a safer place these days than when Reggie and Ronnie and Charlie and Eddie and Danny and myself were young men, then you are kidding yourself, young lady.’

  He leaned forward and looked from Edie to me.

  There was no warmth in him now.

  ‘Do you actually know what happened to little Daniel? My grandson? He was riding his little bike over a zebra crossing when that bastard came along in his fucking Porsche and mowed him down. Daniel was in a coma for six months before they turned off the life support. Do you know why we’ve got the dog? Why the dog’s with us? Because Daniel’s mother – my youngest – can’t look after a dog any more because she has never been right since her boy died. She has the lot. Depression. Pills. Panic attacks. Self-harming. Falling to bits. Can’t even walk a dog twice a day. Can’t get out of bed to feed old Bullseye. Can’t get out of bed to wash herself or take her daughter to school. She can’t see the point to any of it – you know. Fucking living. That bastard wrecked lives, Max. Served two years for what he did to a child. I served twenty years for what I did to grown men.’

  ‘But nobody has the right to kill him,’ I said. I found that I would not say the name of Hector Welles in this house. I did not understand if it was out of respect to young Daniel Warboys, or his grandfather, or if it was because I hated him too.

  Paul Warboys shook his head.

  ‘That’s your law, Max. It’s not mine.’

  He leaned back. Edie Wren closed her notebook. She looked at me and I nodded. Time to go.

  Paul Warboys walked us to the front door in silence. There he placed one large hand on my arm. I looked at his face and his pale bl
ue eyes were shining with tears.

  ‘You ever hear of a man called John Favara, Max?’

  I shook my head. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘John Favara was a man who lived in New Jersey many years ago. One day in 1980 this John Favara ran down and killed a twelve-year-old boy. This child’s name was Frank Gotti – that ring any bells, Max?’

  I nodded. Now it was coming back to me.

  ‘Frank was the son of John Gotti,’ I said.

  Paul Warboys chuckled. ‘John Gotti – the Dapper Don. The boss of the Gambino family. The last of the old school Mafia bosses. And then this John Favara knocks down and kills young Frank Gotti. You know what happened next?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The guy – John Favara – was abducted and never seen again. And the assumption is that he was murdered for killing the boy.’

  ‘But Gotti and his wife were on holiday in Florida when Favara disappeared,’ Paul Warboys smiled. ‘So they were in the clear, weren’t they? Long way from Florida to New Jersey.’

  ‘Didn’t they also call Gotti the Teflon Don?’ Edie said. ‘Because nothing ever stuck? And didn’t Mrs Gotti attack John Favara with a baseball bat prior to his disappearance?’

  ‘Feels like the least she could do,’ Paul Warboys said.

  He placed a scarred hand on our arms so that we could not take our leave. His knuckles were stark white against his suntan where the skin had been torn off and grown back. I had seen hands like that before but only on professional boxers.

  He leaned close to our faces.

  This was very important to him.

  ‘My point is this,’ Paul Warboys said quietly. ‘If I had killed the bastard that murdered my grandson with his car, I would have a much better alibi than the one I’ve got.’

  Then he laughed.

  ‘And I wouldn’t have done it online,’ he said.

  9

  Jackson went for his run at first light.

  As the sun came up around five the door to his room quietly opened and I stirred from the last stage of sleep, that shallow sleep that is full of dreams, as he padded across the loft to get Stan. By the time I got up an hour later the dog was curled up on his favourite chair, happily exhausted, and Jackson was in the kitchen, making porridge for us, his hair still wet from the shower. He already looked stronger than when we had found him.