The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  It was still early, before five, but the rising sun was turning the great dome of St Paul’s as white as bone. And at the meat market, the night shift was over and Jackson was coming home.

  I watched him cross Charterhouse Street, grinning at something one of his workmates had said, and the light of the new sun was so dazzling on the front of his white porter’s coat that at first you could not tell that it was smeared with fresh blood.

  A few hours later I stood alone in MIR-1 looking at the floor-to-ceiling map of London and sipping a triple espresso from Bar Italia.

  Professor Hitchens came in with his motorbike helmet under his arm, already sweating inside his corduroy.

  ‘Tyburn,’ he said. ‘It’s a river, isn’t it? That’s where everything else comes from. Tyburn Road, Tyburn gallows – it’s all named after the River Tyburn. The Tyburn is one of the great underground rivers of London.’

  ‘The gallows is named after the river?’ I said.

  He nodded his egg-shaped head. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

  He produced a battered book from his saddlebag. Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd. Professor Hitchens found the page he wanted and pointed a fat finger at a passage. He began to read:

  ‘There is some intimate association between the river and what we call “paganism”. Something has settled there. The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment . . .’

  He looked at me with his eyes shining.

  ‘Don’t you see? The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment!’

  Tara Jones walked in and stared at us. Hitchens continued reading.

  ‘It is perhaps not coincidental that the two major sites of execution on land, Tyburn and Smithfield, were adjacent to the Thames tributaries of the Tyburn and the Fleet.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘Can’t you see what it means?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me get this straight. London’s underground rivers – the Tyburn and the rest – they once flowed over ground?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘So what happened to them?’

  ‘We built this city on top of them.’ He waved at the giant map on the wall. ‘As the city has grown over the centuries, the rivers became deeper. The London sewer system is built on the template of the city’s underground rivers. But they’re still there.’

  I looked at the map, and back at him.

  ‘So the Tyburn – the River Tyburn – still exists?’ I said.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Where does it flow?’ I said. ‘Show me.’

  He pointed at a great swathe of green towards the top of the map.

  ‘The source of the Tyburn is Hampstead. It runs south – parallel to the Finchley Road, down to Swiss Cottage, through Regent’s Park. In the West End it follows the path of Marylebone Lane before passing through Mayfair and into the Thames.’

  ‘We’re probably standing on it,’ Tara said.

  Hitchens’ prematurely aged face split into a wide grin.

  ‘Savile Row? I would say that it’s extremely likely the Tyburn is directly below us.’

  I thought about it, let it settle.

  ‘They’re not going to go back to the site of the gallows because they know we’ll be waiting. But – if they are so obsessed with the ritual of punishment – they could still leave the body in the Tyburn – the River Tyburn.’

  ‘It has to be a possibility,’ Hitchens said.

  ‘How many miles of river are we looking at?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘The Tyburn winds and turns . . .’

  ‘Ballpark figure, Professor.’

  ‘It could be as many as ten miles.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Only someone much more important than me can authorise a search of that scale.’

  I called the Chief Super’s office. They put me straight through and I told her what I wanted.

  ‘Where’s Pat Whitestone?’ DCS Swire said.

  The truth is I didn’t know where DCI Whitestone was or if she was ever coming to work again.

  ‘Ma’am, I believe she must be with her son at the hospital.’

  A pause.

  ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Send everyone you can down there. But I want them all out at the end of the shift.’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘London sewers have the highest concentration of cocaine of any waters in Europe.’

  For a moment I had the image of London’s paranoid coke users all flushing away their drug of choice.

  But that wasn’t quite it.

  ‘The city has the highest number of cocaine users in the northern hemisphere and their urine all ends up in the sewers,’ DCS Swire told me. ‘The trace cocaine in London’s waste waters is 500 per cent higher than anywhere else in Europe. If anyone stays down there too long, we’re going to start getting cardiac arrests. And then we’re going to start getting lawsuits. So one full shift and they’re all out, understood, DC Wolfe?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  I’ll tell them not to inhale, I thought, heading for the door as I speed-dialled Edie Wren.

  Tara Jones called me back.

  ‘I got the voiceprint of that sound we heard on the latest film,’ she said. ‘It’s not a name. And it’s not a word.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s laughter.’ She shook her head as if she could not understand such a thing, and a veil of glossy black hair swung in front of her lovely face. I watched her push it away. ‘The noise is a short bark of someone . . . laughing. What does it mean?’

  ‘They’re starting to enjoy it,’ I said.

  We had been looking in the wrong place. They were never coming back to the site of Tyburn gallows. So almost one hundred officers – Specialist Search Teams from West End Central and New Scotland Yard, surveillance officers from SO15’s Counter Terrorism Command – spent eight hours of a long summer day wading through the miles of sewers that trace the flow of the Tyburn.

  And at the end of a long shift we knew this was the wrong place too.

  I showered and changed my clothes at West End Central but I felt that I could still smell the ancient stink of subterranean London on my skin. MIR-1 was deserted apart from Hitchens, who was sitting at a workstation reading his Peter Ackroyd book. I stared up at the great map of London that covers one wall of MIR-1.

  ‘Where does it come out?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ He didn’t look up from his book.

  ‘This river. The River Tyburn.’ I took a step towards the map. ‘The Tyburn is a tributary of the Thames, right?’

  Now he was looking up.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So it doesn’t flow into the sea,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t disappear underground. At some point the River Tyburn flows into the River Thames.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Where?’

  He quickly pulled his iPad from his saddlebag and found an ancient map of London.

  ‘The Rocque map of London in 1746,’ he said. And then, ‘Vauxhall Bridge.’

  ‘So the Tyburn flows into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It will be quicker if we take your bike,’ I said.

  Vauxhall Bridge rose up before us as Hitchens tore down Millbank on his old 500cc Royal Enfield with me riding pillion.

  Downriver the sun was sinking behind Battersea Power Station. On the far side of the Thames I could see the great tiered building housing MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, at Vauxhall Cross. Hitchens steered his bike in the empty forecourt outside Tate Britain and we left it there.

  We found some stone steps that led down to the Thames Path, the walkway that runs along the riverbank. I started towards the bridge, Hitchens struggling to keep up with me.

  ‘Down there,’ he panted. ‘A culvert.’

  I was directly opposite the MI6 building when I saw it. A large round hole punched into reinforced concrete, big enough for a man to stand up in, pouring a shallow but stea
dy stream of water into the Thames. The culvert was one level lower than the Thames Path, and I realised that it was invisible from the road.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘That’s the Tyburn?’

  I don’t know what I had been expecting.

  His breathless voice was behind me. ‘According to Rocque—’

  But I was already going down the steps that led right on to the riverbank and so I missed what Rocque had noted in the eighteenth century. I stepped into the culvert and the water covered my shoes. I took another step and peered into blackness. But the concrete culvert looked too modern to mark the end of a river that had flowed here for thousands of years.

  Hitchens hesitated at the mouth of the culvert, keeping his feet dry.

  ‘This can’t be it,’ I shouted, and my voice echoed back to me.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said—’

  And then I saw the body.

  One arm reaching from the deeper darkness of the culvert. The limb bare, white and – as I edged through the water towards it – I saw the ghastly scars of heroin addiction, the track marks on the limb looking like a child’s join-the-dots game.

  Hitchens called out to me. ‘Detective?’

  ‘This is it!’ I shouted.

  I went further into the black hole and the water was deeper here, over my shoes, and much colder. And there he was – Darren Donovan, perhaps ten metres back from the Thames, his cropped head face down in the black waters of the Tyburn.

  Then the darkness suddenly rose up and slammed into me, knocking the wind out of me and throwing me backwards against the curved wall of the concrete culvert.

  I banged my head hard against the wall and sat down in the water with a thump, the base of my spine smacking against the reinforced concrete.

  And then I felt the hands around my throat.

  I was thrown onto my back as if I was weightless, the hands never letting go, digging deep into my flesh, their grip tighter now.

  Large hands. Strong hands. Trying to kill me, trying to choke the life out of me.

  I stared up at the large figure in the darkness, and I kicked out wildly, clawing at the hands around my neck and then raking the thick muscled arms, reaching for where I knew his eyes would be but unable to find them, unable to get even close, all the strength ebbing out of me with every passing second.

  Already my breath had stopped. Already the blood had stopped.

  ‘Detective?’ Hitchens said at the entrance to the culvert. ‘Max?’

  The hands let me go.

  I was aware of the dark bulky figure splashing towards the light. I tried to call out to Hitchens but found I could not speak. I tried to get up but found I could not move. Sickness overwhelmed me. Far away someone was calling my name.

  But I was bone-tired, suddenly far too exhausted to respond, and so I lay back and closed my eyes for just a little while, needing a moment before I got up and went on, my head resting in the ancient waters of the Tyburn.

  PART TWO

  The CroSS-beam aNd the rOpe

  14

  I sat on a bench by the Thames watching the sun go down in a blaze of red over Chelsea while a couple of detective inspectors from New Scotland Yard did the hot debrief, the interview that takes place in the golden hour after a major incident. There wasn’t much to tell them but we went over it again and again and again as the sun sunk lower over West London.

  ‘He was big,’ I said. ‘Freakishly big. Abnormally strong. Tossed me about as if I weighed nothing.’

  One of the detective inspectors stifled a yawn. The other one closed his notebook.

  ‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that when you get dumped on your arse, they tend to get bigger and stronger every time you tell the story. You want us to drive you to an A&E?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Nothing broken,’ I said, and they both gave me their cocky Scotland Yard grins.

  * * *

  The press were waiting for me when I arrived at West End Central in the morning.

  They were milling around and sucking down caffeine under the big blue lamp that hangs above the entrance to 27 Savile Row, young journalists and older photographers, maybe twenty of them, sent out to collect whatever scraps they could on the story that was dominating the rolling news. They stirred at the sight of me. I recognised Scarlet Bush but I did not stop walking. They all crowded in with their little digital microphones and their cameras and their questions.

  ‘DC Wolfe? Scarlet Bush, Daily Post. Is it true that you were assaulted when you found the body of Darren Donovan? What’s that mark around your throat, Max? Did the Hanging Club do that to you?’

  They followed me inside. A uniformed sergeant, red-faced with irritation, stepped out from behind his desk and began shooing them back. The questions became nastier when they knew I wasn’t going to answer them.

  ‘Is the Hanging Club doing a better job than the police at cleaning the streets, Max?’

  ‘How does it feel to be hunting heroes?’

  ‘What about the victims? Do you ever think about them?’

  ‘Did you see one of them, Max? Did you see one of the Hanging Club?’

  No, I thought. But I know a man who did.

  In a quiet corner of MIR-1, Professor Adrian Hitchens sat working with a police sketch artist.

  ‘No, no . . . those eyes are wrong . . . can you erase that and try again? Could we possibly have another go at the mouth?’

  It’s never easy. Anyone who sits down with a police sketch artist has been a witness to a serious crime. They are attempting to recall a face that they saw for only moments, usually during a criminal act that was accompanied by extreme violence. In the case of our history man, he was attempting to remember the face of someone who had come barrelling out of a culvert without warning and knocked him flat on his ample backside.

  I nodded to the police sketch artist, a woman around thirty who looked as though she had the patience of a Zen monk. She had probably grown up wanting to be the next Picasso or Edward Hopper.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  She showed me her sketchpad with a half-smile. She had drawn the outline of a large oval-shaped head with a sizeable nose in the middle and a pair of ears stuck to the side. And that was it. I looked at Hitchens.

  ‘So we’re looking for Mr Potato Head?’ I said.

  ‘I can only draw what he saw, Max,’ said the sketch artist. ‘And Professor Hitchens doesn’t know what he saw.’

  He wrung his hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

  ‘How long have you been working on this?’ I said.

  The sketch artist glanced at her watch. ‘Couple of hours?’

  I shook my head and stared at Hitchens with disbelief.

  ‘Tell me one more time what happened,’ I said.

  He brushed his nicotine-stained fingers across the great sweaty dome of his head.

  ‘You entered the culvert. When you didn’t come back out, I called out to you because I was worried. I can’t recall exactly what I said . . .’

  ‘You said, Detective and then you said Max – and that was when my assailant let me go and did a runner . . . Then what?’

  ‘I was trying to text you,’ Hitchens said. ‘I was looking at my phone when I heard footsteps in the water – moving very fast. I thought it was you – and I looked up and . . . I stared straight into his face just before he sent me flying. And that’s where you found me. Sitting on my backside.’

  Tara Jones came in and began clearing her desk. She saw me looking at her and nodded, sending a torrent of black hair forward. She pushed it off her face and began packing away the hardware that was scattered all over the workstation she had used for the last month.

  I patted Hitchens on the arm. ‘You saw him. You did, Adrian. Briefly – very briefly – but you saw him. But it’s just out of reach.’

  ‘I don’t understand why I can’t recall . . .’

  ‘It’s the shock of violence. Even if you were used to it, th
is would be hard. And you’re not used to it. You just had one of the worst experiences of your life. Don’t feel too bad. I looked at him too and I didn’t see a thing.’

  ‘But you were in darkness and I was in blazing sunshine . . .’

  ‘You want me to try some software?’ the sketch artist asked.

  In recent years there has been a move to improve facial composites with what we call a feature recognition system – the witness is shown complete faces until a final image emerges. But I shook my head.

  ‘Pencil and pad still works best,’ I said. ‘Just keep trying,’ I told Hitchens.

  ‘I am . . .’

  ‘Try harder.’

  I walked over to Tara Jones. I had worked out by now that I needed to be directly facing her before I started talking. She looked up at me and smiled politely.

  ‘You’re leaving,’ I said.

  ‘My contract with the Met was for a month. And the month’s over. So . . .’

  ‘Thanks for your help with the tapes.’

  She laughed. Good teeth. So white and even that there must have been an orthodontist in her childhood. Middle-class teeth. I wondered what her parents had been like and how they had dealt with her disability. As far as I could tell, it had not stopped her doing anything she wanted.

  ‘I didn’t do much,’ she said. She slipped a thin MacBook Air into a messenger bag. ‘But then – in my defence – they didn’t say very much, did they? I’ve run full voice biometrics of everything we have.’

  I suddenly realised that it was unlikely I would ever see her again.

  ‘May I ask you something, Tara?’

  She nodded, shoving back her hair, the wedding ring a glint of gold among the black.

  I hesitated. ‘You don’t do the thing with the hands,’ I said.

  She wasn’t offended. If anything, she just seemed a little weary, as if she had explained this one so many times that it was becoming a chore.

  ‘Signing? No, I don’t sign. Why – can you read sign language?’

  I felt stupid.