The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  He looked at me and for the first time I thought that I might be getting through to him.

  ‘I understand how you feel, Steve. I understand why you want to do it. And I can even understand why they deserve it. I saw your dad the night he died.’

  The boy flinched as if he had been slapped.

  ‘And I saw you that night,’ I said. ‘And your sister Kitty. And your mum. And I was there in the Old Bailey when those three bastards got off with a slap on the wrist. But that doesn’t mean you should take the law into your own hands. Because if you do, then the law is going to come down on you. And I promise you, Steve, you are not the kind of lad who thrives in Feltham.’

  I stood up.

  ‘Get rid of the knife,’ I said. ‘On your way home – drop it down a drain. The first drain you see. Then go home and take care of your mum and your sister. They need you more than you can imagine.’

  I began to walk away.

  His voice called me back.

  ‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘Is that the only reason I can’t get even with the bastards? Is that the only reason I can’t stick a blade in those bastards who killed my dad? Because of what will happen to me if I do?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s the only reason. But it’s the only reason you need.’

  16

  In New Scotland Yard’s Room 101, Sergeant John Caine put the kettle on while I walked into the Black Museum and stared at the hanging tree. More than twenty ropes were draped over the three-legged gallows’ pole, arranged with the loving care of decorations on a Christmas tree. Next to the hanging tree there was a framed photograph of Albert Pierrepoint and a quote from 1974.

  ‘The fruit of my experience has this bitter aftertaste. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing but revenge.’

  ‘Sorry, no triple espresso in here,’ John Caine told me, holding out a mug of steaming tea. He took a sip from his BEST DAD IN THE WORLD mug.

  ‘You’re having a bit of a quiet week, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Nobody’s been hanged on YouTube.’

  I nodded. ‘Three murders in July and now nothing for the first seven days in August. Why would they stop, John?’

  ‘Lots of reasons why they might jack it in. One of them might have died. They could have fallen out with each other. Somebody’s wife found out what her old man has been doing and begged him to stop for the sake of the kiddies. Or – most likely reason a crew stops – they might think that they’ve been rumbled and you’re going to kick down their front doors at five o’clock tomorrow morning.’

  I laughed bitterly.

  ‘Not much chance of that happening.’

  DCI Whitestone had not turned up for work this morning because her son was having another operation on his eyes. This meant I was still the acting SIO. In the absence of any leads, I had done what I always do when I need guidance – come for a cup of tea at the Black Museum.

  ‘Or one of them lost their nerve,’ John said. ‘Or all of them lost their nerve. Or they’ve ticked off everyone on their kill list. That’s possible. Or they’re quitting while they’re ahead because they’re intelligent enough to know that if they keep doing it, they’ll get caught.’ He took a thoughtful sip of his tea. ‘Maybe they’re cashing out while they’re ahead.’

  ‘You ever meet a villain that smart?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  I inspected the ropes on the hanging tree. The oldest – four thin strands now black with age – was two hundred years old. The newest – in pride of place at the front, like the star on top of a Christmas tree – dated back to 1969, the year that capital punishment was officially abolished. It was made of eight thick strands of hemp that were gathered in a large brass thimble. They looked slick and sticky.

  ‘Vaseline,’ John said. ‘Stops the rope from burning off skin. That’s the Sixties for you – when they hanged you with a bit of compassion.’

  ‘What am I doing wrong? I’m no nearer to them than I was a month ago.’

  He adjusted the ropes on the hanging tree. If anything was touched in here, then he wanted it to be exactly as it was before.

  ‘You’re not following the leads you’ve got,’ he said.

  ‘But I don’t have any leads. No kill site. No witnesses. No prints that are worth a damn – nothing that shows up on IDENT1.’

  He looked at me as if I was missing the obvious.

  ‘You’ve got two men with criminal records who both had serious beefs with two of the dead,’ he said. ‘Back in the day, Paul Warboys and his brother Danny gave Reggie and Ronnie Kray and Eddie and Charlie Richardson a run for their money. Paul Warboys didn’t get a life sentence just because he took out a lawyer’s tongue with a bolt cutter. He got life because the lawyer bled to death. Now – if Paul Warboys would kill a man for talking to the police, what’s he going to do to a man who runs over and kills his grandson?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘But I don’t buy it. Warboys is retired. He’s been retired for twenty years.’

  ‘You don’t think he’d come out of retirement for the man who knocked down and killed his grandson?’

  ‘But we ran a Trace, Interview and Eliminate on Warboys. Of course we did. And he made the point – and I thought it was a good point – that if he had wanted Hector Welles dead, he would not have bothered with putting a post on YouTube.’

  ‘And does he have a cast-iron alibi for when Welles was hanged? Because he had a very good one the time that lawyer had his tongue taken out – Warboys and his brother were miles away, doing the Lambada on the Costa del Sol. But that didn’t stop a judge finding him guilty and sending him down for life.’

  I thought about it.

  ‘The funny thing is, Warboys doesn’t have a cast-iron alibi for when Welles was killed,’ I said. ‘He was at home with his wife and we have no other witnesses to confirm it. But that makes me believe him. As he said to me himself – if you were going to invent an alibi, you would come up with something much better than that.’

  I drank my tea. It was strong enough to stand up your spoon in. Real builder’s tea.

  ‘It’s the cast-iron alibis that I never quite believe,’ I said. ‘Good tea.’

  ‘Thank you. And then there’s Sofi Wilder’s dad,’ John said. ‘Barry Wilder. He did time, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, but that was kid’s stuff. Years ago. And he was in a different league from Paul Warboys.’

  ‘But look what they did to his daughter, Max. Look what they did! This grooming gang, they got away with it for so long because everyone was afraid of seeming racist. The police, the social services – we practically held their coats while they were raping and torturing children.’

  ‘I’m not denying he’s got motive. But Wilder is another one with an alibi that’s not good enough to be made up, another one that says he was home with the wife watching television. And what about Bert Page? How does he fit into this?’

  ‘Who’s Bert Page?’

  ‘The Normandy veteran that Darren Donovan put in a coma for fifty pence. As far as we can see, Bert Page doesn’t have any violent criminals to avenge him. In fact, despite all the hand wringing in the press, Bert doesn’t have anyone to give a toss about him. He was living in care until Donovan put him into the hospital. There’s a middle-aged daughter in Australia and that’s it. Why would someone want to hang the nasty little creep who hurt him?’

  Sergeant John Caine shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, Max,’ he said, making a minute adjustment to one of the ropes on his hanging tree. ‘Maybe just because it’s the right thing to do.’

  At the end of the working day Edie Wren and I stood outside a big house in Canonbury Square. We were close enough to Highbury Corner to hear the unbroken rumble of the traffic on the Holloway Road and Essex Road, but Canonbury Square itself was green and leafy, like a millionaire’s fantasy of the English countryside.

  Edie consulted her phone as I rang the doorbell. ‘Tara Jones lives in the whole hous
e?’ she said. ‘The whole house?’

  A child in his pyjamas opened the door. Maybe three years old. That age when they stop being babies and start being the person they will be for the rest of their life. And I could see Tara in the child. The pale face, the huge green eyes and especially that almost Asian hair.

  I crouched down so that our eyes were at the same level.

  ‘Is your mummy in?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but a Filipina nanny came to collect him and a man appeared, still wearing the suit and tie he had worn to his office in Cheapside or Canary Wharf.

  ‘Can I help you?’ He had an accent that was full of privilege and a nose that had been broken more than once, the telltale signs of someone who had played a bit of rugby at his private school.

  ‘I’m DC Wolfe and this is my colleague DC Wren from West End Central,’ I said, standing up. ‘I believe your wife is expecting us?’

  He nodded and went to get her, leaving Edie and I alone on the doorstep. Down the corridor we could see large mirrors, tasteful prints on the walls, a home of money and taste.

  Edie chuckled softly. ‘And to think I felt sorry for her when she arrived in Savile Row,’ Edie murmured. ‘You know – the brave young deaf woman making her way in the world. To think I felt sorry for her! She’s got everything, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess so.’

  Then Tara Jones was in front of us in a white T-shirt with those tight trousers with the hoops around her bare feet. She pushed back her hair and she didn’t smile and she didn’t ask us to come inside.

  ‘Tomorrow we’re bringing in Paul Warboys and Barry Wilder for further interviews,’ I said.

  ‘On the weekend?’ she said.

  ‘The law doesn’t stop for the weekend,’ I said.

  ‘And you want to know if they’re lying,’ said Tara Jones.

  17

  The summer had a different rhythm to the rest of the year and I did not drive home after we said goodnight to Tara. I didn’t need to go home.

  Now Scout was at school, our lives revolved totally around term dates, pick-up times and all the everyday details of school life. But it was different in the long summer holiday.

  Many of Scout’s friends had gone off on holiday, but there were always plenty more still in town, and my daughter was a popular child –and not just with her classmates. Parents loved her too because she was polite, sweet-natured and – just shy of her sixth birthday – already a veteran of the sleepover. Scout wasn’t one of these children who had been pushed into the sleepover too soon and then wakes up in tears at 3 a.m., demanding an Addison Lee cab to take her home. Parents, kids – everyone loved her.

  Tonight Scout was away at her number one sleepover destination – with her best friend Mia in Pimlico – and as I watched Edie walk off to join the revellers on Upper Street where she was meeting her married boyfriend in some funky new bar, I realised I had no reason to hurry home.

  So instead of heading south to Smithfield, I turned the BMW X5 north and drove to the far end of the Holloway Road, to the Whittington Hospital, where Darren Donovan’s elderly victim slept in the darkness that is somewhere between life and death.

  Bert Page lay in a room full of flowers.

  There were flowers on every available surface of his small room at the Whittington, flowers in every state from brown decay to full bloom, many still wrapped in their cellophane. I checked a few of them for the cards of well-wishers, but there was nothing.

  I sat down beside the old man, my eyes stinging with helpless fury at the state of him.

  Bert Page was a tiny man, almost child-size, and his frame did not seem strong enough to cope with the vast array of machines attached to his frail body.

  He had tubes snaking up his nose and mouth and down into his windpipe from the ventilator giving him his next breath. An intravenous drip pumped two soft bags of fluids into one of his stick-like arms. Monitors traced lines of green, yellow and red for his heart rate and blood pressure.

  I leaned closer to see some sign of life. Beyond the tubes that covered much of his face, he did not appear to be sleeping. He was not in anything recognisable as sleep. It was in a state far deeper than sleep. I had never seen anyone look so far from life with their heart still beating.

  Frayed striped pyjamas hung loosely on the tiny old man’s emaciated frame and I could see the white hair on the papery skin, and the rough tattoo just above his heart, smudged with the passing of the years.

  6 - 6 - 44

  The sixth of June 1944. D-Day. I tried to imagine Bert as the teenage soldier he had been, landing on that Normandy beach, but it felt like it was another lifetime. I took his hand, the one that didn’t have the tubes keeping him alive, and it was like holding a small bird, just delicate bones held by a thin layer of skin.

  ‘Oh, Bert,’ I said out loud. ‘What did that bastard do to you?’

  The door opened and a nurse let in a young doctor. The nurse disappeared and the doctor came in, consulting his notes. He looked Greek or Turkish. Very young, very tired.

  ‘I’m Dr Safik.’

  Turkish then, I thought. I stood up and shook hands, telling him my name as I showed him my warrant card. He really looked at it and I realised that he had already seen a few warrant cards in his short career.

  ‘Detective Constable Wolfe?’ He gave me back my warrant card. ‘By your rank, I’m assuming you’re not the Senior Investigating Officer?’

  ‘Acting.’

  ‘How can I help you? Presumably you’re not investigating the assault on Mr Page?’

  ‘I’m investigating the murder of Darren Donovan, the man who assaulted Mr Page.’ I looked at the old man in the hospital bed. I did not like saying Donovan’s name in this room. ‘What can you tell me about his visitors?’

  Dr Safik’s mouth twitched with distaste.

  ‘He doesn’t have any, as far as I am aware. That’s not unusual these days. But it’s unusual for a man that attracted so much widespread sympathy as Mr Page.’ The young doctor almost smiled. ‘It didn’t appear to do him much good, did it? All that attention from the media.’

  ‘Does Mr Page have any chance of recovery?’

  ‘He’s in what we call a state of unrousable unconsciousness. Do you know what the Glasgow scoring system is, Detective?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s a numerical system used to assess the extent of a head injury. It’s based on motor response, eye opening and so on. A score of seven indicates a full coma.’ He glanced at the old man. ‘And Mr Page is a seven. Recovery at his age? It’s unlikely.’

  ‘And he has no visitors at all?’

  ‘Not as far as I am aware. You should talk to the nurses’ station. I know there were some members of the press sneaked in when the attack first happened.’ I suddenly remembered a horrific photograph of Bert Page in an Intensive Care Unit shortly after he was robbed by Darren Donovan, the old man’s face so swollen and discoloured that it barely looked human. ‘There’s a daughter in Australia who can’t quite manage to get over to see her father before he dies. But, no – Mr Page does not get visitors.’

  I inhaled the sweetness of Bert Page’s hospital room.

  ‘Then who sends him flowers?’ I said.

  Saturday night was slipping into Sunday morning when I finally arrived home. Stan roused himself and padded across the loft to meet me, his strawberry blonde tail wagging with welcome.

  Jackson was sitting at my laptop, wearing some of my old clothes – a black T-shirt that said LONSDALE LONDON in white letters, faded Levi 501s – that I did not recognise at first because he had washed and ironed them so well.

  ‘You should have seen Scout when Mrs Murphy packed her off with little Mia and her mum,’ he said. ‘She was so excited.’

  I felt the pang of the parent who is absent too often.

  ‘Is it OK to use the laptop?’ he said. ‘I was just checking the news.’

  ‘Anytime.’

  He clo
sed the laptop.

  ‘You should try to get away with her yourself,’ Jackson said. ‘They give you holidays in the Met, don’t they?’

  I nodded. ‘We get twenty-five to thirty days, depending on length of service.’

  I tended to use my days off walking Stan on the Heath. Were Scout and I really going to go on holidays like normal families? Two weeks in the sun? I couldn’t quite imagine it. And what would we do with Stan? He didn’t have a passport. And he was part of our little family, too.

  ‘Remember that holiday home my folks had when we were kids?’

  The family that adopted Jackson had a cottage on the coast of Kent. I remembered a pebble beach, bunk beds and the salt tang of the English Channel. The sea was freezing even in the height of summer. When I was eleven years old, it had seemed like heaven.

  ‘Sand Pebbles,’ I said.

  ‘Sand Pebbles!’ Jackson laughed.

  ‘It’s still there?’ I said. ‘Sand Pebbles is still there?’

  ‘They never sold it,’ he said. ‘They rented it out before they died, but now it doesn’t even get rented out. I spent a couple nights there before I came up to London. It’s not in great nick, but you and Scout can use it anytime.’

  He pulled on one of my old red Realm and Empire hoodies and started for the door. For a moment I thought he was going to the little holiday home on the coast.

  ‘Work,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  Stan followed him to the door and then came padding back into the loft when Jackson had left. I stared at the laptop but resisted the urge to open it, and I resisted the urge to look at his browsing history. There seemed to be no point. I felt like I already knew what it contained.

  Instead I walked to the window and I stared down at the great meat market of Smithfield. It was in total darkness because London Central Markets, to give Smithfield its official name, is not open at the weekend or Bank Holidays.