The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  So wherever my oldest friend was going, he certainly wasn’t going to work.

  18

  I looked across the table at Paul Warboys. He held my gaze but his expression was pleasant. I had never seen anyone so calm in an interview room. But then he had done this many times before.

  ‘OK, are we ready?’ I said. ‘Is everybody ready?’ I glanced at Edie Wren, sitting by my side, and Warboys and his lawyer on the other side of the small table. ‘When I press this button, we will start recording . . .’

  Warboys smiled gently at the beep, his deeply tanned face as creased as old leather. He crossed his arms and his heavy gold jewellery clinked in the box-like room. His lawyer hovered at his side, staring at me over his reading glasses, ready to pounce.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘this interview is being recorded and may be given in evidence if any case is brought to trial. My name is DC Max Wolfe and I am currently serving with Homicide and Serious Crime Command here at West End Central, 27 Savile Row, London. The other officer present is DC Edie Wren. The time is – look at that – exactly noon.’ I nodded at the elderly gangster on the other side of the table. ‘Please state your name and profession.’

  ‘Paul Warboys. Businessman. Retired.’

  ‘Further to our previous interview at your home, Mr Warboys, I’d like to ask – what were your movements on the day that Hector Welles was abducted and murdered?’

  The lawyer leaned forward. ‘I’d like to remind you that my client is not under arrest.’

  Warboys held up a hand. His lawyer sat back in his chair.

  ‘I was at home. All day. All night.’

  Most people become impatient or irritated when they are asked the same questions more than once. But not Paul Warboys.

  ‘How did you learn about Welles’ death?’

  ‘I told you before and now I’ll tell you again.’ It was said with a wry smile. ‘And I’ll keep on telling you the same thing as many times as you like. The phone started ringing. And then it didn’t stop.’

  ‘Who called you?’

  ‘Everybody called me, Detective. And they all said exactly the same thing: “Somebody just hanged the bastard who killed your grandson.” I’m paraphrasing.’ His pale blue eyes glistened with tears and he laughed, amused at himself, the old gangster who was still capable of crying. ‘That’s what they all told me. Somebody lynched the bastard who knocked down little Danny when he was crossing the road.’

  Paul Warboys smiled at me again. His teeth were white and even. Most of those old London faces didn’t care too much about their dental work. I couldn’t imagine Ronnie and Reggie Kray worrying about their flossing. But Paul Warboys had spent a lot of money and time getting his teeth to look that good.

  ‘Did you ever meet Barry Wilder?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Who? Sorry, Max. You’re going to have to give me a clue.’

  ‘Barry Wilder’s young daughter was a victim of Mahmud Irani’s grooming gang.’

  ‘Ah. Mahmud Irani. The first one they hanged.’

  ‘Yes, the first one. I’ll ask you again – did you ever meet Barry Wilder?’

  ‘No.’ He laughed. ‘You want me to take a lie detector, Detective? I’m willing.’

  His lawyer shot forward. ‘Paul, I strongly advise—’

  Warboys again silenced him with a raised hand.

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ I said. ‘But I appreciate the offer. I’m concluding this interview.’

  I looked at the one-way mirror of the interview room.

  And I smiled back at Paul Warboys.

  Because I had someone much better than a lie detector.

  * * *

  I walked Warboys to the main entrance of West End Central.

  Doll, his wife, was waiting for him under the big blue lamp that hangs outside 27 Savile Row. She came to his side and gave him a quick, fierce hug, gold chains sliding down her thin brown arms. She peered into her husband’s face.

  ‘You done?’

  He nodded. ‘For now.’

  A chauffeured Mercedes was idling by the kerb.

  ‘Are you going back to Essex?’ I said.

  ‘Spain,’ he said. ‘Just for a few days. My brief can give you our schedule.’

  I nodded. ‘OK.’

  He held out his hand to me and I shook it. But then he wouldn’t let go. He kept my hand in his grip, and he held my gaze with his cold blue eyes.

  ‘I’d like to wish you luck in your investigation,’ he said. ‘But my grandson was the best thing that ever happened to me, Max. An innocent little boy who never did anyone in this world any harm. And I really hope these chaps – the Hanging Club – get away with it.’

  Up in MIR-1 Tara Jones was running voice biometrics on a recording of the Paul Warboys interview. His laconic old London accent filled the room.

  ‘Paul Warboys. Businessman. Retired.’

  It was a voice from an old London that no longer existed. It made the graph on the screens in front of Tara jump like lightning. When she looked up at us, Edie said, ‘So, Tara – what’s the difference between a lie detector and voice biometrics?’

  ‘Approximately the difference between a horse and a Ferrari,’ Tara said. ‘A polygraph – or lie detector – is hundred-year-old technology. It records physiological changes during questioning – blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, sweating and so on. And it’s fine if you are screening new employees. You’ll know if they’re lying about their CV, their qualifications and their smoking habits. But for someone like Paul Warboys? It just doesn’t work as well as it does in the movies. Someone like Warboys will be aware of what we call countermeasures. Confidence, controlled breathing, establishing a friendly – or at least a workable – rapport with the questioner. Confidence, above all. Not being scared by the process or his environment. That’s why a polygraph is not considered reliable evidence in a court of law. It is Jurassic technology. But voice biometrics does what we want a lie detector to do.’

  We let her work. I stared down at the street, sipping a triple espresso from the Bar Italia until Tara Jones leaned back in her chair and ran her hands through her hair.

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ she said.

  * * *

  In the afternoon Barry Wilder came in. There was no lawyer with him. But his wife Jean was there. She was waiting in the corridor outside the interview room with him, furiously stubbing out one unfiltered Camel on the floor and immediately lighting another one. Barry Wilder got to his feet at the sight of us, moving in weary slow motion, as if every movement took enormous effort.

  ‘There’s no smoking in this building, ma’am,’ Edie told his wife.

  Jean Wilder glared at her and muttered under her breath as we went into the interview room.

  ‘Little ginger cow.’

  Edie shook her head and let it go.

  Barry Wilder eased himself into the chair opposite us.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘this interview is being recorded and may be given in evidence if any case is brought to trial. My name is DC Max Wolfe and I am currently serving with Homicide and Serious Crime Command here at West End Central, 27 Savile Row, London. The other officer present is DC Edie Wren. The time is 3 p.m.’ I nodded at Barry Wilder. If he had once been a man of violence then he looked as if all the violence had been knocked out of him.

  ‘Please state your name and profession.’

  ‘Barry Wilder. Builder.’

  ‘Thank you. Did you ever meet a man called Bert Page, Mr Wilder?’

  He looked startled. ‘Who’s Bert Page?’

  ‘Bert Page was a war hero. Landed on Juno Beach on D-Day. Won the Distinguished Service Medal. Then, a lifetime later, Darren Donovan put him in a coma.’

  ‘Ah, Bert Page – the old gentleman who got mugged by the junkie they just strung up. No, I never met Mr Page. But he sounds like a fine old man.’

  ‘Did you have contact with Mahmud Irani after he was released from prison?’

  Wilder hesitated.


  I felt Edie tense beside me.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  We waited. I stared at the faded football tattoos on his arms. I saw now they were two crossed irons. West Ham.

  ‘I got a knife,’ Barry Wilder said quietly. ‘I was planning to stick it in his heart.’

  I heard Edie exhale by my side.

  I leaned forward.

  ‘Mr Wilder, I want you to understand that you are not under arrest but you do have the right to have a legal representative present,’ I said. ‘And I have to remind you this interview is being recorded and may be given in evidence if any case is brought to trial.’

  He ignored me.

  ‘I wanted to kill him,’ he said.

  Then he waited.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘You wanted to kill him . . .’

  ‘I thought I could kill him. I thought God would forgive me because of what he did to our Sofi. The way he ruined her. The way he took her life away from her and nobody did anything to stop him. Not you and your lot. And not me, the one man she should have been able to trust. The one man who should have protected her. And I didn’t, did I? Her own father didn’t protect her. Mahmud Irani and those men took her to those rooms and then they filled her with drink and drugs and then they did whatever they wanted to.’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever they wanted, they did to her. And then they phoned their friends and their fucking brothers, and they came round to do what they wanted to my daughter. They made their own pornography. That’s what they were doing with her. And when we got her back, she was pregnant. Did you know that? Did you?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘She lost the baby and I thanked God. And how can I live with myself, thanking God for the death of a baby?’

  ‘Tell me about the knife,’ I said.

  ‘I said I was going to kill him in the courtroom. You knew that. You quoted the exact words! When they all went down for whatever pitiful little stretch they got. When the judge gave them their slap on their wrists. When all those evil bastards were laughing at us. I said I was going to kill him, didn’t I? So then I got the knife and I waited for him at the mosque where he prays every Friday.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t do it.’ His voice choking now. ‘I didn’t have it in me. I wanted him to die – and I wanted to be the one who did it – but I was not enough of a man to do it.’

  ‘Did you ever meet Paul Warboys, Mr Wilder?’

  ‘Paul Warboys – the gangster?’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

  I reached across and turned off the machine quietly, anxious not to intrude on a grief that would never end.

  Outside the interview room, Jean Wilder had a cigarette in her mouth. She brandished it at Edie, to show that it wasn’t lit, but when she got to her feet and got in my face, I could still smell the scent of tobacco that she always carried with her, and I could still smell the Jimmy Choo perfume and Juicy Fruit chewing gum that she used to cover it.

  ‘Will you ever leave us alone?’ she said. ‘You useless flat-footed fools. He didn’t do it. We have been through hell in this family. Mahmud Irani destroyed this family and my husband didn’t do a thing. Why don’t you arrest the stinking Paki bastards that are out there raping our children right now? Right now. Right now. Why don’t you do something useful? Why do you let those Paki bastards get away with murder?’

  ‘Stop,’ Barry Wilder said, very quietly, and she stopped immediately, shaking her head.

  ‘I’ll walk you out,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Jean Wilder. ‘We can find the door ourselves. Go and catch some villains. Make yourself useful.’

  When Edie and I went up to MIR-1, Tara was already running the voice biometrics on Wilder’s interview.

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ I said.

  A slim figure was standing by the window, looking down on Savile Row. She turned to face us and it took a long moment for me to recognise her.

  ‘I want to show you something,’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.

  19

  Pat Whitestone sat at her workstation in MIR-1 and searched online until she found a ninety-second film of pure horror.

  ‘Look,’ she told us.

  The footage was grainy, jerky, filmed by someone who was at the end of a long night. It opened on a club, the dance floor as crowded as a tube train at rush hour, the music a wall of booming noise. Boom, boom, boom. Girls in heels and miniskirts. Shirtless boys holding bottles. Dancing in a space where there was no room to dance. Boom, boom, boom. And then the first screams. High-pitched, disbelieving, the revellers all turning their heads, straining to see.

  The crowd parted.

  A boy with blood covering his face staggered across the dance floor.

  Staggering on legs that were on the verge of giving out. His hands held out before him, groping for help.

  Blinded.

  The club began to glow with the white lights of phone cameras as more of them began to film the broken boy.

  ‘Look what they did to my son,’ Whitestone said.

  ‘Online?’ I said. ‘How the hell can it be online?’

  ‘Because fifty people got out their phones and filmed him. They filmed him, Max. Nobody helped him. But they all filmed him.’

  On the film, the white lights followed fifteen-year-old Justin Whitestone as he sank to his knees in the middle of the empty dance floor and screamed. A terrible sound, filled more with fear than pain, and the pain must have been unbearable. Somebody laughed. The film stopped.

  ‘Who have we arrested?’ Edie said.

  ‘Nobody,’ Whitestone said. ‘It happened in the toilets. Somebody put a bottle across his eyes in the toilets. The place was full of people but nobody saw a thing. My Just will need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life – and nobody saw a thing.’

  ‘There must be CCTV cameras,’ Edie said.

  ‘Not in toilets,’ Whitestone said. She was still staring at the frozen image on her computer screen. Her son on his knees, blood streaming from his torn eyes, the long-legged high-heeled girls and shirtless gym-fit boys standing behind him with their phones in their hands. ‘No CCTV cameras in toilets, Edie. Invasion of privacy.’

  ‘Pat?’

  ‘Yes, Max?’

  She was hypnotised by the image on the screen and still would not look at me.

  ‘They must know who did it,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, they know all right. It’s a gang from one of the estates behind King’s Cross. The Dog Town Boys. Have you heard of them? I even know their names and where they live. But nobody saw anything, nobody is willing to come forward, and there are no cameras to prove a thing.’

  I reached forward and hit the command and Q buttons on her keyboard. Quit. The image disappeared. She looked at me. But there was nothing I could tell her to stop the pain. And if it had been my child in the hospital, my Scout with her sight gone and her attackers still walking the streets, there would have been nothing that she could have done for me.

  ‘They’re getting away with it, Max,’ Whitestone told me. ‘But then they usually do.’

  I was back at home before I managed to get anyone on the phone who had been involved in investigating the blinding of Justin Whitestone.

  ‘Terrible thing,’ said an old DI from New Scotland Yard. ‘Well-educated kid like that, never in any bother, and some little herbert takes his eyes out for looking at him the wrong way or spilling his drink or whatever it was. They don’t need an excuse, do they? Yeah, I remember the case.’

  ‘Back up a minute,’ I said. ‘This is not an ongoing investigation?’

  The DI sighed down the line.

  ‘What can we do? Everyone’s scared of the Dog Town Boys – and when I say everyone, I mean everyone in about a square mile of the council estates behinds King’s Cross.’

  ‘But this is one of our own,’ I said. ‘The boy is the son of my DCI at West End Central.’

  ‘I know whose son he is,’ said the DI from New Sco
tland Yard, the first frost coming into his voice. ‘But the boy didn’t see who glassed him – or so he says. And nobody in the club knows who did it – or so they say. There’s not a lot we can do.’ Now there was even more frost. ‘And if it was West End Central running the investigation – there’s bugger all you’d be able to do.’

  I stared out the window. The dome of St Paul’s bone-white in the moonlight, the party people rolling down Charterhouse Street, the lights of the meat market coming on for the long night shift.

  ‘I know you did your best,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard to believe that nobody gets lifted for such a serious assault.’

  The DI softened.

  ‘It’s rotten, I know. But even if we lifted one of these little gangsters from the Dog Town Boys, it’s not going to make the kid see again, is it? What can you do, eh? Sometimes the guilty just walk away.’

  ‘And there was never a lead?’

  I heard him hesitate. ‘There was a girl. A young woman. From Hungary. Worked in one of those big Islington squares looking after kiddies of people who work in the City. A nanny. A nice Islington nanny called – let’s see – Margit Mester. Twenty-two. Lovely girl. When we went in that first night, stopped them all leaving and tried to have a word, I spoke to Margit Mester and she pointed out a local lad called Trey N’Dou.’

  He spelled it for me.

  ‘You know this Trey?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, Trey N’Dou is the leader of the Dog Town Boys.’

  I let that sink in. ‘So what happened to your Hungarian witness, Margit Mester?’

  I could already guess the answer.

  ‘We brought her in for a line-up that included Trey and she didn’t recognise him. Couldn’t place him at the scene. It was noisy, confusing, upsetting. The usual bullshit when a witness gets cold feet.’

  ‘Can I talk to Margit Mester?’

  ‘If you go to Budapest.’

  ‘She went home?’

  ‘Couldn’t get there fast enough when she twigged who she was pointing a finger at.’