The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

Jackson came out of his room and crossed the loft. At the door, he raised his hand in salute and gave me his gap-toothed grin and pointed at the market. He was off to work. I lifted my hand – goodbye – and he slipped out.

  ‘The big problem for us was that we didn’t have CCTV,’ said the DI, warming to his theme of the guilty going unpunished. ‘You know the Met solves nearly one hundred murders every year with CCTV images? There are six million CCTV cameras in this country – one for every ten people – but not enough to stop every villain.’

  Below me I could see Jackson walking towards Smithfield. But he did not go inside. He turned right and began walking towards Holborn Circus.

  ‘And there’s no CCTV cameras in toilets,’ I said. ‘Although they have them everywhere else, don’t they?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to disclose an image of a patient without their written consent,’ said the security officer at the Whittington Hospital.

  ‘I’m not looking for an image of a patient,’ I said. ‘I want to know who visited him.’

  We were in the hospital’s security bunker. It was a darkened room with no natural light where four large screens each showed a grid revealing nine CCTV images, everything from the car park to the maternity ward, the A&E department to the main foyer.

  ‘How far can you go back?’ I said.

  ‘I can go back a month,’ the security officer said. ‘That’s how long we store the images.’ The grid of images was constantly changing on the large screens. ‘We’ve got one hundred and fifty cameras – pretty standard for a hospital like the Whittington – and when bad things happen, like a sexual assault on a mixed ward, or a baby abduction on the maternity ward, or the assaults on our staff that happen every drunken weekend of the year – they usually get reported immediately. What we looking for?’

  ‘Do you have images from the Critical Care Unit?’

  He hit some buttons.

  ‘Waiting room, nurses’ station, entrance to the CCU – you need a card to get beyond the door. Nobody just wanders in.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at the nurses’ station.’ I thought about it. ‘Let’s start with weekend nights.’

  The security officer went back to a Saturday night at the start of the month and found what I was looking for almost immediately.

  ‘Stop it there,’ I said.

  Jackson Rose was on the CCTV.

  He was holding a bouquet of flowers and smiling at a pretty Filipina nurse as if the flowers might possibly be for her as he walked past the nurses’ station on his way to visit an old soldier in a coma.

  * * *

  You see London’s homeless at night.

  In the day they are invisible, or at least hard to tell from the people with homes. But at night they are revealed and there are places – pathetically few in a wealthy city of ten million souls – where they go to be fed.

  One of those places is Waterloo. Under the arches where trains roar above your head, arches that are black with the fumes of today and the fog of long ago.

  On this warm summer evening Jackson Rose stood at the back of a white van with a few other volunteers and spooned heaps of Phad Thai noodles on paper plates for men and women of all ages, all races, although many of them wore the rags of what had once been military uniforms.

  I waited by the side of the white van, declining a nice old posh lady’s offer of a cup of tea and ‘some of Jackson’s wonderful noodles’. He was trying to serve everyone, but new people kept arriving so in the end he handed over to the nice old posh lady and we walked beyond the arches until the noise of the trains receded and conversation was possible.

  ‘You quit your job at Smithfield,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.

  ‘This is more fulfilling,’ he said. ‘You still get your rent money, don’t you?’

  ‘You think I give a toss about rent money?’

  He nodded at the men and women waiting in line for his noodles.

  ‘A lot of them served. Iraq. Afghanistan. And Northern Ireland and the Falklands, some of the older ones.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that you visited Bert Page?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Because you know exactly what I’m investigating. You know Darren Donovan put Bert in that coma. You know I’m out there looking for whoever topped Darren Donovan.’

  Jackson glanced back at the van where the queue for noodles was growing.

  ‘Ah, the late Darren Donovan. You seem more concerned about this dead junkie than you do about the old man he ruined.’

  ‘Look – I can understand why you’d be moved by Bert Page.’

  He shook his head. ‘Moved? Is that what you think I am, Max? Moved?’

  ‘Call it what you want. I understand why you would care, OK? What I don’t understand is why you wouldn’t think to tell me.’

  ‘Why should I? You already look at me sideways.’

  ‘I don’t mean to look at you sideways, Jackson.’

  He laughed. ‘Do you think I’m involved in any of this, Max? These vigilantes – the Hanging Club – you think I’m mixed up in it in some way?’

  I remembered the Show History list on my laptop. And I remembered how he single-handedly demolished the men who attacked us on Charterhouse Street. And I remembered what he said.

  One in the head and one in the heart.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’re involved. But I think you’re on their side.’

  ‘Yeah, me and sixty million other people!’

  I remembered the wild kid he had been. And I knew that wildness was in him still and that it would be there forever.

  ‘I don’t want you to get into trouble,’ I said. ‘I care about you, all right? I just don’t know you, Jackson.’

  He showed me his famous smile.

  ‘You know me better than anyone,’ he said. ‘You want some Phad Thai noodles? Best this side of Bangkok.’

  I stared at him for a moment and then smiled back at him.

  ‘Some Phad Thai would be great,’ I said.

  But I never got the chance to try Jackson’s Phad Thai noodles. We were under the black arches of Waterloo when my phone began to vibrate.

  EDIE WREN CALLING.

  ‘They’ve got another one,’ she said.

  And I did not need to turn my head to know that Jackson was watching me, his face impassive, not smiling now.

  20

  I came into MIR-1 thirty minutes later and saw the big HD TV screen was filled with a head-and-shoulders shot of a bearded man.

  The beard was the frizzy kind that is missing a moustache. The man who wore it was light-skinned, pushing forty, with a small pillbox hat perched on his head and hooded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. He wore plain grey robes.

  ‘The victim of the latest abduction is Abu Din,’ Pat Whitestone was saying. Edie Wren, Billy Greene and Tara Jones watched her from their workstations. They must have renewed Tara’s contract, I thought, with a stab of elation.

  ‘Abu Din was born in Egypt and granted asylum in the UK,’ Whitestone continued. ‘He is wanted for inciting acts of terror in the United States but currently resisting extradition from the UK. His appeal is pending at the European Court of Human Rights.’ She nodded. ‘Pretty much your basic hate-preaching scumbag.’

  ‘You back?’ I said.

  ‘I’m back.’

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I can’t find the Abu Din hanging online.’

  ‘They haven’t hanged him yet,’ Edie Wren said. ‘Or at least they haven’t put anything online.’

  Billy Greene brought me a triple espresso and I smiled at him gratefully. It wasn’t from the Bar Italia, but it would do for now. I bolted it down in one.

  ‘What have they posted about him?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing that we can find on any of the usual platforms,’ Edie told me. ‘We’ve got an open line to Colin Cho at the Police Central e-crime Unit. The abduction is generating a lot of traffic. PCeU are on it. But Albert Pierrepoint himself is unusually silent.’ />
  ‘How do we know it’s them?’ I said. ‘They could be copycats. They could be self-radicalised. There are enough people out there who feel like they are on their side. How do we know it’s the Hanging Club?’

  ‘Educated guess,’ said Whitestone. ‘We’ve got CCTV of Abu Din being lifted. They’re far too slick to be fan boys. Have a look at this, Max. Can you run it, Billy?’

  Greene’s fingers flew over his keyboard and the mugshot of Abu Din was replaced by black-and-white footage from a CCTV camera. The camera revealed a crowd of men kneeling in the road of a suburban street. A figure in grey robes stood before them. Abu Din. High above the street I could see the curved arch of Wembley Stadium, glinting in the sunshine at the end of another beautiful day.

  ‘Abu Din was at the Wembley Central mosque, but they kicked him out after he went on Newsnight and praised the murder of six British soldiers in Afghanistan. So now he preaches in the street.’

  I wanted another triple espresso.

  ‘Abu Din,’ I said. ‘Why does his name seem familiar?’

  ‘He’s the one they call the Mental Mullah,’ Billy said. ‘I’ll just fast-forward over the prayers, shall I?’ The CCTV footage began speeding up. ‘The papers tagged him the Mental Mullah after he said the killing of British soldiers was “a glorious thing”.’

  ‘He gets fifty grand a year in benefits for his wife and six kids,’ Edie said. ‘I reckon we must be the mental ones.’

  ‘The papers had to stop calling him the Mental Mullah because it was considered offensive by mental health charities,’ Billy said. ‘Ah, this is the money shot.’

  The CCTV footage slowed down to real time. There were perhaps one hundred men kneeling in the Wembley street. Abu Din himself faced them in his plain grey robes, flanked by what looked like a couple of bodyguards. Both of Abu Din’s index fingers were pointing to the heavens. At the back of the crowd I could see a solitary uniformed policeman, a black officer with the height and bulk of a heavyweight boxer. I guessed he could handle himself. Watching this street wasn’t an easy posting. The uniformed cop was standing directly in front of a young man in a wheelchair. There was a woman behind the wheelchair. Their dark good looks were so similar they could have been twins. The young man was holding up a placard. I could just about make out the words.

  My Country – Love It or Leave It.

  ‘Coming up now,’ Billy said.

  The policeman suddenly started to run. The woman gripped the handlebars of the young man in the wheelchair and seemed to hunch, as if expecting a blow. And then the crowd were all getting to their feet, pointing at something out of camera.

  They began to scatter.

  Running for their lives.

  A black transit van was being driven at speed. It appeared to be heading straight for the crowd but suddenly it mounted the pavement to avoid the young man in the wheelchair. I automatically looked for anything that would make the transit van unique. Dents, scratches, words that had been sprayed over. But there was nothing. There was brown duct tape plastered over the registration plate. Simple but effective.

  The crowd had done a runner. Apart from Abu Din, who was wagging an admonishing finger at the black van.

  He was still wagging it when Albert Pierrepoint got out of the van. And then another Albert Pierrepoint. The faces of the two kindly uncles scanned the street. At the top of the screen I could see the young uniformed copper on his belly, radioing for assistance. Another kindly uncle sat at the wheel of the transit van, gunning the engine.

  ‘Albert Pierrepoint masks,’ I said. ‘Nice touch.’

  ‘And the duct tape over the registration plates is an even nicer touch,’ Whitestone said. ‘Whoever they are, they know exactly what they’re doing.’

  Abu Din’s bodyguards were nowhere to be seen as the preacher was bundled into the back of the black van without ceremony. It began to reverse at speed down the suburban street and then it was gone, the street gradually filling with worshippers watching it leave, the uniformed copper slowly getting to his feet.

  Billy hit a few buttons and the big screen became the standard CCTV grid of nine, all of them views of fast-flowing evening traffic.

  ‘The CCTV followed them on the North Circular heading in an anti-clockwise direction and then we lost them. And then we picked them up again.’

  The grid was replaced by a single still image of the transit van burning on what looked like the surface of an abandoned planet. In the background I could see the faded sign of a giant oil company.

  ‘They switched vehicles,’ I said.

  ‘Disabled the cameras in this abandoned petrol station and torched their old ride,’ Edie said. ‘So we’ve got one CCTV camera for every person in London but it does us no good at all because we don’t know what we’re looking for.’

  Telephones suddenly began to ring, chime and vibrate. Edie scanned a text on her mobile.

  ‘Getting the first pictures from what we believe to be the execution of Abu Din,’ she said. ‘Let me put it on the big screen.’

  She pounded her keyboard and a hangman’s noose appeared on the TV. The camera zoomed in and then out again, as if getting focused. It settled on the noose, hanging stark against the familiar cell-like space, mildewed with the ages, beyond all light. Then the camera slowly pulled back and you could see the four black-coated figures.

  ‘Production values definitely improving,’ Edie muttered.

  But this time was different. Because there was no condemned man wild-eyed with terror at the centre of it all. Instead the camera focused on a series of photographs on the wall.

  Servicemen. Six of them. Smiling, happy, proud.

  Edie looked up from her laptop.

  ‘Getting reports – unconfirmed – that those are the Sangin Six.’

  ‘I remember the Sangin Six,’ I said. ‘Sangin is a district in the east of Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Six of our servicemen – and women – were in a patrol vehicle in Sangin that got hit by an IED. They all survived the blast but then they were torn to bits by a mob. They didn’t show it on the mainstream media because it was too gruesome. Body parts hanging from bridges while the locals danced in the street.’

  The camera tracked slowly across the faces of the six dead soldiers. I looked across at Tara Jones who was running voice biometrics on the film.

  She saw me watching her.

  ‘Are you picking up any dialogue, Tara?’ I said.

  ‘Just ambient sounds,’ she said. ‘It’s not traffic. Sounds like some kind of major building work going on nearby.’

  ‘Abu Din was vocal in his praise of the killers of the Sangin Six,’ Whitestone said. ‘He insisted on calling them the Six Crusaders. The elderly grandmother of one of the Sangin Six said that he should be hanged.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they?’ Edie said.

  The camera zoomed in for another close-up on the empty noose. And then the image froze.

  ‘Maybe it’s a trailer,’ Edie said. ‘Stay tuned for the main event.’

  ‘Maybe they think hanging’s too good for him,’ I said.

  The early morning crowds filled the Imperial War Museum. But it was very quiet in the basement room where I sat with the young woman in a wheelchair. I had met Carol through my first SIO in Homicide and Serious Crime Command, DCI Victor Mallory. It was because of him that I could come to her for help at any time.

  ‘I was in Camp Bastion when the Sangin Six died,’ she said. ‘It felt like a turning point in the war on terror.’ A short laugh. ‘That’s when it started to feel like terror had declared war on us.’

  She moved her wheelchair closer to the desk and scrolled through some images of hell. Jubilant crowds. Scraps of human remains. The pitiless sun of Afghanistan.

  ‘I don’t know how much you want to see of this stuff, Max,’ Carol said. ‘There’s plenty that they couldn’t show on the evening news, but I’m not sure you can learn anything from it.’

  I checked my phone again for a message from Edie Wren.
We kept expecting the execution to go live. But the morning after the abduction of Abu Din, it still hadn’t happened.

  ‘I really wanted to sound you out about Abu Din,’ I said.

  ‘The Mental Mullah,’ she grinned. ‘They took him, didn’t they?’

  I nodded. ‘Who would want to string him up, Carol?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Anyone who served. Anyone who loved someone who served.’ She slapped the sides of her wheelchair without anger or self-pity. ‘Anyone who came home in one of these.’

  I thought of the two protestors held back by one uniformed cop in Wembley.

  ‘But that’s not the same as doing it,’ Carol continued. ‘And besides – the style’s all wrong.’

  ‘You mean abduction and the mock trial and the hanging?’

  ‘All of it. The masks. The drama. The little hashtags. Why hang him? There are far easier ways to kill someone.’

  One in the head and one in the heart.

  Jackson Rose, I thought. Who the hell are you?

  My phone began to vibrate.

  ‘We’ve got Abu Din,’ Edie said. ‘And he’s alive.’

  21

  ‘Inshallah, there was a mighty fire,’ said Abu Din. ‘And it was revealed to me that this country is Dar al-Harb – the land of war.’

  Edie looked at her notes.

  ‘So this was when they burned the van just down the road from Brent Cross, right?’ she said. ‘This is when you had your revelation about the land of war? At Brent Cross?’

  He turned his face away from her, the pink tip of his tongue flecking his lips. He smoothed down his grey robes and stared out of the window of his home. It was as if Edie had never spoken. I followed his gaze. On the street where they had taken him, his followers were already gathering, excited at the news of his miraculous return. Some of them were praying. Others were taking pictures with their selfie sticks.

  Abu Din had been found alive at London Gateway service station, on the very edge of the city. He had spent the night locked up in the back of an abandoned container lorry until he eventually kicked his way out and raised the alarm. Perhaps his followers were right. It seemed a miracle that his execution was not being watched on YouTube.