The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  ‘Please tell me everything you remember, Mr Din,’ I said.

  He nodded, his eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles flicking on me and then away.

  ‘Allahu akbar,’ he murmured, not for the first time. ‘They took me. The men in their masks. And then they burned the first vehicle and put me in another vehicle. Then we drove to the car park with many lorries. The big lorries.’

  ‘Container lorries,’ I said.

  ‘And all of them gathered around me as they locked me in the metal box.’ His eyes swivelled to the heavens. ‘But the metal was weak, Allahu akbar, and it was not my time to die.’

  I looked down at his sandalled feet, both of them bandaged, both of them weeping blood where he had spent the night kicking out the rusted side of a container lorry.

  ‘Did they say anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Before they locked me away, one of them – the big one – asked me if I knew why I was being punished. This made another very angry and he slapped the side of the lorry, calling for silence. They were trying not to talk. And then they locked me in and left me and all three of them returned to their vehicle. I heard it drive away.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Three of them locked you up? So there was another one that remained in the cab?’

  ‘No. They all came to lock me away.’

  ‘So you’re saying there were only three of them?’ I said.

  Abu Din nodded. ‘The two who took me and the one who was driving.’

  Edie and I exchanged a look.

  ‘Then where was the fourth man?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe he was driving the change vehicle,’ Edie said. ‘It was the smart move to switch vehicles and burn the kidnap van.’

  ‘But he would still need a ride, wouldn’t he? After the first vehicle was torched.’ I turned back to Abu Din.

  ‘Did you see their faces?’ I asked him. ‘Did they remove their masks? Did you hear voices? Did they say any names?’

  ‘You asked me this already. I saw their white hands. I smelled their lack of faith. They were kuffars – unbelievers. Like you.’

  ‘Any tattoos or distinguishing features on their hands? Did they say anything at all?’

  He did not answer me.

  ‘You’re very lucky to be alive,’ Edie said. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  He knew.

  Abu Din gripped his right hand with the left, but still he could not stop it shaking. But he was playing the big man for the followers who were out in the street and who had crammed into the large council house in Wembley. We could hear them stomping around upstairs while we conducted our interview. And it crossed my mind that perhaps he truly believed that it was some god who had saved him today.

  ‘It was not my time for jannah,’ he said.

  ‘Jannah is paradise, right?’ I said.

  He said nothing, unimpressed by my sketchy knowledge of Arabic. ‘London cops know fifty words in fifty languages,’ I said, smiling at him.

  No response.

  ‘Mr Din, we are going to give you an Osman Warning,’ I said. ‘It’s an official warning that we believe your life is in mortal danger and we are offering you police protection.’

  His thin-lipped mouth twisted into a smile.

  ‘Do you think I need the protection of unbelievers?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And we’ll talk again.’

  We closed our notebooks.

  Abu Din went off to address the followers who were gathering in the street. Edie and I went to the window and watched. It was the kind of shabby suburban street that looks grey and tired even in the middle of a blazing summer. But there was no mistaking the buzz of excitement that ran through it when Abu Din began to speak in Urdu.

  ‘Why didn’t they just do him straight away?’ I said.

  ‘Maybe their kill site was being used for a yoga class,’ Edie said. ‘Do you believe he didn’t see or hear anything, Max?’

  I nodded. ‘If they knew enough to cover their registration plates, and if they knew enough to burn all forensics in the van, then they knew enough not to make all the usual dumb mistakes – like calling each other by their names or showing their faces in the presence of their victim.’

  We walked out into the street.

  Beyond the heads of the crowd of men listening to Abu Din – and they were all men – I could see the uniformed black cop who had been minding the street when the transit van bowled up. Beyond him, the young man in the wheelchair was back with the young woman who accompanied him. They still had their placard and the young man in the wheelchair held it up as Abu Din slipped from Urdu into English.

  ‘In the mighty fire much was revealed to me,’ he declared. ‘It was revealed that the black flag of Islam will fly above Buckingham Palace and it will also fly above Downing Street.’

  ‘Don’t hold your fucking breath,’ Edie said.

  Skirting the crowd, we walked to the end of the street and introduced ourselves to the uniformed cop. Our people were still here, but not in great numbers and holding back. The SIO – DCI Whitestone, back where she belonged – the CSIs and the search teams had all been and gone on this grey street and now they were up at the London Gateway services on the M1, rummaging around the derelict container where Abu Din had been imprisoned.

  We showed our warrant cards to the uniform. Up close he was far bigger than he had looked on CCTV and much younger. He couldn’t have been long out of Hendon. Rocastle, it said on his name tag. He was embarrassed he hadn’t done better when the transit van came barrelling down the road.

  ‘You did the right thing,’ I said. ‘You got out of the way. They wouldn’t have stopped for you or anyone else.’

  ‘Did you see their faces?’ Edie said. ‘Hear anything when they got out of the van?’

  ‘They had those masks on when I clocked them,’ he said. ‘The Albert Pierrepoint masks. There was a lot of screaming and hollering when they were getting Abu Din into the van, but I couldn’t tell who was shouting.’

  ‘If you catch them,’ said a woman’s voice, ‘give them a medal.’

  She was standing behind the young man in a wheelchair. For the first time I saw that he was wearing what looked like the remains of a uniform. Green army-issue T-shirt, DPM desert camouflage trousers that hung loosely on prosthetic legs fitted into Asics trainers so unused they could have just come out of the box. As they looked at my warrant card I saw they shared the same brown-eyed, black-haired good looks and the kind of skin that tans easily.

  ‘DC Wolfe,’ I said. ‘But who are you?’

  The woman laughed. At first I had thought they could be twins, but now she seemed to be a few years older than the young man in the wheelchair.

  ‘You people are unbelievable,’ she said, her mouth tight with bitterness. ‘Mr Din down there is talking about flying his flag over Downing Street and you really want to see our ID?’

  Quite a few reporters and photographers were hanging around, most of them at Abu Din’s end of the street. But a couple of them stirred at the sound of the woman’s voice raised in amused disbelief. I gave Edie the nod and she headed them off before they could come our way.

  ‘This was a crime scene, ma’am,’ I told the woman. And then I waited. She gave me a driving licence.

  Piper Maldini, twenty-nine years old.

  ‘I haven’t got anything,’ the man in the wheelchair said, panic in his voice. Piper Maldini soothed him with a touch of his shoulder. She fished an NHS card out of his rucksack. Philip Maldini, twenty-six.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ he said.

  I gave them back the driving licence and the NHS card. Piper’s hand was still lightly resting on her brother’s shoulder.

  ‘You’re here every day?’ I said, as gently as I could.

  Piper Maldini still took offence. ‘Is that a crime, too?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Was it the Hanging Club?’ Philip Maldini said, excitedly. He had none of the thin-skinned aggression of his sister. ‘Is that wh
o took him?’

  I could give them a bunch of flannel or I could tell them the truth.

  ‘We’re working on that assumption, although we haven’t ruled out that it could be a group of self-starters.’

  ‘And he got away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Better luck next time,’ Piper said.

  ‘Why do you come down here?’ I asked them.

  ‘To confront the people who would dance on our graves,’ Piper Maldini said. ‘Why do you come down here, Detective? To protect the likes of Abu Din?’

  ‘I’m just doing my job.’

  ‘Isn’t that what the guards said at the Nazi concentration camps?’

  I stared at her. ‘I don’t think of myself as a concentration camp guard,’ I said. ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘What would happen to me if I spewed the kind of filth that comes out of his mouth?’ she said, gesturing to the man in robes droning away at the end of the street. ‘If I preached hatred, and if I mocked boys who died for their country, and if I saw gays and women and Jews as less than human – what would you do to me, Detective?’

  I leaned forward to look at the young man in the wheelchair.

  ‘Thank you for your service,’ I said.

  I began to walk away. I didn’t want to argue with her and I didn’t want to arrest them. And I was afraid if I stuck around much longer I would have to do both.

  Piper Maldini shouted at my back. ‘Detective!’

  I turned to look at her. She was gripping the side of her brother’s wheelchair with one hand and with the other she was pulling up the sleeve of her T-shirt to show me the tattoo on her bicep. I had seen the tattoo before. It was a British Army tattoo. Five red and black poppies under six words.

  ALL GAVE SOME – SOME GAVE ALL

  ‘My brother wasn’t the only one who served,’ she said.

  22

  I awoke near the end of the night, at that moment when deep, restorative sleep enters the dreaming shallows.

  The first rays of sunrise were filling the big windows of the loft with a milky light. I heard Stan sigh and settle by my side and I reached out to stroke him, reassuring him it wasn’t time to get up yet.

  But my phone was vibrating. It was DCI Whitestone.

  Press conference –

  West End Central –

  0800 sharp.

  I looked at the clock by the side of the bed. 04.45. I lay back with a sigh, my hand on fur that was smoother than silk. Stan’s huge round eyes were watching me in the half-light.

  ‘Nobody sleeps any more, Stan,’ I said.

  Scout was spending a couple of nights at Mia’s, an extended sleepover that was only possible during her long summer break, so after I had walked and fed the dog I waited for Mrs Murphy to arrive and then headed off for work hours before I really needed to. There was no sound from Jackson’s room.

  MIR-1 was empty when I arrived at West End Central carrying a triple espresso from the Bar Italia on Frith Street, Soho. As sometimes happened when I had not slept well, I could feel my old injuries coming back, reminders of ancient pain that my grandmother would have called ‘playing up’.

  There was a three-inch scar on my stomach where a man who was now dead had stuck his knife.

  There was the lower part of my ribcage on the right-hand side where I had torn my internal intercostal muscles – the muscles that let you breathe – when I had fallen through a table. And there were assorted knocks that I had picked up in the gym, trying to be a tough guy.

  They all hurt today.

  So I took off the jacket of the suit that I had got married in and got down on the floor of MIR-1 to do some stretching. It was the only thing that made all that old bone-deep pain go away. I had learned the moves watching Stan. He did them every time he got up.

  I settled in a neutral position on my hands and knees and then curved my spine, raising my head as I pushed back my shoulders. Just like Stan. And then the other way round, arching my back and trying to make my chin touch my navel. Just like Stan. I breathed out, feeling better already, and settled for a moment on my hands and knees before straightening my arms and legs and pushing my butt into the air. And that is the position I was in when I saw Tara Jones watching me from the doorway of MIR-1.

  ‘You do yoga?’ she said. ‘I’m impressed.’

  I got to my feet, my face burning. ‘What? Yoga? No! These are just some moves that Stan taught me.’

  ‘Stan’s your yoga teacher? He’s good.’

  ‘Stan’s my dog.’

  She came into the room and went to her workstation.

  ‘Why are you in so early?’ I said, and when she turned to look at me we both realised that she had not heard me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Sometimes I forget.’

  She was plugging her laptop into the workstation’s computer.

  She looked at my face. ‘You forget I’m deaf?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s no reason to remember. My condition doesn’t define me. It’s a difficulty not a disability. My parents were told, “Your baby girl can have a disability or a difficulty. It’s up to you.” They treated it as a difficulty rather than a disability. And so do I.’

  ‘I don’t mean to offend you.’

  ‘It’s fine that you forget. You don’t offend me.’

  She waited for me to speak.

  ‘I just wondered why you are here so early.’

  The hint of a smile. She pushed the hair out of her face.

  ‘I didn’t mean to disturb your yoga session, Detective.’

  I laughed uneasily. ‘I don’t do yoga.’

  ‘Oh yes, you do,’ she insisted. ‘And so does your dog. Stan? Even if you don’t know it.’ She powered up her machine. ‘Two things. I’ve been running biometrics on the most recent film. The background sound is building work. I know, I know – all of London is a building site. But this is not the sound of someone having a loft conversion or a new conservatory put in. This is heavy machinery, a hundred and fifty feet below ground. That’s a major skyscraper going up. That narrows it down, doesn’t it?’

  I nodded. ‘What’s the other thing?’

  ‘I did a review of your interviews with Mr Wilder and Mr Warboys. The interview with Mr Warboys has no biometrical anomalies. But I don’t think that Mr Wilder was telling you the whole truth.’

  I remembered Barry Wilder in the interview room and my total conviction that he had been telling the truth. He had nothing to do with the lynching of Mahmud Irani.

  ‘I thought you said that voice biometrics was infallible?’

  ‘I never said infallible. I said that it was light years ahead of twentieth-century tech like the lie detector.’ She hit the keyboard and called up the interview tape. ‘Just watch, will you?’

  I heard my voice.

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

  I heard Barry Wilder reply and saw a yellow line jump across Tara Jones’ screen like summer lightning.

  ‘Yes . . . I got a knife . . . I was planning to stick it in his heart.’

  ‘He’s telling the truth,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but even when he’s telling the truth, his results show evidence of heart palpitations, raised blood pressure, shallow breathing. Initially I didn’t run tests on statements that we believed to be true. And I should have done.’

  ‘But he’s nervous,’ I said. ‘He’s in a police station. He’s admitting that he considered killing one of the men who abused his daughter.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s more than that. Far more. His blood pressure was a reading of systolic 190 over a diastolic 110 – that’s what doctors call a hypertensive crisis. Even when he was telling you the truth, his blood pressure was off the chart.’

  ‘Are you saying he lied to me?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m saying that you didn’t ask him the right questions.’

  * * *

  Whitestone froze.

  She was staring
out at the massed reporters, photographers and camera crews stuffed into the first-floor media room at West End Central and they were all staring back at her, waiting for something to happen.

  But nothing did.

  This small, bespectacled woman, the most experienced homicide detective at 27 Savile Row, looked as if she did not understand what she was doing here, or what was expected of her. There was a statement in her right hand. I saw her fingers tighten into a fist, crumpling the statement.

  I was on one side of her and the Chief Super was on the other. I saw the Chief Super gently touch Whitestone’s back, encouraging her, urging her on. And still she did not move.

  From the time Whitestone had arrived at MIR-1 today she had seemed distracted, tired, as though her mind was still with her son in the hospital. But I brought her some serious coffee from the Bar Italia and by the time our MIT had assembled, she was more like her old self. Now she had suddenly blanked.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ I whispered, and took the microphone. ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m DC Max Wolfe of West End Central and I’m going to make a brief statement about our ongoing investigations and then take a few questions.’

  Scarlet Bush stood up.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about the victims of the Hanging Club,’ she said.

  I prised Whitestone’s statement from her hand. She glanced at me for a moment and then quickly fled the room.

  I looked down at the words she had written:

  I’m going to make a brief statement.

  Scarlet Bush was still talking. ‘A child molester. A hit-and-run driver. A drug addict who put an old war hero in a coma. And now a hate preacher, popularly – and some would say deservedly – known as the Mental Mullah.’

  I held my temper.

  ‘What’s your question?’

  ‘How does it feel to be hunting men who millions consider to be heroes?

  ‘Vigilantes are not heroes,’ I said. ‘Murderers are not heroes. Not in the eyes of the law.’

  They were shouting questions at me now.