by Tony Parsons
His face was suddenly white with shock.
‘That’s Dead Man’s Walk,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason the ceiling gets lower and the walls come in, Max. It’s because when a man – or a woman – knew that they were about to hang, they went fighting mad. They went berserk. The corridor getting smaller was a way to physically control the condemned.’
I could feel the welt around my neck throbbing with blood.
‘Where’s Dead Man’s Walk?’ I said.
‘You mean – where was it?’ he said. ‘Dead Man’s Walk was in Newgate Prison. But, Max – Newgate was razed to the ground more than one hundred years ago.’
30
‘Dead Man’s Walk was in Newgate Prison,’ I told Whitestone as I walked back to my car. ‘Don’t let Professor Hitchens leave. I’ll be there in five minutes.’
I put on the blues-and-twos for the short drive to 27 Savile Row, fully expecting to find MIR-1 feverish with excitement when I arrived. But they all looked up at me as if it was just the end of another long day. Whitestone. Edie. Billy Greene. Tara. And Professor Hitchens, who had an ancient map of London, coloured gold and black, spread out across four workstations.
Whitestone gave me a sad smile.
‘Looks like chump bait, Max,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
‘What’s chump bait?’ Tara said.
‘Chump bait is a false lead,’ I said. ‘Chump bait is deliberately sending an investigation in completely the wrong direction. But—’
‘Newgate Prison no longer exists,’ Hitchens said. ‘You have to get that into your head, Max. I have no idea where you were taken, but it couldn’t have been Newgate. This is Charles Booth’s map of London in 1899. It’s what they call a “poverty map” – it was originally drawn to show areas of chronic want in the city. Black indicates poverty, gold indicates wealth.’ His index finger tapped the centre of the map. ‘What does that say?’
I stared at the map. And there it was, between Smithfield meat market and St Paul’s Cathedral, right at the very heart of the city.
‘Newgate Gaol,’ I read.
‘That’s right. As you can see, Newgate Prison is clearly visible at the end of the nineteenth century. And now look at Booth’s poverty map of 1903, just four years later.’
He unfolded what looked like an identical black and gold map of London and spread it on top of the first.
‘No Newgate,’ I said.
Hitchens nodded.
‘Because Newgate was razed to the ground in 1902,’ he said. ‘The prison stood for nearly a thousand years, but it was completely demolished at the start of the twentieth century. The Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – was built on the site. It was a deeply symbolic gesture. One kind of British justice – medieval, brutal, retributive – was replaced at the start of the new century with another kind of British justice – modern, fair and just.’
‘So nothing of Newgate remains?’ Whitestone asked. ‘Nothing at all?’
Hitchens began folding up his maps.
‘There’s a very nice pub opposite the Old Bailey – the Viaduct Tavern – with what’s left of Newgate’s cells down in the beer cellar,’ he said. ‘Debtors’ cells that held up to twenty people. They say the smell was so bad that it could have choked a horse. But I’ve seen them and they don’t match Detective Wolfe’s description. In fact, they’re nothing like them. Your colleague at New Scotland Yard is quite correct, Max – your description perfectly matches the corridor in Newgate Gaol called Dead Man’s Walk. It progressively narrowed so that the condemned man – or woman – could not turn around to fight or flee. But it hasn’t existed for over one hundred years.’
They were all looking at me with something approaching pity.
‘But it was real,’ I said. ‘I saw it. I walked down it.’
‘The internal architecture of Newgate is well documented,’ Hitchens said. ‘The prison appears on the very first map of London drawn in 1575 by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. More than anywhere that ever existed, Newgate represented traditional British justice, red in tooth and claw. So whoever abducted you knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly what that corridor resembles.’ He slipped his maps into his man bag and wiped his hand across his sweating forehead. ‘But trust me – it couldn’t have been Newgate.’
‘I want to check out the pub,’ Whitestone said. ‘The Viaduct Tavern.’
‘There’s not much there,’ Hitchens said. ‘Certainly nothing that—’
Whitestone raised one hand, silencing him, and I saw the thread of steel inside this unassuming woman. Her world had been torn apart this summer but she was still running this murder investigation and she wanted to see the cellars of the Viaduct Tavern.
It wasn’t a suggestion.
Thirty minutes later we were all down in the beer cellar of the Viaduct Tavern on Newgate Street. Hacked into the walls were cells that could have been built to contain large animals. They were cold, dark and reeked of ancient terrors. The pub above was a place of warmth and cheer and it was light years away from this ancient place of horrors. The cells seemed designed to muffle human screams. I felt my skin crawl.
Whitestone and Edie were looking at me.
‘Anything look familiar?’ Whitestone said.
‘This is not where they took me,’ I said. ‘Nothing like it.’ My spirits sank. ‘Chump bait, as you say.’
‘Fair enough,’ Whitestone said, patting me lightly on the back. ‘Every investigation has its share of false leads, Max, and this was one of them.’
We went up to the pub. The Viaduct Tavern is a beautiful Victorian pub with a wrought-copper ceiling that gives the place a warm and rosy glow. After the fetid air of the cells, being up here felt like breathing out. I sank into the nearest chair. Suddenly I was very tired.
‘I think we deserve a round,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ll get them in.’
Hitchens was excited. ‘Their selection of real ales is first class,’ he said.
I saw Tara Jones slip outside. I placed an order for a sparkling mineral water and a triple espresso and followed her. She was staring up at the sky. I looked up at the white wash of moonlight on the dome of the cathedral.
‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘I wasn’t looking at St Paul’s,’ she said.
And I saw what she had been looking at.
The giant black silhouettes of the cranes standing out against the night sky, those huge constructions that dwarfed even the highest shining towers, the cranes that would build tomorrow’s skyscrapers.
I drove her home. It was surprisingly easy to arrange. Nobody looked at us twice when I offered to give her a lift back to Canonbury. But she was distant in the car and when I touched her arm she just shook her head.
‘You don’t want to be that guy, Max,’ she said.
‘What guy?’
‘The cynical romantic. The man who gets his heart broken early on and spends the rest of his life moving from one married woman to the next. Taking no chances, risking nothing, leaving all these wrecked marriages in his wake that, most times, never even know that they’re wrecked.’ She shot me a brief look. I smiled at her beautiful face. She didn’t smile back. ‘Women will come to you,’ she told me. ‘All kinds of women. Don’t make the mistake of only wanting what you can’t have. Don’t become that man, Max. I mean it. You’re better than that.’
I laughed.
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.
But I did and she could see it in my face.
We had reached Canonbury Square and she told me I could let her out at the corner. I said that I would drive her to her front door and she didn’t argue with me. But of course I understood that I could not kiss her goodnight in front of her home.
The door opened as she went up the path and I could have looked away but I forced myself to watch. Her husband appeared in the light of the doorway, shirttails outside his trousers and a glass of red wine in his hand, the successful mone
y man at the end of his busy day, and I saw them briefly kiss. More of a quick peck between two sets of lips than a proper kiss. There was affection in the gesture, and familiarity, and even love – the kind of quiet, understated love that comes with the years.
But there was no hunger.
There was nothing like our coffee-flavoured kisses in the Bar Italia.
What she had with her husband was very different.
Their front door closed and I went home and read about Newgate Prison until the sky began to lighten.
I read of how a gaol had been built on the fringe of a Roman fort, a place of punishment born at a moment in history so unremarkable that no man ever thought to record it or remember it.
And as the meat market buzzed with its nighttime life beyond the windows of our loft, I read of Newgate becoming a crucible of misery and disease and corruption across the centuries, constantly destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666 and rising yet again, like a disease that could never be killed.
I read of the virulent strain of typhus that fermented in Newgate’s filthy black depths. I read of Rob Roy and Casanova rotting there, and of Robin Hood and Captain Kidd dying there, and the London crowds who queued to peek at its horrors and flocked to see its public executions and the appalled visitors like Charles Dickens who saw Newgate as London’s mark of eternal shame.
And as the total blackness of the night began to bleed away into the milky dawn, I read how, at the start of the twentieth century, Newgate was torn down brick by brick by brick, as if the city was seeking to hack out the tumour that had grown in its heart for almost a thousand years.
And when real morning came, one of those cold bright mornings that make summer suddenly seem like the stuff of dreams, I shaved and showered and I walked Stan and I made Scout breakfast and saw her settled with Mrs Murphy.
Then I walked to the Old Bailey to wait for justice.
31
As I waited for Alice Goddard inside the Central Criminal Court I stared up at a large shard of broken glass embedded in the wall at the base of the main staircase.
The jagged chunk of glass was as big as a dinner plate. It glinted with the golden light of an early autumn morning as the traffic of the Old Bailey bustled beneath it. The QCs in their wigs and gowns, the lawyers in black carrying cardboard boxes of evidence, judges, jurors, witnesses and – mostly younger, poorer and blacker than everyone else – the defendants in their best suits or newly laundered sportswear.
At least, I thought it was a chunk of glass. It looked like a chunk of broken glass. But I couldn’t understand how it got up there. Perhaps I was seeing things. Security at the Central Criminal Court is tighter than any public building in the country. No mobile phones, no bags and no food and drinks are allowed. So how did a random hunk of broken glass get stuck in the wall?
‘It’s from the IRA car bomb in 1973,’ said a voice beside me.
I looked at him. He was a large man with the beginnings of a beard. There was a name card on his dark suit.
ANDREJ WOZNIAK, it said. BAILIFF.
And now I knew him.
He was the court bailiff who had stood in front of me and blocked my path when Steve Goddard’s killers had got away with murder.
He was the big man who had prevented me from doing something stupid.
I held out my hand and he shook it.
‘Before my time,’ he said. ‘But I understand the IRA made a bit of a mess. One dead and two hundred injured that day.’ He nodded at the broken glass embedded in the wall, almost smiling now. ‘We keep it as a souvenir.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t fall on some judge’s wig,’ I said.
Wozniak laughed.
‘It’s buried quite deep,’ he said. ‘I think we’re safe.’
Wozniak had a reassuring presence. Although the Central Criminal Court is the venue for some of the highest profile cases in the land, a large part of its daily life is devoted to cases concerning gangs. Far more than the average policeman, the bailiffs of the Old Bailey have to be physically capable men with skill sets somewhere between diplomats and bouncers.
Over Wozniak’s shoulder I could see Alice Goddard coming through the main doors. Her children, Stephen and Kitty, followed her. Now I saw the entire family looked much older than the night I met them. The children on the edge of maturity, and Mrs Goddard worn down by stress, growing old before her time. She waved to me. The big bailiff was still looking up at the chunk of broken glass buried deep into the wall of the Old Bailey.
‘All this time,’ he said. ‘Just think.’
The gang of three had been reduced to one.
Jed Blake, in his best suit. Looking nervous. Sitting in the dock and scanning the public gallery for familiar faces. They had been a gang the night that Steve Goddard died. When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, they had been a gang.
Different kinds of creeps, certainly. The coward. The weakling. And the bully. But undoubtedly a gang. They had felt like a gang when we brought them in and separated them in different interview rooms. They had felt like a gang when we charged them. And when they had gone down for involuntary manslaughter, they had felt like a gang. But now Jed Blake sat in the dock alone, anxious to abdicate from the gang, as his wigged and robed lawyer argued in an expensively educated accent that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Because they were never really a gang, he insisted.
‘My Lord, there was no joint enterprise,’ the lawyer said. ‘My client was under the impression that he was joining his friends for a game of soccer in the local park. He took no part in the involuntary manslaughter of the deceased. He is a young man of impeccable character, My Lord. The suggestion that there was joint enterprise was predicated on the fact that my client filmed the assault.’
The judge frowned over his reading glasses at the trembling youth in the dock. There was a kiss tattoo on Jed Blake’s neck. I had never seen one of those before. I don’t think they will catch on. It’s going to look silly when he’s sixty.
‘Do you understand the premise being suggested by your legal representative?’ the judge said.
Jed Blake snapped from his reverie. ‘Sorry, sir? What, sir?’
Irritation flickered across the claret-faced features of the judge.
‘Young man, all judges sitting at the Central Criminal Court are referred to as “My Lord” or “My Lady” regardless as to whether they are High Court judges, Circuit judges or recorders – do you understand?’
‘Yes . . . My Lord.’
‘Good. Your Mr Gilkes here argues that you had no intention of causing any physical harm to the late Mr Goddard. In common law legal doctrine there is something called common purpose – also known as joint criminal enterprise or common design. It imputes criminal liability for all participants in a criminal enterprise from all that results of that enterprise. Under the doctrine of common purpose, if a gang murders a man then all members of that gang are responsible for his death, regardless of who dealt the fatal blow.’
Jed Blake’s mouth lolled open. He was trying to keep up.
The judge continued.
‘You are here today to request leave to appeal against the verdict of involuntary manslaughter on the premise that you were never part of the gang that committed involuntary manslaughter. What do you have to say for yourself?’
‘Please, My Lord,’ the boy said, and burst into a fit of snotty sobbing. For a minute the only sound in the court was his weeping.
The judge cleared his throat.
‘Do you need a glass of water?’ he asked.
‘No, My Lord.’
‘Do you need a fifteen-minute break?’
‘No, My Lord. Thank you very much for asking, My Lord. It’s very kind of you, My Lord.’
Blake wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He smiled bravely. The judge frowned at him over his reading glasses.
‘Wha
t were you doing outside Mr Goddard’s property?’
‘I thought we were, like, going to play football, My Lord.’ Blake’s rat-like features pinched with cunning. ‘The only reason I filmed it was because I was messing about with my phone when he – the man – came out of his house. I was scared of him, My Lord. I could see he had lost his rag – that he was angry, My Lord. My mates – they had the bundle, My Lord. We were just mucking about, My Lord. It was just a laugh! A bit of a laugh, My Lord! I don’t know how it happened. The altercation, My Lord. I just froze. I didn’t touch him. It wasn’t me. It was my mates, My Lord. It’s completely wrong that I got done.’
The judge thought about it for a moment.
‘Leave to appeal . . . granted,’ he said.
I looked up at the public gallery. Heavy-set women with tattoos were celebrating as though they were at a football match. Blake’s mother, sisters, perhaps a girlfriend.
The lawyer was puffed up with pride.
‘It’s not fair, is it, Max?’ Mrs Goddard said quietly.
I looked at the stony face of her son, Steve Junior, and the quiet tears of her daughter, Kitty. And then I looked at Alice.
It clawed at my heart that she felt the need, even now, to keep her voice down.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not fair.’
* * *
I stood at the base of the main staircase and stared up at the broken shard of glass from an IRA car bomb buried deep in the wall.
All that time. Just think.
The crowds at the Old Bailey were thinning out now.
But I lingered, staring up at the detritus of an old war, troubled by a thought that I could not name.
Just think.
Then I began to move, walking up the main staircase of the Old Bailey, unsure what I was looking for.
I went through a door and into a long, lavish dining room. It was set for dinner. Perhaps fifty places. A signed portrait of the Prince of Wales smiled at me.