The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe)

by Tony Parsons

  And then I saw it. A heavy black iron doorknocker attached to a square of hard wood, ancient but unmarked, the wood dark brown with time.

  The doorknocker of Newgate Prison. It was as black as the grave. And I could see where the old saying comes from. As black as Newgate’s knocker. And as I stared at it I could understand – really understand for the first time – that Newgate Prison had once stood on this same ground.

  All that time.

  Just think.

  I went out of the door as some kind of manservant was coming in. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said, but I was already past him, going back down the main staircase and through the marble halls of the Old Bailey.

  STAFF ONLY, said a door, and I went through it. It was a long corridor with offices on one side. I walked past the offices, looking in, seeing that they were quite small, glimpsing screen savers on computers and the remains of café-bought lunches eaten at the desk, seeing the faces of all those office workers weary with mid-afternoon torpor. Everyone ignored me. There was an unmarked door at the end of the offices. It was unlocked so I went through that, too, and down a staircase, deep into the bowels of the building. I could hear machinery rumbling and wheezing, like the engine room of some old ocean liner. I came to an ancient boiler room.

  This basement area was bathed in a weary green light. There was an unmarked door at the end of the corridor. It was locked.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I turned to face Andrej Wozniak.

  ‘I just want to check something out,’ I told the bailiff. ‘Do you have a key for this door?’

  ‘I can find you one.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He was back within minutes. I stood aside as he unlocked the door for me and I went through, descending another flight of stairs. There was no light now apart from what seeped down from the boiler room. It was colder down here, and getting darker by the second as I continued down the stairs, and I could feel the weight of the city was pressing down on me. Wozniak’s footsteps were right behind me.

  I stepped into a room that was abandoned years ago.

  ‘What’s down here?’ I said.

  ‘Storage rooms,’ said Wozniak. ‘But there’s a lot of damp so we can’t keep papers down here. They rot.’

  I walked on. There was empty room after empty room, the damp showing through the cracked and peeling plaster.

  And then I opened a rotten wooden door and finally there was a room that I recognised.

  A room with white tiles that had turned green with time.

  A room that was shaped like a cube.

  You could smell the decay.

  ‘You having any luck?’ Wozniak said.

  I thought he was talking about Mrs Goddard.

  ‘They gave the boy leave to appeal his conviction,’ I said. ‘They said it wasn’t joint enterprise.’

  ‘I meant the other thing,’ he said. ‘Your murder investigation. Any luck with that?’

  It was like a room that I had seen in a dream. Everything felt slightly changed from what it should be. There was no kitchen step stool. The stool where they had stood Mahmud Irani. And Hector Welles. And Darren Donovan. And me.

  It was not dark. A green light ebbed into the room from the boiler room a floor above. My eyes scanned the floor.

  There was no gun.

  And there was no rope hanging from the ceiling.

  And so I was wrong. This could not be the place.

  I was overthinking it. I was trying too hard.

  ‘The other thing,’ Wozniak repeated. ‘The Hanging Club.’

  ‘We’ll find them,’ I said. ‘You can’t go around helping yourself to revenge.’

  He chuckled. ‘But it’s not revenge, is it? It’s a signal. It’s saying, “This is still our country. You can’t do what you like here. We’re not going to let you.”’

  ‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

  And then I saw it. The dull gleam of a single casing.

  I picked it up and looked at it.

  Spent brass, I thought.

  This was the place.

  I held it in my hand, and I turned to smile at Wozniak.

  And then I saw something that his beard could not quite hide.

  The teeth marks that I had left on his face.

  32

  There was a door on the far side of that square room with the rotting tiles and I already knew what was beyond it.

  No, not a door – a black slit in the wall, just big enough for a man to pass through. Taking my time, not looking at the big man, I walked across to it and saw the corridor.

  It had not been a dream.

  It was the corridor where the walls came in and the ceiling came down.

  ‘Dead Man’s Walk,’ Wozniak said. ‘It narrows to stop a man – or woman – going insane at the sight of the scaffold. Can you imagine what it felt like? Hearing the crowd outside. Knowing the agonies that were waiting for you. Dead Man’s Walk was behind the prison. Originally it connected the gaol to the sessions house next door. It became the most practical way of transporting some wretch to the scaffold. But it’s just one of a labyrinth of tunnels. Hardly anyone knows that so much of Newgate is still down here.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe too much,’ he said, and quietly closed the door.

  A green light still seeped into the room and for the first time I noticed the air vent high up in one wall. But it was like breathing the air of dead men.

  And now I looked at him.

  ‘Newgate was a nice touch,’ I said. ‘A shame that nobody recognised it. But who knew that so much of it was still left down here.’

  He did not move. I took a step towards him, staying just beyond arm’s length.

  Timing and distance, I thought. Remember your boxing at Smithfield ABC. Remember all those hard hours. Remember the lessons of Fred.

  ‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘bringing back Newgate does make you and your friends look bat-shit crazy.’

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘I think it makes us look like the last sane men alive,’ he said. ‘We executed an abuser of young girls. We executed a hit-and-run driver who killed an innocent boy. We executed a stinking scumbag drug addict who destroyed an old man who fought for our nation’s freedom. And we’re the crazy ones? You protect these scumbags. You hold their coats while they commit their crimes. You worry about their human rights while they’re raping our children.’

  ‘Shut up now,’ I said. ‘I’m arresting you—’

  He kicked me across the room.

  One kick, perfectly executed, that caught me high in the midriff with the side of his enormous right foot, whooshing the air out of me as it lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards.

  It felt like the first time I had been kicked by someone who really knew what he was doing.

  Wozniak crossed the room and pulled me up by the lapels of my wedding suit. I heard the material rip and felt him adjust his grip. I weigh eighty kilos. He tossed me into the centre of the room as if I weighed nothing. My trousers tore across the backside as I hit the ground. I watched him touch one lapel of his jacket.

  He brought out an old-fashioned razor blade from behind the lapel. It’s an old bouncer’s trick. If anyone ever grabbed his lapel, they would soon wish they hadn’t.

  He started towards me.

  I tried to roll away but he was fast for a man that big and then he was directly above me and I saw the razor blade in his right hand and I watched him set himself on the balls of his feet and I could hear someone screaming and it was me and then he came down on top of me like a bomb. As he came down I drove my right fist up into his heart with every scrap of my remaining strength. The air went out of him and he flinched with shock and pain.

  But it didn’t stop him.

  Shit, I thought. That punch always used to work for me.

  He settled his massive weight on top of me, but not exactly the way he’d planned. He had one knee pressed into my ch
est, the other pinning down my left shoulder, the razor blade still in his right paw, but his body was twisted from the one shot that I had landed.

  I had hurt him. He was breathing hard. The sweat rolled off him and dropped onto my face. His free hand pinned down the top of my right arm but there was diminished strength in it.

  That’s the thing about big men. They wear themselves out.

  ‘Little man,’ he said, as I thrashed like something dying in a bigger animal’s mouth, flailing at him with my legs. ‘Don’t you know that you should be on our side? Can’t you see that we’re doing the job you should be doing? Are you so stupid—’

  I wrenched my right arm free and stuck my thumb in his left eye. Then I kept it there. He jerked away from me with a scream and then I was on my feet and trying to slam the sole of my right shoe into his knees, and I realised that I was trying to fight like Jackson Rose, going for his eyes and his knees, kicking him again and again, catching his shin and his calf muscle and his upper thigh, kicking him everywhere apart from his knee.

  But he backed off with one hand over his eyes and I went after him, still kicking.

  I took my breath and I took my aim.

  And finally I caught him, my right foot striking him on the side of his knee, buckling the big man and making him roar like a wounded bear, swiping out at me with the blade in his right hand. I felt something sharp pass across my forehead and then it was warm and wet but there was no pain yet, and I realised he had cut me with his blade.

  But he was done.

  And so was I.

  I sank to my knees, the blood flowing freely now, my hands covered with it as I tried to keep it from my eyes and Wozniak crumpled against the wall, moaning as he measured the damage. I stared at my hands, weak with the loss of blood and the paralysing shock of being cut. And when I looked up I saw him hobble through the crack in the wall of that secret room.

  I must have gone after him because I was aware of passing down Dead Man’s Walk and into the broad, low-ceilinged tunnel that has waited beyond it for centuries.

  I found the stone staircase that went deeper into the city and I took it, hearing Wozniak ahead of me, making the infuriated sounds of a wounded animal. We moved slowly. I looked at my phone once. But there was no signal down here. This was the past.

  The stairs ended.

  I called his name.

  ‘Wozniak! Wozniak!’

  But he kept on and so I went after him, deeper into that other city, the forgotten city, the underground city, to where the stairs finally ended and there were four identical tunnels, each with a rounded arch, wide but not high, built to process large numbers of people who had been dead for nearly a hundred years.

  And I reached the train station where two wooden platforms faced each other across the ancient tracks and where, on a big red circle, the name of the station was written in black letters on a white background.

  B L O O M S B U R Y

  I watched Wozniak disappear off the end of the platform and hobble into the darkness. There was a light deeper down the tunnel. It was getting closer. It twisted and turned in the darkness. I watched him limp towards it, a giant of a man who could hardly walk now.

  I stood on the edge of the platform but I went no further as I watched him disappear into the black. The light of the approaching tube train hurtled still closer and although I knew it would never reach this abandoned station, I understood that it would reach the man hobbling in the darkness.

  ‘Wozniak!’

  He was gone now but I heard the tube train twist and turn and speed away to light and life and some station where the commuters and tourists were waiting, and I heard the wheels of steel screaming with protest as the driver applied the emergency brakes as he saw, far too late, the man who shuffled towards him in the darkness.

  But I did not see him die and if he made a sound, then I did not hear it.

  33

  What remained of Newgate Prison was a crime scene now.

  Deep in the bowels of the Old Bailey, our people waited at the perimeter that Whitestone had decided should begin at the boiler room. CSIs, photographers, forensic scientists, geo-forensic specialists were all struggling into their white Tyvek suits, overshoes and masks, waiting for the go-ahead from the Senior Investigating Officer. TDC Billy Greene was helping a young uniformed officer put up the barrier tape, a major incident scene log form in his hand, ready to sign them in and out.

  Inside the square room with the rotting tiles, Whitestone and I stood on forensic stepping plates. Above her face mask, the eyes behind her glasses roamed the room.

  ‘So this was the holding cell,’ she said. ‘Where they kept the condemned before they took them outside to hang them.’ She took off her glasses and polished them. She was thinking about the perimeter of our crime scene. ‘I know where it begins,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know where it should end.’

  A figure in a white Tyvek suit squeezed through the gap in the wall that led into Dead Man’s Walk. A stray strand of red hair fell across Edie Wren’s forehead. She pushed it away.

  ‘The tunnel at the end leads from here – Newgate – to St Sepulchre’s church across the way. It dates from 1807. Hangings were massive crowd-pullers – twenty-eight people died when a pie stall overturned – so they built the tunnel to allow the priest to minister to the condemned man without having to force his way through the crush.’

  ‘There’s at least one staircase leading off the tunnel,’ I said. ‘But I’ve been down there. It goes on forever.’

  Whitestone thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Establish the other side of our perimeter at the far end of the tunnel,’ she told Edie.

  ‘Ma’am,’ Edie said, and disappeared back inside Dead Man’s Walk.

  ‘Shall I tell the Crime Scene Manager to send them in?’ I said.

  ‘Give me a minute,’ Whitestone said.

  I knew that every SIO valued this first look. For all our stepping plates and bunny suits and blue gloves, once we started work, this place would never look the same again.

  ‘So nobody knows this place is down here?’ she said. ‘That’s hard to believe.’

  ‘It’s not preserved,’ I said. ‘It’s just here – the holding cell, Dead Man’s Walk. Like the cells in the pub across the street. There’s no conservation order on it. There’s no blue plaque outside. It has just survived, by some fluke of history. It’s not open to tourists. It’s not open to anyone. I doubt if more than 1 per cent of the staff of the Central Criminal Court have ever been down here, or even know it exists. One day they’ll replace that boiler room outside and it will all be swept away with no fuss and no ceremony. And nobody will be sorry to see it go because nobody was ever proud of Newgate. Not now. Not ever. Just the opposite. From the time Charles Dickens came to Newgate in 1836, it was a source of national shame.’

  ‘It’s the perfect kill site. You can smell death in the air. How many hanged at Newgate?’

  ‘One thousand, one hundred and sixty-nine – not including Mahmud Irani, Hector Welles and Darren Donovan.’

  ‘Do we know how Wozniak accessed this place from the street?’

  ‘I’ve asked the search teams to work their way through all the underground car parks of the surrounding office blocks. It might take a while, but they’ll find it.’

  ‘You’ve carried this investigation, Max,’ she said.

  She was staring down at a smear of blood on the floor. It was next to a scrap of torn wedding suit.

  ‘You’ve had a lot on your plate,’ I said. ‘How’s he doing? How’s Just?’

  ‘He’s coming out of hospital soon,’ she said. ‘He’s coming home.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ I said, wanting to do something for the pair of them, wanting to make it right, and knowing that I never could. I felt my face burning because it seemed like a pathetically inadequate thing to offer, to drive Whitestone and her son from one end of the Holloway Road to the other.

  But she shot me a grateful
smile.

  ‘That would be a big help, Max,’ she said. Then she nodded at the door, and the perimeter beyond, suddenly all business. ‘Let them in,’ DCI Whitestone said.

  We went deeper into the city.

  Lit by the torches of our phones, Whitestone and I passed through Dead Man’s Walk and into the underground tunnel that links Newgate to St Sepulchre’s church, descending the stone staircase and carefully picking our way through the blackness until we reached the four identical tunnels with the rounded arch, and passed through them to the two wooden platforms of the abandoned British Museum tube station.

  Deep inside the tunnel we could see the lights of the emergency services, retrieving the remains of Andrej Wozniak.

  ‘Who was he?’ I said. ‘What do they say up at the Central Criminal Court?’

  ‘Apparently he was very good at his job,’ Whitestone said. ‘A master of decorum who you wouldn’t want to mess with.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He stopped me once. After the verdict at the Goddard trial. When I might have done something stupid. Something that I would have lived to regret.’

  ‘From what they tell me, he was a typical Old Bailey sheriff. You know what they’re like. They are actually a great bunch of guys. Staying calm and collected in the face of every scumbag that passes through their doors.’

  ‘He told me we were on the same side. Just before he tried to cut out my eyeball.’

  ‘He was single, never married, no children, thirty-nine years old. Third-generation Anglo-Polish. His grandfather came over here to fly Hurricanes for the RAF in 1939.’

  ‘The Polish Air Force. There were twenty-five thousand of them. They were the largest non-British contribution to the Battle of Britain.’

  Deep in the tunnel we could see the lights of the emergency services, hear the calls of the men, see a silver glint of the tube train that had claimed Andrej Wozniak.

  ‘What happened to him?’ I said. ‘How did he make the leap from Old Bailey bailiff to the Hanging Club? It has to be something more than staring at the daily parade of scumbags.’