by Tony Parsons
MURPHY & SON
Domestic and Commercial Plumbing and Heating
‘Trustworthy’ and ‘Reliable’
We went up a flight of stairs to the flats. Mrs Murphy opened the door with a couple of children and a dog underfoot. Scout and Stan flew inside as if this was their second home. The Murphys’ flat was, as usual, full of family and I smiled as I heard the greetings called out to my daughter and my dog.
‘You’ll come in for a cup of tea,’ Mrs Murphy predicted. ‘The gang’s all here. Big Mikey. Little Mikey, Siobhan and the kids. You should see Baby Mikey walking about like he owns the place.’
‘I’d love to, but I have to run.’
She frowned with disapproval. ‘Work?’
‘Fred’s.’
‘Defend yourself at all times,’ Mrs Murphy advised.
It was one of those nights when I desperately needed to train. Fred saw it and he was happy to push me hard.
‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he said, as he drove me through one of his favourite circuits. Ten three-minute rounds banging the pads with ten burpies and twenty press-ups instead of a minute’s rest in between, Fred slapping me round the ear with a cracked leather pad whenever I dropped my guard, the rounds passing until I lost count, until I was so exhausted that I was on the very edge of sickness.
‘You’ll sleep well tonight,’ Fred said.
And that would normally have been true. But when we were back at the loft and Scout was brushing her teeth as I turned down the lights, Stan watched me with his huge adoring eyes, certain that the coming weekend held nothing but fun for us, certain that I would never betray him, his love and trust so unquestioning that it filled me with shame.
I crawled into bed weak with exhaustion.
And I still couldn’t sleep.
In the morning Stan was sick.
Elaborately sick at both ends. Extravagantly sick. His cage was a mess of bodily fluid that had erupted from everywhere it could. Foul liquid stuck to his basket, his blanket and his magnificent fur. Stan laid stock still in a puddle of watery filth, staring with numb disbelief at Scout and I, unable to understand what had happened during the night.
We put him in the bath and cleaned him up. Then, when most of the mess had been washed away, and he was starting to get his natural biscuit-smell back, I called the vet’s.
‘Oh, poor old Stan,’ said the kindly receptionist at the Well Animal Clinic. ‘Probably something he ate. Best leave the surgery for another day.’
Scout was fussing over him in the bathtub. The projectile vomiting and volcanic diarrhoea had left him bewildered. He looked forlorn, and half his usual size, with his fur sopping wet. But he watched me grinning in the doorway of the bathroom and a familiar, fun-loving glint suddenly lit up those eyes like black marbles.
Hampstead Heath was waiting for us.
* * *
Even in September, they were still swimming in the mixed bathing pond.
We saw the distant bathing figures laughing at the cold as we cut across the great rolling expanse of Pryor’s Field, Stan hanging back to hunt small flying creatures in the long grass, then sprinting to catch up when Scout called his name. Then we were in the thick forest that separates the bathing ponds from the highest point on Hampstead Heath, and Scout kept Stan closer now. A young fox stalked across our path, checked us out and in an instant was gone. We pushed on, the ground always rising, and suddenly we came out of the trees and onto Parliament Hill, blue sky all around and the city spread out below us, a sight to steal your breath away, and it was as if London belonged to us.
My phone began to vibrate.
EDIE WREN CALLING, it said.
‘It’s Abu Din,’ Edie said. ‘Guess what? Somebody just slotted the bastard.’
Saturday afternoon at the Imperial War Museum.
The museum was crowded but down in Carol’s small basement office the sound of the crowds seemed far away, like an old soldier’s memory of war. Carol expertly spun her wheelchair in a circle as she closed the door behind us. The BBC news was playing on her iMac.
‘Do you have anything on Special Operations in Afghanistan?’ I asked.
‘Some,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘You know those servicemen – the ones who were killed, the Sangin Six – were regular army. They weren’t Special Ops.’
‘I know.’
‘And there’s restricted viewing on anything to do with Special Ops, Max.’
I nodded. We stared at each other for a bit. Then she sighed.
‘You can’t take anything away,’ she said.
And so Carol placed a fat green file marked UKSF on the desk and then made us two mugs of builder’s tea – they don’t do triple espresso in the Imperial War Museum – deftly if noisily manoeuvring her wheelchair in the cramped office as she got the kettle on.
I waded through pictures of Special Operation Forces in Afghanistan. There were endless images of heavily armed fighting men on what looked like the surface of the moon, all of them with their faces obscured. There were pixelated faces, blacked-out faces and smudged faces, and the men wore civilian clothing, camouflage gear and fleeces on rocky terrain that looked as though it was either searing hot or freezing cold, with nothing in between.
It looked like the harshest place on the planet, but the men seemed as happy as larks, posing proudly with their assault rifles on land where it looked as though nothing good could ever grow.
Many of them had beards but a few were cleanly shaven and as I sipped my strong sweet tea I found him, posing in profile in a T-shirt and cargo trousers that were stuffed with kit, his weapon held at a 45-degree angle.
I read, ‘The relevance of this photo is simply the weapon – an M249 SAW featuring the collapsible Para stock and a 200-round plastic assault pack. This operator wears civilian clothing.’
The top half of the operator’s head was blacked out but you could still see his smiling mouth.
The gap-toothed grin of my oldest friend was unmistakable.
‘Have you seen this?’ Carol said.
She was looking at the screen of her iMac. Blue lights swept a drab street in Wembley. The police tape was going up.
BBC BREAKING NEWS: HATE CLERIC FOUND MURDERED
Carol swivelled in her chair to look at me.
‘Is it true?’ she said. ‘Somebody just killed this bastard?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Did they hang him?’
I closed the thin green file.
‘Shot him,’ I said, sipping my tea. ‘One in the head and one in the heart.’
Author’s Note
Strangely enough, Newgate Prison is still down there. It is true that not much remains of the country’s most notorious prison, but all that Max Wolfe discovers – the condemned man’s holding cell and Dead Man’s Walk, where the ceiling and the walls contract like a corridor in a nightmare – is, rather incredibly, still buried deep beneath the Old Bailey.
What remains of Newgate is not preserved or conserved, for nobody was ever proud of the London’s most notorious prison – chamber of horrors for eight hundred years, the human zoo, ‘the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted’. As Max suggests, no doubt one day it will all be swept away in a mad fit of rebuilding, but for now, it is still down there. You just go down to the basement of the Old Bailey. And then you keep going.
As for Albert Pierrepoint, whose name and image is appropriated by the Hanging Club, he was of course the nation’s executioner in the middle of the twentieth century, hanging 435 people, including 202 Nazis found guilty of war crimes.
Pierrepoint, by this time sickened of capital punishment, retired to work as a publican. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.’
No doubt this is true. But as Sergeant John Caine asks Max Wolfe up in the Black Museum – ‘What’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’
Tony Parsons,
London, 2016.
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Epub ISBN: 9781448185740
Version 1.0
Published by Century 2016
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Copyright © Tony Parsons, 2016
Tony Parsons has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780892375