The Hanging Club

2

Later that day we watched the man hang.

We saw the film of his death on the big HDTV screen that’s on the wall of Major Incident Room One in West End Central, at first not sure what we were seeing, not even convinced it was real, still stunned by the fact that you can watch a man being executed online.

It was early evening and we were standing at our workstations, ignoring the phones that were ringing all over MIR-1, as the man was helped onto the kitchen step stool and a noose was slipped round his neck.

And the terrible exchange between the two men.

‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’

‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—’

The voice of the first man muffled by some sort of mask. The voice of the second man choked with terror.

‘Who is he?’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.

‘IC4,’ said DC Edie Wren, running a hand through her red hair, her eyes not leaving the giant screen. IC4 meant the man – the one we could see, the one with the noose around his neck – was of South Asian descent. ‘Maybe forty years old. Unshaven. Jeans. Polo shirt. Lacoste.’

‘A Lacoste knock-off,’ I said. ‘The little crocodile’s looking in the wrong direction.’

‘Where is that place, Max?’ said Whitestone.

I took a few steps closer to the screen. The film was sharp but the room was dark. In the shadows I could glimpse white tiles or bricks, stained green and yellow by time and the weather.

I felt I had seen it before. It was some part of London that was just round the corner, and yet a hundred years away, and beyond the reach of memory. I took a step back.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘What are they doing to him?’ said Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene.

Then the stool was kicked away and we did not speak as we watched the man hang, his body twisting and squirming in the air, and there was no sound but the strangled gurgling coming from his throat. When the hanging man began to soil himself the cameraman turned away and I caught glimpses – nothing more – of two or three figures in dark clothes, their faces covered in black masks, only their eyes showing, their backs pressed against those yellowing walls.

‘There’s three or four of them,’ I said. ‘Maybe more. Wearing ski masks. No, not ski masks – they’re tactical Nomex face masks, or something similar.’ A pause. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

The man’s face began to change colour as the life was strangled out of him. Then he was still and it ended. A film lasting ten minutes and twenty-one seconds that was suddenly trending all over the world.

‘You seen this hashtag?’ Edie said, hunched over her laptop. ‘It’s everywhere: #bringitback.’

‘Bring what back?’ said TDC Greene.

‘Play it again,’ said Whitestone. ‘Answer the phones, Billy. Find out where the hashtag comes from, Edie.’

Edie began tapping on her keyboard.

‘Does that look like a hate crime to you, Max?’ Whitestone said.

‘It looks like a lynching,’ I said. ‘So – yes, maybe.’

‘Here,’ Edie said, and then a panel appeared in a corner of the big screen.

There was a black-and-white picture of a smiling rabbit-faced man from the middle of the last century. The account was called @AlbertPierrepointUK. No message. Just the hashtag – #bringitback – and a link to the film.

‘It’s got just under twenty-five thousand followers,’ Edie said. ‘No – over seventy-eight thousand followers. Wait—’ She leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘Wow, popular guy, this Albert Pierrepoint. Why is the name so familiar?’

‘Albert Pierrepoint was the most famous hangman this country ever had,’ I said. ‘He carried out more than four hundred executions, including a lot of the Nazis in Nuremberg.’

‘Metcall have had a 999,’ Billy said, putting down the phone. ‘From a woman who recognises the victim.’ He looked up at the screen and winced at the man once more locked in the final throes of agony. ‘The woman’s a Fatima Irani from Bethnal Green. The man is Mahmud Irani. Her husband.’

‘How do you spell his name?’ Whitestone said. ‘Got a DOB? Got a description of what he was wearing?’

Greene read from his notes. Then he looked up at the screen.

‘She said her husband was wearing jeans and one of those shirts with the little crocodile,’ he said, and stooped to retch into a wastepaper basket. It took him a moment to recover. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Play it again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Have a drink of water, Billy. Are you looking on the PNC, Edie?’

Edie Wren was running the name of Mahmud Irani through the Police National Computer.

‘He’s been away,’ she said, meaning the man had done time. ‘Did six years of a twelve-year sentence. He was part of the Hackney grooming gang. They targeted girls as young as eleven. A lot of the girls – but not all of them – were in care. Some of the gang got life. This Mahmud Irani was found guilty of trafficking – he’s a taxi driver. He was a taxi driver. He got off relatively lightly.’

We watched him hang for the third time.

‘Maybe not that lightly,’ I said. ‘If this is connected.’

A young Chinese man appeared in the doorway of MIR-1. He was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, jointly funded by the Home Office to provide a national response to the most serious crimes on the Internet.

‘We’re looking for Albert Pierrepoint,’ he told Whitestone, nodding at the big screen. ‘He – they – seem to be using exactly the same tech as terrorists, pornographers and whistle blowers. The account is running through an anonymiser designed to hide all digital footprints. But it’s not Tor or 12P. It’s something we have never seen before. The site’s under a lot of pressure – political, media, users, concerned parents – to take the film down in the name of decency, but we’ve persuaded them to leave it up there while we try to trace the sender’s IP address. Off the record, of course.’

‘Thanks, Colin,’ Whitestone said, glancing at her phone. ‘Metcall tell us we’ve got a body. In the middle of Hyde Park. No positive ID yet.’ She looked at the screen and then at me. ‘But the responding officer says the deceased is wearing one of those shirts with the little crocodile.’

‘Hyde Park?’ I said. ‘The body was found in the actual park?’ I looked up at the screen, at the subterranean space with the stained white tiles. ‘They didn’t do this in Hyde Park.’

I thought of the underground car parks of the big hotels on Park Lane, running down the east side of Hyde Park. But none of them looked anything like the room where they strung up Mahmud Irani. That place was from some other century.

In the panel of the TV screen we could see that @AlbertPierrepointUK had gone viral.

TRENDS

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

‘I think somebody just brought back the death penalty,’ I said.

Edie pressed play and on the screen Mahmud Irani was about to hang again.

‘But who’d want to do that to him?’ said the new boy, TDC Greene, and I remembered that Hackney grooming gang and the thought came unbidden as I headed for the door.

Who the hell wouldn’t?