The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

3

There was something strangely peaceful about standing in the middle of Hyde Park on a warm summer night, nothing moving out here but the Specialist Search Team doing their fingertip search off in the darkness, and the CSIs quietly getting kitted up as DCI Whitestone and I contemplated the corpse.

You could tell it was him.

There was enough moonlight to show the crocodile on his polo shirt was still facing in the wrong direction and what looked like severe burn marks around his neck.

So even before the divisional surgeon had arrived to officially pronounce death, and long before his next of kin had the chance to formally identify the body in the morgue, we knew the identity of the body lying under the trees of Hyde Park.

‘Mahmud Irani,’ Whitestone said quietly.

‘So it’s not a hate crime,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t killed because of his race or religion.’

‘All murder is a hate crime. Do you know what that gang did to those girls? They branded them, Max. Can you believe that grown men would do that to children?’ She shook her head. ‘Some people deserve to be hated.’

I looked away from the dead man and inhaled clean air. Hyde Park stretched on forever. Londoners always complain about how cramped and crowded their city is, but Henry VIII used to hunt wild boar right here. Even today, London was still a city with fields. The white lights of the West End burned bright from far away, an orange glow rising high above them, like the sun coming up on another planet.

Whitestone stared silently at the corpse.

She was a small, fair-haired woman in glasses, neither young nor old, and if you saw her on the train you would not think that she was one of the most experienced homicide detectives in London. I would not speak again until she spoke to me first, for these were the crucial minutes when the Senior Investigating Officer takes a look at the pristine scene, the body exactly where it had been found, letting it all sink in, learning what she can before we start filming, photographing and bagging evidence. Those last moments when the scene is untouched.

Even the blue lights of our response vehicles seemed very distant, as though they were waiting for a sign from the SIO; a large circle of blue lights in the darkness of the massive park, sealing us off from the outside world. I could see DC Edie Wren and TDC Billy Greene interviewing the Romanian men who had discovered the body while preparing for an illegal barbecue.

‘OK,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

I raised a hand to the Crime Scene Manager and on her word the CSIs moved. I saw that our POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape now ran down the length of Park Lane and was patrolled every twenty metres or so by uniformed officers.

‘You’ve locked down all of Hyde Park?’ I said.

‘Because I can always bring the perimeter in later,’ Whitestone said quietly, her eyes not leaving the body. ‘But I can’t extend it later. Better to make the crime scene too big than too small. Let’s take a closer look.’

We wore blue nitrile gloves and white face masks and under the plastic baggies over our shoes we stood on forensic stepping plates that were invisible to the naked eye.

Whitestone and I both carried a small stack of the stepping plates – transparent, lightweight – and we carefully placed them on the grass before us as we created an uncontaminated pathway to the body. We crouched down either side of Mahmud Irani.

‘First hanging?’ Whitestone said.

I nodded.

She pointed with a gloved index finger at the livid, lopsided markings around his neck.

‘You only get that mark from hanging,’ she said. ‘Any other ligature strangulation will leave horizontal marks.’

‘But this is diagonal,’ I said. ‘It runs from low on the neck on one side to just below the ear on the other.’

Whitestone nodded.

‘Because the rope – or belt, or bed sheet, or wire, or whatever it is – angles towards the knot. See how deep it is? He was strangled by his own body weight. The rope compresses the carotid arteries, turns off the supply of blood to the brain. In judicial hangings, they used to snap the second cervical vertebra – the hangman’s fracture, they call it. More humane. These guys didn’t bother with any of that. They just strung him up. But hangings always look like this – the angled strangulation mark. What’s unusual about this one is that it’s not a suicide.’ She stood up. ‘Every hanging I ever saw until tonight – and I’ve had my share – was either deliberate or accidental suicide.’

‘Accidental suicide?’

‘Autoerotic asphyxia. You know. Sex games that kill you.’

‘Oh.’

‘It tends to be a male pastime, like doing DIY or watching cricket. Women seem less keen on autoerotic asphyxia. But strangulation apparently heightens the intensity of orgasm. And what could possibly go wrong?’ She nodded at the body. ‘What’s unique about Mahmud Irani is that his hanging was not for the purposes of masturbation or ending his life. It was murder. Who uses hanging to murder someone?’

I thought about it.

‘Somebody who wants revenge?’

‘No – somebody who wants justice.’ Her eyes scanned the park. ‘This is not the killing ground, is it? He didn’t die here.’

I thought of the white-tiled room where no light seemed to shine. And I thought of the underground car parks that were in this area, not just by Hyde Park but also under the grand hotels and the fancy car dealerships of Park Lane. None of them, as far as I knew, looked even remotely like the room in the film, which looked like somewhere that should have been torn down a hundred years ago.

‘So they chose to move him from the kill site to the dumping ground,’ I said. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘Makes it harder for us,’ Whitestone said. ‘Now we can’t run forensics on the kill site.’

‘Yes, but it makes it more dangerous for them. Why risk someone seeing them dump the body? Why not leave him where they’d strung him up?’

Whitestone thought about it.

‘Because they wanted us to find him,’ she said.

We watched the Specialist Search Team inching their way across Hyde Park on their hands and knees. In the distance, a German Shepherd from the Dog Support Unit began to bark.

‘What I could really use is the rope they did it with,’ Whitestone said, more to herself than me. ‘Ropes can speak volumes. The kind of rope. The kind of knot.’

Fierce white arc lights clicked on and lit up the scene like a film set. The body of Mahmud Irani looked horribly broken in the glare, the agony of his death imprinted on his lifeless face. The crocodile on his shirt stared off in the wrong direction, as if averting its gaze from the large stain on his jeans.

The Area Forensic Manager and his CSIs were already sweating inside their Tyvek suits, blue gloves and forensic face masks. A van with blacked-out windows came trundling across the parched grass. The mortuary van. And behind it I saw the great white marble arch that marks the junction of Oxford Street, Edgware Road and Park Lane. And something whispered through the trees, like the sigh of the uneasy dead.

‘This was Tyburn,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s why they took the chance of dumping him here. The dump site could be part of a ritual killing. Maybe the most important part. Because this was Tyburn.’

‘Tyburn?’ Whitestone said. ‘The public gallows?’

I nodded. ‘The Tyburn tree – the three-legged gallows pole – was at Marble Arch. This spot was where London had its public execution site for almost a thousand years.’ The great triumphal arch glowed with the lights of the night. ‘Fifty thousand people were hanged right where we’re standing,’ I said. ‘And they weren’t just killing him, were they?’ I looked down at the body of Mahmud Irani and the lopsided wound on his neck. ‘They were punishing him.’