The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

6

There is a hanging tree in the Black Museum.

It is a horizontal wooden triangle supported by three legs and it rests in a quiet corner of what is officially known as the Crime Museum. It is draped with perhaps two dozen hangman’s nooses, all individually labelled with the name of the man or woman they executed.

‘It’s a replica of the triple-tree at Tyburn,’ said Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum. ‘The gallows was portable, and that’s one of the reasons that nobody can ever agree about where Tyburn actually stood, although they were hanging people there for centuries.’ He sipped from a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘They moved it about, see.’

I touched one of the nooses.

It was just four thin strands of rope running through a metal eyelet to form the noose. Other ropes were much thicker, twice the size, strands of heavy rope woven together and running through a big brass thimble to form the noose.

‘The thin ones date from the eighteenth century,’ Sergeant Caine said. ‘The thicker ones are more modern. They go all the way to 1969, when the death penalty was abolished in this country.’

‘You’ve got a lot of ropes in here, John. I never noticed before.’

‘We’ve hanged a lot of people in this country. You could fill a stadium with the people they hanged at Tyburn alone. Some of these nooses date back to 1810 when there were 222 offences that were punishable by hanging, including robbing a rabbit warren and shoplifting.’

‘But why would anyone use hanging to murder someone?’ I said, touching one of the nooses as if it would reveal the answer. ‘Why not just shoot them or stab them?’

‘Because they want revenge,’ said Sergeant John Caine. ‘Let me show you something.’

It was a battered black leather suitcase. Inside was a length of rope, a leg strap and a hood that had once been white but was now yellow with age, folded as neatly as a handkerchief.

‘This is Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase,’ John Caine said. ‘People misunderstand Pierrepoint. They forget how important he was to this country. He didn’t simply represent punishment. He represented justice – right up until capital punishment started being seen as wicked and cruel and not very nice. But before that, Pierrepoint was a national hero. Who do you think hanged all those Nazi war criminals after the Second World War? Old Albert went to Germany twenty-five times in four years and strung up over two hundred Nazis. Not that he enjoyed it much, because they were making him do job lots – a dozen or so at a time. Old Albert was a bit of a perfectionist, with a lot of professional pride in his work.’ He had a sip of his tea. ‘The people who killed this child abuser – they use a picture of Pierrepoint online, don’t they?’

I nodded.

‘So they want justice,’ I said. ‘They want revenge.’

John gently closed Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase. ‘And what’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’ he said.

My phone began to vibrate. EDIE WREN CALLING, said the display. Her voice was tight with adrenaline.

‘We’ve got another hanging,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it.’

‘I’ll be back in the office in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch it then.’

‘Max,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it now.’ Edie Wren took a breath. ‘This one is live.’

We watched the second man hang on John Caine’s computer.

At first it looked like exactly the same set-up with the camera aimed up at a terrified man standing on some kind of stool as the same voice asked the same question.

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

But the picture was far sharper, and there was a date and time stamp running in the bottom right-hand corner, as if they wanted the world to know that this public execution was going out live.

It was the same room. You could see the walls more clearly this time, and they seemed to be rotting with age, brickwork that was once white crumbling to yellow and green and brown.

‘Where’s that look like, John?’

We leaned in closer. I heard John Caine quietly curse.

‘I feel like I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t remember.’

The condemned man on the stool was babbling with terror. There was a rope being placed around his neck and it snaked off out of shot to the ceiling. He was a much younger man than Mahmud Irani, and dressed in a suit and tie. And white.

‘Do you know—’

And then suddenly it all went wrong. The man in the suit was half jumping, half falling from the stool, and the noose could not have been secured to the ceiling because although it was around his neck it didn’t stop him falling from the stool and then the camera was dropped and there was nothing to see and only the sounds of a furious struggle and the soft thud of punches thrown into flesh and bone and the weeping of a man who was suddenly aware that there was no escape.

As the camera was picked up, I saw some dark figures taking their places against a wall, standing like masked sentries under a single 8 x 10 inch photograph that had been attached to the wall of a smiling boy, perhaps eleven years old, wearing school uniform as he posed happily for the photographer.

I looked at the boy’s smile and I knew with total certainty that the man being forced onto the back of the stool had somehow killed him.

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

Someone was kicking at the stool. The man flapped his arms and I saw that his hands were not tied. But the noose was still around his neck and now it was secured to the ceiling.

‘There’s four of them,’ John Caine said. ‘At least. Four that I can see. Black tracksuits – I think I saw a Nike logo. They’re all wearing tactical Nomex face masks – that’s what those masks are. The one who held the camera is the one who did the heavy lifting when the victim tried to do a bunk. A very big geezer. Can’t see much of the others.’

The man on the hanging stool screamed once.

‘No!’

‘But who is he?’ John Caine said. ‘And who’s the kid?’

The man in the suit hung.

With his hands unbound, he fought against the rope tightening around his neck more fiercely than Mahmud Irani had fought it, he clawed at his neck, he ripped and tore at it, he lashed wildly with his legs and he tried to scream in protest, although no sound was possible other than the terrible noise that a man makes when he is being strangled to death. But he fought more fiercely and so it was over more quickly.

The man stopped kicking. The screen froze, one spot of fresh blood on the eye of the lens.

‘Why don’t they just stab him in the eye?’ I said, getting out my mobile phone.

‘Because that would look like murder,’ John Caine said. ‘And – I’m just guessing here – they think that murder is too good for him.’

I watched the digital world react.

#bring it back

#bring it back

#bring it back

#bring it back

#bring it back

‘You want me to drive you to West End Central?’ John Caine said.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But it’s faster to run.’

He was still staring at the screen.

‘Where is that place?’ he said, as if he should know.