The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

7

I ran all the way to 27 Savile Row.

It was early in the evening but the heat was sticking to the city and I was soaked in sweat by the time I climbed the stairs to the top floor of West End Central. Major Incident Room One was already crowded.

DCI Whitestone was deep in conversation with our boss, DCS Swire, the Chief Super, as the two women stood before the giant TV screen, watching the man in the suit and tie hang one more time.

I realised with a jolt that they seemed relieved.

‘But are we sure?’ DCS Swire was saying in her hushed Margaret Thatcher voice. ‘Are we absolutely sure, Pat?

‘Yes, ma’am,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘The victim is definitely an IC1.’

IC stands for identity codes and it is the system our people use to describe ethnicity. IC1 meant the man who had just been hanged was a white man of North European stock.

Mahmud Irani had been an IC4.

‘Good,’ said the Chief Super. ‘Then whatever the motive – it’s not race. Thank God for that!’

Edie Wren was furiously pounding her laptop as she conducted a conversation with Colin Cho of the Police Central e-crime Unit. TDC Billy Greene was on the phone fending off a reporter who had somehow been put through from the switchboard. And there was a shockingly attractive young woman I had never seen before who had her laptop plugged into one of the MIR-1 workstations. She was watching the same segment of the new film over and over again.

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

She had a long pale face, very serious, and the kind of hair that doesn’t move so much as swing. When she leaned forward to stare at the screen her hair swung forward, like a long black veil falling over her serious face, and she pushed it back, biting at her lip with concentration.

‘DC Wolfe,’ I introduced myself to her. ‘Are you running some kind of voice analysis on that dialogue?

But she just glanced at me for a second and then turned back to the screens, pushing back the long black veil of hair, a glint of gold on the third finger of her left hand. So that was the end of that conversation.

Edie Wren looked up from her workstation. On the screen before her I could see the online traffic reacting to the second hanging.

United Kingdom Trends

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

‘It feels like it never went away,’ Edie said.

‘Who is she?’ I said, nodding towards the woman with the swinging hair.

‘Tara Jones. Speech analyst. Voice biometrics, they call it.’

‘Is she any good?’

Edie shrugged. ‘Tara’s meant to be the best. But she hasn’t given us anything yet.’

Then a mid-Atlantic voice called me.

‘Max? Come and have a look at this.’

Dr Joe Stephen, a forensic psychologist from King’s College London, was at a workstation with someone else I didn’t recognise, a bald but bearded middle-aged man with a sweat patch in the shape of Australia on the back of his corduroy jacket. They were also watching the hanging. And I saw that the man with Dr Joe was not middle-aged at all. Beyond the bald head and the beard he was perhaps only thirty but there was something prematurely aged about him. His head was remarkable – so oval that it looked like a rugby ball impersonating a hard-boiled egg.

‘Murder by hanging is almost unknown, isn’t it?’ the strange young man said.

Dr Joe nodded. ‘But the unsubs – sorry, the unidentified subjects – don’t think of it as murder.’ He had an American accent softened and smoothed by half a lifetime in London. ‘They clearly believe they are carrying out the death penalty for what they consider a capital crime.’

The young man nodded thoughtfully.

‘Capital from the Latin capitalis, of course,’ he said. ‘Literally regarding the head – a reference to execution by beheading.’

‘Max,’ Dr Joe said. ‘This is Professor Adrian Hitchens. He lectures in history at King’s College.’

I held out my hand but Professor Hitchens ignored it. He was looking at the frozen image on the screen before him, the last frame of this latest online execution – a glimpse of the worn, ruined brickwork of the kill site.

I took my hand away.

Perhaps he was thinking very deeply about where the kill site could be. Or perhaps he thought I was the janitor.

But my feelings were not too hurt. The Met are always wheeling in these experts for a bit of specialist advice. Some of them – like our resident psychologist Dr Joe – stick around for years. But most of them are wheeled straight out again when they prove to be no help with our enquiries. There was a very good chance that I would never see Professor Hitchens again.

Or the woman with the swinging hair.

The history man jabbed a fat finger at the screen. It was stained yellow with nicotine.

‘The building looks late Victorian,’ he said, more to himself than Dr Joe or me. ‘I’m guessing some kind of public works.’ He nodded at the dank white walls, stained green and yellow with the rot of a hundred years. ‘A madhouse? A prison? Yes, almost certainly late Victorian.’

DCS Swire and DCI Whitestone joined us.

‘Hitch,’ the Chief Super said to the history man, as if they were old buddies. ‘I understand DC Wolfe here has a theory about where the first body was dumped.’

Whitestone nodded encouragement at me. ‘You thought it could be significant that the body was left in Hyde Park, right, Max?’

I nodded. Professor Hitchens still wasn’t looking at me.

‘Tyburn,’ I said. ‘We found the first victim on the Park Lane side of Hyde Park. Not far from the site of Tyburn.’

He looked at me at last.

‘Where this country hanged people for a thousand years,’ I said.

Professor Hitchens grinned at me, though there was no warmth in his smile. His chipped teeth also looked old beyond their years. I wasn’t crazy about him, to tell you the truth.

‘I know what Tyburn was, Detective Wood.’

‘Wolfe.’

‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said, and he turned in his swivel chair to address the room at large. Fat yellow fingers tapped the armrests of his chair. ‘But Tyburn was most emphatically not in Hyde Park.’

‘No, I know that, but—’

‘The location was further north – according to the Rocque map of London in 1746. Are you familiar with Rocque’s map of 1746?’

I briefly shook my head to confirm I was not familiar with Rocque’s map of eighteenth-century London.

‘The actual location of the Tyburn Tree was on the traffic island where the Edgware Road, Oxford Street and Bayswater Road all meet,’ Hitchens said.

‘But they’re not going to dump a body in the middle of a traffic island, are they?’ I said, and watched him bristle, unused to being contradicted. I suppose these big-shot academics get used to students hanging on their every word. ‘What about that kitchen step stool, Professor?’ I said. ‘That look late Victorian to you?’

Whitestone shouted across the room to Wren. ‘Still no ID of the vic, Edie?’

Wren shook her head. ‘Colin’s monitoring the online traffic and Billy’s got an open line to Metcall, but nothing yet.’

Metcall, also known as Central Communications Command, is responsible for public contact. If someone hit 999 because they knew the man who had just been hanged online, it would come through to them first.

‘Play it one more time,’ the Chief Super said.

TDC Greene hit the button and we watched in silence as the scene unfolded again. Somehow repeated viewing had not drained the hanging of its power to shock.

The man in the suit and tie fighting for his life. The desperate struggle before he was dragged onto the stool they used for a makeshift scaffold. The last words he would ever hear: ‘Do you know why you’ve been brought to this place of execution?’ His strangulation on the end of a rope. His hands unbound, tearing at his throat.

And the boy. The picture on the wall of the smiling young boy, who smiled just as sweetly and innocently as the girls had smiled when Mahmud Irani died. Smiling from beyond the grave, smiling for all eternity.

‘What the hell are they doing, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said quietly to our psychologist.

‘The ceremony is everything,’ Joe said. ‘The ritual seems to be at least as important as the punishment. Both of these killings have been as choreographed as anything you would see at the Old Bailey. But instead of wigs they wear black masks. Instead of a judge and jury it’s the unsubs. And in the dock, you have the accused.’

‘With no chance of getting a suspended sentence,’ Whitestone said.

‘But the ritual – the ceremony – whatever you want to call it – is a statement and a warning. And, above all, it’s an expression of power,’ Dr Joe said. ‘That’s the crucial thing. It’s an expression – and a reaffirmation – of power. In a normal court of law it is a reaffirmation of the power of the state. The unsubs no doubt see what they’re doing as a reaffirmation of – I’m guessing here – some higher form of justice, some higher and more noble and less fallible law. A reaffirmation of the power of the people.’

‘Got it!’ Wren shouted. ‘The name of the victim!’ She listened to her phone and I saw her face register something that I could not read. ‘And the name of the kid on the wall,’ she said, all the euphoria suddenly leaving her. She ran her hands through her red hair and slowly hung up the phone.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘The victim of the hanging is – was – Hector Welles. Thirty-five years old. Single. A trust fund manager in the City. Sent down for causing an accidental death while driving.’

‘The boy on the wall,’ I said.

Edie nodded. ‘Welles was driving his Porsche 911 when the kid rode his bike into the street.’ She hit her keyboard and the same photograph of the smiling boy filled the giant TV screen.

‘The child was killed outright?’ Whitestone said.

‘He was in a coma for six months. In the end the parents switched off the life-support machine. The boy’s name was . . .’ She glanced down at her notes. ‘Daniel Warboys,’ she said.

I took a breath.

‘Daniel Warboys? What part of the world was he from?’

‘West London. Hammersmith.’

‘Do you know this child, Max?’ Whitestone said.

‘I think I’ve met his grandfather,’ I said. ‘Paul Warboys.’

There was silence in MIR-1.

‘The Paul Warboys?’ the Chief Super said.

I nodded.

Paul and Danny Warboys ran West London back in the day when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were running the East End while Charlie and Eddie Richardson ruled the roost in South London.

I could easily believe that Paul Warboys had a grandson named after his beloved brother Danny.

‘How long did Hector Welles go down for?’ Whitestone asked.

‘He was sentenced to five years for dangerous driving,’ Edie said. ‘Also fined ten grand and banned from driving for three years. Let off with a slap on the wrist because there was not a trace of drugs or booze in his bloodstream. And also because he had the best brief that his employers could buy and apparently he wept a lot in the dock. In the end, he served just under two years. And they even gave him his old job back.’

We were silent. The phones had stopped ringing. The only sound was the low drone of the cars down on Savile Row and the laptop of the voice analyst with the swinging hair.

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

‘Two years for knocking down a little kid,’ I said. ‘It’s not enough, is it?’