The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

11

A Media Liaison Officer was meant to be briefing DCI Pat Whitestone before the press conference at West End Central. But it was the Chief Super, DCS Swire, who was doing most of the briefing.

‘The message we need to send, Pat, is that nobody takes the law into their own hands. Because that doesn’t improve the law. It destroys it. Just keep hammering that point home.’

‘Phone call, ma’am,’ TDC Billy Greene said.

Behind her glasses, DCI Whitestone’s eyes flashed with anger.

‘I said no calls, Billy.’

‘You’ll want to take this, ma’am.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m afraid it’s your son.’

Whitestone took the call and I went to the window where Edie Wren was staring down at the street. The circus was arriving. Camera crews, satellite vans, and dozens of reporters.

‘And they’re not even serial killers yet,’ Edie said.

‘Give them time,’ I said. ‘They’ve done two. They only need one more to make the grade.’

‘Are you all right, Pat?’ the Chief Super said behind us.

Whitestone was white-faced with shock.

‘It’s Just. My son. My Just. I thought he was staying with a friend last night. But he’s at the hospital. They tell me he’s been there all night. There’s been . . . an incident. Someone – a gang – put a bottle across his eyes.’ She fought to control herself. She took her glasses off and polished them. ‘Ma’am,’ she said to the Chief Super. ‘They say – they think – the doctors think there’s a chance he could lose his sight.’

To me Whitestone’s son was a shadow that I had glimpsed on a computer screen late at night when his mother Skyped him from our office. They talked of the domestic minutiae that fill a family’s life – homework, meals, triumphs and disappointments, the plans for tomorrow. It suddenly felt as if he would never be the same boy again.

‘Go to him,’ the Chief Super said. ‘Just go.’

‘But the press conference—’

‘Just go to your son,’ Swire said, and she physically escorted Whitestone to the door of MIR-1. ‘Go to him now. Nothing is more important.’

When Whitestone was gone, the MLO stood before the Chief Super, shaking her head.

‘But who’s going to take the press conference?’ the MLO said.

‘The investigation’s senior officer,’ the Chief Super said, and she looked at me without enthusiasm.

I stared out at the massed ranks of media who had crammed into the briefing room at West End Central. My mouth was dry and my palms were wet. My shirt stuck to my back and my mind was totally blank.

‘Good morning, everyone,’ I said. Nobody looked up.

‘Wait a minute,’ the MLO said. ‘Your microphone’s not on.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said, one second after she had turned it on. Now they were all looking at me. Some of them were smiling. Someone shook his head.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘My name’s DC Wolfe and I’m going to give you a briefing on the two murders we are currently investigating.’

I looked at my notes. But they were already shouting questions at me.

I tried to remember the message. The message I had to hammer home. The message about the law not existing when someone takes it into their own hands. Feedback howled out of the microphone.

‘DC Wolfe?’ a tall, hard-looking redhead said. ‘Scarlet Bush.’

‘Scarlet,’ I said.

‘How do you feel that the online community sees these men as heroes?’

‘They’re not heroes,’ I said.

My mouth twisted to show the absurdity of the very idea. It was bone dry although curiously my back was warm and wet with sweat.

‘What we have seen in these two films,’ I said. ‘That’s not the law – that is what happens when the law breaks down.’

Scarlet Bush shook her head.

‘But the two men who died had both done unspeakable things. One was part of a grooming gang. The other crippled and killed a young boy. How can you stand there and say—’

‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done,’ I said, and the room went wild.

‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done?’

‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done?’

‘It doesn’t matter what they’ve done?’

I reached for my water just as I caught DCS Swire staring at me from the back of the room. Somehow I knocked the water over.

‘Oh, fuck my giddy aunt,’ said the Media Liaison Officer as water spread across the front of her dress.

Scarlet Bush laughed.

‘The victims of both these evil men were children,’ she said. ‘Blameless, innocent children who had their lives destroyed by wicked men. And you say it doesn’t matter what they’ve done?’

‘What I meant—’

The MLO leaned across me.

‘No more questions!’ she shouted into the microphone.

‘One last question,’ said Scarlet Bush. ‘How do you sleep at night, Detective?’

It was online news by the time I got to the hospital.

‘IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT

THEY’VE DONE!’

Callous cop insults the innocent

By Scarlet Bush, Crime Correspondent

Bad day at the office, I thought.

Pat Whitestone was sleeping in the hospital waiting room.

She was curled up on a row of plastic chairs that were fixed to the sticky carpet as if somebody might decide they were worth stealing. Without her glasses her face had an unguarded look that was so different to the woman I knew from work, she almost looked like someone else.

I went to get myself a cup of coffee from a vending machine that I had passed on the way in. It came out black and boiling hot. I stood in the corridor, sipping it as it cooled down, watching the cancer patients in their dressing gowns smoking their last cigarette of the day beyond the big glass doors of the main entrance. When I came back to the waiting room, she was awake and sitting up.

‘Max,’ she said, and I knew that there had been no real rest for her in this place. She slowly put her glasses on and I had never seen her face look more vulnerable.

‘How’s your son?’ I said. ‘How’s Just?’

She nodded, as if struggling to understand their new reality.

‘He – uh – lost his sight in one eye.’ She shook her head. ‘Somebody hit him in the face with a bottle, Max.’ She put on her child-sized trainers, ran her fingers through her messy blonde hair. ‘In a club. A fight. Over some girl. He was meant to be looking at some girl. And his right eye – his right eye took the full force of the blow and the left eye got a shower of glass fragments. He’s lost that right eye, Max. That’s gone. That’s mush. Forget about that right eye, Max. The left eye has a detached retina and all the bits of glass in it and – uh – they are trying to save that other eye. Dr Patel is doing his best, Max. But there’s glass . . . bits of glass . . . in his eye . . . his left eye.’

‘Pat,’ I said. ‘My God, Pat.’

She scratched her head. She sighed. She exhaled.

‘So that’s where we are,’ she said. ‘Waiting for news about his other eye.’ She shook her head and then she looked at me and her face stirred with the start of a smile. ‘What about you?’

‘Me?’

‘I left you in the lurch. Up at West End Central. The press conference. How did it go?’

‘You didn’t see it?’

‘No.’

‘Of course not. Of course you didn’t see it. It went well.’

‘That’s good, Max.’

I felt like putting my arm around her. But she looked me straight in the eye and I saw that she was still the woman I knew, she was still my boss, she was still the most experienced homicide detective in 27 Savile Row, and the moment passed, even though her eyes were wet with tears, even though I had never felt closer to her.

I sat down next to her.

‘What happened, Pat?’

She shook her head. She told me the story in broken fragments. Because it made no sense and yet at the same time it was all horribly easy to imagine.

‘Just the usual teenage rubbish,’ she said. ‘It started with a lie – Just told me he was going to play video games at his friend’s house. I believed him. And his friend told his mother the same lie. And instead they sneaked off to this place. To have a few drinks. To pretend that they’re not children any more. It’s what teenagers do, Max. Some boys out – Just and a couple of his friends from school – nice kids – they were in some little pub off the Holloway Road – then suddenly these other boys were shouting at Just – that he had looked at a girl – but his friend – I spoke to his friend – his friend sat in the hospital all night long, too scared to go home – he said that Just didn’t do anything – he didn’t even see this girl – but they – one of them – this gang – the Dog Town Boys, they call themselves – they put a bottle across his face – and it broke – the glass – and his eyes . . .

I took her hands in mine.

She needed to say no more. It was the kind of ordinary madness that happened every night of the year. But it usually happened to someone else.

‘We’re such a small family, Max. Me and Just. You don’t realise it until a time like this. I feel like I should call someone. But who can I call? My parents are dead. I don’t have brothers or sisters. There’s no one to call, is there?’

‘What about his father?’ I said, and when I saw her face twist with anger I knew immediately it was the wrong thing to say.

‘He’s dead to us,’ she said. ‘He left us to get on with it. And we will get on with it. Even this.’

Then we were silent until a doctor appeared in the doorway. A thirty-something Asian in blue scrubs, in a rush. He looked around the waiting room.

‘Miss . . . Whitehead?’

‘Whitestone,’ she said, standing up. ‘Where’s the other doctor? Dr Patel?’

‘Dr Patel’s shift ended. I’m Dr Khan. I’ve just come out of surgery with your son, Jason.’

‘His name is Justin.’

‘Exactly.’ He looked at her, his face a mask, and my stomach fell away. ‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said, consulting his notes. ‘We managed to remove the fragments of glass from your son’s left iris and its supporting tissue but unfortunately the optic nerve has been detached from the back of the eye . . .’

He looked at her, nervously licked his lips, waiting for her to fill in the terrible blank.

But she said nothing.

‘What does that mean, Doctor?’ I said.

‘The eye is a sphere with a transparent bulge at the front – the cornea – and a stalk – the optic nerve – at the back. The glass was in the cornea but the optic nerve – which carries visual impulses to the brain – has been severed . . .’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Vision is not possible without the optic nerve.’

‘So he’s . . .’ she said, swallowing hard. Swallowing it all down. The rage. The grief. The fear. The disbelief. Emotions that I could not begin to imagine because it was not my child in that operating room. She could not say the word. It seemed as if she would never say it, as if she would live and die without ever saying the word. And then finally she said it.

‘Blind?’ she said. ‘He’s blind?’

The doctor was saying something about the benefits of counselling but Pat Whitestone wasn’t listening. She was gone, calling her son’s name, out of the waiting room and into the corridor.

‘Just! Just! Just!’

‘You can’t—’ a nurse said at their station.

‘He’s resting after the operation,’ said another nurse outside her son’s room. ‘You mustn’t—’

But she must and she did.

I followed her.

The room was in darkness and so was her boy, still unconscious from the general anaesthetic. There were white bandages over his eyes that covered half his face.

‘My beautiful son,’ Pat Whitestone said, sinking to her knees beside the bed, and then the tears came, hopeless tears that seemed as if they would never stop.

‘I’m here now,’ she said.

I stood by her side but I did not touch her and I did not speak.

And I wished there was a father and grandparents and siblings in this room to help her carry a weight that she should never have to carry alone. But there was only me.

‘Those bastards,’ she said. ‘Those fucking bastards.’

She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth and her mouth tightened with a rage and a violence that I had never seen in her before. And as I watched her she gasped, as if she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and lifted her face, her eyes still screwed tight, as if she could actually see the bastards who had done this to her son, as if she could see their faces, as if she could see them getting what they deserved.

As if – and the thought came unbidden – she could see them screaming for mercy as they swung from the end of a rope.