The Hanging Club

19

Pat Whitestone sat at her workstation in MIR-1 and searched online until she found a ninety-second film of pure horror.

‘Look,’ she told us.

The footage was grainy, jerky, filmed by someone who was at the end of a long night. It opened on a club, the dance floor as crowded as a tube train at rush hour, the music a wall of booming noise. Boom, boom, boom. Girls in heels and miniskirts. Shirtless boys holding bottles. Dancing in a space where there was no room to dance. Boom, boom, boom. And then the first screams. High-pitched, disbelieving, the revellers all turning their heads, straining to see.

The crowd parted.

A boy with blood covering his face staggered across the dance floor.

Staggering on legs that were on the verge of giving out. His hands held out before him, groping for help.

Blinded.

The club began to glow with the white lights of phone cameras as more of them began to film the broken boy.

‘Look what they did to my son,’ Whitestone said.

‘Online?’ I said. ‘How the hell can it be online?’

‘Because fifty people got out their phones and filmed him. They filmed him, Max. Nobody helped him. But they all filmed him.’

On the film, the white lights followed fifteen-year-old Justin Whitestone as he sank to his knees in the middle of the empty dance floor and screamed. A terrible sound, filled more with fear than pain, and the pain must have been unbearable. Somebody laughed. The film stopped.

‘Who have we arrested?’ Edie said.

‘Nobody,’ Whitestone said. ‘It happened in the toilets. Somebody put a bottle across his eyes in the toilets. The place was full of people but nobody saw a thing. My Just will need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life – and nobody saw a thing.’

‘There must be CCTV cameras,’ Edie said.

‘Not in toilets,’ Whitestone said. She was still staring at the frozen image on her computer screen. Her son on his knees, blood streaming from his torn eyes, the long-legged high-heeled girls and shirtless gym-fit boys standing behind him with their phones in their hands. ‘No CCTV cameras in toilets, Edie. Invasion of privacy.’

‘Pat?’

‘Yes, Max?’

She was hypnotised by the image on the screen and still would not look at me.

‘They must know who did it,’ I said.

‘Oh, they know all right. It’s a gang from one of the estates behind King’s Cross. The Dog Town Boys. Have you heard of them? I even know their names and where they live. But nobody saw anything, nobody is willing to come forward, and there are no cameras to prove a thing.’

I reached forward and hit the command and Q buttons on her keyboard. Quit. The image disappeared. She looked at me. But there was nothing I could tell her to stop the pain. And if it had been my child in the hospital, my Scout with her sight gone and her attackers still walking the streets, there would have been nothing that she could have done for me.

‘They’re getting away with it, Max,’ Whitestone told me. ‘But then they usually do.’

I was back at home before I managed to get anyone on the phone who had been involved in investigating the blinding of Justin Whitestone.

‘Terrible thing,’ said an old DI from New Scotland Yard. ‘Well-educated kid like that, never in any bother, and some little herbert takes his eyes out for looking at him the wrong way or spilling his drink or whatever it was. They don’t need an excuse, do they? Yeah, I remember the case.’

‘Back up a minute,’ I said. ‘This is not an ongoing investigation?’

The DI sighed down the line.

‘What can we do? Everyone’s scared of the Dog Town Boys – and when I say everyone, I mean everyone in about a square mile of the council estates behinds King’s Cross.’

‘But this is one of our own,’ I said. ‘The boy is the son of my DCI at West End Central.’

‘I know whose son he is,’ said the DI from New Scotland Yard, the first frost coming into his voice. ‘But the boy didn’t see who glassed him – or so he says. And nobody in the club knows who did it – or so they say. There’s not a lot we can do.’ Now there was even more frost. ‘And if it was West End Central running the investigation – there’s bugger all you’d be able to do.’

I stared out the window. The dome of St Paul’s bone-white in the moonlight, the party people rolling down Charterhouse Street, the lights of the meat market coming on for the long night shift.

‘I know you did your best,’ I said. ‘It’s just hard to believe that nobody gets lifted for such a serious assault.’

The DI softened.

‘It’s rotten, I know. But even if we lifted one of these little gangsters from the Dog Town Boys, it’s not going to make the kid see again, is it? What can you do, eh? Sometimes the guilty just walk away.’

‘And there was never a lead?’

I heard him hesitate. ‘There was a girl. A young woman. From Hungary. Worked in one of those big Islington squares looking after kiddies of people who work in the City. A nanny. A nice Islington nanny called – let’s see – Margit Mester. Twenty-two. Lovely girl. When we went in that first night, stopped them all leaving and tried to have a word, I spoke to Margit Mester and she pointed out a local lad called Trey N’Dou.’

He spelled it for me.

‘You know this Trey?’ I said.

‘Yeah, Trey N’Dou is the leader of the Dog Town Boys.’

I let that sink in. ‘So what happened to your Hungarian witness, Margit Mester?’

I could already guess the answer.

‘We brought her in for a line-up that included Trey and she didn’t recognise him. Couldn’t place him at the scene. It was noisy, confusing, upsetting. The usual bullshit when a witness gets cold feet.’

‘Can I talk to Margit Mester?’

‘If you go to Budapest.’

‘She went home?’

‘Couldn’t get there fast enough when she twigged who she was pointing a finger at.’

Jackson came out of his room and crossed the loft. At the door, he raised his hand in salute and gave me his gap-toothed grin and pointed at the market. He was off to work. I lifted my hand – goodbye – and he slipped out.

‘The big problem for us was that we didn’t have CCTV,’ said the DI, warming to his theme of the guilty going unpunished. ‘You know the Met solves nearly one hundred murders every year with CCTV images? There are six million CCTV cameras in this country – one for every ten people – but not enough to stop every villain.’

Below me I could see Jackson walking towards Smithfield. But he did not go inside. He turned right and began walking towards Holborn Circus.

‘And there’s no CCTV cameras in toilets,’ I said. ‘Although they have them everywhere else, don’t they?’

‘I’m not allowed to disclose an image of a patient without their written consent,’ said the security officer at the Whittington Hospital.

‘I’m not looking for an image of a patient,’ I said. ‘I want to know who visited him.’

We were in the hospital’s security bunker. It was a darkened room with no natural light where four large screens each showed a grid revealing nine CCTV images, everything from the car park to the maternity ward, the A&E department to the main foyer.

‘How far can you go back?’ I said.

‘I can go back a month,’ the security officer said. ‘That’s how long we store the images.’ The grid of images was constantly changing on the large screens. ‘We’ve got one hundred and fifty cameras – pretty standard for a hospital like the Whittington – and when bad things happen, like a sexual assault on a mixed ward, or a baby abduction on the maternity ward, or the assaults on our staff that happen every drunken weekend of the year – they usually get reported immediately. What we looking for?’

‘Do you have images from the Critical Care Unit?’

He hit some buttons.

‘Waiting room, nurses’ station, entrance to the CCU – you need a card to get beyond the door. Nobody just wanders in.’

‘Let’s have a look at the nurses’ station.’ I thought about it. ‘Let’s start with weekend nights.’

The security officer went back to a Saturday night at the start of the month and found what I was looking for almost immediately.

‘Stop it there,’ I said.

Jackson Rose was on the CCTV.

He was holding a bouquet of flowers and smiling at a pretty Filipina nurse as if the flowers might possibly be for her as he walked past the nurses’ station on his way to visit an old soldier in a coma.

* * *

You see London’s homeless at night.

In the day they are invisible, or at least hard to tell from the people with homes. But at night they are revealed and there are places – pathetically few in a wealthy city of ten million souls – where they go to be fed.

One of those places is Waterloo. Under the arches where trains roar above your head, arches that are black with the fumes of today and the fog of long ago.

On this warm summer evening Jackson Rose stood at the back of a white van with a few other volunteers and spooned heaps of Phad Thai noodles on paper plates for men and women of all ages, all races, although many of them wore the rags of what had once been military uniforms.

I waited by the side of the white van, declining a nice old posh lady’s offer of a cup of tea and ‘some of Jackson’s wonderful noodles’. He was trying to serve everyone, but new people kept arriving so in the end he handed over to the nice old posh lady and we walked beyond the arches until the noise of the trains receded and conversation was possible.

‘You quit your job at Smithfield,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.

‘This is more fulfilling,’ he said. ‘You still get your rent money, don’t you?’

‘You think I give a toss about rent money?’

He nodded at the men and women waiting in line for his noodles.

‘A lot of them served. Iraq. Afghanistan. And Northern Ireland and the Falklands, some of the older ones.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that you visited Bert Page?’

‘Why would I?’

‘Because you know exactly what I’m investigating. You know Darren Donovan put Bert in that coma. You know I’m out there looking for whoever topped Darren Donovan.’

Jackson glanced back at the van where the queue for noodles was growing.

‘Ah, the late Darren Donovan. You seem more concerned about this dead junkie than you do about the old man he ruined.’

‘Look – I can understand why you’d be moved by Bert Page.’

He shook his head. ‘Moved? Is that what you think I am, Max? Moved?’

‘Call it what you want. I understand why you would care, OK? What I don’t understand is why you wouldn’t think to tell me.’

‘Why should I? You already look at me sideways.’

‘I don’t mean to look at you sideways, Jackson.’

He laughed. ‘Do you think I’m involved in any of this, Max? These vigilantes – the Hanging Club – you think I’m mixed up in it in some way?’

I remembered the Show History list on my laptop. And I remembered how he single-handedly demolished the men who attacked us on Charterhouse Street. And I remembered what he said.

One in the head and one in the heart.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think you’re involved. But I think you’re on their side.’

‘Yeah, me and sixty million other people!’

I remembered the wild kid he had been. And I knew that wildness was in him still and that it would be there forever.

‘I don’t want you to get into trouble,’ I said. ‘I care about you, all right? I just don’t know you, Jackson.’

He showed me his famous smile.

‘You know me better than anyone,’ he said. ‘You want some Phad Thai noodles? Best this side of Bangkok.’

I stared at him for a moment and then smiled back at him.

‘Some Phad Thai would be great,’ I said.

But I never got the chance to try Jackson’s Phad Thai noodles. We were under the black arches of Waterloo when my phone began to vibrate.

EDIE WREN CALLING.

‘They’ve got another one,’ she said.

And I did not need to turn my head to know that Jackson was watching me, his face impassive, not smiling now.