The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

20

I came into MIR-1 thirty minutes later and saw the big HD TV screen was filled with a head-and-shoulders shot of a bearded man.

The beard was the frizzy kind that is missing a moustache. The man who wore it was light-skinned, pushing forty, with a small pillbox hat perched on his head and hooded eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles. He wore plain grey robes.

‘The victim of the latest abduction is Abu Din,’ Pat Whitestone was saying. Edie Wren, Billy Greene and Tara Jones watched her from their workstations. They must have renewed Tara’s contract, I thought, with a stab of elation.

‘Abu Din was born in Egypt and granted asylum in the UK,’ Whitestone continued. ‘He is wanted for inciting acts of terror in the United States but currently resisting extradition from the UK. His appeal is pending at the European Court of Human Rights.’ She nodded. ‘Pretty much your basic hate-preaching scumbag.’

‘You back?’ I said.

‘I’m back.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘I can’t find the Abu Din hanging online.’

‘They haven’t hanged him yet,’ Edie Wren said. ‘Or at least they haven’t put anything online.’

Billy Greene brought me a triple espresso and I smiled at him gratefully. It wasn’t from the Bar Italia, but it would do for now. I bolted it down in one.

‘What have they posted about him?’ I said.

‘Nothing that we can find on any of the usual platforms,’ Edie told me. ‘We’ve got an open line to Colin Cho at the Police Central e-crime Unit. The abduction is generating a lot of traffic. PCeU are on it. But Albert Pierrepoint himself is unusually silent.’

‘How do we know it’s them?’ I said. ‘They could be copycats. They could be self-radicalised. There are enough people out there who feel like they are on their side. How do we know it’s the Hanging Club?’

‘Educated guess,’ said Whitestone. ‘We’ve got CCTV of Abu Din being lifted. They’re far too slick to be fan boys. Have a look at this, Max. Can you run it, Billy?’

Greene’s fingers flew over his keyboard and the mugshot of Abu Din was replaced by black-and-white footage from a CCTV camera. The camera revealed a crowd of men kneeling in the road of a suburban street. A figure in grey robes stood before them. Abu Din. High above the street I could see the curved arch of Wembley Stadium, glinting in the sunshine at the end of another beautiful day.

‘Abu Din was at the Wembley Central mosque, but they kicked him out after he went on Newsnight and praised the murder of six British soldiers in Afghanistan. So now he preaches in the street.’

I wanted another triple espresso.

‘Abu Din,’ I said. ‘Why does his name seem familiar?’

‘He’s the one they call the Mental Mullah,’ Billy said. ‘I’ll just fast-forward over the prayers, shall I?’ The CCTV footage began speeding up. ‘The papers tagged him the Mental Mullah after he said the killing of British soldiers was “a glorious thing”.’

‘He gets fifty grand a year in benefits for his wife and six kids,’ Edie said. ‘I reckon we must be the mental ones.’

‘The papers had to stop calling him the Mental Mullah because it was considered offensive by mental health charities,’ Billy said. ‘Ah, this is the money shot.’

The CCTV footage slowed down to real time. There were perhaps one hundred men kneeling in the Wembley street. Abu Din himself faced them in his plain grey robes, flanked by what looked like a couple of bodyguards. Both of Abu Din’s index fingers were pointing to the heavens. At the back of the crowd I could see a solitary uniformed policeman, a black officer with the height and bulk of a heavyweight boxer. I guessed he could handle himself. Watching this street wasn’t an easy posting. The uniformed cop was standing directly in front of a young man in a wheelchair. There was a woman behind the wheelchair. Their dark good looks were so similar they could have been twins. The young man was holding up a placard. I could just about make out the words.

My Country – Love It or Leave It.

‘Coming up now,’ Billy said.

The policeman suddenly started to run. The woman gripped the handlebars of the young man in the wheelchair and seemed to hunch, as if expecting a blow. And then the crowd were all getting to their feet, pointing at something out of camera.

They began to scatter.

Running for their lives.

A black transit van was being driven at speed. It appeared to be heading straight for the crowd but suddenly it mounted the pavement to avoid the young man in the wheelchair. I automatically looked for anything that would make the transit van unique. Dents, scratches, words that had been sprayed over. But there was nothing. There was brown duct tape plastered over the registration plate. Simple but effective.

The crowd had done a runner. Apart from Abu Din, who was wagging an admonishing finger at the black van.

He was still wagging it when Albert Pierrepoint got out of the van. And then another Albert Pierrepoint. The faces of the two kindly uncles scanned the street. At the top of the screen I could see the young uniformed copper on his belly, radioing for assistance. Another kindly uncle sat at the wheel of the transit van, gunning the engine.

‘Albert Pierrepoint masks,’ I said. ‘Nice touch.’

‘And the duct tape over the registration plates is an even nicer touch,’ Whitestone said. ‘Whoever they are, they know exactly what they’re doing.’

Abu Din’s bodyguards were nowhere to be seen as the preacher was bundled into the back of the black van without ceremony. It began to reverse at speed down the suburban street and then it was gone, the street gradually filling with worshippers watching it leave, the uniformed copper slowly getting to his feet.

Billy hit a few buttons and the big screen became the standard CCTV grid of nine, all of them views of fast-flowing evening traffic.

‘The CCTV followed them on the North Circular heading in an anti-clockwise direction and then we lost them. And then we picked them up again.’

The grid was replaced by a single still image of the transit van burning on what looked like the surface of an abandoned planet. In the background I could see the faded sign of a giant oil company.

‘They switched vehicles,’ I said.

‘Disabled the cameras in this abandoned petrol station and torched their old ride,’ Edie said. ‘So we’ve got one CCTV camera for every person in London but it does us no good at all because we don’t know what we’re looking for.’

Telephones suddenly began to ring, chime and vibrate. Edie scanned a text on her mobile.

‘Getting the first pictures from what we believe to be the execution of Abu Din,’ she said. ‘Let me put it on the big screen.’

She pounded her keyboard and a hangman’s noose appeared on the TV. The camera zoomed in and then out again, as if getting focused. It settled on the noose, hanging stark against the familiar cell-like space, mildewed with the ages, beyond all light. Then the camera slowly pulled back and you could see the four black-coated figures.

‘Production values definitely improving,’ Edie muttered.

But this time was different. Because there was no condemned man wild-eyed with terror at the centre of it all. Instead the camera focused on a series of photographs on the wall.

Servicemen. Six of them. Smiling, happy, proud.

Edie looked up from her laptop.

‘Getting reports – unconfirmed – that those are the Sangin Six.’

‘I remember the Sangin Six,’ I said. ‘Sangin is a district in the east of Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Six of our servicemen – and women – were in a patrol vehicle in Sangin that got hit by an IED. They all survived the blast but then they were torn to bits by a mob. They didn’t show it on the mainstream media because it was too gruesome. Body parts hanging from bridges while the locals danced in the street.’

The camera tracked slowly across the faces of the six dead soldiers. I looked across at Tara Jones who was running voice biometrics on the film.

She saw me watching her.

‘Are you picking up any dialogue, Tara?’ I said.

‘Just ambient sounds,’ she said. ‘It’s not traffic. Sounds like some kind of major building work going on nearby.’

‘Abu Din was vocal in his praise of the killers of the Sangin Six,’ Whitestone said. ‘He insisted on calling them the Six Crusaders. The elderly grandmother of one of the Sangin Six said that he should be hanged.’

‘Then why didn’t they?’ Edie said.

The camera zoomed in for another close-up on the empty noose. And then the image froze.

‘Maybe it’s a trailer,’ Edie said. ‘Stay tuned for the main event.’

‘Maybe they think hanging’s too good for him,’ I said.

The early morning crowds filled the Imperial War Museum. But it was very quiet in the basement room where I sat with the young woman in a wheelchair. I had met Carol through my first SIO in Homicide and Serious Crime Command, DCI Victor Mallory. It was because of him that I could come to her for help at any time.

‘I was in Camp Bastion when the Sangin Six died,’ she said. ‘It felt like a turning point in the war on terror.’ A short laugh. ‘That’s when it started to feel like terror had declared war on us.’

She moved her wheelchair closer to the desk and scrolled through some images of hell. Jubilant crowds. Scraps of human remains. The pitiless sun of Afghanistan.

‘I don’t know how much you want to see of this stuff, Max,’ Carol said. ‘There’s plenty that they couldn’t show on the evening news, but I’m not sure you can learn anything from it.’

I checked my phone again for a message from Edie Wren. We kept expecting the execution to go live. But the morning after the abduction of Abu Din, it still hadn’t happened.

‘I really wanted to sound you out about Abu Din,’ I said.

‘The Mental Mullah,’ she grinned. ‘They took him, didn’t they?’

I nodded. ‘Who would want to string him up, Carol?’

‘Are you kidding? Anyone who served. Anyone who loved someone who served.’ She slapped the sides of her wheelchair without anger or self-pity. ‘Anyone who came home in one of these.’

I thought of the two protestors held back by one uniformed cop in Wembley.

‘But that’s not the same as doing it,’ Carol continued. ‘And besides – the style’s all wrong.’

‘You mean abduction and the mock trial and the hanging?’

‘All of it. The masks. The drama. The little hashtags. Why hang him? There are far easier ways to kill someone.’

One in the head and one in the heart.

Jackson Rose, I thought. Who the hell are you?

My phone began to vibrate.

‘We’ve got Abu Din,’ Edie said. ‘And he’s alive.’