The Hanging Club- Max Wolfe 03

30

‘Dead Man’s Walk was in Newgate Prison,’ I told Whitestone as I walked back to my car. ‘Don’t let Professor Hitchens leave. I’ll be there in five minutes.’

I put on the blues-and-twos for the short drive to 27 Savile Row, fully expecting to find MIR-1 feverish with excitement when I arrived. But they all looked up at me as if it was just the end of another long day. Whitestone. Edie. Billy Greene. Tara. And Professor Hitchens, who had an ancient map of London, coloured gold and black, spread out across four workstations.

Whitestone gave me a sad smile.

‘Looks like chump bait, Max,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’

‘What’s chump bait?’ Tara said.

‘Chump bait is a false lead,’ I said. ‘Chump bait is deliberately sending an investigation in completely the wrong direction. But—’

‘Newgate Prison no longer exists,’ Hitchens said. ‘You have to get that into your head, Max. I have no idea where you were taken, but it couldn’t have been Newgate. This is Charles Booth’s map of London in 1899. It’s what they call a “poverty map” – it was originally drawn to show areas of chronic want in the city. Black indicates poverty, gold indicates wealth.’ His index finger tapped the centre of the map. ‘What does that say?’

I stared at the map. And there it was, between Smithfield meat market and St Paul’s Cathedral, right at the very heart of the city.

‘Newgate Gaol,’ I read.

‘That’s right. As you can see, Newgate Prison is clearly visible at the end of the nineteenth century. And now look at Booth’s poverty map of 1903, just four years later.’

He unfolded what looked like an identical black and gold map of London and spread it on top of the first.

‘No Newgate,’ I said.

Hitchens nodded.

‘Because Newgate was razed to the ground in 1902,’ he said. ‘The prison stood for nearly a thousand years, but it was completely demolished at the start of the twentieth century. The Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – was built on the site. It was a deeply symbolic gesture. One kind of British justice – medieval, brutal, retributive – was replaced at the start of the new century with another kind of British justice – modern, fair and just.’

‘So nothing of Newgate remains?’ Whitestone asked. ‘Nothing at all?’

Hitchens began folding up his maps.

‘There’s a very nice pub opposite the Old Bailey – the Viaduct Tavern – with what’s left of Newgate’s cells down in the beer cellar,’ he said. ‘Debtors’ cells that held up to twenty people. They say the smell was so bad that it could have choked a horse. But I’ve seen them and they don’t match Detective Wolfe’s description. In fact, they’re nothing like them. Your colleague at New Scotland Yard is quite correct, Max – your description perfectly matches the corridor in Newgate Gaol called Dead Man’s Walk. It progressively narrowed so that the condemned man – or woman – could not turn around to fight or flee. But it hasn’t existed for over one hundred years.’

They were all looking at me with something approaching pity.

‘But it was real,’ I said. ‘I saw it. I walked down it.’

‘The internal architecture of Newgate is well documented,’ Hitchens said. ‘The prison appears on the very first map of London drawn in 1575 by Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg. More than anywhere that ever existed, Newgate represented traditional British justice, red in tooth and claw. So whoever abducted you knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly what that corridor resembles.’ He slipped his maps into his man bag and wiped his hand across his sweating forehead. ‘But trust me – it couldn’t have been Newgate.’

‘I want to check out the pub,’ Whitestone said. ‘The Viaduct Tavern.’

‘There’s not much there,’ Hitchens said. ‘Certainly nothing that—’

Whitestone raised one hand, silencing him, and I saw the thread of steel inside this unassuming woman. Her world had been torn apart this summer but she was still running this murder investigation and she wanted to see the cellars of the Viaduct Tavern.

It wasn’t a suggestion.

Thirty minutes later we were all down in the beer cellar of the Viaduct Tavern on Newgate Street. Hacked into the walls were cells that could have been built to contain large animals. They were cold, dark and reeked of ancient terrors. The pub above was a place of warmth and cheer and it was light years away from this ancient place of horrors. The cells seemed designed to muffle human screams. I felt my skin crawl.

Whitestone and Edie were looking at me.

‘Anything look familiar?’ Whitestone said.

‘This is not where they took me,’ I said. ‘Nothing like it.’ My spirits sank. ‘Chump bait, as you say.’

‘Fair enough,’ Whitestone said, patting me lightly on the back. ‘Every investigation has its share of false leads, Max, and this was one of them.’

We went up to the pub. The Viaduct Tavern is a beautiful Victorian pub with a wrought-copper ceiling that gives the place a warm and rosy glow. After the fetid air of the cells, being up here felt like breathing out. I sank into the nearest chair. Suddenly I was very tired.

‘I think we deserve a round,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ll get them in.’

Hitchens was excited. ‘Their selection of real ales is first class,’ he said.

I saw Tara Jones slip outside. I placed an order for a sparkling mineral water and a triple espresso and followed her. She was staring up at the sky. I looked up at the white wash of moonlight on the dome of the cathedral.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘I wasn’t looking at St Paul’s,’ she said.

And I saw what she had been looking at.

The giant black silhouettes of the cranes standing out against the night sky, those huge constructions that dwarfed even the highest shining towers, the cranes that would build tomorrow’s skyscrapers.

I drove her home. It was surprisingly easy to arrange. Nobody looked at us twice when I offered to give her a lift back to Canonbury. But she was distant in the car and when I touched her arm she just shook her head.

‘You don’t want to be that guy, Max,’ she said.

‘What guy?’

‘The cynical romantic. The man who gets his heart broken early on and spends the rest of his life moving from one married woman to the next. Taking no chances, risking nothing, leaving all these wrecked marriages in his wake that, most times, never even know that they’re wrecked.’ She shot me a brief look. I smiled at her beautiful face. She didn’t smile back. ‘Women will come to you,’ she told me. ‘All kinds of women. Don’t make the mistake of only wanting what you can’t have. Don’t become that man, Max. I mean it. You’re better than that.’

I laughed.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ I said.

But I did and she could see it in my face.

We had reached Canonbury Square and she told me I could let her out at the corner. I said that I would drive her to her front door and she didn’t argue with me. But of course I understood that I could not kiss her goodnight in front of her home.

The door opened as she went up the path and I could have looked away but I forced myself to watch. Her husband appeared in the light of the doorway, shirttails outside his trousers and a glass of red wine in his hand, the successful money man at the end of his busy day, and I saw them briefly kiss. More of a quick peck between two sets of lips than a proper kiss. There was affection in the gesture, and familiarity, and even love – the kind of quiet, understated love that comes with the years.

But there was no hunger.

There was nothing like our coffee-flavoured kisses in the Bar Italia.

What she had with her husband was very different.

Their front door closed and I went home and read about Newgate Prison until the sky began to lighten.

I read of how a gaol had been built on the fringe of a Roman fort, a place of punishment born at a moment in history so unremarkable that no man ever thought to record it or remember it.

And as the meat market buzzed with its nighttime life beyond the windows of our loft, I read of Newgate becoming a crucible of misery and disease and corruption across the centuries, constantly destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt, burned to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666 and rising yet again, like a disease that could never be killed.

I read of the virulent strain of typhus that fermented in Newgate’s filthy black depths. I read of Rob Roy and Casanova rotting there, and of Robin Hood and Captain Kidd dying there, and the London crowds who queued to peek at its horrors and flocked to see its public executions and the appalled visitors like Charles Dickens who saw Newgate as London’s mark of eternal shame.

And as the total blackness of the night began to bleed away into the milky dawn, I read how, at the start of the twentieth century, Newgate was torn down brick by brick by brick, as if the city was seeking to hack out the tumour that had grown in its heart for almost a thousand years.

And when real morning came, one of those cold bright mornings that make summer suddenly seem like the stuff of dreams, I shaved and showered and I walked Stan and I made Scout breakfast and saw her settled with Mrs Murphy.

Then I walked to the Old Bailey to wait for justice.