The Hanging Club

32

There was a door on the far side of that square room with the rotting tiles and I already knew what was beyond it.

No, not a door – a black slit in the wall, just big enough for a man to pass through. Taking my time, not looking at the big man, I walked across to it and saw the corridor.

It had not been a dream.

It was the corridor where the walls came in and the ceiling came down.

‘Dead Man’s Walk,’ Wozniak said. ‘It narrows to stop a man – or woman – going insane at the sight of the scaffold. Can you imagine what it felt like? Hearing the crowd outside. Knowing the agonies that were waiting for you. Dead Man’s Walk was behind the prison. Originally it connected the gaol to the sessions house next door. It became the most practical way of transporting some wretch to the scaffold. But it’s just one of a labyrinth of tunnels. Hardly anyone knows that so much of Newgate is still down here.’

‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

‘Maybe too much,’ he said, and quietly closed the door.

A green light still seeped into the room and for the first time I noticed the air vent high up in one wall. But it was like breathing the air of dead men.

And now I looked at him.

‘Newgate was a nice touch,’ I said. ‘A shame that nobody recognised it. But who knew that so much of it was still left down here.’

He did not move. I took a step towards him, staying just beyond arm’s length.

Timing and distance, I thought. Remember your boxing at Smithfield ABC. Remember all those hard hours. Remember the lessons of Fred.

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘bringing back Newgate does make you and your friends look bat-shit crazy.’

He laughed bitterly.

‘I think it makes us look like the last sane men alive,’ he said. ‘We executed an abuser of young girls. We executed a hit-and-run driver who killed an innocent boy. We executed a stinking scumbag drug addict who destroyed an old man who fought for our nation’s freedom. And we’re the crazy ones? You protect these scumbags. You hold their coats while they commit their crimes. You worry about their human rights while they’re raping our children.’

‘Shut up now,’ I said. ‘I’m arresting you—’

He kicked me across the room.

One kick, perfectly executed, that caught me high in the midriff with the side of his enormous right foot, whooshing the air out of me as it lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards.

It felt like the first time I had been kicked by someone who really knew what he was doing.

Wozniak crossed the room and pulled me up by the lapels of my wedding suit. I heard the material rip and felt him adjust his grip. I weigh eighty kilos. He tossed me into the centre of the room as if I weighed nothing. My trousers tore across the backside as I hit the ground. I watched him touch one lapel of his jacket.

He brought out an old-fashioned razor blade from behind the lapel. It’s an old bouncer’s trick. If anyone ever grabbed his lapel, they would soon wish they hadn’t.

He started towards me.

I tried to roll away but he was fast for a man that big and then he was directly above me and I saw the razor blade in his right hand and I watched him set himself on the balls of his feet and I could hear someone screaming and it was me and then he came down on top of me like a bomb. As he came down I drove my right fist up into his heart with every scrap of my remaining strength. The air went out of him and he flinched with shock and pain.

But it didn’t stop him.

Shit, I thought. That punch always used to work for me.

He settled his massive weight on top of me, but not exactly the way he’d planned. He had one knee pressed into my chest, the other pinning down my left shoulder, the razor blade still in his right paw, but his body was twisted from the one shot that I had landed.

I had hurt him. He was breathing hard. The sweat rolled off him and dropped onto my face. His free hand pinned down the top of my right arm but there was diminished strength in it.

That’s the thing about big men. They wear themselves out.

‘Little man,’ he said, as I thrashed like something dying in a bigger animal’s mouth, flailing at him with my legs. ‘Don’t you know that you should be on our side? Can’t you see that we’re doing the job you should be doing? Are you so stupid—’

I wrenched my right arm free and stuck my thumb in his left eye. Then I kept it there. He jerked away from me with a scream and then I was on my feet and trying to slam the sole of my right shoe into his knees, and I realised that I was trying to fight like Jackson Rose, going for his eyes and his knees, kicking him again and again, catching his shin and his calf muscle and his upper thigh, kicking him everywhere apart from his knee.

But he backed off with one hand over his eyes and I went after him, still kicking.

I took my breath and I took my aim.

And finally I caught him, my right foot striking him on the side of his knee, buckling the big man and making him roar like a wounded bear, swiping out at me with the blade in his right hand. I felt something sharp pass across my forehead and then it was warm and wet but there was no pain yet, and I realised he had cut me with his blade.

But he was done.

And so was I.

I sank to my knees, the blood flowing freely now, my hands covered with it as I tried to keep it from my eyes and Wozniak crumpled against the wall, moaning as he measured the damage. I stared at my hands, weak with the loss of blood and the paralysing shock of being cut. And when I looked up I saw him hobble through the crack in the wall of that secret room.

I must have gone after him because I was aware of passing down Dead Man’s Walk and into the broad, low-ceilinged tunnel that has waited beyond it for centuries.

I found the stone staircase that went deeper into the city and I took it, hearing Wozniak ahead of me, making the infuriated sounds of a wounded animal. We moved slowly. I looked at my phone once. But there was no signal down here. This was the past.

The stairs ended.

I called his name.

‘Wozniak! Wozniak!’

But he kept on and so I went after him, deeper into that other city, the forgotten city, the underground city, to where the stairs finally ended and there were four identical tunnels, each with a rounded arch, wide but not high, built to process large numbers of people who had been dead for nearly a hundred years.

And I reached the train station where two wooden platforms faced each other across the ancient tracks and where, on a big red circle, the name of the station was written in black letters on a white background.

B L O O M S B U R Y

I watched Wozniak disappear off the end of the platform and hobble into the darkness. There was a light deeper down the tunnel. It was getting closer. It twisted and turned in the darkness. I watched him limp towards it, a giant of a man who could hardly walk now.

I stood on the edge of the platform but I went no further as I watched him disappear into the black. The light of the approaching tube train hurtled still closer and although I knew it would never reach this abandoned station, I understood that it would reach the man hobbling in the darkness.

‘Wozniak!’

He was gone now but I heard the tube train twist and turn and speed away to light and life and some station where the commuters and tourists were waiting, and I heard the wheels of steel screaming with protest as the driver applied the emergency brakes as he saw, far too late, the man who shuffled towards him in the darkness.

But I did not see him die and if he made a sound, then I did not hear it.