The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (11 page)

It was another night when the heat would not quit and Scout had kicked off the single sheet that covered her. She stirred as I pulled it back up.

‘Daddy?’

‘Sleep now, angel, it’s late.’

‘But Jackson went to work.’

‘They have to work at night in the market.’

‘Mmm.’

She buried her sleepy face in the pillow and it made me smile.

‘You enjoying your summer holiday?’

‘It lasts forever.’

I laughed.

‘It feels that way when you’re little. The bigger you get, the faster the time goes. Sleep now, angel.’

‘And you too.’

‘I will.’

But after Mrs Murphy had gone home, I sat in the window, looking at the blaze of Smithfield meat market. Dozens of white-coated porters were unloading vans and trucks, but I couldn’t see Jackson.

At midnight the five-ton clock bell of St Paul’s Cathedral – Great Tom, they call it – struck the hour and I called Edie. SO15 had sent a dozen surveillance officers to Marble Arch.

‘I can’t see the others,’ Edie said. ‘But then I guess that’s the point.’ I could feel her frustration. ‘Do you really think they’re going to leave a third body here, Max?’

‘It feels like a long shot because I don’t see how they can do it without getting collared. They must know we’ll be waiting for them. But at the same time, I don’t see how the crazy bastards can resist it.’

I told Edie to go home.

My old colleagues at SO15 would be out there all night. They would be the homeless man sleeping in Hyde Park, and they would be the courting couple snogging in the doorway of a closed department store, and they would be the late-night dog walker and they would be the dark figures sitting unnoticed in parked cars.

And they would be waiting.

I turned off the lights and was about to go to bed when I saw my MacBook Air on the kitchen table, exactly where I had left it. But the laptop was closed now and I was sure I had left it open. Stan stirred in his basket as I powered up.

I went on Safari and hit
Show History
.

And it wasn’t my history.

There was more. Much more. Reams of the stuff. I glanced towards the big windows where the lights of Smithfield shone. I had told my old friend that he could use my laptop whenever he needed it. It looked as though he had spent all day on it, reading about just one thing.

I closed the laptop and went to bed. But when sleep came it seemed to abruptly jerk just out of reach, jolting me awake, and I spent hours trying to get comfortable, trying to empty my mind, trying too hard to fall asleep. I must have dropped off at some point because in the light period of sleep, the last part of sleep, when dreams come in the shallows, I found myself waking from a dream of Marble Arch in the darkness and slipping from my bed and walking to the window.

It was still early, before five, but the rising sun was turning the great dome of St Paul’s as white as bone. And at the meat market, the night shift was over and Jackson was coming home.

I watched him cross Charterhouse Street, grinning at something one of his workmates had said, and the light of the new sun was so dazzling on the front of his white
porter’s coat that at first you could not tell that it was smeared with fresh blood.

A few hours later I stood alone in MIR-1 looking at the floor-to-ceiling map of London and sipping a triple espresso from Bar Italia.

Professor Hitchens came in with his motorbike helmet under his arm, already sweating inside his corduroy.

‘Tyburn,’ he said. ‘It’s a river, isn’t it? That’s where everything else comes from. Tyburn Road, Tyburn gallows – it’s all named after the River Tyburn. The Tyburn is one of the great underground rivers of London.’

‘The gallows is named after the river?’ I said.

He nodded his egg-shaped head. ‘Look at this,’ he said.

He produced a battered book from his saddlebag.
Thames: Sacred River
by Peter Ackroyd. Professor Hitchens found the page he wanted and pointed a fat finger at a passage. He began to read:

‘
There is some intimate association between the river and what we call “paganism”. Something has settled there. The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment . . .
’

He looked at me with his eyes shining.

‘Don’t you see?
The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment!
’

Tara Jones walked in and stared at us. Hitchens continued reading.

‘
It is perhaps not coincidental that the two major sites of execution on land, Tyburn and Smithfield, were adjacent to the Thames tributaries of the Tyburn and the Fleet.
’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘Can’t you see what it means?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me get this straight. London’s underground rivers – the Tyburn and the rest – they once flowed over ground?’

‘Yes!’

‘So what happened to them?’

‘We built this city on top of them.’ He waved at the giant map on the wall. ‘As the city has grown over the centuries, the rivers became deeper. The London sewer system is built on the template of the city’s underground rivers. But they’re still there.’

I looked at the map, and back at him.

‘So the Tyburn – the River Tyburn – still exists?’ I said.

‘Of course!’

‘Where does it flow?’ I said. ‘Show me.’

He pointed at a great swathe of green towards the top of the map.

‘The source of the Tyburn is Hampstead. It runs south – parallel to the Finchley Road, down to Swiss Cottage, through Regent’s Park. In the West End it
follows the path of Marylebone Lane before passing through Mayfair and into the Thames.’

‘We’re probably standing on it,’ Tara said.

Hitchens’ prematurely aged face split into a wide grin.

‘Savile Row? I would say that it’s extremely likely the Tyburn is directly below us.’

I thought about it, let it settle.

‘They’re not going to go back to the site of the gallows because they know we’ll be waiting. But – if they are so obsessed with the ritual of punishment – they could still leave the body in the Tyburn – the River Tyburn.’

‘It has to be a possibility,’ Hitchens said.

‘How many miles of river are we looking at?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘The Tyburn winds and turns . . .’

‘Ballpark figure, Professor.’

‘It could be as many as ten miles.’

I shook my head.

‘Only someone much more important than me can authorise a search of that scale.’

I called the Chief Super’s office. They put me straight through and I told her what I wanted.

‘Where’s Pat Whitestone?’ DCS Swire said.

The truth is I didn’t know where DCI Whitestone was or if she was ever coming to work again.

‘Ma’am, I believe she must be with her son at the hospital.’

A pause.

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Send everyone you can down there. But I want them all out at the end of the shift.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘London sewers have the highest concentration of cocaine of any waters in Europe.’

For a moment I had the image of London’s paranoid coke users all flushing away their drug of choice.

But that wasn’t quite it.

‘The city has the highest number of cocaine users in the northern hemisphere and their urine all ends up in the sewers,’ DCS Swire told me. ‘The trace cocaine in London’s waste waters is 500 per cent higher than anywhere else in Europe. If anyone stays down there too long, we’re going to start getting cardiac arrests. And then we’re going to start getting lawsuits. So one full shift and they’re all out, understood, DC Wolfe?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

I’ll tell them not to inhale, I thought, heading for the door as I speed-dialled Edie Wren.

Tara Jones called me back.

‘I got the voiceprint of that sound we heard on the latest film,’ she said. ‘It’s not a name. And it’s not a word.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s laughter.’ She shook her head as if she could not understand such a thing, and a veil of glossy black hair swung in front of her lovely face. I watched her push
it away. ‘The noise is a short bark of someone . . . laughing. What does it mean?’

‘They’re starting to enjoy it,’ I said.

We had been looking in the wrong place. They were never coming back to the site of Tyburn gallows. So almost one hundred officers – Specialist Search Teams from West End Central and New Scotland Yard, surveillance officers from SO15’s Counter Terrorism Command – spent eight hours of a long summer day wading through the miles of sewers that trace the flow of the Tyburn.

And at the end of a long shift we knew this was the wrong place too.

I showered and changed my clothes at West End Central but I felt that I could still smell the ancient stink of subterranean London on my skin. MIR-1 was deserted apart from Hitchens, who was sitting at a workstation reading his Peter Ackroyd book. I stared up at the great map of London that covers one wall of MIR-1.

‘Where does it come out?’ I said.

‘What?’ He didn’t look up from his book.

‘This river. The River Tyburn.’ I took a step towards the map. ‘The Tyburn is a tributary of the Thames, right?’

Now he was looking up.

‘Yes.’

‘So it doesn’t flow into the sea,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t disappear underground. At some point the River Tyburn flows into the River Thames.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘Where?’

He quickly pulled his iPad from his saddlebag and found an ancient map of London.

‘The Rocque map of London in 1746,’ he said. And then, ‘Vauxhall Bridge.’

‘So the Tyburn flows into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge?’

‘Yes.’

‘It will be quicker if we take your bike,’ I said.

Vauxhall Bridge rose up before us as Hitchens tore down Millbank on his old 500cc Royal Enfield with me riding pillion.

Downriver the sun was sinking behind Battersea Power Station. On the far side of the Thames I could see the great tiered building housing MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, at Vauxhall Cross. Hitchens steered his bike in the empty forecourt outside Tate Britain and we left it there.

We found some stone steps that led down to the Thames Path, the walkway that runs along the riverbank. I started towards the bridge, Hitchens struggling to keep up with me.

‘Down there,’ he panted. ‘A culvert.’

I was directly opposite the MI6 building when I saw it. A large round hole punched into reinforced concrete, big enough for a man to stand up in, pouring a shallow but steady stream of water into the Thames. The culvert was one level lower than the Thames Path, and I realised that it was invisible from the road.

‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘That’s the Tyburn?’

I don’t know what I had been expecting.

His breathless voice was behind me. ‘According to Rocque—’

But I was already going down the steps that led right on to the riverbank and so I missed what Rocque had noted in the eighteenth century. I stepped into the culvert and the water covered my shoes. I took another step and peered into blackness. But the concrete culvert looked too modern to mark the end of a river that had flowed here for thousands of years.

Hitchens hesitated at the mouth of the culvert, keeping his feet dry.

‘This can’t be it,’ I shouted, and my voice echoed back to me.

‘What’s that?’

‘I said—’

And then I saw the body.

One arm reaching from the deeper darkness of the culvert. The limb bare, white and – as I edged through
the water towards it – I saw the ghastly scars of heroin addiction, the track marks on the limb looking like a child’s join-the-dots game.

Hitchens called out to me. ‘Detective?’

‘This is it!’ I shouted.

I went further into the black hole and the water was deeper here, over my shoes, and much colder. And there he was – Darren Donovan, perhaps ten metres back from the Thames, his cropped head face down in the black waters of the Tyburn.

Then the darkness suddenly rose up and slammed into me, knocking the wind out of me and throwing me backwards against the curved wall of the concrete culvert.

I banged my head hard against the wall and sat down in the water with a thump, the base of my spine smacking against the reinforced concrete.

And then I felt the hands around my throat.

I was thrown onto my back as if I was weightless, the hands never letting go, digging deep into my flesh, their grip tighter now.

Large hands. Strong hands. Trying to kill me, trying to choke the life out of me.

I stared up at the large figure in the darkness, and I kicked out wildly, clawing at the hands around my neck and then raking the thick muscled arms, reaching for where I knew his eyes would be but unable to find them,
unable to get even close, all the strength ebbing out of me with every passing second.

Already my breath had stopped. Already the blood had stopped.

‘Detective?’ Hitchens said at the entrance to the culvert. ‘Max?’

The hands let me go.

I was aware of the dark bulky figure splashing towards the light. I tried to call out to Hitchens but found I could not speak. I tried to get up but found I could not move. Sickness overwhelmed me. Far away someone was calling my name.