The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (12 page)

But I was bone-tired, suddenly far too exhausted to respond, and so I lay back and closed my eyes for just a little while, needing a moment before I got up and went on, my head resting in the ancient waters of the Tyburn.

I sat on a bench by the Thames watching the sun go down in a blaze of red over Chelsea while a couple of detective inspectors from New Scotland Yard did the hot debrief, the interview that takes place in the golden hour after a major incident. There wasn’t much to tell them but we went over it again and again and again as the sun sunk lower over West London.

‘He was big,’ I said. ‘Freakishly big. Abnormally strong. Tossed me about as if I weighed nothing.’

One of the detective inspectors stifled a yawn. The other one closed his notebook.

‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that when you get dumped on your arse, they tend to get bigger and stronger every time you tell the story. You want us to drive you to an A&E?’

I shook my head.

‘Nothing broken,’ I said, and they both gave me their cocky Scotland Yard grins.

*  *  *

The press were waiting for me when I arrived at West End Central in the morning.

They were milling around and sucking down caffeine under the big blue lamp that hangs above the entrance to 27 Savile Row, young journalists and older photographers, maybe twenty of them, sent out to collect whatever scraps they could on the story that was dominating the rolling news. They stirred at the sight of me. I recognised Scarlet Bush but I did not stop walking. They all crowded in with their little digital microphones and their cameras and their questions.

‘DC Wolfe? Scarlet Bush,
Daily Post
. Is it true that you were assaulted when you found the body of Darren Donovan? What’s that mark around your throat, Max? Did the Hanging Club do that to you?’

They followed me inside. A uniformed sergeant, red-faced with irritation, stepped out from behind his desk and began shooing them back. The questions became nastier when they knew I wasn’t going to answer them.

‘Is the Hanging Club doing a better job than the police at cleaning the streets, Max?’

‘How does it feel to be hunting heroes?’

‘What about the victims? Do you ever think about them?’

‘Did you see one of them, Max? Did you see one of the Hanging Club?’

No, I thought. But I know a man who did.

In a quiet corner of MIR-1, Professor Adrian Hitchens sat working with a police sketch artist.

‘No, no . . . those eyes are wrong . . . can you erase that and try again? Could we possibly have another go at the mouth?’

It’s never easy. Anyone who sits down with a police sketch artist has been a witness to a serious crime. They are attempting to recall a face that they saw for only moments, usually during a criminal act that was accompanied by extreme violence. In the case of our history man, he was attempting to remember the face of someone who had come barrelling out of a culvert without warning and knocked him flat on his ample backside.

I nodded to the police sketch artist, a woman around thirty who looked as though she had the patience of a Zen monk. She had probably grown up wanting to be the next Picasso or Edward Hopper.

‘How’s it going?’

She showed me her sketchpad with a half-smile. She had drawn the outline of a large oval-shaped head with a sizeable nose in the middle and a pair of ears stuck to the side. And that was it. I looked at Hitchens.

‘So we’re looking for Mr Potato Head?’ I said.

‘I can only draw what he saw, Max,’ said the sketch artist. ‘And Professor Hitchens doesn’t know what he saw.’

He wrung his hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’

‘How long have you been working on this?’ I said.

The sketch artist glanced at her watch. ‘Couple of hours?’

I shook my head and stared at Hitchens with disbelief.

‘Tell me one more time what happened,’ I said.

He brushed his nicotine-stained fingers across the great sweaty dome of his head.

‘You entered the culvert. When you didn’t come back out, I called out to you because I was worried. I can’t recall exactly what I said . . .’

‘You said,
Detective
and then you said
Max
– and that was when my assailant let me go and did a runner . . . Then what?’

‘I was trying to text you,’ Hitchens said. ‘I was looking at my phone when I heard footsteps in the water – moving very fast. I thought it was you – and I looked up and . . . I stared straight into his face just before he sent me flying. And that’s where you found me. Sitting on my backside.’

Tara Jones came in and began clearing her desk. She saw me looking at her and nodded, sending a torrent of black hair forward. She pushed it off her face and began packing away the hardware that was scattered all over the workstation she had used for the last month.

I patted Hitchens on the arm. ‘You saw him. You did, Adrian. Briefly – very briefly – but you saw him. But it’s just out of reach.’

‘I don’t understand why I can’t recall . . .’

‘It’s the shock of violence. Even if you were used to it, this would be hard. And you’re not used to it. You just had one of the worst experiences of your life. Don’t feel too bad. I looked at him too and I didn’t see a thing.’

‘But you were in darkness and I was in blazing sunshine . . .’

‘You want me to try some software?’ the sketch artist asked.

In recent years there has been a move to improve facial composites with what we call a feature recognition system – the witness is shown complete faces until a final image emerges. But I shook my head.

‘Pencil and pad still works best,’ I said. ‘Just keep trying,’ I told Hitchens.

‘I am . . .’

‘Try harder.’

I walked over to Tara Jones. I had worked out by now that I needed to be directly facing her before I started talking. She looked up at me and smiled politely.

‘You’re leaving,’ I said.

‘My contract with the Met was for a month. And the month’s over. So . . .’

‘Thanks for your help with the tapes.’

She laughed. Good teeth. So white and even that there must have been an orthodontist in her childhood.
Middle-class teeth. I wondered what her parents had been like and how they had dealt with her disability. As far as I could tell, it had not stopped her doing anything she wanted.

‘I didn’t do much,’ she said. She slipped a thin MacBook Air into a messenger bag. ‘But then – in my defence – they didn’t say very much, did they? I’ve run full voice biometrics of everything we have.’

I suddenly realised that it was unlikely I would ever see her again.

‘May I ask you something, Tara?’

She nodded, shoving back her hair, the wedding ring a glint of gold among the black.

I hesitated. ‘You don’t do the thing with the hands,’ I said.

She wasn’t offended. If anything, she just seemed a little weary, as if she had explained this one so many times that it was becoming a chore.

‘Signing? No, I don’t sign. Why – can you read sign language?’

I felt stupid.

‘No – I just . . .’

‘Not all members of the deaf community sign,’ she said, very patiently. ‘It’s a misconception that all deaf people sign. It’s very much a personal choice. I can speak and I can read lips. I don’t consider myself to be culturally deaf. That is, I don’t define myself by my lack
of hearing.’ She zipped her messenger bag shut. Her desk was clear now. She smiled brightly. ‘OK?’

I nodded. ‘Thank you. For everything.’

I wanted to know more but there was no time.

Edie Wren was standing in the door of MIR-1 and beyond her I could see Dr Joe Stephen, checking his messages.

Tara Jones was ready to leave 27 Savile Row.

And the dead were waiting for me.

The three dead men lay naked on their stainless steel beds in the Iain West Forensic Suite at the Westminster Public Mortuary, untroubled by the temperature that is forever kept just a degree or two above freezing point.

The first thing you noticed about them were the large Y-shaped incisions on their torsos where Elsa Olsen, our forensic pathologist of choice, had chopped open their ribcages with exactly the kind of green-handled pruning shears you can buy in any gardening centre to trim your roses. And the next thing you noticed were the burn marks around their necks.

‘Cause of death was strangulation,’ Elsa said. ‘All three of them. Method of death was almost certainly some kind of wire noose.’

‘Not rope?’ I said.

‘Rope would probably leave trace evidence in their wounds,’ Elsa said. ‘And I couldn’t find any rope fibres. I suggest they used some other kind of material.’

‘And they know what they’re doing,’ I said.

I stared at the cadavers. Mahmud Irani. Hector Welles. And Darren Donovan. Three men of wildly disparate ages, income and background. Irani had the soft spreading gut of a man who had spent a lifetime sitting down. Welles had been a confirmed fitness fanatic, spending hours pushing himself in parodies of manual labour. And Donovan had abused his body with Class A drugs since his early teens but still had the unearned slimness of youth.

Even their crimes were very different.

Irani had been one of a gang that abused vulnerable young girls for years. Welles, the heartless hit-and-run driver who was found wanting in a mad moment. And Donovan was a career junkie who regularly mugged elderly pensioners for his next shot of poison.

They did not look so different now.

Elsa considered the three of us shivering inside our blue scrubs and hairnets. On one side of me Edie Wren was impassive, her pale young face a mask of professional curiosity, but on the other side I could feel Dr Joe shaking with tension. It is never an easy thing to step inside the Iain West Forensic Suite for the first time.

‘So are you SIO on this investigation, Max?’ Elsa said.

‘Acting SIO,’ I said. ‘Until DCI Whitestone returns. Dr Joe’s with us looking for signatures, if that’s all right with you.’

The tall Norwegian pathologist nodded, anxious that she should only have to say all this once. She slowly circled the dead men on their stainless steel tables.

‘Life flows through the neck,’ she said. ‘The fragile, essential neck. Blood is pumped from the heart to the brain. Oxygen flows to the lungs. Compress the neck hard enough, and all that abruptly stops. You see the marks on their necks?’

On all three of them, the hanging mark angled diagonally across the neck, the highest point almost touching the left ear, where the noose’s knot had been. On all three men, the furrow of the hanging mark was far more shallow here. But it was pale yellow on Darren Donovan’s neck, a darker yellow on the raw skin of Hector Welles’ neck and a dark brown on Mahmud Irani, the earliest victim.

I felt the thick bile of revulsion rise up inside me and I swallowed it down. Deep breath, Max, I told myself. It’s about to get worse.

With a long thin stainless steel implement, Elsa gently prised open the mouth of Mahmud Irani. Then she did the same with Hector Welles, and finally Darren Donovan.

‘See that?’ Elsa said, her blue eyes bright. ‘When a man has been hanged, his tongue turns purple.’

Dr Joe had begun to pant like a dog on a summer’s day.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, not looking at me. ‘I’m fine. Really.’

‘This is how strangulation by hanging works,’ Elsa continued. ‘Once the noose is around your neck and
there is nothing to support you, you are killed by your own body weight. Strangulation compresses the carotid arteries in the neck, shutting off the supply of blood to the brain and causing the brain to swell so much that it plugs the top of the spinal column. This causes a reaction known as the vagal reflex, which stops the heart. The compression of the neck closes the trachea and aborts the supply of oxygen to the lungs. So – no blood to the brain and no air to the lungs. Bad news. The victim passes out due to suffocation. And then he dies.’

‘How long does it take, Elsa?’ I asked.

‘It depends. But it is not a quick way to die. Strangulation by hanging takes at least five minutes, but no more than twenty.’

‘Do we have any defensive wounds?’

‘There are no defensive wounds on Mahmud Irani or Darren Donovan, although there
are
signs of advanced intravenous drug use on Mr Donovan.’

‘What does advanced mean?’ Dr Joe asked.

‘The veins of his arms had collapsed and he was shooting up between his toes,’ Elsa said. ‘But Hector Welles is the only one of them with extensive defensive wounds.’

I remembered Welles fighting for his life as the dark figures struggled to control him.

He knew what they had done to Mahmud Irani.

‘There are contusions and welts on Mr Welles’ arms where he was restrained,’ Elsa said. ‘Some facial bruising where he was punched or kicked.’ She smiled sadly at me. ‘But unfortunately no skin tissue under his fingernails, Max. Apart from his own.’

In the glare of the Iain West, the flayed neck of Hector Welles looked like the self-inflicted scars of some bizarre tribal ritual.

‘Hanging is of course a popular method of suicide. But Mr Irani and Mr Donovan both have burn marks on their wrists where their hands were secured behind their backs, precluding suicide. Mr Welles did not have his hands secured behind his back, making suicide a theoretical possibility – in fact, most suicide hangings look exactly like Mr Welles, as they change their mind when it is far too late and attempt to claw the noose from their neck. But the extent of his defensive wounds eliminates that.’

‘And three million hits on YouTube of the guy being hanged,’ Edie said.

Elsa Olsen looked at her sharply.

‘I’m looking at the medical evidence and
not
what’s trending on YouTube, Detective.’

‘Of course,’ Edie said.

Elsa nodded curtly. ‘And a suicide victim is unlikely to be cut down and dumped in the middle of Marble Arch. The dead don’t move themselves,’ she said. ‘In all three cases, the manner of death was murder.’