The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (22 page)

By the time I climbed the tube station’s long and winding staircase up to the street, they were waiting for me.

Armed officers from SC&O19.

They didn’t think I was a ghost.

They thought I was a terrorist.

As I stepped out into the warm summer night, they started screaming at me. I could not tell where the voices were coming from but I could feel the adrenaline in the air. Then I saw their raised weapons. The Glock pistols. The Heckler and Koch submachine guns.

‘
Hands in the air and get down on your knees!
’

‘I am DC Wolfe of West End Central and I am complying with your command,’ I said, as calm and clear as I could make it.

‘
Do it now! Do it now!
’

I raised my hands and got down on my knees, the pavement surprisingly cold in the warm summer night.

Then I saw them.

Edging towards me, fingers on the triggers.

‘There’s a wallet in my right pocket which contains my warrant card,’ I said, still as calm and clear as I could make it, but finding it harder to sound like the voice of reason with my face pressed against the pavement.

Someone pushed a boot heel against the back of my neck. A pair of hands patted me down and another pair of hands went through my pockets. I lifted my lower body very slightly so they could remove my wallet.

‘
Don’t move! Don’t move!
’

I felt the barrel of a Glock screw itself into my ear.

I held my breath. I did not move.

But even after they saw my warrant card they kept my face pressed to the pavement and my limbs spread wide. Even after they clocked my photo ID they kept me face down on the ground with a size-12 boot heel pressed firmly against the back of my neck.

And they kept me there for a long time.

It was as if nobody could be trusted any more, as if the world had gone insane, as if you never knew who might want to dance on your grave.

The view from the top of New Scotland Yard is spectacular.

When you are up there on the eighth floor you realise that the big modern office block located at 8–10 Broadway, Victoria, so self-consciously anonymous, sits at the heart of British power.

From the window of the room where I waited in my old Paul Smith wedding suit I checked my watch against two of Big Ben’s faces as they struck noon and then looked across at the spires of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster and, stretching off to the north, the rooftops of Whitehall and Downing Street.

It took my breath away.

A portrait of the Queen smiled at me. Her Majesty was young in the picture, and the painting had those saturated Sixties colours where everything was slightly more vivid than real life. She looked like a nice lady who was happy that England had just won the World Cup. Apart from the portrait of the Queen, there was
nothing on the walls of that waiting room but posters proclaiming the values of the Metropolitan Police. They all said the same thing.

THE MET VALUES:
PROFESSIONALISM – INTEGRITY – COURAGE – COMPASSION

But on each wall the poster had a definition of a different value. PROFESSIONALISM was highlighted on one wall, INTEGRITY on another, COURAGE on another and COMPASSION on the last, the one with the portrait of the Queen. I had no time to read about the different values because a civilian PA put her head around the door.

‘They’ll see you now,’ she said.

I followed her inside where DCS Swire and DCI Whitestone were waiting for me in a top-floor corner room, the Chief Super at the head of a long boardroom table and Pat Whitestone at her right-hand side. Far below, the Thames shimmered like molten gold in the last of the summer sunshine.

‘Max,’ the Chief Super said. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine, ma’am, thank you. Nothing broken.’

The truth is my neck felt as though someone had tried to remove my head and I was so bone-tired that only a constant stream of triple espressos from the Bar Italia was keeping my eyes open. It had been a long night.

When the armed officers had allowed me to remove my face from the pavement I had been taken to West End Central where Edie Wren, roused from her bed in the early hours, had conducted what we call a hot debriefing – an interview conducted at the earliest opportunity to obtain as much information as possible in the aftermath of a serious incident. The Senior Investigating Officer almost always conducts a hot debriefing, but DCI Whitestone had been staying with her son at the hospital, and was unavailable. After the hot debrief I had gone home, slept for a few hours, parked Scout at Mrs Murphy’s, then shaved, showered, got suited and booted and come straight to New Scotland Yard.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t have a chance to do the hot debrief myself,’ Whitestone said. ‘Just had some complications with one of his eyes and – well. I’m sorry.’

I shook my head. ‘No problem, ma’am.’ But I wondered how long Pat Whitestone could be the SIO of a major murder investigation when her personal life was taking up so much of her time.

‘But DC Wren has done a thorough job,’ the Chief Super said.

They both had a set of Edie’s notes in front of them.

‘So the assumption we’re making is that they targeted you because you were effectively the public face of this investigation?’ Swire continued.

I saw Pat Whitestone flush with embarrassment as she stared down at Edie’s notes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

‘What do we know about them, Max?’ the Chief Super said.

I wasn’t surprised to be asked the same questions that Edie had asked me at the hot debriefing. That’s the way we work. You ask a question again and again and again. Then you ask it again. And then you see if the answer is always the same.

‘There were four of them,’ I said. ‘There seems to have been one missing when they attempted to abduct Abu Din. But last night – with me – they were at full strength. And they are highly organised, highly motivated and at least a couple of them appear to have received some kind of training. One of them does the heavy lifting. Another one had close combat experience.’ I shrugged. ‘They’re tough, resourceful and barking mad.’

‘Edie’s notes say that one of them spoke to you,’ said Whitestone.

I felt myself begin to tremble. I took a deep breath, held it and let it out slowly. I wasn’t going to fall to pieces in this room.

‘Yes, ma’am.’ I nodded at the notes. ‘He told me that the white transit van that distracted the ARV was driven by what he called
friends
.’

Whitestone turned to the Chief Super.

‘We found it burned out in a car park in Notting Hill,’ she said. ‘We’re looking for prints.’

The Chief Super laughed bitterly. ‘Good luck with that.’

I didn’t understand.

‘Wait – our ARV
lost
the decoy van? How does an Armed Response Vehicle with two highly trained firearms officers lose a transit van on the North Circular?’

‘The white van was driven by a wheelman,’ Whitestone said. ‘He wasn’t some boy racer. He knew his stuff. He could drive and I mean,
really
drive. Like a pro. Like a professional wheelman. And he lost our ARV almost immediately because he entered the North Circular against the flow of the traffic.’

‘He drove against the traffic?’

She nodded. ‘And the ARV couldn’t follow. Too dangerous. They’re trained to shoot straight, not drive like Lewis Hamilton. They phoned ahead and by the time we found the white van – twenty minutes later – it was on fire.’

The Chief Super’s mouth twisted with annoyance. ‘They took you to the kill site, Max. Any thoughts on where it could be?’

I thought of the square room with the decaying tiles, turned green by a century of neglect, and the corridor they had led me down, where the walls and the ceiling
were always closing in on me. Had I imagined that? In the bright light of the morning, I wasn’t sure how much of the night had been real and how much the fevered imaginings of pure terror. There was a smell – wasn’t there? It was sweet and rotten, like dead flowers, or sugar in a sewer. A rank sweetness that I knew from somewhere – or was that just in my head?

‘We drove into the city,’ I said. ‘Somewhere very central. Underground. An abandoned building that was important a century or so ago. But I don’t even know where you found me. Nobody’s told me. I thought I saw a sign on the wall that said
Bloomsbury
. . . No, I mean, I definitely saw a sign on the wall that said
Bloomsbury
– but I never heard of a tube station with that name.’

‘The tube station you found was closed in 1933,’ Whitestone said. ‘It was originally called British Museum. They were going to call it Bloomsbury but they changed the name before it ever opened. And in 1935 – a couple of years after it was closed – they shot a scene in a film called
Bulldog Jack
down there – a swordfight – and the producers put up signs saying
Bloomsbury
.’

‘With Fay Wray,’ Swire said. ‘The
King Kong
girl.’

‘I was looking at . . . a film set?’

‘The tube station was real, Max,’ Whitestone said. ‘Only the sign was fake.’

‘But if we know that I was in this tube station,’ I said, ‘then our search teams must be able to find the kill site.’

Whitestone shook her head.

‘They’re looking,’ she said. ‘But it’s not that simple. London has hundreds of miles of disused tracks and literally dozens of abandoned underground stations. We know the one you came out of, but you don’t know how far you walked and you don’t know what direction you came from.’

‘What about the Dog Support Unit? The sniffer dogs must be able to follow my trail from Bloomsbury back to the kill site?’

‘Do you know the best way to distract a sniffer dog, Max?’ Whitestone asked me.

‘Introduce another animal, prey or food,’ I said. ‘Villains call it hiding the ball. You introduce a scent that’s strong enough to distract the sniffer dogs from what they’re meant to be hunting. Is that what they did?’

‘Not them. It’s the rats, Max. The millions of rats down there. The sniffer dogs don’t have a chance picking up a trail in a world full of rats.’

‘I want you to talk to Professor Hitchens later today,’ the Chief Super said. ‘There might be something you recall about the kill site that will ring some bells for him.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand . . .’ Whitestone said.

I waited.

‘Why aren’t you dead, Max?’ she asked.

I had told Edie Wren everything that I could remember but I had not mentioned the Glock 17. Because I did not know where to begin with the Glock and I did not want my friend to go to jail.

But I knew that our people must have found the gun by now.

‘The pipe they hanged me from broke and they took off,’ I said in reply to Whitestone’s question. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

Whitestone and Swire exchanged a look. I knew what was coming so I got there first.

‘And they couldn’t shoot straight,’ I said. ‘I managed to get hold of their firearm after it was discharged. Presumably you’ve found it by now? Some kind of Glock. I’m no firearms expert.’

Whitestone glanced at her notes.

‘Yes, a Glock,’ she said. ‘The search team found it down on the tracks of that old tube station.’ She looked at me levelly, reading me the way I had seen her read so many faces in interview rooms. ‘A Glock Safe Action Pistol,’ she said. ‘The British Army like them. Standard issue, apparently.’

‘Forensics will find my prints all over it,’ I said.

‘You
shot
at them?’ Swire said, her face darkening.

Every time a member of the Metropolitan Police discharges a firearm, he or she triggers an enquiry that
treats him or her as a potential criminal. You are arrested. You are investigated. Unemployment and incarceration are both real possibilities just for pulling that trigger. Even if you shoot Osama bin Laden. And that’s what they do to our highly trained Specialist Firearms officers, the Armed Response Vehicle officers and Tactical Support officers – the specialist police who are actually meant to be carrying a gun.

I had no idea what they would do to someone like me and I wasn’t anxious to find out.

‘The magazine was empty by the time I had the weapon in my hands,’ I said. ‘I pulled the trigger but it didn’t go bang. I took it with me for evidence and dropped it when I got out of the way of a train.’

Silence.

They looked at each other and back at me. They were not sure if they wanted to buy it. I found I did not care.

‘What about PC Rocastle?’ I said.

‘Who?’ said the Chief Super.

‘The uniformed officer who was on duty in Abu Din’s street. I saw he had gone down when they took me away.’

‘Oh – PC Rocastle got shot with whatever taser knock-off they used on you,’ Whitestone said. ‘He’s shaken up. Nerve ends a bit scrambled. But he’ll live.’

The Chief Super nodded once. The debriefing was over.

Her voice stopped me at the door.

‘And one final matter, DC Wolfe,’ she said. ‘We’ve had an enquiry from the MoD about a misper.’

‘A missing person?’

‘Yes.’ She stared down at her notes, although I felt she did not really need to. ‘A Captain Jackson Rose,’ she said. ‘The MoD is anxious to contact him. We understand he’s a friend of yours and wondered if you knew of his whereabouts?’

‘Jackson was staying with me for a while. Then he left.’ I stared at them. Their faces gave nothing away. ‘Why does the MoD want to reach him?’ I asked.

‘That’s MoD business not Met business,’ the Chief Super said, a sudden frost in her voice. ‘Do you have any idea where Captain Rose might be?’

I thought of a beach hut by the English seaside where the water was freezing cold even in the middle of a blazing summer, and I thought of two boys who believed that they would be friends forever.

‘No,’ I said.