The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (7 page)

‘Someone killed Hector Welles,’ I said.

He shot me a ferocious look. Paul Warboys had always been friendly to me, thanks to our connection to Bullseye, but I was under no illusion that we were anything resembling friends. And even now, even after all these years since the Warboys brothers had been almost as famous as the Krays, I could still see the serious violence in the man.

He got his rage under control.

‘We don’t say that name in this house,’ he said very quietly, his fingers deep in Bullseye’s fur. The dog whimpered with something between pleasure and pain. ‘We
never
say that name, Max.’

It was a threat as much as a statement.

‘But I have to talk to you about him,’ I said.

‘I understand that you have to run your fucking Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘But this is my house and we never say the name of the man who killed my grandson in this house.’ He waited for me to contradict him. ‘OK?’

Edie had her notebook out. ‘Where were you when Hector Welles was being hanged?’

Under the deep tan, his face flushed with fury, the kind of fury that once enabled him to order the amputation of an informer’s tongue. But then he laughed.

‘I was home with Doll,’ he said, and I was reminded that he had been answering police questions since before Edie Wren and I were born.

‘How did you hear about it?’ Edie said.

‘How do you think?’ he said. ‘The phones started ringing. Ringing and ringing and ringing they were. Friends. Family. Former colleagues. Some of them were laughing. Some of them were crying. And they all said the same thing.
Go online
, they said.
Go online, Paul, because someone is stringing up the bastard that killed your Danny.
’

‘And you can corroborate your alibi?’ Edie said.

‘Darling, I can give you all the corroboration you need. But let me ask you a question.’

She held up her notebook as if to protect herself.

‘Mr Warboys—’

‘Do you know how long ago it was that I last hurt someone for profit or pleasure?’ he said. ‘A
lifetime
. When people talk about the Krays and the Richardsons and the Warboys, they forget that it was all over before most people in this country had colour television. They came after us, love. Your lot. Your mob. And we all went down hard. Charlie Richardson got twenty-five years in 1966 – when England won the World Cup! A couple of years later, Reggie and Ronnie went down for thirty years – the longest sentence ever passed at the Old Bailey.’

‘And you and your brother both served life sentences for murder,’ Edie said. ‘For removing your lawyer’s tongue.’

‘The evidence was circumstantial,’ he said. ‘But my point is that our generation – those days when family firms ran London – ended fifty years ago. We all went away for a long time, and we either died inside or we came out into a changed world. You know – lovely modern multicultural Britain, where the blackies, the Pakis and the Iraqis all deserve their slice of the pie or it violates their human rights.’

‘Yes,’ said Edie. ‘If only we could go back to the good old days when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were helping little old ladies across the street.’

He waved a dismissive hand.

‘Now you’re just taking the piss,’ he said, sounding almost bored. ‘But if you honestly think that the world is a safer place these days than when Reggie and Ronnie and Charlie and Eddie and Danny and myself were young men, then you are kidding yourself, young lady.’

He leaned forward and looked from Edie to me.

There was no warmth in him now.

‘Do you actually know what happened to little Daniel? My grandson? He was riding his little bike over a zebra crossing when
that bastard
came along in his fucking Porsche and mowed him down. Daniel was in a coma for six months before they turned off the life
support. Do you know why we’ve got the dog? Why the dog’s with us? Because Daniel’s mother – my youngest – can’t look after a dog any more because she has never been right since her boy died. She has the lot. Depression. Pills. Panic attacks. Self-harming. Falling to bits. Can’t even walk a dog twice a day. Can’t get out of bed to feed old Bullseye. Can’t get out of bed to wash herself or take her daughter to school. She can’t see the point to any of it – you know. Fucking living.
That bastard
wrecked lives, Max. Served two years for what he did to a child. I served twenty years for what I did to grown men.’

‘But nobody has the right to kill him,’ I said. I found that I would not say the name of Hector Welles in this house. I did not understand if it was out of respect to young Daniel Warboys, or his grandfather, or if it was because I hated him too.

Paul Warboys shook his head.

‘That’s your law, Max. It’s not mine.’

He leaned back. Edie Wren closed her notebook. She looked at me and I nodded. Time to go.

Paul Warboys walked us to the front door in silence. There he placed one large hand on my arm. I looked at his face and his pale blue eyes were shining with tears.

‘You ever hear of a man called John Favara, Max?’

I shook my head. ‘Who was he?’

‘John Favara was a man who lived in New Jersey many years ago. One day in 1980 this John Favara ran down and killed a twelve-year-old boy. This child’s name was Frank Gotti – that ring any bells, Max?’

I nodded. Now it was coming back to me.

‘Frank was the son of John Gotti,’ I said.

Paul Warboys chuckled. ‘John Gotti – the Dapper Don. The boss of the Gambino family. The last of the old school Mafia bosses. And then this John Favara knocks down and kills young Frank Gotti. You know what happened next?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The guy – John Favara – was abducted and never seen again. And the assumption is that he was murdered for killing the boy.’

‘But Gotti and his wife were on holiday in Florida when Favara disappeared,’ Paul Warboys smiled. ‘So they were in the clear, weren’t they? Long way from Florida to New Jersey.’

‘Didn’t they also call Gotti the Teflon Don?’ Edie said. ‘Because nothing ever stuck? And didn’t Mrs Gotti attack John Favara with a baseball bat prior to his disappearance?’

‘Feels like the least she could do,’ Paul Warboys said.

He placed a scarred hand on our arms so that we could not take our leave. His knuckles were stark white against his suntan where the skin had been torn off and grown
back. I had seen hands like that before but only on professional boxers.

He leaned close to our faces.

This was very important to him.

‘My point is this,’ Paul Warboys said quietly. ‘If I had killed the bastard that murdered my grandson with his car, I would have a much better alibi than the one I’ve got.’

Then he laughed.

‘And I wouldn’t have done it online,’ he said.

Jackson went for his run at first light.

As the sun came up around five the door to his room quietly opened and I stirred from the last stage of sleep, that shallow sleep that is full of dreams, as he padded across the loft to get Stan. By the time I got up an hour later the dog was curled up on his favourite chair, happily exhausted, and Jackson was in the kitchen, making porridge for us, his hair still wet from the shower. He already looked stronger than when we had found him.

He smiled his gap-toothed grin and nodded at the sleeping Cavalier.

‘Stan likes the ladies,’ Jackson said. ‘You’re going to have to watch that.’

‘He’s still a puppy,’ I said. ‘He’s just friendly.’ Stan was snoring. ‘You wore that dog out.’

‘I think it was the cute Labradoodle he met down by the river who wore him out,’ Jackson laughed, tipping blueberries into the porridge.

Then his face became serious.

‘Thanks for all this, Max. You know – putting me up. I appreciate it.

‘No problem.’

‘I’ll sort myself out soon,’ he said. ‘Find my own place.’ He tugged at the wrists of his long-sleeved T-shirt. He preferred to keep his scarred arms covered, even here in the loft. Even with us. He flashed that gap-toothed smile. ‘You know what they say about house guests and fish,’ he said. ‘They start to smell after a while.’

I shook my head. ‘Stay as long as you like.’

‘I might have a look across the road for work.’

‘At the meat market? Good idea. They always need grafters.’

He grinned, pleased that I liked his plan, and placed a bowl of porridge in front of me.

And the truth was I liked having Jackson around. He had been with us for two days now, and he did everything he could to make himself useful – walking the dog, making breakfast. And I realised that I had missed having someone that close in my life. It was true what he said – you can make new friends but you can’t make old friends.

Scout emerged from her bedroom, wild hair and bleary-eyed. ‘You kept Stan on lead, right, Jackson?’

‘I promised you, didn’t I?’

My phone vibrated. DCI Whitestone.

‘We’ve got the body of Hector Welles,’ she said. ‘They must have dumped it during the night.’

‘Where did they leave him?’

‘About one hundred metres from where we found Mahmud Irani.’

‘In Hyde Park?’

‘No. This one – if you can believe it – was found at the junction of Oxford Street, Bayswater Road and Edgware Road – on that massive traffic island right opposite Marble Arch. You know where I mean, Max?

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Tyburn.’

DCI Whitestone and I came out of the white CSI tent, both of us sweating from the heat and the sight of the dead body of Hector Welles. She wiped her brow with the back of her hand.

‘He’s a bigger mess than the first one,’ she said.

‘They secured Mahmud Irani’s hands behind his back,’ I said. ‘They didn’t get the chance to do that with Hector Welles.’

‘It looks like he tried to tear his own throat out.’

‘Yes – and he still couldn’t shift the rope around his neck. Irani never quite believed what was happening to him, but Welles knew exactly what they were going to do – he had probably seen Irani hang on YouTube – so he fought like hell. Before they had his neck in a noose,
and then when he was hanging. This one fought for his life, Pat. And that’s what made all the mess in there.’

We had thrown up our perimeter around the traffic island where the body of Hector Welles had been found and it had effectively shut down central London. The POLICE: DO NOT CROSS tape stretched from Park Lane in the south to Oxford Street in the east to Edgware Road in the north to Bayswater Road in the west. The blue lights of more than twenty Rapid Response Vehicles pulsed and shone in the summer morning, brighter than the sun, and beyond them you could see four of London’s great roads, empty of traffic.

Dozens of uniformed officers patrolled the perimeter. Specialist Search Teams fanned out in every direction, fingertip-searching the area around the traffic island and beyond. Somewhere out in the endless city streets, the blare of all that paralysed traffic filled the air.

‘You sure you want to maintain this perimeter?’ I said. ‘We’ve shut down West London and the rush hour hasn’t started yet.’

‘I told you before – I can always bring the perimeter in later,’ she said. ‘But I can’t take it out later. Who found the body?’

‘Owner of one of the Lebanese supermarkets on the Edgware Road. Edie’s taking his statement now. He was coming in to work about five.’

‘But they didn’t dump him at dawn, did they?’ she said. ‘And nobody noticed a dead body in one of the busiest corners of London during the night?’

‘Maybe they thought he was drunk or stoned or another Romanian gypsy getting his beauty sleep. Probably nobody even clocked him. This traffic island’s not lit up at night. They knew what they were doing.’

We stared out across the great green expanse of Hyde Park. Just beyond the perimeter tape at Speaker’s Corner, I could see Professor Adrian Hitchens in conversation with a young uniformed police officer. The professor had a motorcycle helmet under one arm and sat astride what looked like an old 500cc Royal Enfield, its faded blue paint worn down to shiny silver and freckled with rust.

Edie Wren walked up to us.

‘You told that freak the first body was dumped where Tyburn used to be,’ she said. ‘You told him and he wouldn’t listen, would he? Some expert he is.’

‘I wasn’t sure myself. Not until the second body. But now they’re rubbing our noses in it. They want the world to know they’ve brought back capital punishment.’

Edie looked around at the pristine white monolith of Marble Arch, at the start of the West End proper on Oxford Street, at the grand hotels running all the way
down Park Lane, and at Hyde Park, an endless sea of green in the very heart of the city.

‘And remind me – what’s so special about this place?’ she said. ‘Why does it mean so much to them?’

‘There’s probably more history where we are standing than any place in the country,’ I said. ‘For a thousand years, Tyburn was the country’s most celebrated place of execution. More than fifty thousand men, women and children were hanged here. London was always a city of execution – in the eighteenth century you couldn’t enter the city without seeing a line of gibbets – but Tyburn was always special.’

‘Dr Joe says that ritual and ceremony was important to the perps – as important as the punishment.’

I nodded. ‘It
matters
to them that this was where Tyburn stood. It’s
important
to them that their victims are hanged, and then dumped here. I’m sure they wish they could do it on the pavement outside the Odeon Marble Arch. But I’m hoping they care too much, that it’s
too
important to them. I’m guessing that they are so obsessed with all that symbolism that we will have our chance to nail them.’ I turned to look at our SIO. ‘You want to get Marble Arch staked out?’

‘I should have done it sooner,’ Whitestone said. ‘After the first one. It’s not a difficult place for a team of undercover officers to watch, especially in summer when there are more bodies sleeping out around Hyde Park
and Marble Arch. But if they do it again, they have to come back here. And next time we’ll be waiting.’