The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (8 page)

‘And they’re going to do it again, aren’t they?’ I said.

‘I don’t see how they can stop now,’ she said.

Edie consulted her phone. ‘The Divisional Surgeon has arrived to check that Welles is really dead,’ she said. ‘I’ll escort him in.’

I looked at Whitestone.

‘And the history man is here,’ I said.

‘Let’s give him one last try,’ Whitestone said.

I walked across to the perimeter and the old-looking young man who was waiting there. He had got off his bike and placed the helmet on the pillion and was sucking on a soggy roll-up cigarette. It did not seem to be giving him much joy. Despite the motorbike, and despite the fact that it was going to be another brutally hot day, Professor Adrian Hitchens wore a two-piece corduroy suit, a shirt and tie and a V-neck jumper that had been munched by moths long gone. His head still looked remarkable to me – so egg-shaped that it was almost pointed. It glistened with heavy beads of sweat.

‘Professor Hitchens,’ I said.

‘I feel that we got off to a bad start,’ he said. ‘You and I. Your theory about Tyburn – I dismissed it out of hand. That was wrong. You were correct. And I apologise.’

I shrugged. ‘It was just a hunch. I also told you that they would never dump a body on a traffic island in the middle of the West End.’ I nodded to the white tent. ‘And that’s exactly what they did. So I was wrong, too,’ I said.

I held out my hand to him and he went to shake it until he saw the blue latex gloves I was offering him.

‘Put these on and keep them on until you sign out at the perimeter. Don’t touch anything. Follow my instructions at all times.’

He signed in with the uniformed officer and put on the gloves and baggies. The officer and I held up the DO NOT CROSS tape as Professor Hitchens eased his great bulk under the tape. I had never seen a man so young who was so fabulously unfit.

‘Take your time, sir,’ the young uniform said, without irony.

Safely under the tape, Hitchens smoothed his corduroy suit and cleared his throat. We began walking towards the white tent and I found I had to slow my pace so that he could keep up.

‘We need to find the kill site,’ I said. ‘If the dump site has a ritualistic value for them, then possibly the kill site will have some significance too. The place where both the victims were hanged feels like it should ring some bells. There can’t be many late Victorian basements left in this town. If we find the kill site, it leads us to them. Any thoughts on where it could be?’

‘Where we are right now is London’s primary place of execution, as you so correctly observed.’

‘But they didn’t do it here, did they? They dump the bodies at Tyburn but they can’t hang them here. So where’s the next best thing?’

‘If ritual is that important to them, they’re spoilt for choice. It could be any one of a number of places of execution. Kennington Common, Shepherd’s Bush, Tower Hill, Charing Cross. Pirates were hanged at the execution dock at East Wapping. There were executions at Smithfield – although burning and boiling were preferred to hanging, especially during the sixteenth-century heresy trials. Charles I was executed in Whitehall. But Charles was beheaded – if we are talking specifically about
hanging
. . .’

‘What about Newgate?’ I said. ‘Didn’t they have hangings at Newgate after they stopped public executions at Tyburn?’

Professor Hitchens nodded his great oval head.

‘In many ways, Newgate would be their obvious choice. There was a gaol on that site for eight hundred years and after Tyburn’s gallows were abolished in 1783 public hangings continued at Newgate for almost another hundred years. Hangings were as popular as FA Cup Finals. Huge crowds would turn up to watch. The crush was apparently phenomenal. Often there would be a few dozen dead when the crowds went home for their supper.
But Newgate Gaol was closed in 1902 and torn down in 1904.’

‘And nothing remains?

‘The prison was completely demolished so they could build the Old Bailey on top of it. There’s a plaque on the wall of the Old Bailey. But Newgate was essentially wiped off the face of the earth. The theory was that they were replacing one kind of brutal British justice with another more enlightened kind of justice. There were no executions at the Old Bailey.’

We stopped at the white tent.

Inside, the Tyvek-suited CSIs in their blue gloves, baggies and face masks photographed and filmed and dusted, moving with a kind of insatiable curiosity, determined to record absolutely everything, like tourists on some hostile planet.

I looked at Hitchens.

‘And are you really going to help me, Professor? Don’t waste my time, Hitch – may I call you Hitch?’

‘Please do, Detective.’

‘If you’re just looking for a few juicy anecdotes to share with your colleagues over sherry evenings back on campus, then you can bail out now. You don’t have to like me. But if you stick around, you do have to help me.’

‘I want to help you. I truly do.’

I looked at him for a while.

Then I nodded and took him inside to see the body.

Hector Welles.

What remained of his neck was a pulp of raw and bloody meat. As we watched, a CSI armed with long surgical tweezers carefully plucked something from the shredded meat of his neck and expertly slipped it inside a plastic evidence bag.

The history man’s mouth dropped open with a kind of sickened wonder.

Professor Hitchens stared at the body in disbelief. I have no idea what he had been expecting. But it was not this – a man who, in his last desperate minutes, had tried to remove the rope strangling him by attempting to rip open his own throat.

Hector Welles looked as though he had been flayed alive from his chin to his chest. There was not a piece of skin left intact, just a sickening mass of minced meat where his neck used to be.

Professor Hitchens said, ‘Dear God . . . what does he have stuck in his neck? They’re not . . .’

The CSI gently removed something else with the tweezers. There were ten of them in total.

I nodded.

‘Fingernails,’ I said. ‘Hector Welles’ fingernails. When he was hanging, he tore at the rope around his neck so hard he ripped out all of his fingernails.’

Professor Hitchens quietly emptied his stomach over the blue baggies on his shoes.

A summer breeze stirred the tent.

I shuddered, my skin crawling at the proximity of all that ancient horror, and the wind in the trees of Hyde Park sounded as if all the ghosts of Tyburn were moaning.

I was packing my kit bag for the gym. Scout was off for a sleepover with her friend Mia, and down on the street the meat market’s night was just beginning. After the day I had spent at Marble Arch, I knew that sleep would be a struggle for me if I did not exhaust myself at Fred’s.

Then Edie called with what felt like our first breakthrough.

‘The good news is we’ve got prints,’ she said. ‘All our forensics are back for Mahmud Irani and Hector Welles and the same print is on both of the victims’ clothes.’ I could hear the excitement in her voice. ‘It’s a glove print, Max, but really sharp. A thumb. A left thumbprint on both of the dead men.’

Most criminals believe that gloves hide fingerprints. But it is not true, especially with more modern gloves made of latex or something similar. The thinner the glove, the more likely the telltale ridges, whorls, arches and loops are to be left behind.

‘And what’s the bad news?’ I said.

‘None of it rings any bells on IDENT1.’

IDENT1 is the country’s major database for storing fingerprints and contains the fingerprints of knocking on for ten million people. That only leaves about fifty million people who are not on there – the part of the population who have never come into contact with the police.

‘And both of our potential suspects are on IDENT1,’ I said. ‘Because both Paul Warboys and Barry Wilder have criminal records.’

‘Wilder for his youthful indiscretions at the football, and Warboys because crime was what he did for a living,’ Edie said.

‘Are we sure it’s not them?’

Fingerprint analysis is not the exact science that it is always cracked up to be in the movies. Fingerprint officers have been known to get it wrong. Until 2001, a sixteen-point standard existed for fingerprint matches – meaning there were sixteen identical points required on a latent print to legally match it to a suspect. The system was scrapped because it didn’t work.

‘It’s not even close, Max.’

‘But we still don’t have the kill site, so we don’t have prints on surfaces, do we?’ I argued. ‘Paul Warboys or Barry Wilder could have glove prints, fingerprints, footprints and DNA all over the kill site. This one print found doesn’t mean either Barry Wilder and Paul
Warboys – or both of them – weren’t there. It doesn’t mean they had nothing to do with it.’

‘It makes it a lot less likely though, doesn’t it?’

I had to give her that. ‘Yes.’

Jackson came into the loft, soaked in sweat from his evening run. Stan got off the sofa and padded across to greet him. The pair of them stared at me talking on the phone.

‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ Edie said.

‘There’s a very strong possibility that these guys don’t have criminal records.’

‘Clean skins,’ Edie said. ‘I bloody hate clean skins. I’ll see you in the morning, Max.’

‘This is the thing on the news,’ Jackson said, his fingers scratching the back of Stan’s neck. ‘The Hanging Club.’

I nodded.

‘So what are they?’ Jackson said. ‘Some kind of vigilante group?’

‘We have a psychologist who works with us,’ I said. ‘Dr Joe. American. His theory is that they think of what they’re doing as capital punishment. They don’t think they’re committing murder. They don’t see it like that. They believe they are carrying out a death sentence.’

‘But they’re only killing scumbags, right? A child groomer and a hit-and-run driver.’

I smiled. ‘They’re not allowed to kill anyone, Jackson. It’s against the law.’

He looked thoughtful.

‘Still – it can’t feel good having to go after them. For you, I mean, Max. Like you’re a lawyer or something.’

I shouldered my kit bag.

‘Did they give you any choice about going to Afghanistan, Jackson? Did they ask you if there was somewhere you would prefer to go?’

He shook his head.

‘You went where you were sent,’ I said. ‘Same here. We just do our job. That’s all we do. The law’s not just there for nice people. I’m off to the gym.’

‘Bit late to be training,’ Jackson said.

‘I need to work off the day,’ I said. ‘Or I’ll never get any sleep.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘You just had a run.’

He laughed. ‘Another hour of cardio won’t kill me.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘I’m just saying – what they’re doing is illegal. But does that make it wrong?’

‘You talk like you admire them.’

‘And you talk like you don’t. A child groomer, Max. A hit-and-run driver. No great loss.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point?’

‘The point is – who made them God? Who elected them judge, jury and executioner? They’re not the law.’

‘I forgot,’ he smiled. ‘You are.’

‘I was at the Old Bailey,’ I said. ‘Some boys kicked a man to death. His name was Steve Goddard and he was forty years old. They got off too lightly and it made me mad. I was going to go for them. I wanted to wipe the smiles off their faces. I wanted to hurt them, to punish them in a way that the court had not punished them. I wanted to give them what they deserved. Stupid, right? I’ve got Scout to raise. I’m no good for her sitting in a jail cell. But it was a moment. Then one of the court ushers got in my face and the moment passed.’

‘That’s you, Max. For some people, the moment doesn’t pass.’ He paused. ‘But the hanging’s weird. A funny way to do it, I mean. You ever see anything like this before?’

I shook my head. ‘Never.’

‘Even if you hate these bastards, why would you go to all the trouble of stringing them up?’

I smiled at him. ‘What would you do? Beat them to death with your spatula?’

He didn’t smile back. His dark eyes slid away from me.

‘If I wanted to kill someone that deserved to die, I wouldn’t hang them.’

‘What would you do, Jackson?’

He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t put a rope around his neck.’

‘But what
would
you do? Put a bullet in their brains from half a mile away?’

‘I’m no sniper, Max. I’m a chef. But I’d get close enough to smell what they had for breakfast.’ He stared at the open palms of his hands as though noticing them for the first time. ‘Then one in the head,’ he said. ‘And one in the heart.’

We were silent. Then he gave me his gap-toothed grin and the moment was broken. He gestured at my bag.

Fourteen-ounce gloves. Shirt. Shorts. Trainers. Gum shield.

‘Can you lend me some kit?’ said my friend.

We banged the bags at Smithfield ABC.

One of Fred’s famous circuits – ten three-minute rounds on the bags, alternating the heavy bag and the speedball, with one minute between rounds for ten burpies and ten press-ups. No rest for your heart. Recover while you work.

‘You’re so lucky to be training!’ Fred shouted at us. ‘If it was easy, everybody would do it! Pain is just weakness leaving the body!’

Halfway through I stood back from the speedball, trying to catch my breath, reaching for that second wind while Jackson whaled away at the heavy bag, the dull thud of leather against leather. He had on one of my long-sleeved T-shirts that was a size too big for him.

He laughed at my exhaustion.

‘I was always tougher than you!’ he shouted.

It wasn’t true. I was always tougher.

But he was wilder.

There was a crowd of drunks in Charterhouse Street.

More than anywhere in the city, Smithfield was the neighbourhood that never slept. The meat market worked all night. The clubs on Charterhouse Street had them dancing till dawn. Pubs had licensing laws that saw the clubbers and meat porters having a pint at first light. Drunks were no big deal in this part of town.