The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) Read online

  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.’

  ‘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 tha
t 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.

  10

  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. ‘Y
es.’

  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.’