The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (19 page)

I watched Jackson.

I watched the lads.

I steeled myself to go down and help him.

But he didn’t need my help.

They parted to let him through. They didn’t look at him and he didn’t look at them. But there was something about him that made them step out of his way. At the sound of his key in the door Stan got up and padded off to greet him.

The dog was all over him.

‘Hello, little buddy,’ he said, scratching Stan behind his extravagant ears. Jackson looked at me and saw my face and waited for me to speak.

‘I need your help,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘Fine. Have I got time for a shower?’

Not –
Is it dangerous?

Not –
What’s all this about, Max?

He just wanted to know if he had time for a shower. Just a calm acceptance that I needed him by my side tonight. I smiled to myself. He had never felt more like the closest thing I ever had to a brother. And I had never loved him more.

I looked out of the loft’s huge windows, the last of the summer day’s sunshine streaming in.

We wouldn’t have to make a move until after dark.

‘You’ve time for a shower,’ I told him.

It was knocking on for midnight when we drove north.

The traffic was light but there were still plenty of people on the streets, squeezing the last juice out of the hot summer night, rolling home from pubs and bars dressed for the beach. But on the Farringdon Road the postal workers were filing into Mount Pleasant, the Royal Mail sorting centre, for the graveyard shift and the sight of them going to work made it feel as if summer was nearly over. Jackson stared out at them as I told him the story.

‘A boy was blinded,’ I said. ‘Sixteen years old. Somebody put a broken bottle across his eyes. Over nothing. No reason. No witnesses. Nobody arrested. Nobody punished. His name is Justin Whitestone and he’s the son of my boss.’ I swallowed down something hard and bitter. ‘And the doctors have told his mother that he is never going to see again.’

Jackson nodded. ‘Who did it?’ he said quietly.

‘There’s a little mob called the Dog Town Boys,’ I said. ‘They’re on the estates between King’s Cross and
Upper Street. The closest thing they’ve got to a leader is this Trey N’Dou. A reliable witness pointed a finger at him before she was frightened off.’

Jackson looked at me.

‘And you want to even the score?’

I shook my head.

‘I just want this Trey gone. I want him out of town. He’s never going to go down – all the people who saw him blind that boy are too scared to talk. So what I want is to make him go away so that my friend never has to look at his ugly grinning face when she is out with her son.’

‘And what do I do?’

‘You watch my back.’

We were driving past King’s Cross station. I turned onto the Pentonville Road. Ahead and above us we could see night lights of the Angel.

‘I can do that,’ Jackson said.

We were in a car park off the Liverpool Road.

It served a supermarket that stayed open twenty-four hours a day, but now it was almost empty. I parked a discreet distance from the purple Ford Escort. On the far side of the street was a bar called Dabs, the only sign of life and light in a bleak row of shuttered shops. It was impossible to tell if the shops were closed for the night or until hell froze over. A distant bass line
rumbled from somewhere deep inside Dabs. There were youth on the street, most of them black, chatting with a bouncer. I wondered if the bouncer might be a problem.

‘That’s Trey’s ride,’ I said, indicating the purple Ford Escort.

‘Are we going in or waiting outside?’

‘We’re waiting.’

‘All right,’ he said, and closed his eyes. He had the soldier’s ability to sleep when he was presented with the opportunity. But we didn’t have to wait long. Trey N’Dou came out of the club in the company of a skinny girl in a short skirt. I lightly touched Jackson’s arm and he was immediately awake. We watched Trey and the girl walking towards the car park.

‘What happens if he’s not alone?’ Jackson said.

‘Then we leave it,’ I said.

But Trey and the girl veered off towards a dark corner of the car park. They found a patch of scrubby grass and she sank to her knees. Trey stood above her, checking his phone.

No, he was not checking it.

He was taking her picture.

When she had finished, she got up and Trey zipped up and they walked back towards Dabs. As the girl disappeared inside, Trey turned and started towards the purple Ford Escort, its light flashing twice as he unlocked
it. We waited for him to get close enough that he had missed the chance to run away.

Then I nodded to Jackson and we got out of the car.

‘Hey,’ I said, and as Trey N’Dou turned towards me I shoved him backwards into his car. He hit it hard and as he bounced off it, I turned him around, throwing his hands on the roof and kicking his legs apart. I began to pat him down.

Trey chuckled to himself.

‘I smell bacon,’ he said. ‘Delicious bacon. Yum yum – smell that pig.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘That’s exactly what you smell. You in a gang, tough guy? Me too. I’m in the biggest gang in town.’

I patted him down, struggling to get my breathing under control, feeling myself trembling. I looked back at Jackson but he was calmly staring across the street, watching the entrance to Dabs.

I began pulling things from Trey’s baggy trousers. First a small cellophane wrap of white powder. ‘What’s this, coke? That’s up to seven years in prison for possession.’ Next a lightweight pair of knuckle-dusters. ‘Possession of an offensive weapon in a public place? That’s another four years. I don’t even have to plant anything on you, do I, tough guy?’ Then a lottery ticket. I laughed. ‘Your luck just ran out, Trey.’

And then his phone.

I pressed the photos icon. Then there were a number of options.
All photos. Videos. Bursts. Recently Deleted.
I pressed
Recently Deleted.
And I saw a crowded club. Laughter. Screams. And then Justin Whitestone staggering towards the camera, the blood streaming from his ruined eyes.

‘You piece of shit,’ I said, and banged the back of his head with his phone. His legs buckled but he didn’t go down.

‘I know my rights,’ he laughed, and I saw something that I had not expected.

He wasn’t scared of me.

And I needed him to be scared of me.

This was never going to work unless he was scared of me.

‘Max,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve got company.’

A car tooled slowly into the car park, music coming from inside, four faces, three black and one white, staring out as it circled us in a wide arc. The car stopped, its engine still running. Four doors came open. Jackson was already walking toward them as they got out.

‘Nothing to see here,’ he said to the first one, the driver, and hit him in the centre of his face with the palm of his hand, propelling him backwards, blood all over the hands clawing at the flattened nose. Jackson’s right hand, the same hand that had executed the palm
strike, was raised in what looked like a peace sign until he carefully drove the fingertips of his index and middle finger into the driver’s eyes.

Then the other three were on him.

And Jackson took them out.

He slammed the side of his right foot against a knee and then his left foot into somebody else’s knee.

A few wild blows rained down on him but not for long. He waded into them with his low, hard kicks to the knees and his hands and his elbows in their eyes. I was starting to understand his fighting technique. Knees and eyes. That’s what he went for and it is difficult to do much of anything, let alone fight back, when your knees or your eyes are gone.

All you can do is crawl away.

And that is what they did.

The four of them crawled away.

Somehow they got into the car and took off.

But Trey N’Dou still wasn’t scared of me. He saw some weakness, or some reticence in me. Some line that he knew I would never cross. He looked at me and smiled. He knew I wasn’t going to take out his eye or destroy his knees.

‘I want you away from here,’ I said, and he laughed in my face.

‘And I want you to suck my cock until you love me,’ he told me.

‘Let me have him for a minute,’ Jackson said, pushing me aside.

He grabbed the Dog Town Boy, swung a leg behind him and pushed his chest with both hands.

Trey N’Dou went down like a Greek bank.

And then I saw the gun in Jackson’s hand.

It seemed to come from out of nowhere, but I knew I had watched him reach his right hand round to the back of his spine and produce it from under the Original Penguin polo shirt I had lent him.

Trey N’Dou saw it at the same time. I heard him whimper and then a hissing sound as he wet his baggy jeans. I could not breathe as Jackson straddled the Dog Town Boy and put the barrel of the gun in the kid’s mouth.

‘I can’t hear you,’ Jackson said, the boy gagging on the gun. ‘Louder. Come on. What is it you want?
We can’t understand you
.’

Trey N’Dou was begging for mercy with a gun in his mouth.

Jackson took it out.

‘
Please. Please. Please.
’

Jackson fired between his legs.

Twice.

I had heard guns fired with serious intent before. The sound always shocked me – the way it seemed to last for longer than it should, the way it seemed to rend the air,
to tear it apart, to go on and on. Somehow this was different. The sound was more like two bombs going off.

I stood there paralysed, my ears ringing, my breath ragged.

I watched Jackson carefully pick up the spent brass from the gunshots.

He slipped them in his pocket.

‘Am I dead?’ Trey N’Dou said.

Jackson laughed.

‘If you were dead you would have one in your head and one in your heart. Listen to my friend. Get out of the Angel. We don’t give a toss if you go to Kingston-on-Thames or Kingston, Jamaica. Up to you. But you really don’t want to see my face again. No more warning shots.’

Lights were coming on all over the Liverpool Road.

There was a group of people outside the club across the street, cowering behind cars and looking across at us. The bouncer was nowhere to be seen. But in the distance I could hear sirens and I wondered if they were coming for us.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said.

We did not speak for quite a while.

I drove to the canals of Little Venice and parked up next to a line of houseboats showing no lights. I turned off the engine.

‘Give me the gun, Jackson.’

He half-twisted, reached under his polo shirt and pulled it out. Then he gave it to me. I hefted it in my hand, feeling the weight of the thing, a bit less than a kilo, noting the way just the feel of it made my heart hammer in my chest.

‘It’s a Glock 17,’ Jackson said, as if I might be wondering. ‘Sometimes called a Glock Safe Action Pistol. It’s a nine-millimetre, polymer-framed, short recoil semi-automatic.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Polymer is what its frame is made of instead of steel – that hard plastic-type material makes it much lighter. Easier to carry, easier to conceal. Semi-automatic just means that when you fire a round, the spent brass is ejected and the chamber is reloaded.’

‘I mean – I don’t understand why you have it.’

He shrugged.

‘The Glock 17 is standard issue these days, although the British Army’s pistol of choice was the Browning for seventy years.’ He nodded at the gun in my hand. ‘I prefer this one,’ he said. ‘The Glock holds seventeen bullets – that’s why it’s a Glock 17 – the Browning only thirteen. And the Glock 17 is lighter, safer, more effective at close quarters when the fuzzy-wuzzies have got their hands around your throat.’

‘And you just decided to steal one, did you?’

He looked offended.

‘It’s not stealing. The British Army has got twenty-five thousand of these things. I need it more than they do.’

‘You fucking idiot.’

He watched me slip the handgun in the gap in my jeans where the bottom of my spine met the top of my butt. Then he smiled at me. The gap-toothed smile of Jackson Rose.

I felt like punching him in the face.

‘You’re not going to shoot yourself in the arse, are you, Max?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to shoot myself in the arse.’

He chuckled. ‘Good.’

My mouth was totally dry.

‘We did enough tonight to be put away,’ I said.

‘Only if they catch us. And they’re not going to catch us.’

‘Do you know who CO19 are, Jackson? They’re the Specialist Firearms Command of the Met. If they had seen you in that car park tonight, they would have killed you.’

He stared straight ahead.

He was getting tired of being told off.

He sighed.

‘So you want me to contain that little creep but you don’t want me to – what, Max? – violate his human rights?’

‘I can’t be put away, Jackson. I’ve got Scout. I’ve got a daughter to bring up. I’ve got a life. A home. A family. I can’t be around this stuff. I’m not like you,’ I said, starting the engine. ‘I’ve got something to lose.’

I saw the flash of pain in his eyes and I was glad to see it there.

We drove back to Smithfield in silence, the summer-night city empty now, and the BMW X5 always two or three mph below the speed limit.

There was a rage in him and it had always been there.

When we were two boys who didn’t have one parent between us, I always thought of it as his wildness. But it was more than that – beyond the gap-toothed grin was a deep and abiding anger that Jackson Rose would carry to his grave.

Both of us were raised by someone who had to step in for our parents. My grandmother and his adoptive parents. But my parents died. And his left. Perhaps that was the difference between us. He had a father who didn’t want his mother and a mother who didn’t want him.

And it leaves a rage in you, being left like that.

I had always felt blessed. Lucky to have the mum and dad I had, although I would have liked them for longer. Lucky to have my grandmother, although I wished she hadn’t enjoyed her smokes so much and
had never got lung cancer. Lucky to have Scout, even though I would spend the rest of my days wishing she had known a family life without divorce. But I never felt sorry for myself, and I never felt that kind of rage.