The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (21 page)

There was no change of vehicle. Perhaps they had learned their lesson with Abu Din. Perhaps the switch vehicle had been used to sucker the Armed Response Vehicle. And to sucker me, too. But there was no stopping this time.

We drove.

Fast but not that fast. There was little traffic around at this time of night, but the driver kept below the speed limit, like a good criminal should. Then we seemed to go slower and I thought we must be moving into town
rather than driving out of it. There was no opening up on a motorway, only slowing down to an inner-city crawl.

Then we were on rough terrain, bumping over uneven surfaces, and going down.

The transit van stopped.

We had reached our destination.

The razor blade was drawn across my eyelid. I felt a sharp sting of pain and I cursed as a dribble of blood ran down my face like a teardrop.

‘Be a good little pig and you can die with both of your eyes,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to be on YouTube with your eyes hanging out, do you?’ He laughed. ‘Your daughter wouldn’t want to watch that for the rest of her life, would she?’

The driver opened the back door. And then he didn’t speak any more.

They helped me out into an abandoned underground car park. No, not abandoned. Unfinished. That was why there were no vehicles. This place was still being built.

There were junk-food cartons and empty cans littered around, the refuse of builders working underground in the summer heat. I thought of Tara Jones and her belief that major building work was happening near to the kill site.

Three masked faces stared at me for a moment and then turned away. The big one was behind me. A meaty
hand shoved me in the back and I felt his breath as he walked behind me across the empty car park.

It was massive. Shopping mall? Office block? Luxury apartments? The three figures in front of me moved quickly and the big man behind gave me a casual crack across the back of my head whenever I seemed to slow my pace. He still held the razor blade between the thumb and index finger of his right hand and whenever he hit me, I felt the blade randomly slash through hair and skin.

We came to a dimly lit staircase and started down. At the bottom – two storeys down? – we entered a broad, low-ceilinged tunnel. We were in total darkness now. But they knew where they were going. Then we were crossing uneven floor surfaces towards distant lights.

Machinery. Noise. I caught a glimpse of it.

It was a boiler room.

We walked past it and came to a door. The door was unlocked and we passed inside. We went down some more steps and came to a short, strange corridor that was like something from a dream.

We moved down it in slow single file.

And I could not believe what I was seeing.

The walls and ceiling came closer with every step.

I tried to clear my head. I thought my nerve endings were still rattled from the CEW.

But it was real.

The corridor really did become smaller. The ceiling really did get lower. By the time we reached the end we had to press our hands against our sides and lower our heads.

There was a room at the end of the corridor.

And my heart fell away. For I knew this room.

I saw the white tiles stained green and yellow by a century of weather and neglect. And choked down the sickness when I saw the kitchen step stool where they had stood Mahmud Irani, Hector Welles and Darren Donovan.

The room radiated pure evil.

The sharp red light of someone’s smart phone was aiming at my face. From behind me the big man took my hands and I heard the jangle of the handcuffs. Finally they were taking full physical control. He was about to secure my hands behind my back so that I would hang quietly.

‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’ he asked me.

And I fought for my life.

I dragged the heel of my right shoe from his kneecap to his ankle, feeling the skin peel away beneath his trousers, hearing him shriek with sudden agony, the handcuffs clattering to the ground.

Then the others were all on me, aiming wild, random punches that caught me on the ear and in the shoulder
and did nothing, but one of them knew how to kick because I felt the air whoosh out of me as the toe of a shoe caught me just below the lowest rib and then in the soft spot low on my temple.

It was enough to put me on my knees.

The big man fell on me and grasped me in a headlock, cursing me, his breath sour against my face. The red light had fallen away. They were not filming me now.

‘Fucking pig! Fucking bastard!’

It was a good headlock. I could not move my arms or my legs or my feet. So I pressed my mouth against his face and sank my teeth into his cheek, biting through the Nomex face mask and into his flesh.

He howled and tried to stand up as I held on like a dog with a dying rat. But I was weakened and breathless and sickened by those two kicks and the others pulled me off him.

I felt the noose drop over my head.

They lifted me up, not bothering with the handcuffs now, as they half-dragged and half-pushed me onto the stool, planning to do me as they had done Hector Welles, and I could see him before me now, his unsecured hands still tearing the flesh from his throat with his dying breath, clawing so hard that his fingernails were torn out and buried in his neck.

I screamed with rage and terror.

But I was exhausted.

Then I was standing on the kitchen step stool and my fingers were ripping at the rope around my neck. I looked up and saw that one of them had passed the rope over an ancient pipe that crossed the stained ceiling of that forgotten room. The masked faces were all looking at me, the big figure touching the torn Nomex face mask where it was stained with his blood.

Someone was trying to kick the stool away.

Two of them were shouting at each other.

‘Do you know why—’

‘Just do it!’

The stool flew away and suddenly there was nothing beneath my feet and the rope around my neck was strangling me. My eyes rolled into the back of my head and my fingers tore at the tightening rope for a second that seemed to last for a thousand years. In that never-ending moment I felt my head tip grotesquely to one side as the rope angled towards the knot and I could feel my body weight killing me.

The blood stopped flowing to my brain.

The air stopped flowing to my lungs.

I knew that I was dying.

I saw nothing.

I stared at the ceiling and I didn’t see it.

I looked up at the rope and I didn’t see it.

There was only the sensation of strangulation as my hands tore at the rope around my neck.

My hands fell away from my throat. My legs kicked and flayed, and I had nothing in me to stop them, and I felt myself on the very edge of the blackness that lasts forever, and it felt as sweet and welcome as home.

But then I reached behind me, my fingers scrambling under the back of my polo shirt, clawing at the base of my spine.

And I felt the plastic grip of the Glock 17.

Then it was in my right hand and I was pointing it at the ceiling, pulling the trigger, the crack of gunfire deafening in that confined place, then pulling the trigger again as fast as I could. I was aware of their screams and shouts but I kept pulling the trigger, trying to break the rope that was killing me, and then the sounds seemed to be coming from underwater and then I heard nothing, nothing at all, just an unbroken ringing in my ears as my heart surged with desperation when I realised that it had not worked.

I was still hanging.

The secret room turned red.

The blood flow to my brain had stopped and that blocked dam of blood seemed to be filling the room.

I closed my eyes.

My hand fell to my side. My fingers were opening, my friend’s gun was slipping from my hand and the unbroken blackness was all I wanted now. I felt the full kilo of polymer and steel in my hand. Someone was
trying to prise it from my grasp. I lashed out at them with my foot.

Then something happened in my ears.

I could hear them shouting again.

Scream. Shouts. Cursing.

They were on me, pulling on my legs, and I couldn’t understand, then I saw they were trying to drag me down and get it done, finally get it done, get me over with forever.

And it revived me enough to kick out at their masked faces.

And I raised my right hand one last time.

Because I saw what I had been doing wrong. The range had to be point-blank. Nothing else would work. Everything else was useless. Point-blank or nothing. Point-blank or death.

I felt the barrel of Jackson’s Glock 17 press against the rope, press so hard that I could feel the impossible tightness around my neck become even tighter.

Then I pulled the trigger.

I was aware of the crack of gunfire, a sound that seemed to rip the air apart, and then I was falling, my feet and elbows connecting with human flesh and bone.

I hit the ground hard, the gun still in my hand.

My vision was blurred with what felt like blood and tears. But I could see they were running towards a broken gap in the wall. I pointed at the back of the big man as
he squeezed through the gap and screamed a hoarse curse as I pulled the trigger, my eyes streaming.

I heard the metallic click of an empty magazine.

I pulled it again and again, even after the last of them had disappeared through the hole in the wall. White noise filled my head.

I got up, spitting out a bloody scrap of synthetic material that must have come from a Nomex tactical face mask.

I stuffed the Glock down the back of my jeans, hearing a mocking voice deep inside my head.

You’re not going to shoot yourself in the arse, are you?

I took a painful breath.

And then I went after them.

I was sick to my stomach with pain and exhaustion but the rage inside was bigger than both of them. I went through the crack in the wall, stepping over scraps of rotted wood, and down the low-ceilinged tunnel until I found a stone staircase, going down even deeper into the ground. I went down the stairs slowly, moving in total blackness, afraid of falling, afraid they were waiting for me, smelling what seemed to be soot and sewers.

From somewhere I could hear the sound of heavy machinery but it became fainter as I went lower. Down and down until I reached an open space where a series of corridors met, the meeting point of a labyrinth of tunnels.

I stopped and thought I could hear voices in one of them. Then I went on, the ground always sinking beneath me. And just when I thought about turning back, when I thought I could sense the men waiting for me silently in the darkness, the stairs ended.

Ahead there were four identical tunnels, each with a rounded arch, wide but not high, built to process large numbers of people at once. They felt like they were all heading in the same direction. I carried on more carefully now, treading lightly, straining for sound.

But all I could hear was my own breathing.

And then I stepped into what looked like the train station at the end of the world.

There were two platforms facing each other across ancient tracks. It was a tube station, but nothing like one I had ever seen. The platforms were made of wood and I could see the remains of what had once been advertising posters on the black-and-white tiles of the walls. They had rotted away a lifetime ago. It reminded me of photographs I had seen of Londoners seeking safety underground during the Blitz. On a large red circle, the name of the station was written in black letters on a white background.

B L O O M S B U R Y

I shook my head in disbelief.

There is no tube station in London by that name.

I stared at the ghost station and knew I could wait for a hundred years and there would be no passengers and no trains passing through this place.

I felt a shudder of pure terror and wondered if I had died in the room with the tiles stained green by time.

Then I touched the livid weal that had been burned into the flesh around my neck and I flinched with the pain.

I was not dead yet.

I heard sounds coming from deep inside the tunnel.

I walked to the edge of the platform and stared into the blackness but I could see nothing. But the sound was real. It wasn’t just in my head. I looked down at the tracks. There were four lines, two of them with insulators. I thought about that for a while.

The station was dead but that didn’t mean that the lines were dead.

I was aware that in a working tube station the lines with insulators are live and will kill you instantly, and that the trains run on the other lines. But I also knew it was a myth that no electricity runs through the non-insulated train tracks – they carry enough voltage to power the signals. The fact is that making contact with any tube rail is likely to ruin your whole day.

I steadied myself on the edge of the platform, took a breath, and jumped down between the nearest two tracks.

And that was when I heard the train coming.

I quickly scrambled back up onto the platform, feeling the Glock scrape against my spine as it slipped from my jeans. I looked down at it, just about visible on the tracks, as a rat the size of a neutered tom cat skittered across it. Then the train was much closer. Lights blazed deep in the tunnel, twisting towards me and then away as the train snaked through the bowels of the city. I stood drenched in cold sweat on the platform as the train hurtled towards me like an avalanche.

It never reached the station.

At the last moment it veered into the darkness and away from me, a blur of speed and steel, a silver train with red doors and blue trim and a driver who caught a glimpse of me for a fraction of a section.

And stared as if I had been raised from the dead.

The driver must have called it in immediately.

I knew that any 999 call from the public about a possible armed or terrorist incident would be forwarded instantly to the Tactical Firearms Command desk where someone with the rank of inspector or above would assess the information to see if it fit the criteria for armed officers to respond. And I did.