The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (24 page)

I didn’t speak to him for the rest of the walk. But as he did his morning business in West Smithfield and I read the inscriptions from
Oliver Twist
that cover all the benches, the passage about Bill Sykes dragging Oliver through Smithfield meat market, Stan kept stealing glances at me.

As if I, of all people, should understand.

Scout was up when we got back.

She was still in her pyjamas and was on a step stool in the kitchen, standing on tiptoes to rifle through the cupboards.

‘I’m making you breakfast,’ she said. ‘Jackson taught me to cook.’

‘What you making, Scout?’

‘Toasted jam sandwich.’

‘Sounds good. Don’t put your fingers in the toaster.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Duh.’

‘Need some help, angel?’

‘No.’

‘Looking forward to going back to school and seeing all your friends?’

‘I really need to concentrate now.’

‘Sorry.’

So Scout prepared our breakfast and Stan curled up in his dog basket and I got out plastic bags full of brand-new school clothes, and the iron, and long spools of name tags that ran on and on like all the days of my daughter’s childhood.
Scout Wolfe
, they said.
Scout Wolfe, Scout Wolfe, Scout Wolfe.

And my eyes suddenly blurred over as I stood there with the iron and the name tags and the new school clothes, watching Scout liberally slapping strawberry jam over a slice of thick brown bread. Stan got up and padded into the kitchen, smacking his lips and correctly guessing that there would soon be stray pieces of bread falling from the sky.

I wiped at my eyes with the back of my hand and I stared dumbly at the name tags in my hand.
Scout Wolfe
, they said.
Scout Wolfe.

And with all my heart I ached for a real family for Scout and for me, a mended family, a restored family, a family that looked like all the other families in the world, a family with nobody missing and nobody gone and nobody wandered off, and I longed for that new family as only a man who has lost his old family ever can.

Then Mrs Murphy came into the loft wearing her green winter coat, wishing everyone good morning, Scout and me and Stan, and saying that this was the first day that she’d felt the chill of autumn in the air, and
she gently took the iron and the
Scout Wolfe
name tags from my hand.

‘Here,’ said Mrs Murphy.

‘I’m no good at it,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Murphy told me. ‘Your daughter will love you for your heart, not your housework.’

‘Where’s the kill room, Hitch?’ I said.

It was still early enough for the last of the dawn mist to drift across the rooftops of Mayfair and we were all standing before the massive map of Greater London that covers one wall in MIR-1, West End Central, 27 Savile Row.

Whitestone. Edie. Billy Greene. Tara Jones. Dr Joe. And the history man, his great egghead frowning with concentration.

‘It can’t be far,’ I said. ‘I bet it’s a ten-quid black cab ride from where we’re standing. Where did they take me, Hitch?’

‘You were somewhere in the darkness, Max,’ Professor Hitchens said, his huge head nodding at the map. His nicotine-stained fingers reached out for that great urban sprawl of green and grey and ten million souls. ‘Down in that other London that exists below the surface. Ackroyd is very good on that subterranean city in
London Under
: “Tread carefully over the pavements of London
for you are treading on skin,” Hitchens said, closing his eyes to recite from loving memory, “a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.”’

‘But it was
real
,’ I insisted, touching the welt around my neck, feeling the way it ran up to just under my ear. ‘It wasn’t some mythic underworld. It wasn’t a fantasy. It’s
there
. And I can’t believe it’s impossible to find.’

‘The search teams are still down there,’ Whitestone said. ‘The sniffer dogs are having a lovely time chasing rats. But they’re drawing a blank and the Chief Super is going to wind it up at the end of play today.’ My SIO was staring at me. ‘And I still don’t understand how you walked away.’

‘Me neither,’ I said.

‘And another thing I don’t understand . . .’

I waited.

‘Why didn’t they record it?’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you up there on YouTube?’

‘Maybe they thought that killing a cop would not play well with the #BringItBack brigade,’ Edie suggested. ‘They might have lost a few followers on Twitter if they had done our Max. A few people might have unfriended them on Facebook or started a petition on Change.org. Maybe they were afraid of the trolls.’

‘I don’t think they’re that sensitive to public opinion,’ I said. ‘I saw a red light just before it all kicked off. They were planning to film it. I don’t think they have any qualms about killing a cop. They think we protect the people they hate.’ I looked at Hitchens. ‘You really don’t have any idea where they took me?’

‘Subterranean London is endless, Max,’ he said. ‘It’s not another city – it’s a thousand cities. Ten thousand cities. What exactly are those search teams looking for? A passage that hasn’t been used for a hundred years? Do you know how many disused tube stations there are in London, Max? South Kentish Town – closed in 1924. Lords – closed in 1939. North End – abandoned in 1906. There are twenty-three abandoned tube stations and God knows how many miles of abandoned track.’

‘Yes, but most of those derelict tube stations are much further out than the British Museum stop.’ I tapped the map on Charterhouse Street. ‘This is the heart of the city. Tara, didn’t you say there was some serious building going on nearby?’

She keyed up the film the Hanging Club had uploaded the night that Abu Din did a runner. The figures were in black shadows. But as the camera slowly tracked across the photographs on the wall of the dead soldiers, the happy, proud and young faces of the Sangin Six, she cranked up the volume of the background noise.

‘It’s not traffic, is it?’

‘No,’ Tara said, studying a line that jolted and jarred across the graph on her laptop. ‘Because the noise sometimes stops. And the traffic never stops. I still think it’s some kind of major building work going on next to the kill site.’

‘But the whole of London is a building site,’ Edie said.

‘Not buildings like this,’ Tara insisted. ‘This isn’t a house in Hampstead or Chelsea being done up for a Russian oligarch. This sounds like a major development – maybe pile columns for a skyscraper foundation. That narrows it down, doesn’t it?’

I smiled at her. ‘It certainly does.’

She looked away, biting her lower lip as we listened in silence to the background noise and she studied her graph. I have no idea how Tara registered the sound but to me it sounded like the gods were doing a spot of DIY.

‘Is that a thousand tons of concrete and steel being poured underground?’ Whitestone said. ‘It could be.’

When the film had ended I turned to Professor Hitchens.

‘There’s something I saw that never appeared on any of their films,’ I said. ‘To get to the kill site, they took me down a corridor that got smaller. It was tiled in the same way as the kill site. White tiles that had rotted with time. White tiles that were so old you could not really call them white any more. They were green as much as white. They were in the kill room and they were in this
corridor that got smaller with every step that I took – the ceiling got closer to my head and the walls came in. It was like somewhere in a bad dream But it was real. Did you ever hear of somewhere like that?’

Hitchens shook his head.

‘The big problem is that, after leaving the kill site, you can’t tell us if you were walking in a circle or a straight line,’ Hitchens said. ‘So we don’t know if the station where they found you is next door or several miles away.’ He looked at Whitestone. ‘I can’t overemphasise how vast London is below ground. All those forgotten tunnels, all those uncharted hallways, all those derelict passages – there is a parallel London with layer upon layer of geologic time.’

‘We appreciate all your help, Professor,’ said Whitestone.

‘Come on, Hitch,’ I said, indicating the frozen image of the kill site. ‘Look at that room! Those tiles have to be at least a century old. Doesn’t it ring any bells?’

‘I wish I could be of more help,’ said Professor Hitchens, touching his mouth with those nicotine-stained fingers. I could feel the lopsided welt around my neck throbbing with my frustration. Then I rubbed his great bald egghead to comfort him.

‘No problem, Hitch,’ I said.

You’re not the only history man in town, I thought.

*  *  *

The Black Museum is cold and dark.

The temperature is low in order to preserve the microscopic particles of human flesh that still attach themselves to certain exhibits – some of them 140 years old – while the restrained lighting prevents the Museum’s exhibits from fading. The subdued lighting does something else. It gives London’s most secret room an aura of quiet menace.

When I arrived at Room 101, New Scotland Yard, Sergeant John Caine was just finishing a tour for a dozen uniformed police cadets from Hendon.

‘Give me give a couple of minutes, Max.’

I stood at the back of the tour group.

The young men and women were in a sombre mood. The Met calls the Black Museum – or the Crime Museum, the official name that is increasingly used – a learning resource. And it will certainly tell you more than you really want to know about human nature.

The fledgling cops were staring up at a high shelf on which was displayed a collection of death masks, three-dimensional plaster casts of heads of executed men and women. They were all dark brown, the shade of a burned coffee bean, apart from the very oldest, which had turned jet black over time. The heads were all smooth and their eyes were all closed. But there the similarities ended – the death masks had been taken from faces young and old, fat and lean, male and female.

‘Are they
real
?’ said a young copper who looked as though he only shaved once a week.

‘All of them are real but none of them will bite you,’ said John Caine, standing behind the group. ‘They were all taken from the deceased immediately after they had been executed for murder.’

John cleared his throat and the cadets tore their eyes away from the macabre masks to listen to his closing speech.

‘I hope you have enjoyed your tour today.’ His shrewd, bright eyes considered them. ‘When you join the Metropolitan Police you will all be issued with a warrant number. It is a little-known fact that these numbers are consecutive and have always been consecutive since the force began. I hope you had a chance today to look at the exhibit dedicated to the brave men and women who have died in the service of the Metropolitan Police. Every one of them had a warrant number and you will, too.

‘The very first warrant number was issued to Constable William Atkinson in 1829 – number one. On his first day in the job, and the very first day that the Met walked the streets of London – 29 September 1829 – Constable Atkinson was dismissed for public drunkenness.’

Laughter. Sergeant Caine allowed himself an ironic twist of the mouth.

‘But I know that you will be a credit to the Met, and to the generations who served before you. Take care of yourself and each other. Thank you and goodbye.’

They gave him a round of applause.

After he had escorted them to the first-floor lift, he came back and peered at my neck.

‘Max, you’re the only person I’ve ever seen whose looks have been improved by hanging.’ Then, for the first time in my life, he briefly hugged me. ‘Welcome home. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I? Your mob still babysitting Mustapha Pee?’

‘Abu Din? No, somebody from in here is watching over him. SO15 – Counter Terrorism Command.’

‘So an apologist for terrorists is being looked after by the policemen who protect us from terrorists? Somebody’s had an irony bypass.’

He placed two mugs of tea on his desk. As always, his mug proclaimed BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. My one said NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST.

I took a sip. Strong and sweet. John Caine always gave me three sugars without asking.

‘I need to know where I was, John. We need to find the place they hanged Mahmud Irani – and Hector Welles – and Darren Donovan . . .’

‘And you.’

‘And me. Same kill site. Same location. And nobody at West End Central has got a clue. We’ve rented an academic, a historian from King’s College, and even he is drawing a blank.’

John sipped his tea.

‘Talk me through it,’ he said.

And so I did. All of it. From the moment the white van drew away to the armed guard outside Abu Din’s council house to the appearance of the black van. From the unimaginable muscle spasms of being shot by a conducted electrical weapon to the mystery ride to the kill site. I told him how I had fought for my life.

And I even told him the one thing that I had held back from everyone else. I felt the need to tell someone.

I told John Caine how I had aborted my hanging.

‘Hold on. You had a gun?’

‘A Glock 17. Belonged to an ex-serviceman friend of mine. I’ll not tell you his name, if that’s OK.’

‘I don’t need to know his name, Max. But you were armed?’

‘I took it from my friend because I was afraid of what he might do with it. And I took it with me to Abu Din’s house because I thought the Hanging Club would not hesitate to kill me to get to Abu Din. I was going to get rid of it after that, chuck it in the Thames from the middle of a bridge.’ I thought of young Steve Goddard Junior and his knife. ‘Or drop it down a drain,’ I said.

I was covered in a cold sweat at the memory of having the gun in my hand and wanting to kill them with it. It felt like I had broken enough firearms regulations to get slung out on my ear, or slung in a room with bars on the window. I silently thanked the heavens that it was our people who had found the gun.