The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (26 page)

Jed Blake, in his best suit. Looking nervous. Sitting in the dock and scanning the public gallery for familiar faces. They had been a gang the night that Steve Goddard died. When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, they had been a gang.

Different kinds of creeps, certainly. The coward. The weakling. And the bully. But undoubtedly a gang. They had felt like a gang when we brought them in and separated them in different interview rooms. They had felt like a gang when we charged them. And when they had gone down for involuntary manslaughter, they had felt like a gang. But now Jed Blake sat in the dock alone, anxious to abdicate from the gang, as his wigged and robed lawyer argued in an expensively educated accent that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Because they were never really a gang, he insisted.

‘My Lord, there was
no
joint enterprise,’ the lawyer said. ‘My client was under the impression that he was joining his friends for a game of
soccer
in the local park. He took
no part
in the involuntary manslaughter of the deceased. He is a young man of
impeccable character
, My Lord. The suggestion that there was
joint enterprise
was predicated on the fact that my client filmed the assault.’

The judge frowned over his reading glasses at the trembling youth in the dock. There was a kiss tattoo on Jed Blake’s neck. I had never seen one of those before. I don’t think they will catch on. It’s going to look silly when he’s sixty.

‘Do you understand the premise being suggested by your legal representative?’ the judge said.

Jed Blake snapped from his reverie. ‘Sorry, sir? What, sir?’

Irritation flickered across the claret-faced features of the judge.

‘Young man, all judges sitting at the Central Criminal Court are referred to as “My Lord” or “My Lady” regardless as to whether they are High Court judges, Circuit judges or recorders – do you understand?’

‘Yes . . . My Lord.’

‘Good. Your Mr Gilkes here argues that you had no intention of causing any physical harm to the late
Mr Goddard. In common law legal doctrine there is something called
common purpose
– also known as joint criminal enterprise or common design. It imputes criminal liability for all participants in a criminal enterprise from all that results of that enterprise. Under the doctrine of common purpose, if a gang murders a man then all members of that gang are responsible for his death, regardless of who dealt the fatal blow.’

Jed Blake’s mouth lolled open. He was trying to keep up.

The judge continued.

‘You are here today to request leave to appeal against the verdict of involuntary manslaughter on the premise that you were never part of the gang that committed involuntary manslaughter. What do you have to say for yourself?’

‘Please, My Lord,’ the boy said, and burst into a fit of snotty sobbing. For a minute the only sound in the court was his weeping.

The judge cleared his throat.

‘Do you need a glass of water?’ he asked.

‘No, My Lord.’

‘Do you need a fifteen-minute break?’

‘No, My Lord. Thank you very much for asking, My Lord. It’s very kind of you, My Lord.’

Blake wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He smiled bravely. The judge frowned at him over his reading glasses.

‘What were you
doing
outside Mr Goddard’s property?’

‘I thought we were, like, going to play football, My Lord.’ Blake’s rat-like features pinched with cunning. ‘The only reason I filmed it was because I was messing about with my phone when he – the man – came out of his house. I was scared of him, My Lord. I could see he had lost his rag – that he was angry, My Lord. My mates – they had the bundle, My Lord. We were just mucking about, My Lord. It was just a laugh! A bit of a laugh, My Lord! I don’t know how it happened. The altercation, My Lord. I just froze. I didn’t touch him. It wasn’t me. It was my mates, My Lord. It’s completely wrong that I got done.’

The judge thought about it for a moment.

‘Leave to appeal . . . granted,’ he said.

I looked up at the public gallery. Heavy-set women with tattoos were celebrating as though they were at a football match. Blake’s mother, sisters, perhaps a girlfriend.

The lawyer was puffed up with pride.

‘It’s not fair, is it, Max?’ Mrs Goddard said quietly.

I looked at the stony face of her son, Steve Junior, and the quiet tears of her daughter, Kitty. And then I looked at Alice.

It clawed at my heart that she felt the need, even now, to keep her voice down.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not fair.’

*  *  *

I stood at the base of the main staircase and stared up at the broken shard of glass from an IRA car bomb buried deep in the wall.

All that time. Just think.

The crowds at the Old Bailey were thinning out now.

But I lingered, staring up at the detritus of an old war, troubled by a thought that I could not name.

Just think.

Then I began to move, walking up the main staircase of the Old Bailey, unsure what I was looking for.

I went through a door and into a long, lavish dining room. It was set for dinner. Perhaps fifty places. A signed portrait of the Prince of Wales smiled at me.

And then I saw it. A heavy black iron doorknocker attached to a square of hard wood, ancient but unmarked, the wood dark brown with time.

The doorknocker of Newgate Prison. It was as black as the grave. And I could see where the old saying comes from.
As black as Newgate’s knocker.
And as I stared at it I could understand – really understand for the first time – that Newgate Prison had once stood on this same ground.

All that time.

Just think.

I went out of the door as some kind of manservant was coming in. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ he said, but I was
already past him, going back down the main staircase and through the marble halls of the Old Bailey.

STAFF ONLY, said a door, and I went through it. It was a long corridor with offices on one side. I walked past the offices, looking in, seeing that they were quite small, glimpsing screen savers on computers and the remains of café-bought lunches eaten at the desk, seeing the faces of all those office workers weary with mid-afternoon torpor. Everyone ignored me. There was an unmarked door at the end of the offices. It was unlocked so I went through that, too, and down a staircase, deep into the bowels of the building. I could hear machinery rumbling and wheezing, like the engine room of some old ocean liner. I came to an ancient boiler room.

This basement area was bathed in a weary green light. There was an unmarked door at the end of the corridor. It was locked.

‘Are you all right?’

I turned to face Andrej Wozniak.

‘I just want to check something out,’ I told the bailiff. ‘Do you have a key for this door?’

‘I can find you one.’

‘Thanks.’

He was back within minutes. I stood aside as he unlocked the door for me and I went through, descending another flight of stairs. There was no light now apart
from what seeped down from the boiler room. It was colder down here, and getting darker by the second as I continued down the stairs, and I could feel the weight of the city was pressing down on me. Wozniak’s footsteps were right behind me.

I stepped into a room that was abandoned years ago.

‘What’s down here?’ I said.

‘Storage rooms,’ said Wozniak. ‘But there’s a lot of damp so we can’t keep papers down here. They rot.’

I walked on. There was empty room after empty room, the damp showing through the cracked and peeling plaster.

And then I opened a rotten wooden door and finally there was a room that I recognised.

A room with white tiles that had turned green with time.

A room that was shaped like a cube.

You could smell the decay.

‘You having any luck?’ Wozniak said.

I thought he was talking about Mrs Goddard.

‘They gave the boy leave to appeal his conviction,’ I said. ‘They said it wasn’t joint enterprise.’

‘I meant the other thing,’ he said. ‘Your murder investigation. Any luck with that?’

It was like a room that I had seen in a dream. Everything felt slightly changed from what it should be. There was no kitchen step stool. The stool where they
had stood Mahmud Irani. And Hector Welles. And Darren Donovan. And me.

It was not dark. A green light ebbed into the room from the boiler room a floor above. My eyes scanned the floor.

There was no gun.

And there was no rope hanging from the ceiling.

And so I was wrong. This could not be the place.

I was overthinking it. I was trying too hard.

‘The other thing,’ Wozniak repeated. ‘The Hanging Club.’

‘We’ll find them,’ I said. ‘You can’t go around helping yourself to revenge.’

He chuckled. ‘But it’s not revenge, is it? It’s a signal. It’s saying, “This is still our country. You can’t do what you like here. We’re not going to let you.”’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

And then I saw it. The dull gleam of a single casing.

I picked it up and looked at it.

Spent brass, I thought.

This was the place.

I held it in my hand, and I turned to smile at Wozniak.

And then I saw something that his beard could not quite hide.

The teeth marks that I had left on his face.

There was a door on the far side of that square room with the rotting tiles and I already knew what was beyond it.

No, not a door – a black slit in the wall, just big enough for a man to pass through. Taking my time, not looking at the big man, I walked across to it and saw the corridor.

It had not been a dream.

It was the corridor where the walls came in and the ceiling came down.

‘Dead Man’s Walk,’ Wozniak said. ‘It narrows to stop a man – or woman – going insane at the sight of the scaffold. Can you imagine what it felt like? Hearing the crowd outside. Knowing the agonies that were waiting for you. Dead Man’s Walk was behind the prison. Originally it connected the gaol to the sessions house next door. It became the most practical way of transporting some wretch to the scaffold. But it’s just one of a labyrinth of tunnels. Hardly anyone knows that so much of Newgate is still down here.’

‘I’ve seen enough,’ I said.

‘Maybe too much,’ he said, and quietly closed the door.

A green light still seeped into the room and for the first time I noticed the air vent high up in one wall. But it was like breathing the air of dead men.

And now I looked at him.

‘Newgate was a nice touch,’ I said. ‘A shame that nobody recognised it. But who knew that so much of it was still left down here.’

He did not move. I took a step towards him, staying just beyond arm’s length.

Timing and distance, I thought. Remember your boxing at Smithfield ABC. Remember all those hard hours. Remember the lessons of Fred.

‘Mind you,’ I said, ‘bringing back Newgate does make you and your friends look bat-shit crazy.’

He laughed bitterly.

‘I think it makes us look like the last sane men alive,’ he said. ‘We executed an abuser of young girls. We executed a hit-and-run driver who killed an innocent boy. We executed a stinking scumbag drug addict who destroyed an old man who fought for our nation’s freedom. And
we’re
the crazy ones? You protect these scumbags. You hold their coats while they commit their crimes. You worry about their human rights while they’re raping our children.’

‘Shut up now,’ I said. ‘I’m arresting you—’

He kicked me across the room.

One kick, perfectly executed, that caught me high in the midriff with the side of his enormous right foot, whooshing the air out of me as it lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards.

It felt like the first time I had been kicked by someone who really knew what he was doing.

Wozniak crossed the room and pulled me up by the lapels of my wedding suit. I heard the material rip and felt him adjust his grip. I weigh eighty kilos. He tossed me into the centre of the room as if I weighed nothing. My trousers tore across the backside as I hit the ground. I watched him touch one lapel of his jacket.

He brought out an old-fashioned razor blade from behind the lapel. It’s an old bouncer’s trick. If anyone ever grabbed his lapel, they would soon wish they hadn’t.

He started towards me.

I tried to roll away but he was fast for a man that big and then he was directly above me and I saw the razor blade in his right hand and I watched him set himself on the balls of his feet and I could hear someone screaming and it was me and then he came down on top of me like a bomb. As he came down I drove my right fist up into his heart with every scrap of my remaining strength. The air went out of him and he flinched with shock and pain.

But it didn’t stop him.

Shit, I thought. That punch always used to work for me.

He settled his massive weight on top of me, but not exactly the way he’d planned. He had one knee pressed into my chest, the other pinning down my left shoulder, the razor blade still in his right paw, but his body was twisted from the one shot that I had landed.

I had hurt him. He was breathing hard. The sweat rolled off him and dropped onto my face. His free hand pinned down the top of my right arm but there was diminished strength in it.

That’s the thing about big men. They wear themselves out.

‘Little man,’ he said, as I thrashed like something dying in a bigger animal’s mouth, flailing at him with my legs. ‘Don’t you know that you should be on our side? Can’t you see that we’re doing the job you should be doing? Are you so stupid—’

I wrenched my right arm free and stuck my thumb in his left eye. Then I kept it there. He jerked away from me with a scream and then I was on my feet and trying to slam the sole of my right shoe into his knees, and I realised that I was trying to fight like Jackson Rose, going for his eyes and his knees, kicking him again and again, catching his shin and his calf muscle and his upper thigh, kicking him everywhere apart from his knee.