The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (3 page)

‘There’s three or four of them,’ I said. ‘Maybe more. Wearing ski masks. No, not ski masks – they’re tactical Nomex face masks, or something similar.’ A pause. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

The man’s face began to change colour as the life was strangled out of him. Then he was still and it ended. A film lasting ten minutes and twenty-one seconds that was suddenly trending all over the world.

‘You seen this hashtag?’ Edie said, hunched over her laptop. ‘It’s everywhere:
#bringitback
.’

‘Bring
what
back?’ said TDC Greene.

‘Play it again,’ said Whitestone. ‘Answer the phones, Billy. Find out where the hashtag comes from, Edie.’

Edie began tapping on her keyboard.

‘Does that look like a hate crime to you, Max?’ Whitestone said.

‘It looks like a lynching,’ I said. ‘So – yes, maybe.’

‘Here,’ Edie said, and then a panel appeared in a corner of the big screen.

There was a black-and-white picture of a smiling rabbit-faced man from the middle of the last century. The account was called @AlbertPierrepointUK. No message. Just the hashtag –
#bringitback –
and a link to the film.

‘It’s got just under twenty-five thousand followers,’ Edie said. ‘No – over seventy-eight thousand followers.
Wait—’ She leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘Wow, popular guy, this Albert Pierrepoint. Why is the name so familiar?’

‘Albert Pierrepoint was the most famous hangman this country ever had,’ I said. ‘He carried out more than four hundred executions, including a lot of the Nazis in Nuremberg.’

‘Metcall have had a 999,’ Billy said, putting down the phone. ‘From a woman who recognises the victim.’ He looked up at the screen and winced at the man once more locked in the final throes of agony. ‘The woman’s a Fatima Irani from Bethnal Green. The man is Mahmud Irani. Her husband.’

‘How do you spell his name?’ Whitestone said. ‘Got a DOB? Got a description of what he was wearing?’

Greene read from his notes. Then he looked up at the screen.

‘She said her husband was wearing jeans and one of those shirts with the little crocodile,’ he said, and stooped to retch into a wastepaper basket. It took him a moment to recover. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘Play it again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Have a drink of water, Billy. Are you looking on the PNC, Edie?’

Edie Wren was running the name of
Mahmud Irani
through the Police National Computer.

‘He’s been away,’ she said, meaning the man had done time. ‘Did six years of a twelve-year sentence. He was
part of the Hackney grooming gang. They targeted girls as young as eleven. A lot of the girls – but not all of them – were in care. Some of the gang got life. This Mahmud Irani was found guilty of trafficking – he’s a taxi driver. He
was
a taxi driver. He got off relatively lightly.’

We watched him hang for the third time.

‘Maybe not that lightly,’ I said. ‘If this is connected.’

A young Chinese man appeared in the doorway of MIR-1. He was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, jointly funded by the Home Office to provide a national response to the most serious crimes on the Internet.

‘We’re looking for Albert Pierrepoint,’ he told Whitestone, nodding at the big screen. ‘He – they – seem to be using exactly the same tech as terrorists, pornographers and whistle blowers. The account is running through an anonymiser designed to hide all digital footprints. But it’s not Tor or 12P. It’s something we have never seen before. The site’s under a lot of pressure – political, media, users, concerned parents – to take the film down in the name of decency, but we’ve persuaded them to leave it up there while we try to trace the sender’s IP address. Off the record, of course.’

‘Thanks, Colin,’ Whitestone said, glancing at her phone. ‘Metcall tell us we’ve got a body. In the middle of Hyde Park. No positive ID yet.’ She looked at the
screen and then at me. ‘But the responding officer says the deceased is wearing one of those shirts with the little crocodile.’

‘Hyde Park?’ I said. ‘The body was found in the actual park?’ I looked up at the screen, at the subterranean space with the stained white tiles. ‘They didn’t do this in Hyde Park.’

I thought of the underground car parks of the big hotels on Park Lane, running down the east side of Hyde Park. But none of them looked anything like the room where they strung up Mahmud Irani. That place was from some other century.

In the panel of the TV screen we could see that @AlbertPierrepointUK had gone viral.

TRENDS

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

#bringitback

‘I think somebody just brought back the death penalty,’ I said.

Edie pressed play and on the screen Mahmud Irani was about to hang again.

‘But who’d want to do that to him?’ said the new boy, TDC Greene, and I remembered that Hackney grooming gang and the thought came unbidden as I headed for the door.

Who the hell wouldn’t?

There was something strangely peaceful about standing in the middle of Hyde Park on a warm summer night, nothing moving out here but the Specialist Search Team doing their fingertip search off in the darkness, and the CSIs quietly getting kitted up as DCI Whitestone and I contemplated the corpse.

You could tell it was him.

There was enough moonlight to show the crocodile on his polo shirt was still facing in the wrong direction and what looked like severe burn marks around his neck.

So even before the divisional surgeon had arrived to officially pronounce death, and long before his next of kin had the chance to formally identify the body in the morgue, we knew the identity of the body lying under the trees of Hyde Park.

‘Mahmud Irani,’ Whitestone said quietly.

‘So it’s not a hate crime,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t killed because of his race or religion.’

‘All murder is a hate crime. Do you know what that gang did to those girls? They branded them, Max. Can you believe that grown men would do that to children?’ She shook her head. ‘Some people deserve to be hated.’

I looked away from the dead man and inhaled clean air. Hyde Park stretched on forever. Londoners always complain about how cramped and crowded their city is, but Henry VIII used to hunt wild boar right here. Even today, London was still a city with fields. The white lights of the West End burned bright from far away, an orange glow rising high above them, like the sun coming up on another planet.

Whitestone stared silently at the corpse.

She was a small, fair-haired woman in glasses, neither young nor old, and if you saw her on the train you would not think that she was one of the most experienced homicide detectives in London. I would not speak again until she spoke to me first, for these were the crucial minutes when the Senior Investigating Officer takes a look at the pristine scene, the body exactly where it had been found, letting it all sink in, learning what she can before we start filming, photographing and bagging evidence. Those last moments when the scene is untouched.

Even the blue lights of our response vehicles seemed very distant, as though they were waiting for a sign from the SIO; a large circle of blue lights in the darkness
of the massive park, sealing us off from the outside world. I could see DC Edie Wren and TDC Billy Greene interviewing the Romanian men who had discovered the body while preparing for an illegal barbecue.

‘OK,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

I raised a hand to the Crime Scene Manager and on her word the CSIs moved. I saw that our POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape now ran down the length of Park Lane and was patrolled every twenty metres or so by uniformed officers.

‘You’ve locked down all of Hyde Park?’ I said.

‘Because I can always bring the perimeter in later,’ Whitestone said quietly, her eyes not leaving the body. ‘But I can’t
extend
it later. Better to make the crime scene too big than too small. Let’s take a closer look.’

We wore blue nitrile gloves and white face masks and under the plastic baggies over our shoes we stood on forensic stepping plates that were invisible to the naked eye.

Whitestone and I both carried a small stack of the stepping plates – transparent, lightweight – and we carefully placed them on the grass before us as we created an uncontaminated pathway to the body. We crouched down either side of Mahmud Irani.

‘First hanging?’ Whitestone said.

I nodded.

She pointed with a gloved index finger at the livid, lopsided markings around his neck.

‘You only get that mark from hanging,’ she said. ‘Any other ligature strangulation will leave horizontal marks.’

‘But this is diagonal,’ I said. ‘It runs from low on the neck on one side to just below the ear on the other.’

Whitestone nodded.

‘Because the rope – or belt, or bed sheet, or wire, or whatever it is – angles towards the knot. See how deep it is? He was strangled by his own body weight. The rope compresses the carotid arteries, turns off the supply of blood to the brain. In judicial hangings, they used to snap the second cervical vertebra – the hangman’s fracture, they call it. More humane. These guys didn’t bother with any of that. They just strung him up. But hangings always look like this – the angled strangulation mark. What’s unusual about this one is that it’s not a suicide.’ She stood up. ‘Every hanging I ever saw until tonight – and I’ve had my share – was either deliberate or accidental suicide.’

‘Accidental suicide?’

‘Autoerotic asphyxia. You know. Sex games that kill you.’

‘Oh.’

‘It tends to be a male pastime, like doing DIY or watching cricket. Women seem less keen on autoerotic asphyxia. But strangulation apparently heightens the
intensity of orgasm. And what could possibly go wrong?’ She nodded at the body. ‘What’s unique about Mahmud Irani is that his hanging was not for the purposes of masturbation or ending his life. It was murder. Who uses hanging to murder someone?’

I thought about it.

‘Somebody who wants revenge?’

‘No – somebody who wants justice.’ Her eyes scanned the park. ‘This is not the killing ground, is it? He didn’t die here.’

I thought of the white-tiled room where no light seemed to shine. And I thought of the underground car parks that were in this area, not just by Hyde Park but also under the grand hotels and the fancy car dealerships of Park Lane. None of them, as far as I knew, looked even remotely like the room in the film, which looked like somewhere that should have been torn down a hundred years ago.

‘So they chose to move him from the kill site to the dumping ground,’ I said. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘Makes it harder for us,’ Whitestone said. ‘Now we can’t run forensics on the kill site.’

‘Yes, but it makes it more dangerous for them. Why risk someone seeing them dump the body? Why not leave him where they’d strung him up?’

Whitestone thought about it.

‘Because they wanted us to find him,’ she said.

We watched the Specialist Search Team inching their way across Hyde Park on their hands and knees. In the distance, a German Shepherd from the Dog Support Unit began to bark.

‘What I could really use is the rope they did it with,’ Whitestone said, more to herself than me. ‘Ropes can speak volumes. The kind of rope. The kind of knot.’

Fierce white arc lights clicked on and lit up the scene like a film set. The body of Mahmud Irani looked horribly broken in the glare, the agony of his death imprinted on his lifeless face. The crocodile on his shirt stared off in the wrong direction, as if averting its gaze from the large stain on his jeans.

The Area Forensic Manager and his CSIs were already sweating inside their Tyvek suits, blue gloves and forensic face masks. A van with blacked-out windows came trundling across the parched grass. The mortuary van. And behind it I saw the great white marble arch that marks the junction of Oxford Street, Edgware Road and Park Lane. And something whispered through the trees, like the sigh of the uneasy dead.

‘This was Tyburn,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s why they took the chance of dumping him here. The dump site could be part of a ritual killing. Maybe the most important part. Because this was Tyburn.’

‘Tyburn?’ Whitestone said. ‘The public gallows?’

I nodded. ‘The Tyburn tree – the three-legged gallows pole – was at Marble Arch. This spot was where London had its public execution site for almost a thousand years.’ The great triumphal arch glowed with the lights of the night. ‘Fifty thousand people were hanged right where we’re standing,’ I said. ‘And they weren’t just killing him, were they?’ I looked down at the body of Mahmud Irani and the lopsided wound on his neck. ‘They were punishing him.’

Just before three o’clock on a sun-soaked Monday afternoon, Stan and I waited for Scout outside the school gates, both of us struggling to contain our emotions.

Our small red Cavalier King Charles Spaniel was always excited at the school gates – all those kids, all that attention, all those compliments – but for me today was special because it was the last day of the school year.

And we had made it.

The children began to appear and the waiting crowd of parents surged forward.

I saw the long blonde hair of Miss Davies – my daughter Scout’s beloved teacher – and then there were little girls whose faces I recognised and finally Scout herself, carting a huge folder and wearing a school dress that was the smallest they had in stock but still came down well below her knees.

Miss Davies saw me and smiled, waved, and gave me a big thumb’s up.

I wanted to thank her – for everything – but too many parents were milling around her, giving her gifts, wanting a word before the long summer break, so Stan and I stood and waited at the school gates, his tail wagging wildly and his round black eyes bulging with excitement.

‘We watched a film because it was the last day,’ Scout said, by way of greeting. ‘It was about a Japanese fish called Ponyo.’ She spotted the face of a friend who she hadn’t seen for at least five minutes.