The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (6 page)

Edie Wren looked up from her workstation. On the screen before her I could see the online traffic reacting to the second hanging.

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‘It feels like it never went away,’ Edie said.

‘Who is she?’ I said, nodding towards the woman with the swinging hair.

‘Tara Jones. Speech analyst. Voice biometrics, they call it.’

‘Is she any good?’

Edie shrugged. ‘Tara’s meant to be the best. But she hasn’t given us anything yet.’

Then a mid-Atlantic voice called me.

‘Max? Come and have a look at this.’

Dr Joe Stephen, a forensic psychologist from King’s College London, was at a workstation with someone else I didn’t recognise, a bald but bearded middle-aged man with a sweat patch in the shape of Australia on the back of his corduroy jacket. They were also watching the hanging. And I saw that the man with Dr Joe was not middle-aged at all. Beyond the bald head and the beard he was perhaps only thirty but there was something
prematurely aged about him. His head was remarkable – so oval that it looked like a rugby ball impersonating a hard-boiled egg.

‘Murder by hanging is almost unknown, isn’t it?’ the strange young man said.

Dr Joe nodded. ‘But the unsubs – sorry, the unidentified subjects – don’t think of it as murder.’ He had an American accent softened and smoothed by half a lifetime in London. ‘They clearly believe they are carrying out the death penalty for what they consider a capital crime.’

The young man nodded thoughtfully.

‘Capital from the Latin
capitalis
, of course,’ he said. ‘Literally
regarding the head
– a reference to execution by beheading.’

‘Max,’ Dr Joe said. ‘This is Professor Adrian Hitchens. He lectures in history at King’s College.’

I held out my hand but Professor Hitchens ignored it. He was looking at the frozen image on the screen before him, the last frame of this latest online execution – a glimpse of the worn, ruined brickwork of the kill site.

I took my hand away.

Perhaps he was thinking very deeply about where the kill site could be. Or perhaps he thought I was the janitor.

But my feelings were not too hurt. The Met are always wheeling in these experts for a bit of specialist advice.
Some of them – like our resident psychologist Dr Joe – stick around for years. But most of them are wheeled straight out again when they prove to be no help with our enquiries. There was a very good chance that I would never see Professor Hitchens again.

Or the woman with the swinging hair.

The history man jabbed a fat finger at the screen. It was stained yellow with nicotine.

‘The building looks late Victorian,’ he said, more to himself than Dr Joe or me. ‘I’m guessing some kind of public works.’ He nodded at the dank white walls, stained green and yellow with the rot of a hundred years. ‘A madhouse? A prison? Yes, almost certainly late Victorian.’

DCS Swire and DCI Whitestone joined us.

‘Hitch,’ the Chief Super said to the history man, as if they were old buddies. ‘I understand DC Wolfe here has a theory about where the first body was dumped.’

Whitestone nodded encouragement at me. ‘You thought it could be significant that the body was left in Hyde Park, right, Max?’

I nodded. Professor Hitchens still wasn’t looking at me.

‘Tyburn,’ I said. ‘We found the first victim on the Park Lane side of Hyde Park. Not far from the site of Tyburn.’

He looked at me at last.

‘Where this country hanged people for a thousand years,’ I said.

Professor Hitchens grinned at me, though there was no warmth in his smile. His chipped teeth also looked old beyond their years. I wasn’t crazy about him, to tell you the truth.

‘I know what Tyburn was, Detective Wood.’

‘Wolfe.’

‘Detective Wolfe,’ he said, and he turned in his swivel chair to address the room at large. Fat yellow fingers tapped the armrests of his chair. ‘But Tyburn was most emphatically
not
in Hyde Park.’

‘No, I know that, but—’

‘The location was further north – according to the Rocque map of London in 1746. Are you familiar with Rocque’s map of 1746?’

I briefly shook my head to confirm I was not familiar with Rocque’s map of eighteenth-century London.

‘The actual location of the Tyburn Tree was on the traffic island where the Edgware Road, Oxford Street and Bayswater Road all meet,’ Hitchens said.

‘But they’re not going to dump a body in the middle of a traffic island, are they?’ I said, and watched him bristle, unused to being contradicted. I suppose these big-shot academics get used to students hanging on their every word. ‘What about that kitchen step stool, Professor?’ I said. ‘That look late Victorian to you?’

Whitestone shouted across the room to Wren. ‘Still no ID of the vic, Edie?’

Wren shook her head. ‘Colin’s monitoring the online traffic and Billy’s got an open line to Metcall, but nothing yet.’

Metcall, also known as Central Communications Command, is responsible for public contact. If someone hit 999 because they knew the man who had just been hanged online, it would come through to them first.

‘Play it one more time,’ the Chief Super said.

TDC Greene hit the button and we watched in silence as the scene unfolded again. Somehow repeated viewing had not drained the hanging of its power to shock.

The man in the suit and tie fighting for his life. The desperate struggle before he was dragged onto the stool they used for a makeshift scaffold. The last words he would ever hear: ‘
Do you know why you’ve been brought to this place of execution?
’ His strangulation on the end of a rope. His hands unbound, tearing at his throat.

And the boy. The picture on the wall of the smiling young boy, who smiled just as sweetly and innocently as the girls had smiled when Mahmud Irani died. Smiling from beyond the grave, smiling for all eternity.

‘What the hell are they doing, Dr Joe?’ Whitestone said quietly to our psychologist.

‘The ceremony is everything,’ Joe said. ‘The ritual seems to be at least as important as the punishment. Both
of these killings have been as choreographed as anything you would see at the Old Bailey. But instead of wigs they wear black masks. Instead of a judge and jury it’s the unsubs. And in the dock, you have the accused.’

‘With no chance of getting a suspended sentence,’ Whitestone said.

‘But the ritual – the ceremony – whatever you want to call it – is a statement and a warning. And, above all, it’s an expression of power,’ Dr Joe said. ‘That’s the crucial thing. It’s an expression – and a reaffirmation – of power. In a normal court of law it is a reaffirmation of the power of the state. The unsubs no doubt see what they’re doing as a reaffirmation of – I’m guessing here – some higher form of justice, some higher and more noble and less fallible law. A reaffirmation of the power of the people.’

‘Got it!’ Wren shouted. ‘The name of the victim!’ She listened to her phone and I saw her face register something that I could not read. ‘And the name of the kid on the wall,’ she said, all the euphoria suddenly leaving her. She ran her hands through her red hair and slowly hung up the phone.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘The victim of the hanging is – was – Hector Welles. Thirty-five years old. Single. A trust fund manager in the City. Sent down for causing an accidental death while driving.’

‘The boy on the wall,’ I said.

Edie nodded. ‘Welles was driving his Porsche 911 when the kid rode his bike into the street.’ She hit her keyboard and the same photograph of the smiling boy filled the giant TV screen.

‘The child was killed outright?’ Whitestone said.

‘He was in a coma for six months. In the end the parents switched off the life-support machine. The boy’s name was . . .’ She glanced down at her notes. ‘Daniel Warboys,’ she said.

I took a breath.

‘Daniel Warboys? What part of the world was he from?’

‘West London. Hammersmith.’

‘Do you know this child, Max?’ Whitestone said.

‘I think I’ve met his grandfather,’ I said. ‘Paul Warboys.’

There was silence in MIR-1.

‘The
Paul Warboys?’ the Chief Super said.

I nodded.

Paul and Danny Warboys ran West London back in the day when Reggie and Ronnie Kray were running the East End while Charlie and Eddie Richardson ruled the roost in South London.

I could easily believe that Paul Warboys had a grandson named after his beloved brother Danny.

‘How long did Hector Welles go down for?’ Whitestone asked.

‘He was sentenced to five years for dangerous driving,’ Edie said. ‘Also fined ten grand and banned from driving for three years. Let off with a slap on the wrist because there was not a trace of drugs or booze in his bloodstream. And also because he had the best brief that his employers could buy and apparently he wept a lot in the dock. In the end, he served just under two years. And they even gave him his old job back.’

We were silent. The phones had stopped ringing. The only sound was the low drone of the cars down on Savile Row and the laptop of the voice analyst with the swinging hair.

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

‘Two years for knocking down a little kid,’ I said. ‘It’s not enough, is it?’

Paul Warboys was the last of the line.

The last of those old gangsters whose names were known to the general public. The last of the career villains who wore suits and ties and had a short back and sides even when everyone else in the Sixties was growing their hair, wearing flares and dropping acid.

The very last of the true crime celebrities.

Back in the Sixties and Seventies, Paul Warboys and his brother Danny held court in West London, from their Hammersmith home to the massage parlours, knocking shops and drinking dens of old Soho. While Ronnie and Reggie Kray nursed their grievances in dingy East End boozers and Charlie and Eddie Richardson rattled around their South London scrapyards dreaming of striking gold in Africa, the Warboys brothers sucked the juice from the West End.

Paul and Danny Warboys had made more money than all of them.

‘Nice gaff,’ said Edie Wren as I steered the BMW X5 down the great sweeping driveway of the Essex mansion where Paul Warboys and his wife lived when they were not in Spain.

I could see staff dotted all around the grounds. A man trying to capture a solitary leaf that glided on the pristine swimming pool. A team of gardeners fussing around the flower beds and mowing the lawn. A maid in traditional black-and-white uniform giving strict instructions to a supermarket delivery driver.

But Paul Warboys opened his front door himself.

‘I’ve been expecting you, Max,’ he told me, almost smiling. ‘Come in.’

Paul Warboys was dressed for the beach and had a deep tan that did not come from a spray can. Polo shirt, khaki shorts, flip-flops. Chunky gold jewellery clinked on his thick muscled arms. No tattoos. His thinning patch of hair was dyed an unbelievable shade of blond but he looked like what he was: an extremely fit old man who had not had to worry about money for a long time.

‘I thought you might come alone,’ he said, squinting over my shoulder at Edie Wren.

‘I can’t do that, Paul,’ I said. ‘You know that.’

‘Trace, Interview and Eliminate,’ he said. ‘Right, Max?’

‘DC Wren, Homicide and Serious Crime Command,’ Edie said, holding out her warrant card.

Paul Warboys’ smile grew bigger. His teeth were the dazzling white of a game-show presenter. Then he nodded.

‘Put it away, sweetheart,’ he told Edie. ‘I believe you.’

We followed him into the living room. An English Bull Terrier padded across the carpet towards me, wagging his stumpy tail. I held out the back of my hand and the dog bent his magnificent sloping head towards me, confirming we had met before.

‘Bullseye remembers you,’ Paul Warboys laughed, scratching the dog behind his ears.

Bullseye had once belonged to an old face called Vic Masters, who I had found dead in a ditch on Hampstead Heath. Bullseye had stayed with me, Scout and Stan until Paul Warboys had come to claim his dead friend’s dog.

‘I never knew about your grandson,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded briefly, folding up something within himself. He wasn’t from the generation that needed to share every emotion with the rest of the world.

‘Yeah. Well. Thanks. No reason why you should have known, is there? A little boy getting knocked down by a car. It’s not news, is it? The story got a paragraph here and there. But nobody was holding the front page.’

‘But I would have thought it was news,’ I said, as gently as I could make it. ‘The grandson of Paul Warboys . . .’

He laughed. ‘It’s news now!’ he said. ‘Now that bastard got hanged by the neck until dead.’ Another laugh, harder this time, and it was laughter in the dark, full of something bitter and raw. ‘
Now
it’s news!’

A woman came into the room.

A tiny blonde woman, maybe fifteen years younger than her husband, and she also seemed dressed for some beach far away, with the blue-and-gold batik wrap she was wearing and a tan the colour of teak.

‘Doll,’ Paul Warboys said. ‘This is DC Wolfe.’

‘The young man who looked after our Bullseye?’ she said. ‘Of course. Thank you.’

Doll Warboys shook my hand, and the chains on her tanned arms made the same sound as her husband made when he moved, a soft clinking sound, the sound of money in a life that had not been born into money.

‘Hello, love,’ she said to Edie, and I was reminded of the London I knew when I was growing up, where
love
was almost a punctuation mark, an endearment casually bestowed on total strangers. But when Doll Warboys smiled she seemed very tired, as if she had been awake all night tormented by old wounds.

Her grandson had been killed many years ago, but the execution of the man who did it was still trending online. All the old pain had been awakened. She smiled and left us. Edie and I took the chairs across from the
sofa where Paul Warboys sat with Bullseye’s monstrous head in his lap.