The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (2 page)

And, yes, they were all smiling, every one of them – although some of them had smiles that were stiff and
shy, and some had smiles that were natural and full of confidence.

They all smiled in their own way. The school photographers had insisted upon a smile, encouraged them to smile, tried to make them laugh.

They were formal portraits, the kind that a school takes every year to record and honour a student’s growth, and they caught the girls at the fleeting moment in their lives when they were poised between the children they had so recently been and the women they would one day become.

The smiling faces watched Mahmud Irani.

And he knew these faces. All of them.

He had known them in rooms full of laughing men. He had heard the girls scream for help when no help was coming. He had seen them blurry and on the edge of unconsciousness, foggy with cheap booze and strong drugs as their clothes were removed.

He had laughed at those girls with all the other men.

And now his words were edged with bitterness and contempt and anger.

‘Whores,’ he said. ‘Cheap whores who like drink and drugs. Sluts who show themselves. Girls who like men. Many men. Typical girls of this country. Oh, listen to me! These are not decent girls! Will you listen to me?’

Someone was kicking the stool he stood on.

‘Whores,’ spat Mahmud Irani, and then he said no more, not another word, because the stool was gone and all at once the rope around his neck cut deep, deep,
deep
into his throat and his feet were kicking wildly at nothing but the air.

He soiled himself immediately.

The red light watched him squirm and writhe and twist, wild with panic and pain, so much pain, his body thrashing desperately at the rope that cut into his flesh, deeper and deeper every second.

The rope first compressed his jugular vein and then the much deeper carotid arteries, stopping the flow of blood to his brain, abruptly turning it off, his brain instantly swelling, making Mahmud’s eyes roll back into his head and his tongue loll out of his flapping mouth and a choked gurgling sound come from somewhere deep inside his throttled neck.

The red light watched Mahmud as he was strangled by the rope around his neck.

And the pain!

Mahmud did not know that there was so much pain in the world. The minutes passed as slowly as centuries. But after what seemed to him a thousand years but was less than five minutes he finally stopped kicking and his arms went limp by his side.

Mahmud Irani choked out his very last strangled breath in that secret white-brick basement that hides deep below the city.

The red light went out.

And on the wall, the faces of the girls were still smiling.

We sat in Court One at the Old Bailey and we waited for justice.

‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.

I stood up, never letting go of the hand of the woman next to me. It had been a long day. But finally it was coming to the end.

We were there for the man she had been married to for nearly twenty years, a man I had never known in life, although I had watched him die perhaps a hundred times.

I had watched him come out of their modest house in his pyjamas on a soft spring evening, a middle-aged man wearing carpet slippers, wanting to do only what was right, wanting to do nothing more than what was decent and good, wanting – above all – to protect his family, and I had watched the three young men who now stood in the dock knock him to the ground and kick him to death.

I had watched him die a hundred times because one of the young men in the dock had filmed it on his phone,
the small screen shaking with mirth, rocking with laughter, the picture sharp in the clear light of a March evening. I had watched him die again and again and again, until my head was full of a silent scream that stayed with me in my dreams.

‘He was a good man,’ his widow, Alice, whispered, gripping my hand tight, shaking it for emphasis, and I nodded, feeling her fingers dig deep into my palm. On her far side were her two teenage children, a girl of around sixteen and a boy a year younger, and beyond them a young woman in her late twenties, the FLO – Family Liaison Officer.

I believed the Central Criminal Court – the proper name of the Old Bailey – was no place for children, especially children who had watched their father being murdered from the window of their home.

The FLO – a decent, caring, university-educated young woman who still believed that this world is essentially a benign place – said that they were here for
closure
. But closure was the wrong word for what they wanted in court number one.

They wanted justice.

And they needed it if their world would ever again make any kind of sense.

When I had first gone to their home with my colleagues DCI Pat Whitestone and DC Edie Wren on that March evening, the last chill of winter had still been clinging
on. Now it was July and the city was wilting in the hottest summer since records began. Only a few months had gone by but the woman and her children were all visibly older, and it was more than just passing time. The three of them had been worn down by the brain-numbing shock of violent crime.

For our Murder Investigation Team at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, West End Central, 27 Savile Row, the case had been straightforward. You could not call it routine, because a man having his life brutally taken can never be considered routine. But there was incriminating evidence all over the smartphones of these three blank-faced morons in the dock, and the blood of the dead man was all over their hands and their clothes. It was an easy day at the office for our CSIs.

We were not hunting criminal masterminds. When we arrested them, they still had fresh blood on their trainers. They were just three thick yobs who took it all much too far.

But the case felt personal for me.

Because I knew him. The dead man. That lost husband, that stolen father. Steve Goddard. Forty years old.

I had never met him in life but I knew what made him leave his house when the three yobs were urinating on his wife’s car. I understood him. I got it. He could have let it go – ignored the noise, the laughter, the
obscene insult to his family and the street where he lived, the mocking of all that he loved.

And I could even understand that it made no rational sense at all to go out there in his carpet slippers to confront them. I could see why it was not worth it, why he should have turned up the television and drawn the curtains, and watched his children grow up and get married and have their own children, and why he should have stayed indoors so that he could grow old with his wife. I got all that.

But above all I understood why this decent man did not have it in him to do nothing.

‘Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?’ said the judge.

The jury spokesman cleared his throat. I felt Alice’s fingernails digging into my palm once more, deeper now. The faces of the three defendants – immobile with a kind of surly stupidity through most of the trial – now registered the first stirrings of fear.

‘Yes, Your Honour, we have,’ said the jury spokesman.

Juries don’t give reasons. Juries don’t have to give reasons. Juries just give verdicts.

‘
Guilty.
’

‘
Guilty.
’

‘
Guilty.
’

And juries have no say in sentencing. We all looked at the judge, a papery-faced old man who peered at us
from under his wig and over his reading glasses as if he knew the secrets of our souls.

‘Involuntary manslaughter is a serious offence,’ intoned the judge, glowering at the court, his voice like thunder. ‘It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.’

A cry of, ‘
No!
’ from the public gallery. It was a woman with a barbed-wire tattoo on her bare arms. She must be one of the boy’s mothers, I thought, because none of their fathers had been spotted for nearly twenty years.

The judge rapped his gavel and demanded order or he would clear the court.

‘Public concern and the need for deterrence must be reflected in the sentence passed by the court,’ he continued. ‘But the Criminal Justice Act requires a court addressing seriousness to consider the offender’s
culpability
in committing the offence. And I accept the probability that the deceased was dead before he hit the ground due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage, making this a
single punch
manslaughter case.’

‘But what does that
mean
?’ the youngest child, the boy – called Steve, like his dad – murmured to his mother, and she shushed him, clinging on to good manners even in this place, even now.

It meant they would be home by Christmas, I thought, my stomach falling away.

It meant the bastards would get away with it.

It meant that it didn’t matter that they had kicked Steve Goddard’s head when he lay on the ground. It did not matter that they had urinated on his body and posted it on YouTube.

None of that mattered because the judge had swallowed the defence’s evidence that the man who attacked three unarmed boys was dead before he hit the ground due to a pre-existing medical condition.

Get the right brief and you can worm your way out of anything.

‘I am also obliged to accept the mitigating factor of self-defence, as the deceased was attempting to assault the defendants,’ said the judge. ‘I note you are all of good character. And I therefore sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’

It was over.

I looked at Alice Goddard’s face. She didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t understand why her husband was dead thirty years before his time. She did not understand what the judge had said or why the defendants were laughing while her two children were quietly weeping. I wanted to say something to them but there was nothing to say. I had no words to offer and no comfort to give.

Alice Goddard let go of my hand. It was over for everybody apart from her and her two children. It would never be over for them.

Alice was smiling, and it tore at my heart. A tight, terrible smile.

‘It’s all right, Max,’ she said. ‘Really. Nothing was going to bring my Steve back, was it?’

She was anxious to make it clear that she did not blame me.

I looked at the defendants. They knew me. I knew them. I had seen one of them weeping for his mother in the interview room. I saw another one of them wet his pants at the prospect of imprisonment. And I saw the other one empty-eyed and indifferent through the entire process, beyond recall, beyond hope.

When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, the three young men had seemed very different.

A coward. A weakling. And a bully.

Now they were one again. Now they were a gang again. Yes, they were going down, but they would be home in six months. Taking a life would have no real impact on their own lives. It would no doubt give them a certain status in the cruel little world they lived in.

The anger unfurled inside me and suddenly I was out of my seat and walking towards them. But the court bailiff blocked my path, his hands slightly raised to show me his meaty palms, but saying nothing and offering no threat if I dropped it right here.

‘Leave it, sir,’ he said.

So I did the smart thing. I did nothing.

He was a typical Old Bailey bailiff with a demeanour somewhere between a diplomat and a bouncer, and he looked at me sympathetically with the faintest hint of a smile – sad, not mocking – and I let the moment pass, choking down the sickness that came with the rage.

And my face was hot with shame.

The three youths in the dock smirked at me before they were taken down.

I had seen that look before.

Too many times.

It was the look of someone who knows they just got away with murder.

Later that day we watched the man hang.

We saw the film of his death on the big HDTV screen that’s on the wall of Major Incident Room One in West End Central, at first not sure what we were seeing, not even convinced it was real, still stunned by the fact that you can watch a man being executed online.

It was early evening and we were standing at our workstations, ignoring the phones that were ringing all over MIR-1, as the man was helped onto the kitchen step stool and a noose was slipped round his neck.

And the terrible exchange between the two men.

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

‘
What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—
’

The voice of the first man muffled by some sort of mask. The voice of the second man choked with terror.

‘Who is he?’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.

‘IC4,’ said DC Edie Wren, running a hand through her red hair, her eyes not leaving the giant screen. IC4 meant the man – the one we could see, the one with the noose around his neck – was of South Asian descent. ‘Maybe forty years old. Unshaven. Jeans. Polo shirt. Lacoste.’

‘A Lacoste knock-off,’ I said. ‘The little crocodile’s looking in the wrong direction.’

‘Where is that place, Max?’ said Whitestone.

I took a few steps closer to the screen. The film was sharp but the room was dark. In the shadows I could glimpse white tiles or bricks, stained green and yellow by time and the weather.

I felt I had seen it before. It was some part of London that was just round the corner, and yet a hundred years away, and beyond the reach of memory. I took a step back.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘What are they doing to him?’ said Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene.

Then the stool was kicked away and we did not speak as we watched the man hang, his body twisting and squirming in the air, and there was no sound but the strangled gurgling coming from his throat. When the hanging man began to soil himself the cameraman turned away and I caught glimpses – nothing more – of two or three figures in dark clothes, their faces covered in black masks, only
their eyes showing, their backs pressed against those yellowing walls.