The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) by Tony Parsons Read Free Book Online Page A

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. Bothof 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.