Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tony Parsons
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Author’s Note
Copyright
About the Book
A band of vigilante executioners roam London’s hot summer nights, abducting evil men and hanging them by the neck until dead.
SENTENCED TO DEATH
– The gang member who’s abused vulnerable girls.
– The wealthy drunk driver who’s mowed down a child.
– The hate preacher calling for the murder of British soldiers.
As the bodies pile up and riots explode across the sweltering city, DC Max Wolfe hunts a gang of killers who many believe to be heroes.
And discovers that the lust for revenge starts very close to home . . .
About the Author
Tony Parsons left school at sixteen and his first job in journalism was at the New Musical Express. His first journalism after leaving the NME was when he was embedded with the Vice Squad at 27 Savile Row, West End Central. The roots of the DC Max Wolfe series started here.
Since then he has become an award-winning journalist and bestselling novelist whose books have been translated into more than forty languages. The Murder Bag, the first novel in the DC Max Wolfe series, went to number one on first publication in the UK. The Slaughter Man was also a Sunday Times top ten bestseller.
Tony Lives in London with his wife, his daughter and their dog, Stan.
Also by Tony Parsons
The Murder Bag
The Slaughter Man
Digital Shorts
Dead Time
Fresh Blood
For Fred Kindall of Kentish Town
A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, and joking. Every thing told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the very centre of all – the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they don’t answer their purpose.
Dr Samuel Johnson
PROLOGUE
After PrayErs
After Friday prayers Mahmud Irani walked back to where he had parked his taxi and within a few minutes he had picked up the man who was going to kill him.
The man was standing opposite the entrance to London Zoo, dressed in a suit and tie, the jacket buttoned up despite the steaming midday heat. His eyes were hidden behind dark glasses and he had one arm already raised in the air to hail a cab, as if he was fully expecting Mahmud to be driving round Regent’s Park’s Outer Circle immediately after prayers, as if he knew he was coming.
As if he had been waiting.
Mahmud pulled up beside him, smelling the animal stink of the zoo in summer.
‘Cash only, boss,’ Mahmud said.
The man nodded, glancing at his phone before showing it to Mahmud. On the iPhone’s screen there was a map of the City with a red marker pinpointing their destination.
Newgate Street, EC1.
Less than four miles away but it meant crossing the middle of the city in the stagnant traffic of lunch hour. Mahmud grunted his reluctant assent and watched the man slide into the back seat.
In silence they drove east through the sweltering city.
Mahmud was turning his taxi onto Newgate Street when he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw the man removing a small leather credit-card holder. Mahmud sighed. How many times did you have to tell these stupid people?
‘It’s cash only,’ he repeated, harder this time, tugging at his polo shirt, the sweat sticking.
But the man was not getting out a credit card.
He leaned forward between the gap in the front seats and placed an old-fashioned razor blade firmly against Mahmud Irani’s left eyelid.
Mahmud drew in his breath and did not let it go.
He felt the thin cold steel of the blade’s cutting edge settle into the folds of soft flesh beneath his eyebrow. The fine layer of skin covering his eye fluttered wildly against the razor blade. Pure naked terror rose up inside him.
‘Please,’ Mahmud said. ‘Please. Just take the money. It’s under my seat.’
The man laughed.
‘I don’t want your money. Keep driving. Nice and easy now.’
Mahmud drove as if in a dream, driving with one eye squeezed closed, trying to concentrate on the road ahead with a razor blade pressed against his eyelid.
Following the man’s directions, he drove to the end of the street and then turned left onto a huge building site. It was deserted, one of those little pockets of total silence and emptiness that suddenly surprise you in the city. Another tower of glass and steel was being erected here, but there was nobody working this afternoon. They were all alone. Ahead of them was a yawning hole in the uneven ground.
‘Down there,’ the man said.
‘I have a wife and children.’
‘Too late for all that now, pal.’
The razor blade pressed more firmly into Mahmud’s flesh and he felt his eyeball move, a sick rolling feeling as the eye recoiled from the cutting edge. Mahmud drove into the hole and down, bumping over a speed bump and then over some random rubble before entering a vast basement twilight.
What was this place?
Mahmud could not tell if it had once been an underground car park or if that’s what it would be in the future. Right now it was simply a massive expanse of empty space with a very low ceiling; a subterranean basement with no lights apart from the shafts of summer sun coming in from somewhere.
‘Where are we going?’ Mahmud said, unable to stop himself talking, and this time the man slid the razor blade very gently across his eyelid, just one inch, but enough to cut into flesh and make Mahmud cry out from the shock of sudden pain.
A warm trickle of blood oozed slowly around the curve of Mahmud’s left eyelid.
And he did not speak after that.
They got out of the car and that was a moment when Mahmud thought he could run away if he was not so stricken with terror, so paralysed with disbelief that this was happening, so appalled by the warm blood that ran now on either side of his left eye, so scared witless that he did not fully register the chance to escape until the moment had passed.
Then the man stood behind Mahmud, the razor blade returned to the soft fold of flesh above the left eye and the man’s other hand gently taking the taxi driver’s wrist.