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?’
8
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.