Edie Wren walked up to us.
‘You told that freak the first body was dumped where Tyburn used to be,’ she said. ‘You told him and he wouldn’t listen, would he? Some expert he is.’
‘I wasn’t sure myself. Not until the second body. But now they’re rubbing our noses in it. They want the world to know they’ve brought back capital punishment.’
Edie looked around at the pristine white monolith of Marble Arch, at the start of the West End proper on Oxford Street, at the grand hotels running all the way down Park Lane, and at Hyde Park, an endless sea of green in the very heart of the city.
‘And remind me – what’s so special about this place?’ she said. ‘Why does it mean so much to them?’
‘There’s probably more history where we are standing than any place in the country,’ I said. ‘For a thousand years, Tyburn was the country’s most celebrated place of execution. More than fifty thousand men, women and children were hanged here. London was always a city of execution – in the eighteenth century you couldn’t enter the city without seeing a line of gibbets – but Tyburn was always special.’
‘Dr Joe says that ritual and ceremony was important to the perps – as important as the punishment.’
I nodded. ‘It matters to them that this was where Tyburn stood. It’s important to them that their victims are hanged, and then dumped here. I’m sure they wish they could do it on the pavement outside the Odeon Marble Arch. But I’m hoping they care too much, that it’s too important to them. I’m guessing that they are so obsessed with all that symbolism that we will have our chance to nail them.’ I turned to look at our SIO. ‘You want to get Marble Arch staked out?’
‘I should have done it sooner,’ Whitestone said. ‘After the first one. It’s not a difficult place for a team of undercover officers to watch, especially in summer when there are more bodies sleeping out around Hyde Park and Marble Arch. But if they do it again, they have to come back here. And next time we’ll be waiting.’
‘And they’re going to do it again, aren’t they?’ I said.
‘I don’t see how they can stop now,’ she said.
Edie consulted her phone. ‘The Divisional Surgeon has arrived to check that Welles is really dead,’ she said. ‘I’ll escort him in.’
I looked at Whitestone.
‘And the history man is here,’ I said.
‘Let’s give him one last try,’ Whitestone said.
I walked across to the perimeter and the old-looking young man who was waiting there. He had got off his bike and placed the helmet on the pillion and was sucking on a soggy roll-up cigarette. It did not seem to be giving him much joy. Despite the motorbike, and despite the fact that it was going to be another brutally hot day, Professor Adrian Hitchens wore a two-piece corduroy suit, a shirt and tie and a V-neck jumper that had been munched by moths long gone. His head still looked remarkable to me – so egg-shaped that it was almost pointed. It glistened with heavy beads of sweat.
‘Professor Hitchens,’ I said.
‘I feel that we got off to a bad start,’ he said. ‘You and I. Your theory about Tyburn – I dismissed it out of hand. That was wrong. You were correct. And I apologise.’
I shrugged. ‘It was just a hunch. I also told you that they would never dump a body on a traffic island in the middle of the West End.’ I nodded to the white tent. ‘And that’s exactly what they did. So I was wrong, too,’ I said.
I held out my hand to him and he went to shake it until he saw the blue latex gloves I was offering him.
‘Put these on and keep them on until you sign out at the perimeter. Don’t touch anything. Follow my instructions at all times.’
He signed in with the uniformed officer and put on the gloves and baggies. The officer and I held up the DO NOT CROSS tape as Professor Hitchens eased his great bulk under the tape. I had never seen a man so young who was so fabulously unfit.
‘Take your time, sir,’ the young uniform said, without irony.
Safely under the tape, Hitchens smoothed his corduroy suit and cleared his throat. We began walking towards the white tent and I found I had to slow my pace so that he could keep up.
‘We need to find the kill site,’ I said. ‘If the dump site has a ritualistic value for them, then possibly the kill site will have some significance too. The place where both the victims were hanged feels like it should ring some bells. There can’t be many late Victorian basements left in this town. If we find the kill site, it leads us to them. Any thoughts on where it could be?’
‘Where we are right now is London’s primary place of execution, as you so correctly observed.’
‘But they didn’t do it here, did they? They dump the bodies at Tyburn but they can’t hang them here. So where’s the next best thing?’
‘If ritual is that important to them, they’re spoilt for choice. It could be any one of a number of places of execution. Kennington Common, Shepherd’s Bush, Tower Hill, Charing Cross. Pirates were hanged at the execution dock at East Wapping. There were executions at Smithfield – although burning and boiling were preferred to hanging, especially during the sixteenth-century heresy trials. Charles I was executed in Whitehall. But Charles was beheaded – if we are talking specifically about hanging . . .’
‘What about Newgate?’ I said. ‘Didn’t they have hangings at Newgate after they stopped public executions at Tyburn?’
Professor Hitchens nodded his great oval head.
‘In many ways, Newgate would be their obvious choice. There was a gaol on that site for eight hundred years and after Tyburn’s gallows were abolished in 1783 public hangings continued at Newgate for almost another hundred years. Hangings were as popular as FA Cup Finals. Huge crowds would turn up to watch. The crush was apparently phenomenal. Often there would be a few dozen dead when the crowds went home for their supper. But Newgate Gaol was closed in 1902 and torn down in 1904.’
‘And nothing remains?
‘The prison was completely demolished so they could build the Old Bailey on top of it. There’s a plaque on the wall of the Old Bailey. But Newgate was essentially wiped off the face of the earth. The theory was that they were replacing one kind of brutal British justice with another more enlightened kind of justice. There were no executions at the Old Bailey.’
We stopped at the white tent.
Inside, the Tyvek-suited CSIs in their blue gloves, baggies and face masks photographed and filmed and dusted, moving with a kind of insatiable curiosity, determined to record absolutely everything, like tourists on some hostile planet.
I looked at Hitchens.
‘And are you really going to help me, Professor? Don’t waste my time, Hitch – may I call you Hitch?’
‘Please do, Detective.’
‘If you’re just looking for a few juicy anecdotes to share with your colleagues over sherry evenings back on campus, then you can bail out now. You don’t have to like me. But if you stick around, you do have to help me.’
‘I want to help you. I truly do.’
I looked at him for a while.
Then I nodded and took him inside to see the body.
Hector Welles.
What remained of his neck was a pulp of raw and bloody meat. As we watched, a CSI armed with long surgical tweezers carefully plucked something from the shredded meat of his neck and expertly slipped it inside a plastic evidence bag.
The history man’s mouth dropped open with a kind of sickened wonder.
Professor Hitchens stared at the body in disbelief. I have no idea what he had been expecting. But it was not this – a man who, in his last desperate minutes, had tried to remove the rope strangling him by attempting to rip open his own throat.