But she must and she did.
I followed her.
The room was in darkness and so was her boy, still unconscious from the general anaesthetic. There were white bandages over his eyes that covered half his face.
‘My beautiful son,’ Pat Whitestone said, sinking to her knees beside the bed, and then the tears came, hopeless tears that seemed as if they would never stop.
‘I’m here now,’ she said.
I stood by her side but I did not touch her and I did not speak.
And I wished there was a father and grandparents and siblings in this room to help her carry a weight that she should never have to carry alone. But there was only me.
‘Those bastards,’ she said. ‘Those fucking bastards.’
She closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth and her mouth tightened with a rage and a violence that I had never seen in her before. And as I watched her she gasped, as if she suddenly couldn’t breathe, and lifted her face, her eyes still screwed tight, as if she could actually see the bastards who had done this to her son, as if she could see their faces, as if she could see them getting what they deserved.
As if – and the thought came unbidden – she could see them screaming for mercy as they swung from the end of a rope.
12
When I got to 27 Savile Row in the morning I was hoping to see Pat’s familiar figure running the show up in MIR-1, but she was clearly still at the hospital with her son.
TDC Billy Greene was putting a photograph of Hector Welles on the whitewall that he must have downloaded from Welles’ company’s website – one of those official portraits that big corporations take of their staff, Welles smiling with shrewd, bright-eyed confidence, as though your money would be safe with him.
It sat next to the police mugshot of Mahmud Irani.
Colin Cho and a couple of his people from the Police Central e-crime Unit were hunkered down around a laptop. Dr Joe was eating a frozen yogurt as he contemplated the giant map of London that covered one wall. And the voice analyst – Tara Jones – was at a workstation, replaying the one line of dialogue from the hanging of Hector Welles, repeatedly stopping and starting the film as her black hair swung across her face and she pushed it away.
But no DCI Whitestone.
‘No word from the boss?’ I said.
Billy shook his head. ‘Should I try to contact her?’
I thought of the blinded boy in his hospital bed.
‘Leave her,’ I said.
I was acting SIO now.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution? Do you know – do you know – do you know?’
The graph on her laptop jumped and fell in time to the words.
‘How’s it going?’ I said, but Tara Jones ignored me, and continued to pore over that solitary line of dialogue.
‘Do you know – do you know – do you know?’
Still looking sickened from his viewing of Hector Welles, our history man, Professor Hitchens, stood before the giant map of the city.
‘So the spot where Hector Welles’ body was discovered,’ Dr Joe asked him. ‘That was Tyburn?’
‘As far as we can ascertain,’ said Hitchens. ‘But it’s not quite so simple. DC Wolfe was correct – this was Tyburn. But the reason Tyburn’s exact location is disputed is because Tyburn’s Triple Tree was portable.’ Hitchens glanced at me. ‘Tyburn was certainly here – though the gallows was probably in twenty different places over the course of the centuries. But the area seems to have deep significance for the – what’s the word? – the perps.’
‘And what did they do?’ Edie said. ‘Back in the day. They just assembled their moveable gallows like an IKEA flat-pack and then strung them up?’
‘The condemned stood on the back of a horse-drawn cart,’ Hitchens said. ‘The rope was attached around their neck to the cross-beam of the Tyburn tree. The cart drove off and death was by strangulation rather than broken neck. The condemned were mostly drawn from the ranks of the poor, but Samuel Pepys saw one of his closest friends – a gentleman – hanged at Tyburn. It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t pretty. And it wasn’t meant to be.’
‘So if we want to stake out the area,’ I said, ‘what counts as Tyburn?’
Hitchens traced a large area on the map that seemed to cover Hyde Park and a hefty chunk of the West End.
‘The area just north of Marble Arch probably saw most of the fifty thousand executions. But all roads in this area lead to Tyburn. Until the eighteenth century, Park Lane was called Tyburn Lane and Oxford Street was called Tyburn Road.’
‘So they could dump a body anywhere from Hyde Park Corner to Oxford Street and still call it Tyburn?’ I said.
Professor Hitchens shrugged. ‘Theoretically,’ he said.
‘You really think they’d come back here with every plain clothes copper in the Met looking for them?’ Edie asked me.
I looked at Dr Joe for the answer.
‘I think they’ll find the temptation to stick to their ritual almost impossible to resist,’ he said. ‘If they kill again.’
‘And you think they will, Dr Joe?’
‘I don’t think they can stop themselves. I think they have set themselves the task of punishing all the wicked in the world.’
‘And who are they, Dr Joe? What kind of men are we after?’
‘They are men who clearly believe that justice has been thwarted. They’re obsessive about the judicial process – or at least their version of the judicial process. The Albert Pierrepoint obsession, the kangaroo court, the reading of charges. I would guess they have some experience of the law and they didn’t much like it.’
I waited for him to say what we were both thinking. But he just finished his frozen yogurt, because it would have sounded like blasphemy in here. So I said it for him.
‘They could be cops,’ I said.
‘Possible,’ said Dr Joe.
I turned to the woman with the swinging hair. She had her back to me.
‘How we doing on the voice recognition, Tara?’
She ignored me, and stood up to pitch an empty coffee cup into a wastepaper bin. She was a tall woman in flat shoes. One of those tall women who are never really comfortable with their height. Leggy. Slim. At first I had thought she was shy or self-contained. Now she just seemed indifferent to the people in this office. Especially me. She sat down and played the same piece of tape.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’
I felt a surge of irritation.
‘Max?’ Edie said. ‘I don’t think that you were ever properly introduced. Tara is—’
And Tara Jones turned and looked up at me, as if seeing me for the first time as she pushed back her swinging black hair that fell across her pale and serious fabulous face.
And I finally realised that Tara Jones was deaf.
‘This is what I’ve found,’ she said. ‘It is the same voice on both the Mahmud Irani and the Hector Welles tape. The voice has the glottal stops of a London or southeast England accent, but there are distinct signs of modification – think of it as an Estuary accent that has learned Received Pronunciation. In other words, the subject is not speaking with the voice that he grew up with. Either he has had elocution lessons or, more likely, moved to a social strata beyond the environment of his parents. It happens a lot. For most people, a university education will do it.’
And I thought about her own voice.
There was nothing wrong with it. But now I knew of her deafness it was as if she was saying the words but not hearing them.
‘And there’s something else,’ she said. ‘There is an unusual cadence to some of his sentences, as if there was a foreign language spoken in his home. And he can speak it too.’
I was impressed.