And they would be waiting.
I turned off the lights and was about to go to bed when I saw my MacBook Air on the kitchen table, exactly where I had left it. But the laptop was closed now and I was sure I had left it open. Stan stirred in his basket as I powered up.
I went on Safari and hit Show History.
And it wasn’t my history.
Last visited today
The Hanging Club – Google search
@AlbertPierrepointUK – Twitter
Mahmud Irani – YouTube
Hector Welles – YouTube
Tyburn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hanging Club – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert Pierrepoint – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bringing Back the Death Penalty – Daily Mail Online
‘Let ’em dangle!’ – Sun Online
Public executions are back – Guardian
@albertpierrepoint – Twitter
Darren Donovan – YouTube
Darren Donovan – YouTube
Darren Donovan – YouTube
Darren Donovan – YouTube
Darren Donovan – YouTube
Vigilantes Hang Third Man – Daily Telegraph – Sunday Telegraph – Telegraph Online
There was more. Much more. Reams of the stuff. I glanced towards the big windows where the lights of Smithfield shone. I had told my old friend that he could use my laptop whenever he needed it. It looked as though he had spent all day on it, reading about just one thing.
I closed the laptop and went to bed. But when sleep came it seemed to abruptly jerk just out of reach, jolting me awake, and I spent hours trying to get comfortable, trying to empty my mind, trying too hard to fall asleep. I must have dropped off at some point because in the light period of sleep, the last part of sleep, when dreams come in the shallows, I found myself waking from a dream of Marble Arch in the darkness and slipping from my bed and walking to the window.
It was still early, before five, but the rising sun was turning the great dome of St Paul’s as white as bone. And at the meat market, the night shift was over and Jackson was coming home.
I watched him cross Charterhouse Street, grinning at something one of his workmates had said, and the light of the new sun was so dazzling on the front of his white porter’s coat that at first you could not tell that it was smeared with fresh blood.
A few hours later I stood alone in MIR-1 looking at the floor-to-ceiling map of London and sipping a triple espresso from Bar Italia.
Professor Hitchens came in with his motorbike helmet under his arm, already sweating inside his corduroy.
‘Tyburn,’ he said. ‘It’s a river, isn’t it? That’s where everything else comes from. Tyburn Road, Tyburn gallows – it’s all named after the River Tyburn. The Tyburn is one of the great underground rivers of London.’
‘The gallows is named after the river?’ I said.
He nodded his egg-shaped head. ‘Look at this,’ he said.
He produced a battered book from his saddlebag. Thames: Sacred River by Peter Ackroyd. Professor Hitchens found the page he wanted and pointed a fat finger at a passage. He began to read:
‘There is some intimate association between the river and what we call “paganism”. Something has settled there. The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment . . .’
He looked at me with his eyes shining.
‘Don’t you see? The river in some sense becomes the sacred witness of punishment!’
Tara Jones walked in and stared at us. Hitchens continued reading.
‘It is perhaps not coincidental that the two major sites of execution on land, Tyburn and Smithfield, were adjacent to the Thames tributaries of the Tyburn and the Fleet.’ He shook his head with wonder. ‘Can’t you see what it means?’
‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Let me get this straight. London’s underground rivers – the Tyburn and the rest – they once flowed over ground?’
‘Yes!’
‘So what happened to them?’
‘We built this city on top of them.’ He waved at the giant map on the wall. ‘As the city has grown over the centuries, the rivers became deeper. The London sewer system is built on the template of the city’s underground rivers. But they’re still there.’
I looked at the map, and back at him.
‘So the Tyburn – the River Tyburn – still exists?’ I said.
‘Of course!’
‘Where does it flow?’ I said. ‘Show me.’
He pointed at a great swathe of green towards the top of the map.
‘The source of the Tyburn is Hampstead. It runs south – parallel to the Finchley Road, down to Swiss Cottage, through Regent’s Park. In the West End it follows the path of Marylebone Lane before passing through Mayfair and into the Thames.’
‘We’re probably standing on it,’ Tara said.
Hitchens’ prematurely aged face split into a wide grin.
‘Savile Row? I would say that it’s extremely likely the Tyburn is directly below us.’
I thought about it, let it settle.
‘They’re not going to go back to the site of the gallows because they know we’ll be waiting. But – if they are so obsessed with the ritual of punishment – they could still leave the body in the Tyburn – the River Tyburn.’
‘It has to be a possibility,’ Hitchens said.
‘How many miles of river are we looking at?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘The Tyburn winds and turns . . .’
‘Ballpark figure, Professor.’
‘It could be as many as ten miles.’
I shook my head.
‘Only someone much more important than me can authorise a search of that scale.’
I called the Chief Super’s office. They put me straight through and I told her what I wanted.
‘Where’s Pat Whitestone?’ DCS Swire said.
The truth is I didn’t know where DCI Whitestone was or if she was ever coming to work again.
‘Ma’am, I believe she must be with her son at the hospital.’
A pause.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Send everyone you can down there. But I want them all out at the end of the shift.’
‘Ma’am?’
‘London sewers have the highest concentration of cocaine of any waters in Europe.’
For a moment I had the image of London’s paranoid coke users all flushing away their drug of choice.
But that wasn’t quite it.
‘The city has the highest number of cocaine users in the northern hemisphere and their urine all ends up in the sewers,’ DCS Swire told me. ‘The trace cocaine in London’s waste waters is 500 per cent higher than anywhere else in Europe. If anyone stays down there too long, we’re going to start getting cardiac arrests. And then we’re going to start getting lawsuits. So one full shift and they’re all out, understood, DC Wolfe?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
I’ll tell them not to inhale, I thought, heading for the door as I speed-dialled Edie Wren.
Tara Jones called me back.
‘I got the voiceprint of that sound we heard on the latest film,’ she said. ‘It’s not a name. And it’s not a word.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s laughter.’ She shook her head as if she could not understand such a thing, and a veil of glossy black hair swung in front of her lovely face. I watched her push it away. ‘The noise is a short bark of someone . . . laughing. What does it mean?’
‘They’re starting to enjoy it,’ I said.
We had been looking in the wrong place. They were never coming back to the site of Tyburn gallows. So almost one hundred officers – Specialist Search Teams from West End Central and New Scotland Yard, surveillance officers from SO15’s Counter Terrorism Command – spent eight hours of a long summer day wading through the miles of sewers that trace the flow of the Tyburn.
And at the end of a long shift we knew this was the wrong place too.