They walked across the wide-open space to a door.
They went down some steps.
The air got colder.
They descended into total darkness and walked along a narrow passage until suddenly a thin shaft of natural light was coming from somewhere high above their heads. Mahmud could see ancient white brickwork that was stained green by time and weather. It was very cold now. The summer was on another planet. The air was fetid with what smelled like stagnant water. It was like stepping into another world.
And then there were the others.
Three of them.
Their faces hidden by black masks that revealed only their eyes.
One of them had a red light shining in their hands.
It was some kind of camera, and it was pointing at Mahmud Irani.
There was a stool. A kitchen step stool. Mahmud could not understand what was happening as hands helped him onto the stool and something was placed around his neck. The blood was in his eyes as he watched the man from the car consulting with the one who held the camera. Mahmud wiped away the blood with the palm of his hands and he tried to balance himself, afraid he would fall from the stool.
His fingers nervously felt his neck.
It was a rope.
They had put a rope around his neck.
He looked up and saw that it was attached to a rusted tangle of ancient pipes in the ceiling.
Hands were touching his arms. He heard a metallic click. He found that his arms were secured behind his back.
And now the words came in a torrent. Now he had no difficulty at all in speaking. Now even the razor blade pressed against his eyeball could not have shut his mouth.
‘I have a wife and children!’ he screamed, and his voice echoed back at him in this secret basement.
Wife and children!
Wife and children!
‘I’m just a taxi driver! Please! You have the wrong person!’
The man from the car was covering his face with a black mask. Like an executioner. He turned to Mahmud Irani.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’ he asked.
Mahmud stuttered, ‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—’
But then the words choked in his throat because, beyond the red light of the camera, one of them was sticking A4 sheets of paper to the worn white bricks of this underground place.
The A4 sheets of paper were portraits that had been downloaded from the Internet.
They were all the faces of girls. Young girls. Smiling girls.
And, yes, they were all smiling, every one of them – although some of them had smiles that were stiff and shy, and some had smiles that were natural and full of confidence.
They all smiled in their own way. The school photographers had insisted upon a smile, encouraged them to smile, tried to make them laugh.
They were formal portraits, the kind that a school takes every year to record and honour a student’s growth, and they caught the girls at the fleeting moment in their lives when they were poised between the children they had so recently been and the women they would one day become.
The smiling faces watched Mahmud Irani.
And he knew these faces. All of them.
He had known them in rooms full of laughing men. He had heard the girls scream for help when no help was coming. He had seen them blurry and on the edge of unconsciousness, foggy with cheap booze and strong drugs as their clothes were removed.
He had laughed at those girls with all the other men.
And now his words were edged with bitterness and contempt and anger.
‘Whores,’ he said. ‘Cheap whores who like drink and drugs. Sluts who show themselves. Girls who like men. Many men. Typical girls of this country. Oh, listen to me! These are not decent girls! Will you listen to me?’
Someone was kicking the stool he stood on.
‘Whores,’ spat Mahmud Irani, and then he said no more, not another word, because the stool was gone and all at once the rope around his neck cut deep, deep, deep into his throat and his feet were kicking wildly at nothing but the air.
He soiled himself immediately.
The red light watched him squirm and writhe and twist, wild with panic and pain, so much pain, his body thrashing desperately at the rope that cut into his flesh, deeper and deeper every second.
The rope first compressed his jugular vein and then the much deeper carotid arteries, stopping the flow of blood to his brain, abruptly turning it off, his brain instantly swelling, making Mahmud’s eyes roll back into his head and his tongue loll out of his flapping mouth and a choked gurgling sound come from somewhere deep inside his throttled neck.
The red light watched Mahmud as he was strangled by the rope around his neck.
And the pain!
Mahmud did not know that there was so much pain in the world. The minutes passed as slowly as centuries. But after what seemed to him a thousand years but was less than five minutes he finally stopped kicking and his arms went limp by his side.
Mahmud Irani choked out his very last strangled breath in that secret white-brick basement that hides deep below the city.
The red light went out.
And on the wall, the faces of the girls were still smiling.
PART ONE
The BlAck StAge
1
We sat in Court One at the Old Bailey and we waited for justice.
‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.
I stood up, never letting go of the hand of the woman next to me. It had been a long day. But finally it was coming to the end.
We were there for the man she had been married to for nearly twenty years, a man I had never known in life, although I had watched him die perhaps a hundred times.
I had watched him come out of their modest house in his pyjamas on a soft spring evening, a middle-aged man wearing carpet slippers, wanting to do only what was right, wanting to do nothing more than what was decent and good, wanting – above all – to protect his family, and I had watched the three young men who now stood in the dock knock him to the ground and kick him to death.
I had watched him die a hundred times because one of the young men in the dock had filmed it on his phone, the small screen shaking with mirth, rocking with laughter, the picture sharp in the clear light of a March evening. I had watched him die again and again and again, until my head was full of a silent scream that stayed with me in my dreams.
‘He was a good man,’ his widow, Alice, whispered, gripping my hand tight, shaking it for emphasis, and I nodded, feeling her fingers dig deep into my palm. On her far side were her two teenage children, a girl of around sixteen and a boy a year younger, and beyond them a young woman in her late twenties, the FLO – Family Liaison Officer.
I believed the Central Criminal Court – the proper name of the Old Bailey – was no place for children, especially children who had watched their father being murdered from the window of their home.
The FLO – a decent, caring, university-educated young woman who still believed that this world is essentially a benign place – said that they were here for closure. But closure was the wrong word for what they wanted in court number one.
They wanted justice.
And they needed it if their world would ever again make any kind of sense.
When I had first gone to their home with my colleagues DCI Pat Whitestone and DC Edie Wren on that March evening, the last chill of winter had still been clinging on. Now it was July and the city was wilting in the hottest summer since records began. Only a few months had gone by but the woman and her children were all visibly older, and it was more than just passing time. The three of them had been worn down by the brain-numbing shock of violent crime.