My phone began to vibrate.
EDIE WREN CALLING, it said.
‘It’s Abu Din,’ Edie said. ‘Guess what? Somebody just slotted the bastard.’
Saturday afternoon at the Imperial War Museum.
The museum was crowded but down in Carol’s small basement office the sound of the crowds seemed far away, like an old soldier’s memory of war. Carol expertly spun her wheelchair in a circle as she closed the door behind us. The BBC news was playing on her iMac.
‘Do you have anything on Special Operations in Afghanistan?’ I asked.
‘Some,’ she said, and hesitated. ‘You know those servicemen – the ones who were killed, the Sangin Six – were regular army. They weren’t Special Ops.’
‘I know.’
‘And there’s restricted viewing on anything to do with Special Ops, Max.’
I nodded. We stared at each other for a bit. Then she sighed.
‘You can’t take anything away,’ she said.
And so Carol placed a fat green file marked UKSF on the desk and then made us two mugs of builder’s tea – they don’t do triple espresso in the Imperial War Museum – deftly if noisily manoeuvring her wheelchair in the cramped office as she got the kettle on.
I waded through pictures of Special Operation Forces in Afghanistan. There were endless images of heavily armed fighting men on what looked like the surface of the moon, all of them with their faces obscured. There were pixelated faces, blacked-out faces and smudged faces, and the men wore civilian clothing, camouflage gear and fleeces on rocky terrain that looked as though it was either searing hot or freezing cold, with nothing in between.
It looked like the harshest place on the planet, but the men seemed as happy as larks, posing proudly with their assault rifles on land where it looked as though nothing good could ever grow.
Many of them had beards but a few were cleanly shaven and as I sipped my strong sweet tea I found him, posing in profile in a T-shirt and cargo trousers that were stuffed with kit, his weapon held at a 45-degree angle.
I read, ‘The relevance of this photo is simply the weapon – an M249 SAW featuring the collapsible Para stock and a 200-round plastic assault pack. This operator wears civilian clothing.’
The top half of the operator’s head was blacked out but you could still see his smiling mouth.
The gap-toothed grin of my oldest friend was unmistakable.
‘Have you seen this?’ Carol said.
She was looking at the screen of her iMac. Blue lights swept a drab street in Wembley. The police tape was going up.
BBC BREAKING NEWS: HATE CLERIC FOUND MURDERED
Carol swivelled in her chair to look at me.
‘Is it true?’ she said. ‘Somebody just killed this bastard?’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Did they hang him?’
I closed the thin green file.
‘Shot him,’ I said, sipping my tea. ‘One in the head and one in the heart.’
Author’s Note
Strangely enough, Newgate Prison is still down there. It is true that not much remains of the country’s most notorious prison, but all that Max Wolfe discovers – the condemned man’s holding cell and Dead Man’s Walk, where the ceiling and the walls contract like a corridor in a nightmare – is, rather incredibly, still buried deep beneath the Old Bailey.
What remains of Newgate is not preserved or conserved, for nobody was ever proud of the London’s most notorious prison – chamber of horrors for eight hundred years, the human zoo, ‘the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted’. As Max suggests, no doubt one day it will all be swept away in a mad fit of rebuilding, but for now, it is still down there. You just go down to the basement of the Old Bailey. And then you keep going.
As for Albert Pierrepoint, whose name and image is appropriated by the Hanging Club, he was of course the nation’s executioner in the middle of the twentieth century, hanging 435 people, including 202 Nazis found guilty of war crimes.
Pierrepoint, by this time sickened of capital punishment, retired to work as a publican. He wrote in his autobiography, ‘Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.’
No doubt this is true. But as Sergeant John Caine asks Max Wolfe up in the Black Museum – ‘What’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’
Tony Parsons,
London, 2016.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Epub ISBN: 9781448185740
Version 1.0
Published by Century 2016
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright © Tony Parsons, 2016
Tony Parsons has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Century
Century
The Penguin Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Century is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781780892375