He looked at the floor and washed his hands with each other.
‘I said those things, yes, I did say them, I don’t deny it, but I didn’t see the man since the trial, not until they showed that film on the Internet.’ At last he looked me in the eyes. ‘The film of him being hung,’ he said.
We stared at each other in silence.
And then I thanked him and stood up.
Jean Wilder followed us to the door.
‘You useless bastards!’ she said. ‘You tiptoe around these gangs because you’re terrified of looking racist.’
I turned to look at her.
‘Mrs Wilder, I don’t tiptoe around anyone,’ I said quietly. ‘I was not a part of the investigation into Mahmud Irani and the Hackney grooming gang that abused your daughter and neither was DC Wren here. Those men were criminals and they got what they deserved.’
She pushed her face close to mine. Too many cigarettes, I thought. And too much Jimmy Choo.
‘She could have loved someone,’ she said. ‘My Sofi. And she could have gone to college and she could have had a normal life, but that’s all gone now.’
I opened the door. Jean Wilder reached across me and closed it. She had not finished with us yet.
‘Do you know what they did to her?’ she said ‘To all those girls? You think you know – because you skimmed some report or you caught it on the news. But you don’t know. They flattered these children, and gave them attention, then filled them with booze and drugs and took them to rooms where men were waiting. Dozens of the leering, stinking bastards. They gang-raped these children. They filmed them. They invited their friends round. All their stinking Paki cousins and Paki brothers. They branded them.’ A rage and grief swelled up inside her and it was no different from vomit. She choked it back down. ‘They put cigarettes out on their bodies and laughed about it. They fucking laughed. My daughter – my little girl – my baby – has cigarette burns on her breasts and buttocks—’
Barry Wilder roared.
‘ENOUGH!’
Jean Wilder’s eyes were shining as she watched her husband lumber towards us. She placed a hand on her husband’s arm, and patted it once.
‘He had nothing to do with it,’ she said, suddenly very tired. ‘But you know what? I wish he did!’
I gently opened the door.
And this time she let me.
‘And what would you do, Detective?’ she said, laughing at my eagerness to get out of that broken-hearted home. ‘If it was your daughter – in those rooms – with those men – what would you do about it?’
I said nothing.
I couldn’t look at her.
She followed us to the door.
‘You catch them?’ she said. ‘The men that hanged Mahmud Irani? Give them a medal.’
We were walking to the car when I looked up and saw the face of the girl at the window. Sofi. The curtain closed and she was gone. Edie and I didn’t speak until we were back in the car.
‘You didn’t answer her question,’ Edie said. ‘What would you do if it was Scout, Max?’
‘Oh, give me a break, Edie.’
We both knew what I would do.
6
There is a hanging tree in the Black Museum.
It is a horizontal wooden triangle supported by three legs and it rests in a quiet corner of what is officially known as the Crime Museum. It is draped with perhaps two dozen hangman’s nooses, all individually labelled with the name of the man or woman they executed.
‘It’s a replica of the triple-tree at Tyburn,’ said Sergeant John Caine, the keeper of the Black Museum. ‘The gallows was portable, and that’s one of the reasons that nobody can ever agree about where Tyburn actually stood, although they were hanging people there for centuries.’ He sipped from a mug that said BEST DAD IN THE WORLD. ‘They moved it about, see.’
I touched one of the nooses.
It was just four thin strands of rope running through a metal eyelet to form the noose. Other ropes were much thicker, twice the size, strands of heavy rope woven together and running through a big brass thimble to form the noose.
‘The thin ones date from the eighteenth century,’ Sergeant Caine said. ‘The thicker ones are more modern. They go all the way to 1969, when the death penalty was abolished in this country.’
‘You’ve got a lot of ropes in here, John. I never noticed before.’
‘We’ve hanged a lot of people in this country. You could fill a stadium with the people they hanged at Tyburn alone. Some of these nooses date back to 1810 when there were 222 offences that were punishable by hanging, including robbing a rabbit warren and shoplifting.’
‘But why would anyone use hanging to murder someone?’ I said, touching one of the nooses as if it would reveal the answer. ‘Why not just shoot them or stab them?’
‘Because they want revenge,’ said Sergeant John Caine. ‘Let me show you something.’
It was a battered black leather suitcase. Inside was a length of rope, a leg strap and a hood that had once been white but was now yellow with age, folded as neatly as a handkerchief.
‘This is Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase,’ John Caine said. ‘People misunderstand Pierrepoint. They forget how important he was to this country. He didn’t simply represent punishment. He represented justice – right up until capital punishment started being seen as wicked and cruel and not very nice. But before that, Pierrepoint was a national hero. Who do you think hanged all those Nazi war criminals after the Second World War? Old Albert went to Germany twenty-five times in four years and strung up over two hundred Nazis. Not that he enjoyed it much, because they were making him do job lots – a dozen or so at a time. Old Albert was a bit of a perfectionist, with a lot of professional pride in his work.’ He had a sip of his tea. ‘The people who killed this child abuser – they use a picture of Pierrepoint online, don’t they?’
I nodded.
‘So they want justice,’ I said. ‘They want revenge.’
John gently closed Albert Pierrepoint’s suitcase. ‘And what’s wrong with a bit of revenge?’ he said.
My phone began to vibrate. EDIE WREN CALLING, said the display. Her voice was tight with adrenaline.
‘We’ve got another hanging,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it.’
‘I’ll be back in the office in fifteen minutes,’ I said. ‘I’ll watch it then.’
‘Max,’ she said. ‘Go online and watch it now.’ Edie Wren took a breath. ‘This one is live.’
We watched the second man hang on John Caine’s computer.
At first it looked like exactly the same set-up with the camera aimed up at a terrified man standing on some kind of stool as the same voice asked the same question.
‘Do you know why you’ve been brought to this place of execution?’
But the picture was far sharper, and there was a date and time stamp running in the bottom right-hand corner, as if they wanted the world to know that this public execution was going out live.
It was the same room. You could see the walls more clearly this time, and they seemed to be rotting with age, brickwork that was once white crumbling to yellow and green and brown.
‘Where’s that look like, John?’
We leaned in closer. I heard John Caine quietly curse.
‘I feel like I know,’ he said. ‘But I don’t remember.’
The condemned man on the stool was babbling with terror. There was a rope being placed around his neck and it snaked off out of shot to the ceiling. He was a much younger man than Mahmud Irani, and dressed in a suit and tie. And white.
‘Do you know—’