And then suddenly it all went wrong. The man in the suit was half jumping, half falling from the stool, and the noose could not have been secured to the ceiling because although it was around his neck it didn’t stop him falling from the stool and then the camera was dropped and there was nothing to see and only the sounds of a furious struggle and the soft thud of punches thrown into flesh and bone and the weeping of a man who was suddenly aware that there was no escape.
As the camera was picked up, I saw some dark figures taking their places against a wall, standing like masked sentries under a single 8 x 10 inch photograph that had been attached to the wall of a smiling boy, perhaps eleven years old, wearing school uniform as he posed happily for the photographer.
I looked at the boy’s smile and I knew with total certainty that the man being forced onto the back of the stool had somehow killed him.
‘Do you know why you’ve been brought to this place of execution?’
Someone was kicking at the stool. The man flapped his arms and I saw that his hands were not tied. But the noose was still around his neck and now it was secured to the ceiling.
‘There’s four of them,’ John Caine said. ‘At least. Four that I can see. Black tracksuits – I think I saw a Nike logo. They’re all wearing tactical Nomex face masks – that’s what those masks are. The one who held the camera is the one who did the heavy lifting when the victim tried to do a bunk. A very big geezer. Can’t see much of the others.’
The man on the hanging stool screamed once.
‘No!’
‘But who is he?’ John Caine said. ‘And who’s the kid?’
The man in the suit hung.
With his hands unbound, he fought against the rope tightening around his neck more fiercely than Mahmud Irani had fought it, he clawed at his neck, he ripped and tore at it, he lashed wildly with his legs and he tried to scream in protest, although no sound was possible other than the terrible noise that a man makes when he is being strangled to death. But he fought more fiercely and so it was over more quickly.
The man stopped kicking. The screen froze, one spot of fresh blood on the eye of the lens.
‘Why don’t they just stab him in the eye?’ I said, getting out my mobile phone.
‘Because that would look like murder,’ John Caine said. ‘And – I’m just guessing here – they think that murder is too good for him.’
I watched the digital world react.
#bring it back
#bring it back
#bring it back
#bring it back
#bring it back
‘You want me to drive you to West End Central?’ John Caine said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But it’s faster to run.’
He was still staring at the screen.
‘Where is that place?’ he said, as if he should know.
7
I ran all the way to 27 Savile Row.
It was early in the evening but the heat was sticking to the city and I was soaked in sweat by the time I climbed the stairs to the top floor of West End Central. Major Incident Room One was already crowded.
DCI Whitestone was deep in conversation with our boss, DCS Swire, the Chief Super, as the two women stood before the giant TV screen, watching the man in the suit and tie hang one more time.
I realised with a jolt that they seemed relieved.
‘But are we sure?’ DCS Swire was saying in her hushed Margaret Thatcher voice. ‘Are we absolutely sure, Pat?
‘Yes, ma’am,’ DCI Whitestone said. ‘The victim is definitely an IC1.’
IC stands for identity codes and it is the system our people use to describe ethnicity. IC1 meant the man who had just been hanged was a white man of North European stock.
Mahmud Irani had been an IC4.
‘Good,’ said the Chief Super. ‘Then whatever the motive – it’s not race. Thank God for that!’
Edie Wren was furiously pounding her laptop as she conducted a conversation with Colin Cho of the Police Central e-crime Unit. TDC Billy Greene was on the phone fending off a reporter who had somehow been put through from the switchboard. And there was a shockingly attractive young woman I had never seen before who had her laptop plugged into one of the MIR-1 workstations. She was watching the same segment of the new film over and over again.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution? Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution? Do you know . . .’
She had a long pale face, very serious, and the kind of hair that doesn’t move so much as swing. When she leaned forward to stare at the screen her hair swung forward, like a long black veil falling over her serious face, and she pushed it back, biting at her lip with concentration.
‘DC Wolfe,’ I introduced myself to her. ‘Are you running some kind of voice analysis on that dialogue?
But she just glanced at me for a second and then turned back to the screens, pushing back the long black veil of hair, a glint of gold on the third finger of her left hand. So that was the end of that conversation.
Edie Wren looked up from her workstation. On the screen before her I could see the online traffic reacting to the second hanging.
United Kingdom Trends
#bringitback
#bringitback
#bringitback
‘It feels like it never went away,’ Edie said.
‘Who is she?’ I said, nodding towards the woman with the swinging hair.
‘Tara Jones. Speech analyst. Voice biometrics, they call it.’
‘Is she any good?’
Edie shrugged. ‘Tara’s meant to be the best. But she hasn’t given us anything yet.’
Then a mid-Atlantic voice called me.
‘Max? Come and have a look at this.’
Dr Joe Stephen, a forensic psychologist from King’s College London, was at a workstation with someone else I didn’t recognise, a bald but bearded middle-aged man with a sweat patch in the shape of Australia on the back of his corduroy jacket. They were also watching the hanging. And I saw that the man with Dr Joe was not middle-aged at all. Beyond the bald head and the beard he was perhaps only thirty but there was something prematurely aged about him. His head was remarkable – so oval that it looked like a rugby ball impersonating a hard-boiled egg.
‘Murder by hanging is almost unknown, isn’t it?’ the strange young man said.
Dr Joe nodded. ‘But the unsubs – sorry, the unidentified subjects – don’t think of it as murder.’ He had an American accent softened and smoothed by half a lifetime in London. ‘They clearly believe they are carrying out the death penalty for what they consider a capital crime.’
The young man nodded thoughtfully.
‘Capital from the Latin capitalis, of course,’ he said. ‘Literally regarding the head – a reference to execution by beheading.’
‘Max,’ Dr Joe said. ‘This is Professor Adrian Hitchens. He lectures in history at King’s College.’
I held out my hand but Professor Hitchens ignored it. He was looking at the frozen image on the screen before him, the last frame of this latest online execution – a glimpse of the worn, ruined brickwork of the kill site.
I took my hand away.
Perhaps he was thinking very deeply about where the kill site could be. Or perhaps he thought I was the janitor.
But my feelings were not too hurt. The Met are always wheeling in these experts for a bit of specialist advice. Some of them – like our resident psychologist Dr Joe – stick around for years. But most of them are wheeled straight out again when they prove to be no help with our enquiries. There was a very good chance that I would never see Professor Hitchens again.
Or the woman with the swinging hair.
The history man jabbed a fat finger at the screen. It was stained yellow with nicotine.
‘The building looks late Victorian,’ he said, more to himself than Dr Joe or me. ‘I’m guessing some kind of public works.’ He nodded at the dank white walls, stained green and yellow with the rot of a hundred years. ‘A madhouse? A prison? Yes, almost certainly late Victorian.’