The Murder Bag
Dead Time
Fresh Blood
The Slaughter Man
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.
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.
For our Murder Investigation Team at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, West End Central, 27 Savile Row, the case had been straightforward. You could not call it routine, because a man having his life brutally taken can never be considered routine. But there was incriminating evidence all over the smartphones of these three blank-faced morons in the dock, and the blood of the dead man was all over their hands and their clothes. It was an easy day at the office for our CSIs.
We were not hunting criminal masterminds. When we arrested them, they still had fresh blood on their trainers. They were just three thick yobs who took it all much too far.
But the case felt personal for me.
Because I knew him. The dead man. That lost husband, that stolen father. Steve Goddard. Forty years old.
I had never met him in life but I knew what made him leave his house when the three yobs were urinating on his wife’s car. I understood him. I got it. He could have let it go – ignored the noise, the laughter, the obscene insult to his family and the street where he lived, the mocking of all that he loved.
And I could even understand that it made no rational sense at all to go out there in his carpet slippers to confront them. I could see why it was not worth it, why he should have turned up the television and drawn the curtains, and watched his children grow up and get married and have their own children, and why he should have stayed indoors so that he could grow old with his wife. I got all that.
But above all I understood why this decent man did not have it in him to do nothing.
‘Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?’ said the judge.
The jury spokesman cleared his throat. I felt Alice’s fingernails digging into my palm once more, deeper now. The faces of the three defendants – immobile with a kind of surly stupidity through most of the trial – now registered the first stirrings of fear.
‘Yes, Your Honour, we have,’ said the jury spokesman.
Juries don’t give reasons. Juries don’t have to give reasons. Juries just give verdicts.
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
‘Guilty.’
And juries have no say in sentencing. We all looked at the judge, a papery-faced old man who peered at us from under his wig and over his reading glasses as if he knew the secrets of our souls.
‘Involuntary manslaughter is a serious offence,’ intoned the judge, glowering at the court, his voice like thunder. ‘It carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.’
A cry of, ‘No!’ from the public gallery. It was a woman with a barbed-wire tattoo on her bare arms. She must be one of the boy’s mothers, I thought, because none of their fathers had been spotted for nearly twenty years.
The judge rapped his gavel and demanded order or he would clear the court.
‘Public concern and the need for deterrence must be reflected in the sentence passed by the court,’ he continued. ‘But the Criminal Justice Act requires a court addressing seriousness to consider the offender’s culpability in committing the offence. And I accept the probability that the deceased was dead before he hit the ground due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage, making this a single punch manslaughter case.’
‘But what does that mean?’ the youngest child, the boy – called Steve, like his dad – murmured to his mother, and she shushed him, clinging on to good manners even in this place, even now.
It meant they would be home by Christmas, I thought, my stomach falling away.
It meant the bastards would get away with it.
It meant that it didn’t matter that they had kicked Steve Goddard’s head when he lay on the ground. It did not matter that they had urinated on his body and posted it on YouTube.
None of that mattered because the judge had swallowed the defence’s evidence that the man who attacked three unarmed boys was dead before he hit the ground due to a pre-existing medical condition.
Get the right brief and you can worm your way out of anything.
‘I am also obliged to accept the mitigating factor of self-defence, as the deceased was attempting to assault the defendants,’ said the judge. ‘I note you are all of good character. And I therefore sentence you to twelve months’ imprisonment.’
It was over.
I looked at Alice Goddard’s face. She didn’t understand any of it. She didn’t understand why her husband was dead thirty years before his time. She did not understand what the judge had said or why the defendants were laughing while her two children were quietly weeping. I wanted to say something to them but there was nothing to say. I had no words to offer and no comfort to give.
Alice Goddard let go of my hand. It was over for everybody apart from her and her two children. It would never be over for them.
Alice was smiling, and it tore at my heart. A tight, terrible smile.
‘It’s all right, Max,’ she said. ‘Really. Nothing was going to bring my Steve back, was it?’
She was anxious to make it clear that she did not blame me.
I looked at the defendants. They knew me. I knew them. I had seen one of them weeping for his mother in the interview room. I saw another one of them wet his pants at the prospect of imprisonment. And I saw the other one empty-eyed and indifferent through the entire process, beyond recall, beyond hope.
When they had been arrested, and when they were questioned, and when they were charged, the three young men had seemed very different.
A coward. A weakling. And a bully.
Now they were one again. Now they were a gang again. Yes, they were going down, but they would be home in six months. Taking a life would have no real impact on their own lives. It would no doubt give them a certain status in the cruel little world they lived in.
The anger unfurled inside me and suddenly I was out of my seat and walking towards them. But the court bailiff blocked my path, his hands slightly raised to show me his meaty palms, but saying nothing and offering no threat if I dropped it right here.
‘Leave it, sir,’ he said.
So I did the smart thing. I did nothing.
He was a typical Old Bailey bailiff with a demeanour somewhere between a diplomat and a bouncer, and he looked at me sympathetically with the faintest hint of a smile – sad, not mocking – and I let the moment pass, choking down the sickness that came with the rage.
And my face was hot with shame.
The three youths in the dock smirked at me before they were taken down.
I had seen that look before.
Too many times.
It was the look of someone who knows they just got away with murder.
Later that day we watched the man hang.
We saw the film of his death on the big HDTV screen that’s on the wall of Major Incident Room One in West End Central, at first not sure what we were seeing, not even convinced it was real, still stunned by the fact that you can watch a man being executed online.
It was early evening and we were standing at our workstations, ignoring the phones that were ringing all over MIR-1, as the man was helped onto the kitchen step stool and a noose was slipped round his neck.
And the terrible exchange between the two men.
‘Do you know why you have been brought to this place of execution?’
‘What? This – what? I don’t understand. What? I’m a taxi driver—’
The voice of the first man muffled by some sort of mask. The voice of the second man choked with terror.
‘Who is he?’ DCI Pat Whitestone said.
‘IC4,’ said DC Edie Wren, running a hand through her red hair, her eyes not leaving the giant screen. IC4 meant the man – the one we could see, the one with the noose around his neck – was of South Asian descent. ‘Maybe forty years old. Unshaven. Jeans. Polo shirt. Lacoste.’
‘A Lacoste knock-off,’ I said. ‘The little crocodile’s looking in the wrong direction.’
‘Where is that place, Max?’ said Whitestone.
I took a few steps closer to the screen. The film was sharp but the room was dark. In the shadows I could glimpse white tiles or bricks, stained green and yellow by time and the weather.
I felt I had seen it before. It was some part of London that was just round the corner, and yet a hundred years away, and beyond the reach of memory. I took a step back.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘What are they doing to him?’ said Trainee Detective Constable Billy Greene.
Then the stool was kicked away and we did not speak as we watched the man hang, his body twisting and squirming in the air, and there was no sound but the strangled gurgling coming from his throat. When the hanging man began to soil himself the cameraman turned away and I caught glimpses – nothing more – of two or three figures in dark clothes, their faces covered in black masks, only their eyes showing, their backs pressed against those yellowing walls.
‘There’s three or four of them,’ I said. ‘Maybe more. Wearing ski masks. No, not ski masks – they’re tactical Nomex face masks, or something similar.’ A pause. ‘They know what they’re doing.’
The man’s face began to change colour as the life was strangled out of him. Then he was still and it ended. A film lasting ten minutes and twenty-one seconds that was suddenly trending all over the world.
‘You seen this hashtag?’ Edie said, hunched over her laptop. ‘It’s everywhere: #bringitback.’
‘Bring what back?’ said TDC Greene.
‘Play it again,’ said Whitestone. ‘Answer the phones, Billy. Find out where the hashtag comes from, Edie.’
Edie began tapping on her keyboard.
‘Does that look like a hate crime to you, Max?’ Whitestone said.
‘It looks like a lynching,’ I said. ‘So – yes, maybe.’
‘Here,’ Edie said, and then a panel appeared in a corner of the big screen.
There was a black-and-white picture of a smiling rabbit-faced man from the middle of the last century. The account was called @AlbertPierrepointUK. No message. Just the hashtag – #bringitback – and a link to the film.
‘It’s got just under twenty-five thousand followers,’ Edie said. ‘No – over seventy-eight thousand followers. Wait—’ She leaned back in her chair and sighed. ‘Wow, popular guy, this Albert Pierrepoint. Why is the name so familiar?’
‘Albert Pierrepoint was the most famous hangman this country ever had,’ I said. ‘He carried out more than four hundred executions, including a lot of the Nazis in Nuremberg.’
‘Metcall have had a 999,’ Billy said, putting down the phone. ‘From a woman who recognises the victim.’ He looked up at the screen and winced at the man once more locked in the final throes of agony. ‘The woman’s a Fatima Irani from Bethnal Green. The man is Mahmud Irani. Her husband.’
‘How do you spell his name?’ Whitestone said. ‘Got a DOB? Got a description of what he was wearing?’
Greene read from his notes. Then he looked up at the screen.
‘She said her husband was wearing jeans and one of those shirts with the little crocodile,’ he said, and stooped to retch into a wastepaper basket. It took him a moment to recover. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Play it again,’ Whitestone said. ‘Have a drink of water, Billy. Are you looking on the PNC, Edie?’
Edie Wren was running the name of Mahmud Irani through the Police National Computer.
‘He’s been away,’ she said, meaning the man had done time. ‘Did six years of a twelve-year sentence. He was part of the Hackney grooming gang. They targeted girls as young as eleven. A lot of the girls – but not all of them – were in care. Some of the gang got life. This Mahmud Irani was found guilty of trafficking – he’s a taxi driver. He was a taxi driver. He got off relatively lightly.’
We watched him hang for the third time.
‘Maybe not that lightly,’ I said. ‘If this is connected.’
A young Chinese man appeared in the doorway of MIR-1. He was Colin Cho of PCeU – the Police Central e-crime Unit, jointly funded by the Home Office to provide a national response to the most serious crimes on the Internet.
‘We’re looking for Albert Pierrepoint,’ he told Whitestone, nodding at the big screen. ‘He – they – seem to be using exactly the same tech as terrorists, pornographers and whistle blowers. The account is running through an anonymiser designed to hide all digital footprints. But it’s not Tor or 12P. It’s something we have never seen before. The site’s under a lot of pressure – political, media, users, concerned parents – to take the film down in the name of decency, but we’ve persuaded them to leave it up there while we try to trace the sender’s IP address. Off the record, of course.’
‘Thanks, Colin,’ Whitestone said, glancing at her phone. ‘Metcall tell us we’ve got a body. In the middle of Hyde Park. No positive ID yet.’ She looked at the screen and then at me. ‘But the responding officer says the deceased is wearing one of those shirts with the little crocodile.’
‘Hyde Park?’ I said. ‘The body was found in the actual park?’ I looked up at the screen, at the subterranean space with the stained white tiles. ‘They didn’t do this in Hyde Park.’
I thought of the underground car parks of the big hotels on Park Lane, running down the east side of Hyde Park. But none of them looked anything like the room where they strung up Mahmud Irani. That place was from some other century.
In the panel of the TV screen we could see that @AlbertPierrepointUK had gone viral.
TRENDS
#bringitback
#bringitback
#bringitback
#bringitback
#bringitback
‘I think somebody just brought back the death penalty,’ I said.
Edie pressed play and on the screen Mahmud Irani was about to hang again.
‘But who’d want to do that to him?’ said the new boy, TDC Greene, and I remembered that Hackney grooming gang and the thought came unbidden as I headed for the door.
Who the hell wouldn’t?
There was something strangely peaceful about standing in the middle of Hyde Park on a warm summer night, nothing moving out here but the Specialist Search Team doing their fingertip search off in the darkness, and the CSIs quietly getting kitted up as DCI Whitestone and I contemplated the corpse.
You could tell it was him.
There was enough moonlight to show the crocodile on his polo shirt was still facing in the wrong direction and what looked like severe burn marks around his neck.
So even before the divisional surgeon had arrived to officially pronounce death, and long before his next of kin had the chance to formally identify the body in the morgue, we knew the identity of the body lying under the trees of Hyde Park.
‘Mahmud Irani,’ Whitestone said quietly.
‘So it’s not a hate crime,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t killed because of his race or religion.’
‘All murder is a hate crime. Do you know what that gang did to those girls? They branded them, Max. Can you believe that grown men would do that to children?’ She shook her head. ‘Some people deserve to be hated.’
I looked away from the dead man and inhaled clean air. Hyde Park stretched on forever. Londoners always complain about how cramped and crowded their city is, but Henry VIII used to hunt wild boar right here. Even today, London was still a city with fields. The white lights of the West End burned bright from far away, an orange glow rising high above them, like the sun coming up on another planet.
Whitestone stared silently at the corpse.
She was a small, fair-haired woman in glasses, neither young nor old, and if you saw her on the train you would not think that she was one of the most experienced homicide detectives in London. I would not speak again until she spoke to me first, for these were the crucial minutes when the Senior Investigating Officer takes a look at the pristine scene, the body exactly where it had been found, letting it all sink in, learning what she can before we start filming, photographing and bagging evidence. Those last moments when the scene is untouched.
Even the blue lights of our response vehicles seemed very distant, as though they were waiting for a sign from the SIO; a large circle of blue lights in the darkness of the massive park, sealing us off from the outside world. I could see DC Edie Wren and TDC Billy Greene interviewing the Romanian men who had discovered the body while preparing for an illegal barbecue.
‘OK,’ Whitestone said. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
I raised a hand to the Crime Scene Manager and on her word the CSIs moved. I saw that our POLICE DO NOT CROSS tape now ran down the length of Park Lane and was patrolled every twenty metres or so by uniformed officers.
‘You’ve locked down all of Hyde Park?’ I said.
‘Because I can always bring the perimeter in later,’ Whitestone said quietly, her eyes not leaving the body. ‘But I can’t extend it later. Better to make the crime scene too big than too small. Let’s take a closer look.’
We wore blue nitrile gloves and white face masks and under the plastic baggies over our shoes we stood on forensic stepping plates that were invisible to the naked eye.
Whitestone and I both carried a small stack of the stepping plates – transparent, lightweight – and we carefully placed them on the grass before us as we created an uncontaminated pathway to the body. We crouched down either side of Mahmud Irani.
‘First hanging?’ Whitestone said.
I nodded.
She pointed with a gloved index finger at the livid, lopsided markings around his neck.
‘You only get that mark from hanging,’ she said. ‘Any other ligature strangulation will leave horizontal marks.’
‘But this is diagonal,’ I said. ‘It runs from low on the neck on one side to just below the ear on the other.’
Whitestone nodded.
‘Because the rope – or belt, or bed sheet, or wire, or whatever it is – angles towards the knot. See how deep it is? He was strangled by his own body weight. The rope compresses the carotid arteries, turns off the supply of blood to the brain. In judicial hangings, they used to snap the second cervical vertebra – the hangman’s fracture, they call it. More humane. These guys didn’t bother with any of that. They just strung him up. But hangings always look like this – the angled strangulation mark. What’s unusual about this one is that it’s not a suicide.’ She stood up. ‘Every hanging I ever saw until tonight – and I’ve had my share – was either deliberate or accidental suicide.’
‘Accidental suicide?’
‘Autoerotic asphyxia. You know. Sex games that kill you.’
‘Oh.’
‘It tends to be a male pastime, like doing DIY or watching cricket. Women seem less keen on autoerotic asphyxia. But strangulation apparently heightens the intensity of orgasm. And what could possibly go wrong?’ She nodded at the body. ‘What’s unique about Mahmud Irani is that his hanging was not for the purposes of masturbation or ending his life. It was murder. Who uses hanging to murder someone?’
I thought about it.
‘Somebody who wants revenge?’
‘No – somebody who wants justice.’ Her eyes scanned the park. ‘This is not the killing ground, is it? He didn’t die here.’
I thought of the white-tiled room where no light seemed to shine. And I thought of the underground car parks that were in this area, not just by Hyde Park but also under the grand hotels and the fancy car dealerships of Park Lane. None of them, as far as I knew, looked even remotely like the room in the film, which looked like somewhere that should have been torn down a hundred years ago.
‘So they chose to move him from the kill site to the dumping ground,’ I said. ‘Why would they do that?’
‘Makes it harder for us,’ Whitestone said. ‘Now we can’t run forensics on the kill site.’
‘Yes, but it makes it more dangerous for them. Why risk someone seeing them dump the body? Why not leave him where they’d strung him up?’
Whitestone thought about it.
‘Because they wanted us to find him,’ she said.
We watched the Specialist Search Team inching their way across Hyde Park on their hands and knees. In the distance, a German Shepherd from the Dog Support Unit began to bark.
‘What I could really use is the rope they did it with,’ Whitestone said, more to herself than me. ‘Ropes can speak volumes. The kind of rope. The kind of knot.’
Fierce white arc lights clicked on and lit up the scene like a film set. The body of Mahmud Irani looked horribly broken in the glare, the agony of his death imprinted on his lifeless face. The crocodile on his shirt stared off in the wrong direction, as if averting its gaze from the large stain on his jeans.
The Area Forensic Manager and his CSIs were already sweating inside their Tyvek suits, blue gloves and forensic face masks. A van with blacked-out windows came trundling across the parched grass. The mortuary van. And behind it I saw the great white marble arch that marks the junction of Oxford Street, Edgware Road and Park Lane. And something whispered through the trees, like the sigh of the uneasy dead.
‘This was Tyburn,’ I said. ‘Maybe that’s why they took the chance of dumping him here. The dump site could be part of a ritual killing. Maybe the most important part. Because this was Tyburn.’
‘Tyburn?’ Whitestone said. ‘The public gallows?’
I nodded. ‘The Tyburn tree – the three-legged gallows pole – was at Marble Arch. This spot was where London had its public execution site for almost a thousand years.’ The great triumphal arch glowed with the lights of the night. ‘Fifty thousand people were hanged right where we’re standing,’ I said. ‘And they weren’t just killing him, were they?’ I looked down at the body of Mahmud Irani and the lopsided wound on his neck. ‘They were punishing him.’
Just before three o’clock on a sun-soaked Monday afternoon, Stan and I waited for Scout outside the school gates, both of us struggling to contain our emotions.
Our small red Cavalier King Charles Spaniel was always excited at the school gates – all those kids, all that attention, all those compliments – but for me today was special because it was the last day of the school year.
And we had made it.
The children began to appear and the waiting crowd of parents surged forward.
I saw the long blonde hair of Miss Davies – my daughter Scout’s beloved teacher – and then there were little girls whose faces I recognised and finally Scout herself, carting a huge folder and wearing a school dress that was the smallest they had in stock but still came down well below her knees.
Miss Davies saw me and smiled, waved, and gave me a big thumb’s up.
I wanted to thank her – for everything – but too many parents were milling around her, giving her gifts, wanting a word before the long summer break, so Stan and I stood and waited at the school gates, his tail wagging wildly and his round black eyes bulging with excitement.
‘We watched a film because it was the last day,’ Scout said, by way of greeting. ‘It was about a Japanese fish called Ponyo.’ She spotted the face of a friend who she hadn’t seen for at least five minutes.
‘MIA! MIA! MIA-MIA-MIA-MIA-MIA!’
‘Bye, Scout!’
‘Bye, Mia!’
Scout gave me her folder stuffed full of the year’s work. Her name and class printed neatly on the front.
Scout Wolfe, 1D.
On top was one of her early works, a picture called ‘My Family’ that I remembered from last September. In the picture Scout’s family was just a little stick-figure man who didn’t even have a briefcase to call his own and a little girl with brown hair and a red dog. That picture had torn at my heart last year because the man and the girl and the dog had seemed lost among all that white space. But now it made me smile.
We made it!
We drifted away from the school gates, and all around us there were best wishes for the holidays, and plans being made to stay in touch, and I felt a sense of relief that was almost overwhelming.
All parents want the same things for their children. But the single parent wants something extra. The single parent wants to survive.
If Scout and I could get through the first year of school, then I knew we could get through anything.
She took Stan’s lead, wrapped it twice around her thin wrist, but the dog was still skittish, as if the thrills of the school gates had yet to wear off. He was sniffing a lamppost, wild-eyed and lost in his own world, that world of scent that dogs live in, when he suddenly looked up and spotted a well-groomed poodle on the far side of the road. Without warning, he tried to dive into the traffic and Scout had to hold him back with both hands.
I took the lead from her and we both stared at Stan, who only had eyes for the poodle on the far side of the road.
‘He’s reached sexual maturity,’ Scout said. ‘You’re going to have to face it, Daddy.’
The homeless man sat on the pavement in the shade of the great arched entrance to Smithfield meat market.
He wore an old green T-shirt, the sleeves far too long, threadbare camouflage trousers and combat boots with no laces. There was a baseball cap in front of him containing a few coins. Everything about him said ex-serviceman.
Without looking up, he spoke to us as we walked past.
‘Spare fifty grand?’
The line made me smile. It was a good line. Unexpected.
And then my smile froze because I knew that voice from years ago. Not the voice of this man but the boy he had once been. A time when I knew that voice as well as I knew my own.
I slowly turned and walked back to him, Scout and Stan following me. And he looked up – a light-skinned black man who had not shaved for a while, who had not slept in a bed last night, and who had not eaten properly for a long time.
But it was still him.
‘Jackson Rose,’ I said, and it wasn’t a question, because there was no doubt in my mind, and I saw the shock of recognition dawn on that familiar face.
‘Max?’
How long had it been? Thirteen years. Another last day of term in what was for us the last school year of them all. But for the five years before that, we had been closer than brothers.
One of those childhood friendships that you never find again.
I held out my hand and helped him to his feet and he grinned and I saw the gap-toothed smile I remembered, although one of his front teeth was chipped now, and we hugged, both laughing at the improbability of it all. Then we stood apart, shaking our heads. Time overwhelmed us.
I looked at his filthy army fatigues.
He looked at my daughter. And our dog.
And then we laughed again.
‘You’re a father?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘Yes.’
That gap-toothed grin. ‘Congratulations.’
‘Thanks.’
He held out his hand to Scout and she solemnly shook it.
‘Jackson Rose,’ he said.
‘Scout Wolfe,’ she said, and she watched him as he crouched down to make a fuss of Stan. ‘Are you my daddy’s friend?’
‘That’s right, Scout. And do you know what they say?’
Scout shook her head.
‘I don’t know what they say,’ she confessed.
‘You can make new friends,’ Jackson Rose said, looking at me. ‘But you can’t make old friends.’ He gave me that gap-toothed grin. ‘Isn’t that right, Max?’
‘You’re coming home with us,’ I said.
Something passed across his face.
‘I can’t come home with you and Scout,’ he said, looking away, and I saw that he was ashamed.
‘Why not?’
He hesitated for a moment then gave a short, embarrassed laugh.
‘Because I really need a shower,’ he said.
‘We’ve got a shower,’ I said.
Then I looked at Scout, wondering if she would be worried by the presence of a stranger under our roof. But she reached out and took Jackson’s hand.
‘My friend’s called Mia,’ she told him.
We took him home.
My plan was to order a Thai takeaway, or pizza, or whatever he wanted, but as soon as I mentioned food he was at the fridge door, looking at what we had.
‘I was a cook in the army,’ he said. ‘You like curry, Scout? Everybody likes curry, right?’
Scout looked doubtful. She had never tried curry.
‘This is a special curry,’ Jackson said, pulling out onions, carrots, chicken. Mrs Murphy, our housekeeper, kept stuff in there. I was more of a scrambled omelette man. ‘A Japanese curry,’ Jackson said, and I saw the boy he had been, and how nothing could stop him once he had decided on a course of action. ‘Not too spicy,’ he said, with a reassuring wink to Scout. ‘Don’t worry about a thing.’
And it was delicious. The three of us ate Jackson’s Japanese curry with the heat of the day wearing off outside, and Stan sleeping in his basket. When Scout had finished her first curry and gone off to her room, Jackson and I smiled at each other.
‘You’re sleeping rough, Jackson?’
He laughed.
‘Purely temporary. And what about you? Anybody else coming home?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s just us,’ I said. ‘Me and Scout. This is it.’
His big wide smile. Then it slowly faded. ‘What happened, Max?’
I wasn’t sure if I could explain it to him, or even to myself.
‘I met a girl, and we fell in love, and then we had a baby, and it was the most beautiful baby in the world. And then things were harder than we ever thought they would be. No money. Her career stalled. My job was all hours and maybe sometimes I was too wrapped up in it. And this girl, Jackson – she was a beauty.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Anne,’ I said, and I wondered if I would ever be able to say that one little name without a stab of pain. ‘And she met someone else. A good-looking guy with plenty of money.’
‘Nothing like you then?’
‘Nothing like me. She fell in love.’ I paused. This next bit was tough to talk about. ‘And got pregnant with his kid. Walked out on us. Now she’s got a new life, got a new family – and me and Scout, we had to get on with it, too. And we did.’
‘This Anne – she still see the kid?’
‘On and off. It’s patchy, to be honest. She’s busy with this new life. Happens all the time.’
‘Yes, it does. But it’s still hard.’
‘It’s actually not that hard because Scout is the best thing that ever happened to me, Jackson. And because it feels like everybody we know is rooting for us.’ I thought of Mrs Murphy. I thought of Miss Davies. And I thought of Edie Wren, who could talk to Scout more naturally than anyone in the world.
‘Lot of support,’ Jackson said.
‘We’re doing all right,’ I said.
The cardboard folder that Scout had brought home was on the dinner table. Jackson leafed through it.
‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Wife? Kids?’ I remembered how much girls had liked him. For his looks, and for his wildness, and for his lack of fear.
He shook his head.
‘Not me,’ he smiled, as if the thought had never even crossed his mind, and when he rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn, I saw how exhausted he was. ‘I’ve been too busy feeding the British Army.’
‘You’re worn out,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
I showed him the little spare room at the far end of the loft and he said that he might have a nap for a bit and I told him that was a good idea.
‘I’m glad to see you, Max,’ he said, and I knew that I would never have a friend like him again.
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Do you need anything?’
He smiled shyly and I cursed my stupidity.
Jackson needed everything.
When I came back with clean clothes, towels and toothbrush, he was standing by the window, staring down at the meat market. He had pulled off his boots, socks and T-shirt, and I saw that his entire torso – his back, his chest, and his shoulders – was one mass of scar tissue. The skin looked as though it had been torn off and then carelessly pulled back together. It was livid, corrugated, discoloured, and it made my throat constrict with shock.
‘What happened?’ I said, echoing his question to me.
‘I served my country,’ smiled Jackson Rose.
‘So that’s the plan?’ said Edie Wren early the next morning. ‘We work our way through the list of everyone who hated Mahmud Irani because of his conviction for grooming? That’s our MLOE?’
Major Line of Enquiry.
I nodded. She whistled.
‘Long list,’ she said.
‘Then we better get started,’ I said.
I had parked the BMW X5 in a courtyard of a low-rise block of flats on the hill that slowly rises from King’s Cross all the way to the Angel. We were in Islington, but this was not the Islington of cool cafés and million-pound studio flats. This was the other Islington, where the council houses stretched as far as the eye could see. Even this early in the day, the heat was building.
‘We run the TIE process on everyone who had good cause to hate the victim,’ I said.
Trace, Interview and Eliminate.
‘We’re doing this in the absence of the kill site,’ I said. ‘And in the absence of any other suspects, clues or leads.’ I looked up at the bleak block of flats. ‘Sofi Wilder was eleven years old when she met Mahmud Irani.’
‘Jesus,’ Edie murmured.
‘Now she’s eighteen. Sofi was one of the gang’s first victims, and has had a lot of physical and mental problems. Apparently she doesn’t leave her home.’
‘Why are we looking at this poor kid? Max, this is a total waste of time.’
‘Not Sofi,’ I said. ‘We’re looking at her father – Barry Wilder. Threats were made in the courtroom on the day of sentencing.’ I read from my notes: ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to hunt you down and fucking kill you. And there’s something else. The dad – this Barry Wilder – he’s been away.’
‘What for?’
‘Assault. Football violence. Twenty years ago.’
Edie looked doubtful.
‘Lynching a man is a bit different from giving the away supporters a good hiding,’ she said.
I shrugged.
‘Look what they did to his daughter,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
We got out of the car and found the flat.
Barry Wilder opened the door. He had a shaved head and a short-sleeved Ben Sherman shirt with fading tattoos on arms that had been built up by manual work rather than a gym. THE JAM, said one tattoo. MADNESS said another. He was a forty-something skinhead but he looked as though life had kicked all the aggression out of him. He glanced at our warrant cards but seemed too shy to make eye contact.
‘Mr Wilder? I’m DC Wolfe and this is DC Wren. We would like to ask you some questions about Mahmud Irani.’
He nodded. ‘All right. You don’t need to talk to our Sofi, do you?’
‘It’s you we’re interested in,’ Edie said, and he seemed relieved.
He let us into the flat.
A large, heavy-set blonde was sitting by the window, furiously smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke out into the warm summer day. Unfiltered Camels. Her mouth flexed with loathing at the sight of us.
Jean Wilder. Sofi’s mother.
‘Ma’am,’ I said, and my greeting was ignored, and she continued to smoke her cigarette as though she hated it.
Edie and I sat on the sofa, Barry Wilder in the armchair opposite us. I got a closer look at the body art on those thick arms. There were some ancient football tattoos, as faded as Egyptian runes. You couldn’t even tell if he was Tottenham or Arsenal.
‘You’re aware that Mahmud Irani has been murdered?’ I said.
I heard a door open, glimpsed the face of a young woman, frightened and pale, and watched the door silently close.
Sofi.
‘Mr Wilder, I hope you understand that we have to talk to you because of the relationship between Mahmud Irani and your daughter.’
The woman at the window exhaled.
‘They didn’t have a relationship,’ Mrs Wilder said quietly. She took a deep drag on her cigarette. ‘What do you think? They were boyfriend and girlfriend? Relationship! Why don’t you ever do your job? It’s not much to expect, is it?’
‘Ma’am,’ Edie said. ‘Please.’
‘You’re in my home,’ Mrs Wilder said, totally calm. ‘And you’re talking about my daughter.’
Edie looked at me and let it go.
‘I need to ask you about threats that you made on Mahmud Irani’s life,’ I said to the father.
Mrs Wilder stubbed out her cigarette with something like fury. But the big man in front of us nodded mildly, his hands rubbing together as if he was washing them.
I tried to make my voice as neutral as possible.
‘This is what you were heard to say in court, OK?’
‘OK.’
I read from my notes. ‘I’m going to kill you. I’m going to hunt you down and fucking kill you.’ I looked at the man. ‘Did you make those threats?’
‘Yes.’
Mrs Wilder came across the room. She had tried to cover the smell of cigarettes with smells that I knew – Jimmy Choo and Juicy Fruit chewing gum.
‘Do you have children?’ she asked me.
‘This is not about me, ma’am.’
‘Why are you scared to tell me the truth?’
‘I have a daughter,’ I said.
‘How old?’
‘She’s five.’
‘She’ll grow up,’ Jean Wilder said. ‘They always do. You can’t imagine it now but she’ll grow up so fast that it will make your head spin. And you should get down on your knees and pray to God that she – your daughter, who I am sure you love like you love nothing else in this world – never has a man like Mahmud Irani and his friends catch her scent. Because what we have been through in this family is worse than hell and it is worse than death and it could happen to anyone with a daughter in this country today. And the people who are meant to protect children? The policemen and the social workers and all the professional do-gooders? They look the other way when children are tortured and raped.’ A breath escaped her mouth, and she shook her head in wonder. ‘They look the other way.’
‘I do appreciate how much you’ve suffered,’ I said. ‘But this is a murder investigation and we are obliged to make enquiries.’
I turned to her husband.
‘Did you have any contact with Mahmud Irani after he was sentenced?’ I said.
But Jean Wilder spoke for him.
‘Barry didn’t do it,’ she said. ‘When was it? He was here. He’s here every night. We all are. The three of us. Where would we go? Why would we want the neighbours and people we don’t even know staring at us – pointing at us – looking at Sofi as if she was less than human. Yes, my husband said those things. Screamed those things at the top of his voice. No doubt he meant it at the time. Because when they were in the dock, they were laughing at us. Those stinking Paki bastards who wrecked our lives.’
‘Please,’ I said.
But she would not let it go.
‘You say you have a daughter,’ she said, as if there was the possibility that I might be lying. ‘What would you say if they treated your daughter like a sex toy and then they laughed at you?’
She was very close to me now. I could smell the unfiltered Camels and the Jimmy Choo and the Juicy Fruit.
‘I’ve had no contact with the man,’ Barry Wilder said quietly. No doubt he had been a violent youth when he was running riot at the football, but I could see no violence in the man now, only a bottomless sadness, and a grief that was never-ending.
He looked at the floor and washed his hands with each other.