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Back The Hanging Club Save as PDF
Chapters (49)
  1. About the Book
  2. About the Author
  3. Also by Tony Parsons
  4. Title Page
  5. Dedication
  6. Epigraph
  7. Prologue
  8. Part One
  9. 1
  10. 2
  11. 3
  12. 4
  13. 5
  14. 6
  15. 7
  16. 8
  17. 9
  18. 10
  19. 11
  20. 12
  21. 13
  22. Part Two
  23. 14
  24. 15
  25. 16
  26. 17
  27. 18
  28. 19
  29. 20
  30. 21
  31. 22
  32. 23
  33. 24
  34. 25
  35. Part Three
  36. 26
  37. 27
  38. 28
  39. 29
  40. 30
  41. 31
  42. 32
  43. 33
  44. 34
  45. 35
  46. 36
  47. 37
  48. Author’s Note
  49. Copyright

‘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?

3

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.