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.

Copyright

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Epub ISBN: 9781448185740

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Published by Century 2016

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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

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781780892375