The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) (23 page)

Tara Jones was standing outside New Scotland Yard.

There is an eternal flame in the lobby of New Scotland Yard, remembering the officers of the Metropolitan Police who died in the great wars of the twentieth century, and I paused by it to watch Tara Jones waiting out on the street.

Through the security fence I could see her standing by the revolving sign, a file in her hand, oblivious to the two young detectives who turned their heads to look back at her. She was one of those women who do not care very much about the effect they have on men. Or don’t care at all. I came through the revolving metal gates that let you out of the New Scotland Yard and walked up to her.

And it was only then that I realised that she was waiting for me.

‘They said you were dead,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘On the Internet.’

I smiled. ‘And it’s usually so reliable.’

She smiled back at me. We still had not touched.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Mustn’t grumble,’ I said. ‘I’m fine. Really. It all could have been a lot worse.’

‘I’ve got this for you.’

A double espresso from Starbucks. It’s the thought that counts. I took a sip.

‘Thank you.’

She shook her head. ‘Oh God, oh God.’

‘What?’

‘Your
neck
.’

There was a thick red welt around my neck that was hidden under my shirt collar apart from where the rope had angled up to the knot, leaving a livid stripe of raw flesh slashed from my Adam’s apple to left ear.

She touched my face with both her hands, her fingertips measuring the bones beneath my skin. I took her in my arms and lightly touched my mouth against her mouth. It wasn’t quite a kiss. It was as if we were seeing if our mouths were a good fit. The preliminary exploration was a success. They seemed to fit perfectly. They seemed to fit better than any other mouth I had ever known. We tried again, deeper this time. Then we broke abruptly away, suddenly aware that we were standing under the revolving sign outside New Scotland Yard. But she took my hand and would not let it go. We walked toward my car.

She was not smiling.

‘What just happened?’ she said, running a hand through her hair, the gold wedding band glinting in all that shiny blackness.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

But it wasn’t true.

I knew exactly what had happened.

It is when we are closest to death that we cling most strongly to life. It is when we can feel the chill of the grave on our skins that we crave the touch of warm human flesh. When we learn that we are all alone in the universe is exactly when we need another mouth. It is our most basic human impulse. The meaning of life is more life, I thought, pitching the empty Starbucks carton into a bin.

I squeezed her hand and smiled at her unsmiling face, and at that moment she was the only woman on earth that I wanted.

‘Do you want to get a real coffee?’ I asked her.

We drove to the Bar Italia.

I could have dropped the BMW X5 in the underground car park of West End Central and then we could have walked across Regent Street to Soho. That would have been the obvious thing to do. But I did not want to break the spell, I did not want her to change her mind about going for a proper cup of coffee, I didn’t want her to change her mind about me.

Because as I steered the big BMW around St James’s Park and Trafalgar Square and into the narrow streets of Soho, the spell between us felt like a fragile thing, as if it could dissolve at any moment.

Tara Jones stared straight out of the window and twisted the gold band on the third finger of her left hand and wondered what the hell she was doing with me.

‘Don’t you have to go to work?’ she said.

‘They gave me the rest of the day off.’

‘Because those men tried to kill you last night?’

I nodded. ‘Some guys have all the luck.’

I found a parking spot on Old Compton Street and we walked to Frith Street while I told her a brief history of the Bar Italia.

‘The Bar Italia has been in the same family for three generations now and they have their own secret blend of coffee that was invented by a man called Signor Angelucci who used to be next door and because their Gaggia coffee machine doesn’t have a water filter no salts are run through it—’

She stopped me with a look.

‘Max?’

‘What?’

‘You’re babbling, just a little bit.’

‘I’m nervous.’

She placed a kiss on my mouth. It felt good. Our mouths fit so well. Ridiculously, thrillingly well. I folded
her in my arms and when she spoke her voice was muffled against the lapel of my old wedding suit.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to be nervous with me.’

We came apart and she slipped her arm through mine and we walked down Old Compton Street into Frith Street like a proper couple, a real couple, and it felt so natural and right and she smiled when she saw the green neon sign that announces the Bar Italia.

We sat holding hands under the large poster of Rocky Marciano that the champ’s widow Barbara gave to the Bar Italia after he died because Marciano had always loved it here. But I didn’t tell her about Marciano’s relationship with the Bar Italia in case it led to some babbling. I kissed her mouth and drank a triple espresso and Tara had a cappuccino, and nobody took any notice of us because AC Milan was playing Inter Milan on the big screens and we were just another couple, lost in the backstreets of Soho.

‘I don’t know anything about you,’ she said. ‘And you don’t know me.’

‘You know me.’

‘What were you like as a boy?’ she said. ‘Did you get bullied?’

I thought about it.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was a bit different because I lived with my grandmother. But I had a friend who was
adopted. Jackson. My parents were gone and he never knew his mum and dad.’ I smiled at the thought of Jackson Rose as a kid. ‘We stuck together,’ I said. ‘For years.’

‘I was bullied every day,’ she said. ‘I went to a normal school. Horribly normal. They – some boys, a little gang – they said I sounded like a seal when I talked. You know? That noise seals make? They said that’s what I sounded like when I talked.’ She squeezed my hand, frowning at my face. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing.’

I wanted to hunt them down.

I wanted to find them.

I wanted to be in a room alone with them for . . . oh, thirty minutes should do it.

‘But it’s all right now,’ she said. ‘So don’t look like that. Smile again. Please?’

‘OK.’

‘It was only a few pathetic idiots. And it made me stronger. Children will pick on anyone who’s a bit different. And you,’ she said, gripping both my hands and shaking them. ‘You live with your daughter. Just you and her. I heard at the office. I don’t know who told me.’

‘Scout. She’s nearly six.’ Tara waited for some kind of explanation. I shrugged. ‘It happens.’ I smiled to soften the words. ‘I didn’t plan it. Nobody plans to be
a single parent. That’s the way it turned out. We were left to get on with it. And we did. We do.’

‘It must be hard.’

I shook my head.

‘Scout makes it easy. And it’s not really just the pair of us. There’s Stan, our dog. And we’ve got a lot of support.’ I thought of Mrs Murphy and her family. I thought of Scout’s buddy, Mia, and her family. I thought of my colleagues up at West End Central, who always found a spare desk and some pens and paper for drawing whenever I had to bring Scout to work. I thought of Edie Wren.

‘There’s a lot of people around us who want us to make it,’ I said.

‘I don’t know how you do it. Aaron – my husband – and I find it tough enough with a full-time nanny.’

I didn’t want to hear about Aaron the husband. I didn’t want to think about any of that. Not today. Not in here. So I touched her hair. Her shining, swinging, fabulous hair. I had wanted to do that for quite a while.

‘It needs a wash,’ she said.

‘Yes, it’s a disgrace,’ I smiled. ‘I don’t know how you have the nerve to step out of the house.’

‘Funny man. I’ve never seen you in a suit before,’ she said, running her fingers under the lapels of my jacket.

‘I got married in this suit,’ I said, and when I looked down at her hands on my lapel I saw that the blue wool
was shiny with time. I had never noticed that before. My wedding suit was old.

She brought her face close to mine.

‘You should get a new one,’ she whispered.

She gave me a coffee-flavoured kiss and slipped off the stool. ‘Time to get back to the real world,’ she said.

The traffic was unmoving on Shaftesbury Avenue when we started back to West End Central so I put on the blues-and-twos and everything that blocked our path quickly got out of the way.

‘Oh
God!
’

Tara sank deep into her seat, laughing with some combination of embarrassment and delight as the two-tone siren howled and the grille lights blazed and London made way.

We laughed out loud all the way back to Savile Row.

And it was only hours later, after Scout had fallen asleep on the sofa reading a book called
I Like This Poem
and the bells of St Paul’s were chiming the hour that I suddenly realised Tara Jones had never heard the sound of the blues-and-twos.

I was jolted from sleep when my phone began vibrating on the small bedside table, moving in jerky little circles as if it had a life of its own. I swung my legs out of bed. Six a.m. and the sky was still almost black. The days were getting shorter.

A woman was crying at the other end of the line. It took me a moment to realise that she was Alice Goddard.

‘They are going to let one of them out! They are going to let him off! Max, he’s going to get away with killing my husband!’

‘Slow down, Alice. What’s happening?’

She got it out. One of the gang who had killed Steve Goddard was trying to get his verdict declared unsound.

‘Which one?’ I said, although I could already guess.

‘The one who filmed it on his phone. Jed Blake. Do you remember him? He’s saying – he’s saying he didn’t take part, that it was nothing to do with him . . .’

I remembered all three of them. The coward. The weakling. And the bully. They had been cocky enough in Court Number One of the Old Bailey but far less impressive when I had first encountered them in Interview Room 2 at West End Central.

I had seen the bully blank-faced with callous indifference, too stupid to realise the enormity of what he had done. And I saw the weakling wet himself at the prospect of a prison sentence.

And I saw the coward – Jed Blake – crying for his mother, head in his hands as if he could not bear to look at the interview room, repeating over and over again that he had not laid a fist or a boot on Mr Goddard, that he had just pointed his phone and pressed
record
.

‘Listen to me, Alice. It sounds like this Jed Blake creep is seeking permission to appeal. The judge at their trial decided that they were all in it together. But Blake’s lawyer is probably going to argue that his conviction was unsound because they were not all in it together.’ The words stuck in my mouth, but I had to spell it out to her. ‘Because Blake was only filming what happened and not taking part in the beating.’

I heard her crying into the phone. Quietly now, knowing this was no nightmare. This was her life.

Her voice was very small. ‘But what does it all mean? He’s not really going to get out, is he?’

‘Alice – if it goes to appeal, I can’t tell you what way it’s going to go. I’m not a criminal lawyer. And even if I was, I still couldn’t call it. But if Blake seeks permission to appeal, he has to file what they call a Form NG – Notice and Grounds of Appeal, setting out what his lawyer says was wrong with his conviction. If the Form NG is granted by the judge, then it goes to the Court of Appeal at the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. And if the judge there decides it’s an unsafe conviction, he could walk. I’m really sorry.’

Sorry this world will not leave you alone. Sorry I can’t do anything to make it better. Sorry your husband got kicked to death for defending his family.

‘I’ll be there with you,’ I promised. ‘You don’t have to go through this alone. I’ll be right by your side in the courtroom.’

But by then she had hung up.

I walked into the loft and stood by the large windows, watching the sun come up over the rooftops of Smithfield and the Barbican, first light shimmering on the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral and, even closer, the bronze statue on top of the Old Bailey, blindfolded Lady Justice, her outstretched arms perfectly balanced between the scales in her left hand and the sword in her right.

And although the blindfold Lady Justice wears was meant to make all her judgements seem impartial and
wise, today it just made her justice seem random and mindless and cruel.

Stan watched me carefully from his basket and when I went to the door and began putting my boots on, he padded over, his round eyes shining and his tail wagging with delight. We went downstairs and into the street, the Cavalier so relaxed by my side, his old leather lead so loose, that it felt as though we didn’t need it at all. We were walking past Smiths of Smithfield when out of nowhere he tried to dash out into the traffic.

The lead snapped tight and a black cab flew past, inches from his head, its horn blaring.

I crouched down to look into my dog’s face. Those great black marbles of eyes were wild and his tongue – as pink as Duchy of Cornwall organic ham – lolled out of his panting mouth. He sniffed the morning air, savouring some perfume that only he could detect.

‘What’s wrong with you, Stan? Christ almighty, you could have been killed!’

And then I saw the woman with her white miniature poodle on the other side of Charterhouse Street. I looked at Stan. He panted some more, and he wouldn’t meet my eye. I shook my head with disbelief.

‘That’s why you would get yourself killed?’ I said. ‘Just for a sniff of some girl dog?’ I pushed my face close to his and he licked my nose, trying to make amends. ‘Listen to me.
Don’t make me do it.
I don’t want
to take you to the vet’s, OK? I don’t want to have you . . . done. But I will if you keep throwing yourself into traffic.’