The Hanging Club (DC Max Wolfe) by Tony Parsons

made me smile.
    ‘You enjoying your summer holiday?’
    ‘It lasts forever.’
    I laughed.
    ‘It feels that way when you’re little. The bigger you get, the faster the time goes. Sleep now, angel.’
    ‘And you too.’
    ‘I will.’
    But after Mrs Murphy had gone home, I sat in the window, looking at the blaze of Smithfield meat market. Dozens of white-coated porters were unloading vans and trucks, but I couldn’t see Jackson.
    At midnight the five-ton clock bell of St Paul’s Cathedral – Great Tom, they call it – struck the hour and I called Edie. SO15 had sent a dozen surveillance officers to Marble Arch.
    ‘I can’t see the others,’ Edie said. ‘But then I guess that’s the point.’ I could feel her frustration. ‘Do you really think they’re going to leave a third body here, Max?’
    ‘It feels like a long shot because I don’t see how they can do it without getting collared. They must know we’ll be waiting for them. But at the same time, I don’t see how the crazy bastards can resist it.’
    I told Edie to go home.
    My old colleagues at SO15 would be out there all night. They would be the homeless man sleeping in Hyde Park, and they would be the courting couple snogging in the doorway of a closed department store, and they would be the late-night dog walker and they would be the dark figures sitting unnoticed in parked cars.
    And they would be waiting.
    I turned off the lights and was about to go to bed when I saw my MacBook Air on the kitchen table, exactly where I had left it. But the laptop was closed now and I was sure I had left it open. Stan stirred in his basket as I powered up.
    I went on Safari and hit Show History .
    And it wasn’t my history.
    Last visited today
    The Hanging Club – Google search
    @AlbertPierrepointUK – Twitter
    Mahmud Irani – YouTube
    Hector Welles – YouTube
    Tyburn – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    The Hanging Club – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Albert Pierrepoint – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Bringing Back the Death Penalty – Daily Mail Online
    ‘Let ’em dangle!’ – Sun Online
    Public executions are back – Guardian
    @albertpierrepoint – Twitter
    Darren Donovan – YouTube
    Darren Donovan – YouTube
    Darren Donovan – YouTube
    Darren Donovan – YouTube
    Darren Donovan – YouTube
    Vigilantes Hang Third Man – Daily Telegraph – Sunday Telegraph – Telegraph Online
     
     
    There was more. Much more. Reams of the stuff. I glanced towards the big windows where the lights of Smithfield shone. I had told my old friend that he could use my laptop whenever he needed it. It looked as though he had spent all day on it, reading about just one thing.
    I closed the laptop and went to bed. But when sleep came it seemed to abruptly jerk just out of reach, jolting me awake, and I spent hours trying to get comfortable, trying to empty my mind, trying too hard to fall asleep. I must have dropped off at some point because in the light period of sleep, the last part of sleep, when dreams come in the shallows, I found myself waking from a dream of Marble Arch in the darkness and slipping from my bed and walking to the window.
    It was still early, before five, but the rising sun was turning the great dome of St Paul’s as white as bone. And at the meat market, the night shift was over and Jackson was coming home.
    I watched him cross Charterhouse Street, grinning at something one of his workmates had said, and the light of the new sun was so dazzling on the front of his whiteporter’s coat that at first you could not tell that it was smeared with fresh blood.
     
    A few hours later I stood alone in MIR-1 looking at the floor-to-ceiling map of London and sipping a triple espresso from Bar Italia.
    Professor Hitchens came in with his motorbike helmet under his arm, already sweating inside his corduroy.
    ‘Tyburn,’ he said. ‘It’s a river, isn’t it? That’s where everything else comes from. Tyburn Road, Tyburn gallows – it’s all