Time to Die

32

‘Not knowing is not shameful, not asking is.’ That was the meaning of the proverb. It was time to ask for a favour. If Hassan demurred, Enver would call his father, the imam. Enver texted Hassan, who he’d always got on well with, and checked the shift patterns of Julie Demirel, Hassan’s wife. She was working that day and would be home about five. The other question was, yes, she’d be working Thursday. Enver arranged to meet her that evening. He could imagine the puzzlement his request to see them would have caused. Enver rarely left London. He’d never been to their house before, although they probably saw him at least a dozen times a year when they came up to London, to Southgate, home of the extended Demirel family, for family do’s. He thought there was a reasonable chance they’d cooperate.

With luck, they would know where the boy was being held within twenty-four hours. He texted Hanlon to that effect and got a laconic ‘good’ by way of reply.

Enver put his phone away. His police station was frenziedly busy. The Reynolds disappearance may have elbowed the Whiteside shooting off the front pages but Whiteside was one of their own. The thoughts of most officers were centred on the Whiteside shooting. He was still in a coma, stable but with an uncertain prognosis. In everyone’s mind was the thought that whoever had done this was quite likely to kill again, or had killed before. Although Whiteside wasn’t dead, the attempt on his life had been unambiguous and so it was being investigated by a murder investigation team. This MIT was being led by DCI Simon Harding, an affable, well-respected officer with a reputation for pedantic thoroughness. The MIT team in charge of the Yilmaz family was still in the charge of DCI Murray. They’d been elbowed to one side in terms of importance by the Whiteside shooting. Both teams were working out of the same station, the two incident rooms separated by a corridor.

Supervising the two MIT teams was the Specialist Crime Directorate’s Homicide Command, represented here by DCS Ludgate. Despite his dislike of Ludgate on a personal level, Enver was impressed by the stamina and energy that Ludgate was putting into everything. He was inspirational. He guessed maybe these cases would be Ludgate’s last hurrah before he retired, and he wanted to leave with a reputation enhanced by the investigations. There were about thirty police working on the Whiteside shooting alone; the station was full to bursting. The only quiet room in the place was Hanlon’s office-cum-storage facility.

Baby Ali’s death and the Yilmaz disappearance had slipped far down the agenda. His investigative team numbered four: DCI Murray, heading it, Enver, and two constables. There was no media interest in the child’s death and none of the crusading zeal that a cop killer creates amongst his fellow officers. There was no ‘it could have been me’ or ‘there but for the Grace of God’ feeling about the Yilmaz family. They were a footnote now in Haringey’s crime stats. There was even, as Corrigan had predicted, a growing feeling that maybe they hadn’t been killed. The theory was that faced with the possibility of deportation, the Yilmaz family had staged their disappearance. And there was no proof they were dead. After all, where were the bodies?

Murray, as far as Enver could see, was doing everything reasonably well. He was a conscientious officer despite the rumours that the Yilmaz family was alive. Until the axe fell on the investigation, and he was secretly convinced the time was not very far away, he’d do his best. With Enver he was very hands off. He was inclined to leave Enver very much to his own devices after Corrigan’s descent on the investigation. He issued Enver with basic investigative duties, particularly liaising with the local community and the sexual assault unit together with the child abuse unit.

Murray was investigating racial attacks on Turks as well as the obvious paedophile angle. Enver felt increasingly uncomfortable watching the vast display of resources that the two investigations were consuming. The media briefings, the endless interviews, the progress meetings, the liaison committees that were needed to make sure that nobody else was holding a vital piece of the jigsaw, the logjam of logistical problems as detectives were taken away from different cases — when two people, he and Hanlon, knew who was responsible. Or, more accurately, he felt, thought they knew who was responsible.

Then there was the ongoing fact of Peter Reynolds’ disappearance. That was the real focus of most of the Met’s resources. It was Whiteside’s misfortune to have been shot when something as newsworthy as Peter’s disappearance had happened. It was a huge news story. BBC, ITV, Sky, and all the newspapers were covering it. Hanlon’s point, that there was no way of knowing where he was being held except via Anderson, was horribly true. Enver didn’t know what she’d said to Anderson to get him to cooperate, but obviously it wasn’t police approved. Given that, would they even be able to legally act on the information as to where the boy was? It had after all been acquired through torture. A human rights lawyer would say they had no right to act on it, even if it meant the rape and murder of Peter. Bingham’s rights had been well and truly violated. It was all so difficult.

Many times Enver had wondered if he was doing the right thing. Should he go directly to an increasingly harassed Ludgate? The DCS was doing a difficult job with tremendous skill and energy. He was at almost every key meeting for the investigations, he put in a staggering amount of hours and, since he was coming to the end of his career, none of this would result in promotion or financial reward. Maybe, Enver felt, he should go to the assistant commissioner? As far as he could tell, Hanlon’s decision to play this alone was based mainly on a feeling that somewhere in the police force, Conquest had a source of information. That to involve the Met would be to tip off Conquest. But there were many informants in the Met. It went with the turf. If you adopted that attitude, nothing would get done. You might as well give up and go home. Or, if you were concerned about the Met, you could use a neighbouring constabulary. Surrey, Herts or Kent and Essex, for example. What if Hanlon’s go-it-alone policy was directed purely by personal revenge and she had suckered him in to help. Yes, she was charismatic, but so, by all accounts, were the Kray twins. That didn’t make them wise leaders.

One of Enver’s worst fears as well was that Corrigan was right. That she was going to take the law into her own hands and he would end up arrested as an accomplice to a police execution. That Hanlon would blow Conquest’s head off in revenge for Whiteside. He certainly believed her capable of it. His own defence would look pathetic. I helped her because I believed in her. That was no defence at all.

Enver’s own emails to Corrigan had been masterpieces of selective information and factual avoidance. He had been greatly helped by Fordham not making official his feelings that Hanlon was behind the Bingham attack. His own concerns about the DI’s behaviour he kept to himself.

Looked at dispassionately, Hanlon created chaos. She was anarchic. Arguably, it was her fault Whiteside had been shot. She had undeniably already got one prisoner severely injured, with another locked down, and induced a state of simmering tension into a maximum-security prison. He suddenly wondered how Julie would react to being asked to help the person indirectly responsible for all of this. The person who had created havoc at HMP Wendover, her place of work.

Enver shrugged to himself. He was innately fatalistic and he knew, deep down, he believed in Hanlon. He’d keep helping until some kind of conclusion was reached. To that end, he picked up the phone and called his cousin.

Conquest stepped into his car and drove out of the underground garage he’d had built under the mansion in the Bishops Avenue, then headed for the North Circular. Underground was the new black for property developers. Whole streets in Knightsbridge, in Camden and Chelsea were being underpinned as builders — despite the anguished objections from neighbours, lives blighted by dust, noise and vibration — dug deep down to add extra floors to already large houses. Conquest’s own property company didn’t handle very much high-end housing but he often thought to himself, who would really want an underground swimming pool and an underground cinema? How often were things like that ever used? They were the multimillionaire’s equivalent of a pasta-maker. Nobody ever used them. In years to come, he thought, a new generation of property developers will be ripping all this out, wondering what had got into people at the time. He smiled at the thought. He was hugely happy.

He slid a CD of Furtwängler conducting Wagner’s Die Meistersinger into the slot on his Bose in-car music system, and pointed the Maserati in the direction of Essex. Now there was something that had stood the test of time. Music and sex, they’d go on forever. He pressed the accelerator and felt the surge of power and the roar of the engine complementing the beauty of Wagner’s opera. The Yilmaz family was gone; in a fortnight the investigation, although officially open, would cease. Whiteside was no longer a threat; soon his police insider would start rumours it was a gay ex-lover who might be behind it, and according to his police source, the Reynolds investigation was going nowhere. The music was golden, the car was golden, everything was golden, especially his future.

The judge relaxed with a glass of champagne at Brussels Airport, waiting for his flight to City Airport London. It had been a productive couple of days. For the judge, productive was synonymous with fun. He had a huge capacity for hard work, and the meal last night at Bruneau had been memorably wonderful — even better than he had expected. It was over the chocolate dessert, as miraculously light as he’d hoped, that he’d learnt unofficially the job was now his for the taking. That meant many more agreeable Michelin-starred lunches, as well as a wonderfully generous pension when he retired and first-class travel complete with chauffeured limousines. But these were fripperies. These were his already.

The best thing about his new job, of course, was the power aspect. To be President of the European Court, that had a ring to it that the judge found exceptionally pleasurable. He would be more powerful than a Prime Minister or Chancellor or Home Secretary. They would come and go on the whim of an electorate, while he carried on, above all of that. His judgments could determine the fate of states. What enhanced the feeling was the knowledge that two of his UK colleagues, who he knew coveted the post, would not get it. When you reach the judge’s eminence, when you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, it’s not just enough that you succeed; others must fail. He lifted the champagne flute aloft in a silent toast to his own glittering future.

But later, as he took his seat on the small BAE 146 Whisper Jet that would fly him back to his luxury penthouse in the City, it wasn’t the career triumph that was foremost in his mind. It was the delights that were waiting for him on Strood Island.

Come Unto Me.

The judge didn’t know the name of the boy, or his background. These were unimportant and, anyway, he didn’t know or care what would happen to the child after he had finished with him. He would cease to exist, Conquest would see to that. But before he met his maker, the boy would fulfil a destiny of sorts as the boy bitch for Europe’s most brilliant legal mind. He would be wearing his mask, as suggested by Bingham.

He owed Bingham a lot for that suggestion. It had been so liberating. Before the mask he had been consumed with fear that he might somehow be recognized by one of his infrequent boy-prostitute lovers. Bingham had mocked this idea. Rent boys do not know the faces of prominent judges. But he could envisage a chance glimpse of his face on TV or a newspaper, the rent boy phoning a red-top, the reporters digging deep. If only we had a sensible anti-privacy law, thought the judge, like they do in France, then I wouldn’t even need to worry about things like this. The Leveson Inquiry would put the brakes on journalists, who the judge feared more than anyone, but it wouldn’t stop them. He turned his mind away from thoughts about how best to muzzle the press. In Europe he’d have more power to try to curb their excesses. It would be a tragedy for the law if unwelcome journalistic investigations were turned on the judiciary. Ordinary people did not understand how judges’ minds worked and they should not be accountable to the electorate. They were the ones in charge; they served Justice itself.

The judge found himself salivating at the thought of enjoying the child, of running his learned tongue over the boy’s flesh that evening. Every night he’d thought about the boy and what he would do to him in great detail. He had dreamed about removing his clothes, running his wrinkled hands over the boy’s smooth body. The judge had a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness, he was proud of it, and Peter Reynolds would get to appreciate this gift in the flesh. Not many people have the chance to make their dreams come true. The judge was one of the select few.

You were allowed to use your phone on the plane. The judge emailed Conquest to see if he could come down that night. The answer came back immediately: yes. The judge smiled in delight and sent some instructions as to how he wanted the child preparing for that evening’s entertainment. He would have three days with him. He breathed deeply in excited anticipation. Three days, seventy-two hours. He would make the most of every minute. Carpe diem. It’s what he deserved. It was, after all, only just. God, he was excited.

Peter counted the scratches on his cell wall. One scratch per injection, that meant four scratches per day. He now had eighteen, so he figured that today was still Wednesday. When there was no clock, no natural light, it was hard to keep count. The hatch on his door rattled and opened and his evening meal, tonight a pasta salad with tuna, was delivered. Today he’d given in to unhappiness and, hiding his head in Tito’s fur so no one could see, cried a little. He was so alone and he didn’t know why he was here or, worse, how long this would last. The dog sensed his misery and gently licked his face and hands, which comforted him a little. He so wanted his mother.

He drank the lemon-flavoured water that had come with his meal and gave himself an insulin injection based on the carb count on the tuna salad packaging. Shortly after he’d eaten, he started yawning deeply. He was feeling very tired all of a sudden. It crossed his mind that he might have been drugged but he was too sleepy to care, and before he did actually fall asleep, he thought, I don’t mind anyway, perhaps when I wake up it’ll be in my own bed, perhaps I’m going home.

And forty miles away in London at the City Airport, Lord Justice Reece walked down the metal staircase from the plane, down to the black tarmac. There was a smile of happy anticipation on his lips. Tonight’s the night, he thought, tonight’s the night.