Time to Die

5

Patrick Cunningham was starting to go crazy. He knew this, but it was so much part of the craziness that had taken over his life that he had come to accept it as normal.

He impatiently parked his red Porsche in a residents-only parking bay. He wasn’t a Notting Hill resident himself, but he’d represented a fair few of them in court and felt more than entitled. He hurriedly walked across the road into the upmarket pub. All the bars in Notting Hill seemed to have been gentrified since the film with Hugh Grant. He ran his eye along the bottles in the refrigerated cabinet behind the barman and ordered a Kirin. He stood by the bar, pretending to read a Metro, the free London newspaper, one eye firmly, and, if he were honest, slightly desperately, fixed on the clock above the optic rack.

The doors had just opened and there were only another two customers, their rosy faces witnesses to their owners’ early starts and late finishes in the pub. It was 12.15 p.m. Cunningham had a hell of a coke habit. That was his problem, the root source of the craziness. The motherlode.

Today he’d rescheduled face-time with a client to see Toby Manning, his dealer. It was extremely unprofessional. This was far from the first time he’d done this. He was beginning to run out of plausible excuses for cancelled meetings and, maybe more worryingly, he was beginning not to care. Work was becoming almost an irrelevance.

Cunningham’s own chambers were becoming both perplexed and alarmed at his behaviour. Eyebrows were beginning to be raised by his erratic work habits. He didn’t care. Real life was cocaine-centred; it was dominating his life. He was either doing coke, getting coke or thinking about coke. Then Toby had texted him to say he couldn’t come and he was sending an associate, but not to worry, the guy was reliable.

Come on, come on, come on, thought Cunningham to himself impatiently. He didn’t drum his fingers on the polished wooden bar counter but he felt like doing so.

He drank some lager. He didn’t want lager, what good was that to him. He wanted Charlie.

Then, at twelve thirty, as promised, the dealer appeared. Cunningham knew it was him as soon as he walked through the door. The lawyer breathed a huge sigh of relief. It wasn’t as if the man was dressed in a hip-hop, pimped-up style, like some of Cunningham’s wealthier, cash-rich, clients. He was dressed inconspicuously, if expensively, but he stood out from the other customers in the pub. The other people in the bar looked normal. They had educated, relaxed, comfortable faces. This man didn’t belong in their cosy Notting Hill world. It was the aura of matter-of-fact menace, the look in the eyes and the face that bore the traces of past violence — a broken nose, a hairline scar, a misaligned jaw disguised by the current trend for beards that was sweeping the media and hipster world. The man reminded him of Anderson. Cunningham had met a lot of criminals. It was his job after all. The innocent didn’t hire him. He knew what he was looking at now. It was the unmistakable face of crime.

Toby’s stand-in too immediately recognized the tall, thin, angular frame of Patrick Cunningham, leaning against the bar, as soon as he walked into the pub. He had seen him in action in court a couple of times. There, he had been effortlessly in charge of the situation. Most people are used to seeing lawyers in TV dramas where they’re well rehearsed, eloquent and effective. The reality is often the reverse. Cunningham, however, looked like a famous actor being a lawyer. He gave a polished performance. He gave good court. The dealer thought the lawyer was one of those people who believed so strongly in themselves that others were drawn into it, judges included. He had made the other legal team appear amateurish, stupid.

Patrick Cunningham, his languid frame physically dominating the court, had looked slightly bored as he effortlessly demolished arguments and evidence given by the prosecution and the police, or introduced reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. They’d been almost cheering him on. It was like watching a Grand Slam tennis player turning up at a club-level tournament.

He went up to Cunningham. ‘I’m George,’ he said quietly. ‘Toby can’t make it. He said he’d called you.’ Cunningham looked at him closely and nodded. He asked George what he wanted to drink, bought the dealer a beer, and they both sat down at a quiet corner table. The pub was popular and was beginning to fill up. George looked around him. He recognized it from a decade ago when it had been a defiantly drinkers’ pub that no one but the desperate would have used, with a sticky carpet, a jukebox and a fruit machine. The fibre of the carpet had been so soaked in spilt beer over the years it was like walking on Velcro. Now its walls were Farrow amp; Ball grey, not nicotine yellow, the ageing alcoholics who’d been its loyal patrons either dead of alcohol-related disease or dispersed. Miles Davis was playing in the background. Tonight it was full of professional people like Cunningham. I’m getting old, thought George.

Notting Hill had changed too. George could remember when it was rundown, the Portobello Road a haven for ageing hippies, when bands used to play under the Westway, the motorway bridge vaulting upwards high above the roof of the open-air concert area. It had smelt of exhaust fumes, cement dust and hash. He’d known it when it was a dump of a place and every other person seemed to be a dealer. Now it was the haunt of millionaires and models. George preferred the old days.

Still, he thought, some things never change. Drugs then, drugs now, and there would be drugs tomorrow. He said, ‘I’ve got something for you from Toby,’ and discreetly took an envelope from his jacket and slid it to the lawyer under the table. It contained ten one-gram wraps of cocaine, and Cunningham in turn pressed a wad of folded twenties silently into George’s hand. George put it in the pocket of his jacket. He knew it would be correct.

A hint of a smile now played around Cunningham’s tight, bloodless lips. George noted, slightly to his surprise, that Cunningham was almost shaking with suppressed eagerness. George knew a lot of people with big drug problems; he hadn’t expected Cunningham to be one of them. You’ve got it bad, mate, he thought to himself.

‘Thank you very much, George,’ said Cunningham. Like Toby, his accent was privately educated, expensively vowelled. George noted with amusement that he was trying to look nonchalant while trembling, practically shaking, with coke desire. ‘Toby did say it was going to be exceptional. I hope he’s right.’ His voice tailed off. He was salivating. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

Cunningham disappeared, practically ran, into the toilets with his coke. George raised his eyebrows; drugs were a great social leveller. It really doesn’t matter where you’re from, an addiction is an addiction, an addict, an addict. George recognized that semi-insane look of overexcited eagerness in Cunningham’s eyes, and it wasn’t the look of a casual user. The lawyer was a man with a monkey on his back. He took a slow mouthful of beer and thoughtfully picked up Cunningham’s paper.

A while later Cunningham came back into the bar. George was still at the table, reading the lawyer’s paper.

‘Everything OK?’ asked the dealer without looking up from the paper.

‘Fine. Exceptional even,’ said Cunningham, his eyes glittering. George raised his eyes, then his eyebrows. Cunningham was wired, coked out of his mind. How much did he just do? wondered George. The lawyer’s jaw was rotating like he was chewing invisible gum. His eyes were starting out of his head as if they’d grown and the sockets had shrunk. Sweat beaded his forehead. Coke sweat. George knew that if he put his head close to Cunningham he’d be able to smell the metallic tang in his perspiration from the drug.

Cunningham stood smiling down at him, shifting his weight from foot to foot. He was so out of it he really didn’t know what to do. God alone knew what was happening to his brain; synapses were exploding like fireworks. ‘Tell Toby, next week, same time, same place,’ said Cunningham, self-importantly. He grinned wildly again. His nose ran and he sniffed loudly.

Jesus Christ, thought George. And this is supposedly one of Britain’s finest legal minds. ‘OK,’ he said mildly. ‘Take care.’ As he watched Cunningham’s back disappear through the frosted glass of the pub’s Victorian doors — a suitable image, thought George, for the man’s brain — he wondered if the lawyer were due in court that day. He guessed the judge might not notice, but Cunningham’s low-life clients certainly would. Oh well, he thought. That’s his problem, not mine. He went back to the paper. The headline read:

‘Burnt girl not “witchcraft” killing, say police.’