Time to Die

6

Cunningham left the pub, stepped off the pavement and was very nearly hit by a four-by-four he hadn’t seen, as he euphorically strode into the road without looking. He was finding it very hard to focus. The driver angrily sounded the horn. Cunningham gave him the finger. He crossed over to his Carrera and climbed inside. He closed his eyes momentarily and told himself to concentrate. As he sat on the leather-upholstered seat, sweating in his expensive suit, the temptation to do another quick line before driving back to his office was overwhelming. No one will notice, he thought, and even if they do, fuck ’em. His hand made contact with the envelope in his pocket.

A tap on the driver’s window made him jump. For a second he wondered what the noise was. He also wondered how long he’d been sitting there staring into space. He’d lost track of time. Momentarily he was disorientated, wondered where he was. He looked up and around, half expecting to see George, and instead saw the dark blue uniform of a policeman. His heart started pounding and he felt an unpleasant lurch in his bowels. He didn’t want to be dealing with the police. Whenever he usually saw them, they were safely in a witness box or deferentially escorting him to a witness room in a police station. Not like this. He opened the window.

‘Would you mind getting out of the car, sir,’ said the officer politely.

He did so, now extremely conscious of the curious glances of passers-by on the pavement. Man in a Porsche being pulled over. Good, they probably thought. He was also extremely conscious of the presence of enough quantities of a Class A drug on his person to be facing jail time. Oh shit, thought Cunningham.

Half an hour before, Hanlon had looked approvingly at Detective Sergeant Whiteside as he shrugged himself into the brown suede jacket that felt as soft as warm butter and slipped a pair of Armani glasses on where they rested comfortably on the slight ridge in his nose from one of the three occasions it had been broken, twice in the line of duty and once in his own time.

Hanlon had borrowed the clothes from the property store of goods confiscated from convicted criminals that were awaiting auction. The sergeant was dressed in the seized goods of a busted drug dealer the same build as Whiteside. It seemed appropriate to Hanlon that if Whiteside were impersonating a drug dealer he might as well dress the part. She felt it was a kind of poetic justice. The dealer’s wardrobe collection seized by the police, not including shoes, was probably worth a conservative fifty thousand, or would have been, when new. Whiteside loved clothes. Having the opportunity to wear an entire new outfit without worrying about the cost was a welcome novelty.

‘Do I get to keep these?’ asked Whiteside.

‘Why not?’ said Hanlon. The evidence storage manager shrugged. ‘Fine by me. Just submit a report later saying they’ve been damaged in police use and are no longer suitable for resale, so it’s all kosher. If DI Hanlon signs it, that’ll be good enough.’

‘There’s your answer then,’ said Hanlon.

Whiteside grinned happily. The civilian in charge of the confiscated goods in the property room, Dan Brudenell, was the brother of the PCSO whose life Hanlon had saved. It was Dan who had come to her after the event to say if ever she needed a favour, no matter what, just to ask. He’d been delighted to help when asked to kit Whiteside out. Whiteside’s own wardrobe was carefully selected and good quality, but Hanlon wanted him in the trappings of the genuine dealer. Whiteside wouldn’t spend three grand on a jacket even if he could afford to. ‘George’, his new alter ego, would.

Hanlon now watched with amusement as Whiteside rubbed his short, clipped beard while he studied his appearance in the mirror of the sun visor of the unmarked police car. ‘I should have requested a Rolex,’ he said. Sergeant Thompson and Constable Childs, sitting in the back, studied the rear of his head.

‘You look so gay, sir!’ said Childs. Thompson put his hand over his mouth to mask a smile. Whiteside was actually gay, a fact known to just about everyone he worked with, but obviously not Constable Childs.

Hanlon’s expressionless eyes met Whiteside’s. The sergeant decided to spare Childs’ blushes. His hard brown eyes rested on the reflection of the two policemen in the rear of the car. Childs was kind of cute, thought Whiteside speculatively. The prospect of action always made him horny. ‘Well,’ said Hanlon, as if divining his thoughts, which wouldn’t have surprised Whiteside. It was as if the woman was psychic sometimes. ‘Off you go, George. Time to make your dope deal.’

Whiteside got out of the Ford and closed the door gently behind him. Hanlon watched his muscular back stretching the fabric of the jacket as he walked to the upmarket Notting Hill pub where he was about to sell ten grams of coke to one of London’s top criminal defendants. It was coming up to half past twelve and already the lunchtime customers were beginning to stream in to the gastropub. In half an hour it would be packed.

Hanlon was about to risk what was left of her career purely to settle an old score. It was revenge, nothing more, nothing less. If it went wrong she faced all sorts of trouble: dismissal from the police and the loss of all pension rights, charges — valid ones — of entrapment, perjury, false witness, false imprisonment, plus possibly several other lesser crimes. Thompson, the uniformed sergeant in the car with her, knew what was going on. He had met Hanlon when she’d been in Specialist Crime and they’d got on well. He too was delighted to have the opportunity to bring down Anderson, which is what all this was about. Cunningham, ‘Jesus’ Anderson’s tame lawyer, was also, in Hanlon’s judgement, his Achilles heel. She was going to bring Anderson down by using the man who’d so far been spectacularly successful at keeping him out of prison. Childs hadn’t got a clue what was happening. He was just excited to be there.

If it went according to plan, she would be able to arrest one of North London’s most notorious drug dealers. David Anderson, to anyone who lived in his manor, was a household name. Hanlon and Whiteside had nearly had him two years ago when they were both working for the Serious and Organized Crime unit of Specialist Crimes and Operations and liaising with the drug squads in various boroughs. The case had collapsed because of witness intimidation. It was par for the course with anything involving Anderson. Hanlon wanted him badly. She’d taken his acquittal as a personal affront. As Whiteside knew, there was an obsessive streak to her and there was no such thing in her world that equated to drawing a line under something. She was out to get the man and she would, even if it meant the destruction of her career.

Hanlon was sure that Cunningham knew a great deal about Anderson’s business. Cunningham had boasted as much to one of Hanlon’s informants while the two of them had been involved in a marathon coke session round at the informant’s house. Cunningham had bragged about how much he’d learnt about Anderson, about how much information he had on deliveries and prices. If what the man said was true, and if Cunningham decided to share the information, they could arrest Anderson with a sizeable drug delivery on his property. This time there would be no witnesses to retract stories, no coercion, just simple, undeniable possession.

‘I couldn’t help but notice you leaving that pub over there, sir,’ said the sergeant, who was accompanied by a young PC who looked about twelve to Cunningham. ‘You were nearly struck by a car as you crossed the road. Have you been drinking, sir?’

Cunningham took a deep breath. Although they had no reason to search him, the five hundred pounds’ worth of coke in his inside pocket felt the size and weight of a breeze block. The police hate lawyers. If they nicked him, he would be disbarred from the legal profession and they’d be turning cartwheels of joy at whichever station these two operated out of. Cunningham was widely known and disliked by the police.

‘I’ve had a drink, yes, but only a half of lager.’ The lawyer’s nose ran a little and he gave a loud involuntary sniff. He noticed the sergeant’s eyes narrow suspiciously.

‘Well, I’ll have to ask you to take a breathalyser test, sir,’ he said, producing the small, transparent plastic bag and fitting it with a tube. Cunningham followed his instructions and blew into it. The sergeant studied it carefully and said, to his huge relief, ‘Well, sir. The test indicates the presence of alcohol but within the permitted limits.’

Yes! thought Cunningham. Thank God for that.

Then, ‘However, sir, your general behaviour and inability to focus would indicate to me that you may be under the influence of drugs, which is an offence under the 1988 Road Traffic Act. I am afraid this means I must ask you to accompany me to the local police station where we can establish whether or not you have been driving under the influence of a controlled substance.’

A few times in his career, Cunningham had seen clients found guilty who had been expecting an acquittal and now he knew very much how they felt, running confidently forward off a cliff, legs pumping furiously on thin air, like a cartoon character, like Wile E. Coyote or Road Runner, only to look down and realize that the ground beneath their feet no longer existed, before plummeting to the earth. It was more or less how he felt now.

‘Could I have your car keys, sir?’ Cunningham opened the door and got out. He locked the car behind him. When he returned to it, he knew it would be clamped or towed. He might as well sell it anyway. He wouldn’t be able to afford it in the future. He wouldn’t have a future. He wouldn’t have a job.

He knew what would happen at the police station. ‘Would you mind emptying your pockets, sir.’ If they believed they had reasonable suspicion that he possessed drugs, which they did, he couldn’t refuse. The discovery of the coke would follow, as would a mandatory mouth swab or blood test to see if he’d been under the influence of drugs whilst intending to drive. The crazy thing was, what he cared about even more than losing his driving licence, or losing his job, his career, was losing the coke in his pocket. He even found himself mentally working out how long they’d hold him for, so he could give Toby a call and get some more. It was the end of the road for his legal career, that much was for sure.

He followed the sergeant, the constable at his side. At least they hadn’t cuffed him. They’d spared him that embarrassment. Their police car was parked round the corner. The sergeant opened the door and put Cunningham in the back, then sat in the passenger seat. The younger policeman got in behind the wheel. He started the engine and then Cunningham, staring at his knees to avoid eye contact with curious pedestrians, hoping to God no one he knew would walk past and recognize him, and wondering which nick they’d take him to, was aware of the window being wound down and a woman’s voice.

The engine stopped. The other rear door opened and a dark-haired, unsmiling woman stepped in and sat next to him. The uniforms got out and walked away from the car. Cunningham looked at her in surprise. He didn’t recognize her. She had a hard, pale face and there were dark patches under her eyes as if she had trouble sleeping. She looked like trouble on legs.

He wondered who she was and what she wanted. It couldn’t be anything good. Not with a face like that.

The coke euphoria was beginning to wear off and he was feeling a growing sense of agonized doom. He just wanted the day to end.

She looked at him and said, ‘My name’s DI Hanlon. I’m liaising with the sergeant from Serious Crimes and I think you’re Patrick Cunningham, the lawyer, and you are in very serious trouble.’ She paused to let the concept of serious trouble sink into the lawyer’s mind. He stared at her blankly. She repeated the phrase. ‘Very serious trouble.’

Hanlon wondered if maybe he’d gone into shock at the prospect of being arrested. She’d seen it happen before with people who had never been in trouble before with the police, had never dreamed it would be possible, and found themselves way out of their depth. Or maybe he was about to spring some devastating legal objection she hadn’t foreseen. Some procedural lapse that they’d committed. He was a lawyer after all. His mind had to be working like crazy to find a way out of the mess he was in. They’d nicked a judge for speeding a while back and he’d turned up for his court appearance with eight ring binders full of paperwork to try to get the charge quashed on a technicality. God knows what Cunningham might try. He was facing a lot more than three points on his licence.

She shrugged mentally and carried on. ‘Now, if you give me the information I want, you can go free; if not, well, it’s up to you. So far, nothing is yet official. You haven’t actually been charged. You can walk away from all this mess. It’s up to you whether it stays that way, but if you’d rather, you can accompany us to the police station and we’ll allow the due process of the law to take over, with all that implies.’ Hanlon waited for the man’s reply. It was more or less the line she had used with Toby, but Toby was a sad failure of a man, in way above his head, and Cunningham was a top-flight lawyer.

Momentarily she wondered if he really was all there mentally. He did look remarkably stoned. She never tried to predict reactions or outcomes but she had been expecting some form of protest, not this silence.

‘What do you want?’ said Cunningham. Eventually. It was not the voice of despair. She had arrested professionals before, white-collar workers with no criminal history who had burst into tears at the thought of their careers being destroyed, the shame they’d brought on their families, feelings not shared by the majority of her clients to whom arrest was either a nuisance or an occupational hazard. Cunningham seemed more resigned than anything else.

‘Information leading to the arrest of David Anderson.’ Hanlon looked at the lawyer speculatively. It was like a raise in poker; the question was whether or not Cunningham would call her bluff or fold. She was asking a lot. Would the dangers posed by betraying a man they both knew to be a killer outweigh the end of Cunningham’s life as a lawyer? Hanlon had told herself that Cunningham’s ego would not allow him to consider the possibility of failure. He would rather take the risk of Anderson than the certainty of the loss of his livelihood. The latter was of course her gigantic bluff. His arrest was based on a lie; she could not carry the charade further than the confines of the car.

For Cunningham, an entrapment defence would be tricky since he’d have to prove or show that he wouldn’t have acted illegally unless the police had talked him into doing it. It would be hard to make a jury credibly believe that you’d been sweet-talked or bullied into buying five hundred pounds’ worth of coke by an undercover officer and then stuck a load of it up your nose. However, her sting operation was not officially sanctioned. The drugs that he’d been busted with had been supplied illegally. She could imagine, if she chose to, the scene in court. ‘And where, Sergeant Whiteside, did you obtain these drugs?’ Kicking Toby’s door in and threatening him was certainly beyond the remit of the police. Theoretically, Whiteside wasn’t simply posing as a dealer: he had been dealing. She had no case, but Cunningham didn’t know that. The end of her career or Anderson behind bars instead of swaggering around his North London estate like some lord of the manor: the outcome lay in Cunningham’s frazzled mind.

For Hanlon, it was a perfectly acceptable gamble. She felt completely calm. If she’d been hooked up to a monitor her heart rate would have shown fifty beats per minute. Cunningham stared at her for what felt like a very long time.

He must know, she thought. He must realize that he’s been set up rather than nicked randomly.

What Hanlon didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that because Cunningham had, for a while now, been behaving so outrageously professionally, been involved in so many lies through his habit, he had come to expect this moment in some form or another. To him it had an air of terrible inevitability. He knew all the things he’d been up to and he suspected that others must know too. His view of the world was skewed through the drug bombardment he was subjecting himself to. Paranoia is a common side-effect of prolonged cocaine abuse and Cunningham had been very edgy for a while now. Reality was a hazy concept for him these days. That he should be arrested came as no real surprise. For Cunningham, sitting in the police car, it had not been a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. He was prepared to bow to the inevitable. He felt he might as well get it over and done with.

‘OK,’ he said simply. ‘What do you want to know?’

Hanlon blinked in surprise. She had won. She was startled by how easy it was all proving to be, but it didn’t show. Her face was impassive. The heart monitor would have remained unchanged. She took a notebook out of a pocket and explained. Cunningham listened carefully.

‘I won’t have to testify, of course, or appear as a witness,’ he said.

‘No,’ replied Hanlon. ‘It’ll all be off the record, I’ll make sure your name doesn’t appear anywhere.’ Cunningham nodded. He started talking.

He talked quickly and fluently: names, dates, times and methods of delivery. He wanted to get back to his flat and do some more coke. He certainly wasn’t going back to work. Not after all this. The quicker this was over, the better. Hanlon’s pen moved over the paper, Anderson’s fate sealed in biro with his lawyer’s complicity.