The Missing Husband

by Alex Coombs

  For Hanlon, the drive was becoming an exercise in nostalgia. She’d lived here once, a junior officer in the Met, with a growing reputation both for efficiency and as a troublemaker.

  The early morning traffic was heavy and her progress was slow. The further north she went, the more Turkish the influence became. Ubiquitous kebab shops, names like the Istanbul Grill, Karadeniz Meats, branches of the Turkish Bank, halal butchers, a couple of Turkish mosques. It was round about here that her last partner – then DS, currently DI, Enver Demirel – had grown up, before the family had decamped to Enfield.

  * * *

  In fact, she thought, he still lives around here, somewhere in south Tottenham.

  She thought of Demirel with nostalgia. His mournful face and his endless, doomed attempts to fight the flab. She’d seen him box once, back before he’d joined the Met. Then there had been no fat on his body. Then he’d been an up-and-coming young fighter. An eye injury had put paid to that. Now, although only about thirty, he seemed to be embracing middle age with enthusiasm. He had grown a thick, black, drooping moustache; he was growing a double chin. He still had his impressive musculature but it was well concealed under his collection of cheap suits and growing flesh.

  But his hangdog demeanour was misleading. In some respects Enver was like a bear. You saw him and thought he was quite sweet, cuddly-looking, but if provoked (and here the analogy broke down, he needed a lot of provoking) he could take your head off. Hanlon had seen Enver flatten a man with one punch, and his gloomy pessimism hid a fierce intelligence and an equally fierce ambition.

  Enver’s father had arrived in London as a penniless teenager from Rize province in Turkey and died a relatively wealthy and successful restauranteur. The same qualities of hard work and ability ran deep in Enver. Enver had, at one time, been ranked in the top ten UK professional fighters of his weight. He was never going to be a world champion, never, come to that, be a British champion, but to have got as far as he did was one hell of an achievement.

  He was doing equally well in the police. He held a fistful of aces in his hand. Young, intelligent, efficient, untainted by scandal, and the fact he was non-Caucasian would stand him in good stead. And he wasn’t ethnic enough to frighten anyone. He’d be a potent symbol of racial diversity,

  * * *

  something the Metropolitan Police could well do with.

  Hanlon herself, despite an exemplary work record, had faced charges of tokenism – yeah, well, it’s because she’s a woman –

  although rarely to her face. She was too frightening a figure for that and she had some equally hard-hitting supporters. The Hanlon fan club was small, but fanatical.

  And Enver had a powerful sponsor. Corrigan, one of the Metropolitan Police’s assistant commissioners, had taken him under his wing. Enver, thought Hanlon, was going places, and he knew it. Whereas I, she thought to herself, I’ve reached the end of my time with the police.

  The thought took her almost by surprise. It was a quiet epiphany. Startled, she repeated it to herself. I’ve reached the end of my time with the police.

  She suddenly realized that she had known for a long time that enough was enough, but had never consciously admitted it. It was like being in a marriage that you knew wasn’t working, then one morning decided was over. I don’t love you any more. We’re through.

  It was an amazing revelation. A Damascene conversion. For nearly twenty years she had defined herself by her job. And the police force had, by and large, tolerated her. It was a useful, symbiotic relationship. Hanlon was undoubtedly a nuisance, but she was a good detective, she wasn’t corrupt and she was useful to wheel out occasionally as proof that there were career opportunities for women in the force. She also could be relied upon to keep her mouth shut. The Met had, on the whole, backed her up. She had got results and any resulting mess had been swept under carpets. But this latest transfer was a signal that the party was over.

  They’d both had enough of each other.

  Hanlon had known for a while that she was as far up the

  * * *

  career pole as she could hope to get. With a record like hers, particularly in the past year, no promotion board would dream of moving her upwards. She didn’t mind. She knew she was poor at administration, rash, hasty, not good at communicating and inclined to hoard information. In fact, she was everything you wouldn’t want in a position of executive power that involved planning and attention to detail – stupidly impulsive, rash, intolerant. She needed a minder, a short leash. Where she was, she was perfectly suited.

  But now, she thought, enough is enough. We define our lives as a narrative, a story, she reasoned, and mine’s been to fight the enemy by whatever means I have at my disposal. I was DI Hanlon, the woman who did it her own way, but it’s time to move on.

  I’ll find Taverner’s killers, she thought. I’ll do that for you, Oksana, then I’ll resign. I’ll even get some shyster lawyer to screw the Met over for me. If I have a leaving party only Enver and Corrigan will come. We can hold it in a stationery cupboard. Her eyes softened as she thought of Enver again. I wonder what he’s up to now.

  Hanlon missed Enver. She hoped he was well in his safe environment of protocol and meeting rooms, liaising with people.

  She guessed too that she was lonely, not that she liked to admit it. Perhaps I’ll make new friends, she thought, join a dating agency. Hanlon laughed sardonically to herself at the idea.

  The traffic had only moved a couple of metres in the last five minutes. In the distance she saw a traffic light change to red. She flipped down the sun visor on her Audi TT and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her sea-grey eyes looked back at her. Her eyebrows were dark and curved and her black corkscrew hair framed her face. There were dark patches under her eyes

  * * *

  and she could still see the faint bruising around her cheekbone. It was a strong face rather than a pretty one.

  On the passenger seat was a small black leather handbag. In it was her purse with warrant card. I won’t be needing that soon, she thought. She put the car in gear and drove northwards to Edmonton.

  She left her car in a car park near the Broadway and headed into the backstreets of the Andersons’ manor. The streets were quiet. She found her destination quickly enough.

  There were two things that surprised Hanlon about the cemetery in Edmonton. Firstly that it was surrounded by a three-metre-high wall topped with razor wire. It seemed out of keeping with the function of the place. You didn’t associate security with a graveyard. Hanlon frowned to herself as she walked along the path by the towering wall that was more suitable for a low-risk prison than a graveyard. The wall to her left seemed endless; it was a brisk ten-minute walk from one end to the other. The opposite side of the walkway on her right-hand side was an estate of small, low-rise houses with landscaped public areas of grass. It seemed peaceful enough and the area by the path was litter-free. It was quite a pleasant spot. She walked alongside the wall, searching in vain for a gate, until she came to its end in a cluster of more social housing, this time small flats. She looked around her. Most of the buildings here were low-rise, the only visible exceptions a sizeable tower block near the High Street and station back the way she had come and, in the opposite direction, the high, slim tower of the Edmonton Waste Incinerator, pointing skywards like an admonitory finger, the tallest chimney in London that she could

  remember. It dominated the area.

  She looked at it again. She remembered one of her conversations with Anderson, his casual comment about how it

  * * *

  was often the final destination for his business rivals. It was Anderson’s own personal crematorium.

  She paused and checked the map on her phone. The cemetery was the shape of an elongated triangle; she had walked down one side of it and was now at the base. This fronted on to the main road and it was here that Hanlon found both the entrance and her second surprise.

  The cemetery was Jewish. She checked t
he sign on the gate just to make sure. No, no mistake there. Was Anderson Jewish? Based on what she knew of him it seemed unlikely, but then again, why shouldn’t he be? The surname was Scandinavian, if anything, but it could well have been changed for assimilation purposes, anything for a quieter life.

  Things now started to make sense. She guessed that the wall and the wire were to keep out anti-Semitic attacks. They were on the increase. All over Europe, as ever, Jews were being targeted. A virulent strain of anti-Semitism was now very much back in vogue. Russia, always anti-Jewish; in Hungary, there was Jobbik. In Greece, the Golden Dawn’s symbol looked alarmingly swastika-like. There was a particularly virulent strain of ugly racism in France, adding to a new diaspora of Jews to the UK, USA and Israel. She’d read in an internal Met document that anti-Semitic attacks were up recently by as much as fifty per cent, and a graveyard like this would be a ripe target for desecration.

  Hanlon guessed too that the recent Dieudonné Quenelle

  controversy would almost certainly lead to further attacks on all things Jewish. She’d seen photos recently, selfies that people had taken at Auschwitz, grinning, thumbs up in approval. Another photo, in Oxford Street, a Middle Eastern or Pakistani kid with a straggly bum-fluffy beard and a placard, Kill All Juice. As illiterate as it was hate-filled. If there was one high-profile

  * * *

  hate crime, it often led to others. But here there was no sign of heightened security for now.

  The gates to the cemetery were open and Hanlon walked in. It was well ordered and tranquil with neat rows of headstones arranged in grid patterns. Some of the headstones were surmounted with angels or decorative motifs. Aside from the odd Star of David here and there and the presence of Hebrew characters on a fair few of the stones, you could have been in any graveyard anywhere in the country. In the middle of the cemetery towards one of the walls she could see a small JCB digger at work. She walked towards it. There were three men there, two workmen and another man in a suit with a clipboard. Hanlon spoke to him and found out that this was indeed the site of the Anderson burial.

  ‘Are you family?’ asked the man respectfully. Hanlon was

  wearing a dark tailored jacket and matching skirt. She had pulled her unruly hair into a tight bun. Foundation masked the faint bruising around her eye socket. She looked the epitome of a respectable businesswoman. She owned very little jewellery but she did have an expensive diamond ring; this she’d put on especially. Money reassured people. You didn’t expect the rich to be troublemakers.

  ‘A business associate,’ said Hanlon, which was true in a sense. Anderson Senior had been a well-known criminal so she guessed they were linked, even if they were on opposite sides. She had a sudden thought that some of her colleagues would almost certainly be turning up to pay their respects. Some would be pensioned-off former Flying Squad, looking forward to getting hammered at the doubtless lavish do afterwards; some would be older police mourning the passing of a generation, the ‘they don’t make them like that any more’ school of thought – they’d get pissed with their age group from the criminal fraternity,

  * * *

  old, fat bald men with red noses, bonding about how London was going to the dogs with all the niggers and Pakis and now the fucking Russians moving into Knightsbridge and don’t let me get started on the Arabs. And one or two serving officers would be there, quietly on Dave Anderson’s payroll.

  Earlier, she had walked past Edmonton Police Station. The borough seemed a nice enough place, but whoever had designed the local nick had been taking no chances. The modern building looked squat and massive. Bunker-like, its featureless walls looked as if they could withstand attack by a tank. It was like a fortress built in hostile territory. She thought of her new office in Langley, and the rationale of more open, less intimidating, access to the public suddenly made a great deal of sense. Chalk one up to Mawson and his Public Relations ethos, she thought. She was aware that the man was still looking at her expectantly. ‘It’s eleven o’clock tomorrow, isn’t it?’ she said. She had no idea of the time that the funeral was scheduled for. The man

  shook his head.

  ‘Ten-thirty,’ he corrected her. ‘Today.’

  Hanlon clicked her tongue irritably. ‘I was misinformed, thank you,’ she said.

  The cemetery manager nodded and said, ‘We’re expecting quite a crowd. I’d get here early if I were you.’

  ‘I fully intend to,’ said Hanlon curtly. ‘Thank you for your help.’ She turned and walked away. The manager watched her back as she disappeared from view down the path. He guessed that she was probably one of the doubtless expensive defence lawyers that the Anderson family were forced to engage periodically. Everyone in Edmonton knew of the Andersons. Today, he thought, if you dropped a bomb on this place you’d take out half of London’s top criminals, all coming to share their last respects.

  * * *

  If the first part of his surmise was incorrect, the second was spot-on accurate. The Andersons were A-list criminals.

  Hanlon watched the first of Anderson’s security to arrive. She had parked her car on the other side of the busy main road in a small side street, diagonally across from the entrance to the cemetery. She was sitting behind the wheel, with half her mind on the situation outside, the other reflecting on her future. Above all, she considered the intractable question of Mark Whiteside, in his drug-induced coma, in a hospital less than five miles from where she was sitting. She had looked into the cost of private surgery and the availability of surgical expertise. It had been made clear to her that the NHS were not simply opposed to the procedure on cost grounds (the National Handbag as Albert Slater might have referred to government funding); it was the likelihood of success that was a major factor too. The chances were slim. And it wasn’t just that. One British surgeon she’d spoken to had pointed out that she had to be aware that the success of the operation could be as devastating as failure. That the damage the bullet had left could be repaired – but it wasn’t yet known at what cost to Whiteside’s quality of life

  afterwards.

  ‘Are you prepared,’ he had asked her quietly, ‘for the fact that you could well spend the rest of your life caring for a grown man who has become, to all intents and purposes, a helpless infant? That would be a worst-case scenario, worse in my view than death on the table, but it is a very real possibility.’

  Well, thought Hanlon grimly. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. But if I don’t do something soon there’s a deadline looming and Whiteside will be allowed to die. Meanwhile there was today’s funeral to think about, to take her mind off things. In many ways Hanlon was craving action, as she always did. Action was her way of coping, her solution to everything. Like

  * * *

  a drug, it could successfully relieve the intensity of her morbid thoughts about her injured colleague and her part in it.

  At nine-thirty a black Range Rover with tinted windows arrived and four shaven-headed men in tight-fitting dark suits got out. The family praetorian guard. They were led by the man she had seen at the Beath Street brothel, Danny. The car drove off.

  The other three listened respectfully while Danny issued instructions. Two of them nodded and took up positions flanking the gates. The other one, with Danny, entered the cemetery. She guessed that they were here to ensure the safety of Anderson. After the murder of Jordan they would all be feeling somewhat twitchy.

  An hour to go, thought Hanlon. She wasn’t a hundred per cent sure why she was here herself. Partly, she guessed, to pay her respects to Malcolm Anderson, whose bravery in the face of his impending death had genuinely moved her, and partly out of curiosity to see which London villains would turn up at the funeral.

  She was also interested to see if she’d recognize any police colleagues. A bent policeman had nearly had her killed in the past. Hanlon didn’t feel outraged by the fact. Corruption was always going to be there; it was a question of scale and manageability. And she had known at least one police
man who was an exceptional copper but at the same time dirty. Yin and yang, she thought, as Mawson would have put it, and when you looked at the Taoist image, there was a speck of black in the white and white in the black. Nothing is absolute.

  She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and looked around her, an ingrained habit of mindfulness automatically taking over. The ability to concentrate fully was one of Hanlon’s greatest strengths. Whiteside, her faltering career, everything

  * * *

  was carefully set aside so she could give all of her attention to the task in hand.

  She registered almost without thinking that to her left was a street of terraced houses and to her right, on the other side of the road, a three-storey-high office building with a flat roof that overlooked the road and the cemetery gates at the front, and the industrial estate and tall chimney of the incinerator plant to the rear.

  Suddenly the inactivity of sitting placidly in the car enraged her. Hanlon was incapable of doing nothing for long; she lacked the gift of patience. She stepped out of the car and crossed the road. Ignoring the gates of the cemetery, instead she threaded her way through the small estate of houses to its left until she came to the broad path that bordered the Jewish graveyard.

  The wall was as high as she remembered it from earlier, some three metres, and she eyed it thoughtfully. It was designed to keep people out, a statement reinforced by the razor wire. But every twenty metres or so there was a tree growing on the side of the wall by the path, a sequence of well-established trees some of whose branches overhung the cemetery.