Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  ‘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.

  7

  Detective Sergeant Enver Demirel was not a happy man. If he had read his horoscope in the newspaper he’d found on his desk, it would have promised him a challenging twelve hours ahead and that was certainly the kind of day he was having. Challenging. Today’s challenge was not to feel too despondent. When police work went well, Enver thoroughly enjoyed his job. When he had days like today, it felt like trying to empty the sea with a bucket: utterly futile. A five-week, painstaking investigation into a prolific local burglar was now, to all intents and purposes, dead in the water. All that time, all the hopes they had raised of burglary victims who felt that for once the police were doing something more constructive than issuing them with a case number to facilitate insurance claims, wasted.

  It had really irritated him because it was the kind of policing he felt they should be doing. Proper policing, not faffing around with celebrities or distractions like bloody Plebgate. Haringey, the London borough that his patch Wood Green lay in, had about a quarter of a million people living in it. It was probably the population of Iceland, thought Enver. It was certainly big enough. Last year there had been about three thousand reported burglaries. Percentage-wise it was over double the national average. The burglar they’d been after had caused misery throughout Wood Green. Many of these people would have been uninsured. There were big pockets of poverty in the borough and premiums were high. It was the kind of crime that most people worried about, that and being mugged or attacked. The kind of crime that directly affected them. It wasn’t just the nicked electrical goods or jewellery. It was the door kicked in, the smashed window, the ransacked flat, the feeling of invasion.

  Phil Johnson, their target, was a prolific criminal and his arrest would have shown the local community that the police were working for them, not against them. It would have won hearts and minds. It would have been a high-profile statement that the police were doing something useful, catching criminals, not just issuing crime case numbers for insurance claim purposes. Yesterday the case against him was rock solid. But now, all this had changed. As of this morning, he had a key eyewitness who was refusing to cooperate and a suspect who’d left the country for the Caribbean, indefinitely. Despite the other evidence they still had on him, Enver knew that once the momentum was lost Johnson would slip down to a fairly low position on the ‘to do’ list when he returned. And now, courtesy of his own extended relatives, he had this new problem to deal with.

  Today, in his lunch hour, he was in the back room of a mosque in Wood Green while family pressure was gently but ruthlessly applied by the imam of the mosque, his Uncle Osman. The small room with its wooden floor smelt of furniture polish overlaid with acrimony.

  The conversation was taking place in heavily accented Turkish, which Enver, who was born in London, didn’t really speak too well, and English. He had to keep interrupting, to ask for clarification.

  ‘So, let me get this straight. He,’ Enver pointed an accusing finger at Mehmet who sat unhappily and powerlessly in his chair while these two men, the policeman and the imam, decided his future, ‘didn’t come forward on Thursday to report his child missing because he’s here, in the UK, illegally and didn’t know what to do?’ Enver’s tone of voice was incredulous. ‘It’s a missing child investigation, not visa fraud! What was he thinking?’

  Osman nodded wearily. He looked hard at his nephew, Enver Demirel. He knew he was emotionally blackmailing him, but it was in a good cause. Mehmet Yilmaz was in the most terrible trouble a parent could be in and it was their duty to help. Whether or not mistakes had been made was neither here nor there. What’s done was done. He could appreciate Enver’s rage. But that would pass. Enver was a good person and Osman was sure he’d deliver. It was just that Enver was judging Mehmet using British frames of reference. If you were in trouble in Turkey, the police were not automatically your first choice for help. Family and community were. Turkey, as Turkey, had only really been around for a century or so. It was a strange mix of the new and the old. Corruption ran deep at most official levels and the police were no exception. He looked into Enver’s angry brown eyes.

  It was a while since he’d seen his nephew and he was surprised and a little concerned by the weight that Enver had put on. His nephew seemed to have morphed from whippet thin to gently fat in the blink of an eye. Majid, his brother, Enver’s father, had died of a massive heart attack in his fifties and looking at the suddenly corpulent son, who had also grown a thick, drooping moustache since he’d seen him last, Osman realized he looked uncannily like Majid. He looked so like him it was disturbing. Osman was worried history would repeat itself.

  The old imam spoke. ‘He was frightened and confused. He doesn’t speak much English. Hardly any in fact. He got friends in the community to speak to the supermarket management. They knew nothing. They don’t employ anyone who has the name Ayse or who matches her description. We told people in the local Turkish mosques at Friday prayers. That’s probably a good two thousand people. Would the police have that kind of coverage? Would they treat a missing illegal immigrant seriously?’ He looked gently at Enver. They both knew the answer. ‘Now we’re coming to you for help and advice. That’s all.’

  Osman had also approached the local Turkish London radio station and newspapers. They had all said they’d be delighted to do everything they could to help, but the police would have to be informed. Mehmet had been adamant. No police. Approaching Enver had been Osman’s idea of a compromise.

  The old imam, immaculate in an antique three-piece suit, winced gently from the pain of the arthritis in his left hand and then smiled at himself. ‘Why me?’ he had been on the point of thinking. Why did God see fit to inflict arthritis on me. Then he thought, Majid got the heart, I got arthritis. I shouldn’t complain. I mustn’t be impatient. It is not my will, Osman thought, that is important. What I will does not matter.

  Enver sipped his Fanta and glared at the hunched, bearded figure of Mehmet. The Sergeant was normally a very patient man but Mehmet’s slowness in coming forward had made any investigation hugely difficult. Mehmet sat on his chair, shoulders rounded, twi
sting his fingers uncomfortably. He was hollow-faced, dark rings around his eyes. He hadn’t slept properly since Thursday. Life, for Mehmet, had taken on an unreal, nightmarish quality, as if he was living in some kind of cave and events were flickering away on the wall, like a terrible hallucination. It’s Monday today, Enver was thinking, and this abduction had happened on Thursday. Four days, gone. His frustration at this time lag was clearly visible on his face. Osman gently recapitulated for Enver’s benefit the problems that Mehmet faced and why he had done, or more to the point, hadn’t done, what he did.

  The biggest problem was of course that he was here illegally and there was currently a crackdown on Turkish illegal workers. If Mehmet had been Kurdish, he could maybe have claimed some form of asylum, citing Turkish persecution, but coming from a country that had wanted to join the EU, and indeed had been backed in that by the British government, it was hard to see an asylum request being granted.

  The next problem was one of debt. Mehmet owed a great deal of money to his family in Turkey for getting him over here. It was money that had to be repaid. It was a debt of honour as well as of hard cash. Currently half of everything he earned went straight back to Cappadocia, remitted to pay back what he owed. Mehmet paid no tax or National Insurance and both he and Mehmet’s employers were keen to keep it that way. They did not want the local Inland Revenue on their backs. Tax avoidance and the employment of illegal immigrants were very hot topics at the moment; trouble was to be avoided at all costs. Osman explained to Enver that Mehmet was working off a debt of about twenty thousand pounds for the fraudulent paperwork and the various bribes that had got him and Nur, his wife, over here. If he were deported, he could never pay it back.