Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  Enver felt a hard knot of rage tie itself in his stomach. He could still see the dead child’s favourite toy in his memory. He could still see the father’s gentle way of holding it, the only link to his missing son. Nobody would play with Grey Rabbit now or ever again.

  ‘I saw you fight, Sergeant.’ It was Hanlon. She ran her eyes over him speculatively like a butcher eyeing a piece of meat of dubious quality, and Enver straightened his back into a more erect posture. He was jerked back to reality, back to the present. ‘About five years ago. You beat someone called Tyler Mirchison on points. It was a good fight.’ She paused, remembering details, as did Enver. You never forget your fights. He was amazed, though, that she’d seen it. It hadn’t been televised; she must have actually been there, in Finsbury Park, on a freezing February night. And to remember his opponent’s name was an uncanny feat of recall. Mirchison had long since disappeared into obscurity. Then she said, ‘Enver, “the Iron Hand” Demirel. That’s what they billed you as, wasn’t it?’

  He blinked in surprise. He hadn’t heard anyone call him that for ages, for years. He used to love the way the MC would introduce him, with the swooping emphasis and stress on the words that was unique to boxing. ‘Aaand in the Blue Corner,’ Blue stretched to two syllables, ‘Berrloo’. ‘All the way from Tottenham (Tot – Ten – Haaam!), North London, Enver, the Iron Hand Demirel.’ For an instant he could hear the roar of the crowd, invisible to him and his opponent in the bright, white light of the ring, the universe shrunk into a tiny square. ‘Are you ready to rumble!’ The smell of sweat and blood would still be there from the previous fight, hanging in the air like perfume, the canvas floor of the ring speckled rusty red here and there. And then he blinked again and he was back on the canal towpath, the glory days gone, the future contracting. ‘Demirel means “Iron Hand” in Turkish, ma’am,’ said Enver, by way of explanation.

  ‘I know that, Sergeant,’ said Hanlon.

  Mirchison, a tough, angular Scot, may have lost the fight, but not as comprehensively as Enver, who had won the fight but lost the war. Mirchison had a powerful right hand and in the course of the eight rounds Enver suffered a detached retina in his left eye, which led to him losing his fight licence from the British Boxing Board of Control. He could never box again, not legally. It was the end of his career. It was then that he’d joined the Met.

  ‘Well, Sergeant. Boxing’s loss is our gain.’ She turned and looked at the top of the lock gates for a while, lost in thought. The gates seemed to fascinate her. Her eyes kept drifting to them.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you again, Sergeant,’ she said in a tone of finality. ‘There are things I’ll have to talk to you about regarding this murder.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Enver dutifully as he watched her walk away. She was joined by a tall, bearded, burly plainclothes officer who had been waiting for her at a respectful distance. Enver watched as she acknowledged him and he inclined his head down closer to her level so they could talk discreetly as they walked. You could tell by their body language that they were very much at ease with each other’s company. He wondered if they were seeing each other, they seemed so intimate. For some reason he felt a sudden stab of jealousy.

  He tried to shake free the image of Hanlon as he too turned and made his way back to his car. He had a lot to do.

  10

  Kathy cleared up the remains of the breakfast from the table in the living room. Peter had left for school some twenty minutes before. The ground-floor flat that Clarissa had found them was perfectly located for Peter’s secondary school, which was about a quarter of an hour’s walk away down (relatively, she thought ruefully) safe streets.

  This part of North London, Finchley, was actually where Kathy was from. She’d been born at the Whittington Hospital down the road in Archway, some forty years earlier. She’d always lived in London and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. There is a saying in German: the air of a city makes you free – ‘Die Luft einer Stadt macht frei’. That more or less summed up her attitude about the capital. London always seemed to her a city of infinite possibilities. After her husband’s death, she had sold the house in Barnes, needing to downsize. It was bought, to her amusement, by some French people. She wondered if maybe there was a Gallic equivalent of A Year in Provence – Une Année en SW13 – a nostalgic French look at the charming, rustic English Barnes, peopled by amusingly stereotypical English people, and it was almost with a sense of relief, of coming home, that she had decided virtually immediately to return to Finchley. There was no question in Kathy’s mind of leaving London.

  The narrow streets of Finchley, with their small, pale-grey houses, seemed to welcome her back. And look, Peter, she had said, there’s the archer outside East Finchley tube station. The archer waited, as he had always waited, his bow perpetually readied as he knelt to defend East Finchley from its foes. It was where she belonged. Barnes was where Dan belonged. Dan had been quite posh. He’d been taken to the theatre a lot by his parents as a treat, he had gone to a private school, and his mother had a tagine and an Aga before anyone had heard of things like that.

  Without Dan, life in Barnes was pointless. Not so Finchley. She remembered how she had always felt as if she were on an island in the borough. It was an island bordered by Mill Hill on the periphery of London, Muswell Hill, isolated without an underground, gateway to Ally Pally and poor relation of now cool, hip, Crouch End. Then to the south, Highgate with its cemetery and vampire and Karl Marx, and Jewish Golders Green. To the north, the countrified Totteridge and Whetstone. Coming back was coming home. She knew she’d made the right decision when she saw the statue of the archer again, her old friend, frozen in time and space, kneeling as he endlessly fired his arrow from his bent bow.

  There had been the odd occasion walking the streets that she had grown up in, when the sense of the past had almost overwhelmed her, when she was momentarily not Kathy Reynolds, aged forty, mother of Peter and Overseas Business Development Manager for PFK Plastics, but Kathy Markham, aged fifteen, in her tartan school uniform skirt, hair in pigtails, school shirt a dazzling white and with creases ironed into it that could almost cut you they were so sharp, living where Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher, was the local MP. Who could have ever imagined her first senile, now dead, or that Meryl Streep would play her in a film? Her mother, now in a home, senile too, had been a champion ironer. Anything that could be ironed was ironed – socks, pants, you name it, everything.

  Now she had a laptop; then she would have had pictures of Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran, cut from Smash Hits, painstakingly glued on to her schoolwork folder.

  Sometimes her current self seemed insubstantial and ghost-like, as if she were haunting East Finchley like a time-travelling spirit, as if her younger avatar was more real. Some afternoons it wouldn’t have surprised her to see her younger self coming home from school, laughing, with a satchel on her back, while she stood, a wraith, looking wistfully on from the other side of the road.

  Life was so much more fun then. It certainly wasn’t fun at the moment; it was bloody hard work, coloured with problems and bordered with tragedy. Fun had upped sticks and left a long time ago. The death of her husband had coincided with her mother losing her mind to dementia. She gritted her teeth and got on with things. What else can you do? Whatever her younger self had imagined, it wasn’t this. This life wasn’t in the script. What, she often wondered, would have been the reaction of her younger self to the older woman she had become, had she been able to see her? Bemused, thought Kathy. I always wanted to be self-confident when I was young, she thought. I am now. I always wanted to be a success. I am now. And I used to fret about my looks. I’m the wrong side of forty and I can still turn heads. I should be grateful really, but I’m tired. I wish I could go back to when Dallas was on the telly and me and Karen Jenkins would go to the wine bar. Wine bars were new then. She fancied Bobby Ewing but I kind of liked Ray, in his tight jeans and checked shirt, even though he walked in a funny way, almost b
ent double – perhaps it was the cowboy boots.

  Her friend Karen would take the piss out of him sometimes and say, ‘Hey, Kat, who’s this?’ and do a Ray walk and imitate his accent, which used to have her in fits. Well, Dallas is back, she thought, but I’m not going to watch it now. I don’t want to see them all old, or dead. I’d rather remember them as they were. And sometimes we’d go to Cinderella Rockefeller’s in North Finchley and lie about our age, and dance to Donna Summer and Kajagoogoo and Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester. Later, of course, it would have been Wham!

  I wish I could practise our dances like we used to in her living room. Her parents had a Bang & Olufsen stereo which Dad said cost as much as his car. Everyone had rubbish cars then and we didn’t care. We didn’t care about brands. It was a lot more egalitarian. She lived in Canada now, Karen did, in Vancouver. She’d married a doctor. Far away. They still exchanged Christmas cards but that was as far as it went. You can never go back, can you. She returned her thoughts to the present.

  She looked at the diary in front of her where she’d written down the day’s to-do list. She’d got the morning off work because Peter’s diabetic nurse was due round and they were to review his blood-sugar levels, carb-counting, diet and exercise. She knew the nurse would be pleased with his performance. Her son was very diligent. The diabetes was not a problem but it was a persistent and ever-present issue that had to be dealt with. She sometimes had nightmares that Peter would be away somewhere inaccessible without his insulin. She was determined she would never become overprotective.

  She looked at the photo of Peter on the mantelpiece, absurdly handsome in his school uniform. He was taller than she was now, and he had the same loose-limbed, muscular grace that he had inherited from his father. Peter’s restricted diet because of his type-one diabetes had also trimmed any puppy fat away from his frame, so that his long muscles stood out like anatomical drawings. Even his stomach was ridged with muscle. He’s got a six-pack, she had thought wonderingly.

  She was glad that Peter was going to be so powerfully built for reasons other than a parent’s simple delight at their child’s attainments. Peter was a frighteningly pleasant boy, considerate, kind. Sometimes she worried that he was too nice for his own good. It wasn’t just her who felt that way. Several of her friends had made the same comment. He would be a sucker for a girl with some hard-luck story.

  On Saturdays he worked as a volunteer for the local branch of the North London Canine Defence League, helping to exercise and care for maltreated dogs. He desperately wanted a dog of his own but Kathy had been adamant. She travelled too much for it to be really practical. It was often hard enough to find a friend who could look after Peter let alone Peter plus dog. That was one of the benefits of living in rented accommodation. The no-animal policy meant the question would not even get raised. His school reports were straight A’s for effort, because, as he explained, ‘I want Daddy to be proud of me and I want to make you happy now he’s gone.’ She was frightened that because of Dan’s death, she might be overly protective, let alone because of the diabetes issue. She felt her eyes fill with tears and blew her nose loudly on a tissue. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she thought, pull yourself together, and straightened some papers on her work table.

  She picked the phone up and tapped out the number for the Siemens office in Stuttgart, where she was bidding for a seven million euro contract for her company. The negotiations were going smoothly. PFK’s product had been approved on a technical level and now it was simply a question of persuading the industrial giant of their own commitment, their own ability. She knew that it was going well and she also knew that it was mainly down to her.

  ‘Ja, guten Morgen. Ich heisse Frau Reynolds, ja, stimt, mitt ein “R”, nein jetzt.’ She paused, listening to the woman on the other end of the line. ‘Ja, Max Brucker bitte.’ She waited to be put through, then she was speaking to the Siemens procurement manager, ‘Max! Wie geht’s? Wie ist das Wetter in Stuttgart?’ The conversation continued for a few minutes and she pictured Max’s calm, intelligent face, his short-cut, thinning, dark hair, his elegant, muscular body, as they discussed the technical questions that she could have answered in her sleep. She was always formidably well prepared. Then, ‘Also, am Freitag um zwölf Uhr. Auf wiederhören, Max.’

  ‘Auf wiederhören, Kathy.’

  She put the phone down with quiet satisfaction. Max wanted her out in Stuttgart in three days’ time for a Friday twelve o’clock meeting, to make a last, formal, presentation. It would be the clincher. She smiled at Max’s pronunciation of Freitag. Freidag. It was so stereotypically Schwäbische Deutsche. Kathy really fancied Max, even down to his Swabian Stuttgart accent. She’d have to arrange some kind of childcare for Peter. He was used to her travelling around the world at short notice. She’d ask Annette. She was irritatingly scatty but Peter liked both her and her son Sam, and of course he adored her dog.

  Just then her front doorbell rang and she raised her head in surprise. She looked through the front-room window and there, outside the front door, with her habitual, charming smile, was Clarissa from the agency.

  Kathy got up and let her in. It was always good to see Clarissa. Presumably she was here to finalize the arrangements for the cable installation. Maybe today, once they’d finished discussing that, she’d tell her to start looking for a permanent house in the area for her and Peter. But first they could have a good old talk about what they were both up to.

  11

  Hanlon was back in Corrigan’s office for the first time since the Essex murder. The public had forgotten about it. Deprived of the oxygen of interest supplied by the words ‘witchcraft killing’, the story had died its own death.

  Hanlon was now working on a draft document for Corrigan with a provisional title, ‘Seizing the Initiative: Building on the Legacy’. The legacy was the post-Olympic Games spirit; ‘seizing the initiative’ was Corriganspeak for increasing the size of his department. Hanlon didn’t like doing paperwork, but she could apply herself diligently to most things if she chose and the right sentiments flowed from her fingertips on to the screen. Corrigan himself was quite inarticulate in written form. Verbally he was great, but he needed people to interact with. Hanlon was famously unable or unwilling to engage with people, so in some respects they made a not unreasonable team.

  He was pleased with Hanlon’s work, pleased until rumblings from the arrest of David Anderson reached his ears. The rumour – there was no actual proof – was that Hanlon was behind it. Hanlon was not supposed to handle anything operational; she was toxic as far as most of the Met were concerned. But now, if the story was to be believed, and it sounded horribly plausible to Corrigan, she’d gone and done it again, launched her own initiative to arrest someone she didn’t like. It had the Hanlon hallmark of a praiseworthy thing done, the arrest and certain conviction of a dangerous criminal, with a cavalier disregard for legal process. It differed from Tottenham in that she’d roped some accomplices in to help. He’d had a couple of acrimonious unofficial meetings about the Anderson bust. Hanlon’s name had been mentioned in connection with that sergeant she was still close with. Corrigan didn’t know for sure, but he’d bet a lot of money that if he chose to ask he’d find Hanlon and Anderson had crossed paths before. Corrigan had gritted his teeth and stood by her. He felt like strangling her, and here she was, in his office, unrepentant as usual.

  ‘So, let’s go over this Anderson arrest again. Why’s he called “Jesus”, did you say?’ he asked. Hanlon was sitting opposite him on the other side of his desk, tired-looking, but holding herself very straight in her chair. He’d never seen her slouch.

  ‘Because he crucified someone to a door once,’ said Hanlon, ‘with a nail gun.’

  ‘Was that proven or is it just a rumour?’ asked Corrigan, curious despite himself. Hanlon shrugged. She was irritatingly self-composed. Then again, thought Corrigan, she always was. Although he was much bigger physically, it was the still, motionless body of Hanlon that somehow dominated
the room.

  ‘Well, he was never charged with it,’ she said.

  Corrigan shook his head in irritation. ‘Typical,’ he said. ‘They all do that kind of thing. Nail guns,’ he added to himself in an angry tone.

  Hanlon couldn’t work out if the assistant commissioner was annoyed by the crime itself or the laziness of using a nail gun. She half expected him to say something along the lines of, in my day, when I was young, criminals used hammers for this kind of thing. Not any more, couldn’t be bothered to get off their fat arses. ‘The point is, what were you doing nicking him?’

  My job, I suppose, thought Hanlon. She decided not to say it and further annoy Corrigan. She knew he had, after all, saved her career when there was a call for her to be got rid of. Nobody else had wanted her. For that she was genuinely grateful and, deep down, quite touched. Corrigan was usually so politically and career motivated. Helping Hanlon, she knew, could not be considered a wise move. She knew she was very good at certain aspects of police work, but she was perfectly aware she was trouble. Her performance appraisals made that abundantly clear. She didn’t care. It was quite touching to discover that the AC was actually a fundamentally decent man, although the fact that it should surprise was an alarming indictment of the society they were in.

  ‘I didn’t make the arrest, sir. The officer in charge was DS Whiteside.’

  Corrigan grunted contemptuously. ‘Pull the other one, Hanlon. Whiteside wouldn’t wipe his arse unless he’d cleared it with you.’