Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  Enver shuddered inwardly. He didn’t mind bodily injuries. He had boxed for ten years, including three as a semi-professional, from the age of fifteen to twenty-five, and his own body had, literally, taken a pounding. But to live the rest of your life brain-damaged, to be there but not there, to be no longer you since you are defined by your personality rather than your physical abilities, struck him as awful. Of course, brain damage was a perpetual risk in boxing, but things had been tightened up a lot since the Michael Watson fight. A Whiteside with a permanent catheter was still undeniably Whiteside. So would be a Whiteside in a wheelchair. A Whiteside with permanent mental impairment, well, was that still Whiteside? If he survived physically, how mentally affected would he be? It was a terrible thought. Enver could face life physically disabled, or felt he could, but not as a vegetable.

  He thought too of Hanlon. ‘Who’s heading the investigation, sir? DI Hanlon?’ Corrigan’s eyes bulged in disbelief, emphasized by his eyebrows arcing upwards. ‘How much punishment did you take in that boxing ring, Sergeant?’ he asked. ‘Are you crazy? Hanlon in charge? Think about it for a minute.’

  Enver did so. He didn’t know the DI that well. She had a reputation for toughness, a superlative arrest record, that much was canteen knowledge, and, of course, there was the famous riot incident. And the rumoured propensity to violence. None of these, though, was particularly remarkable. He could think of half a dozen police that these qualities fitted, himself included, to a certain extent. There was the fact that she was remarkably physically fit, he’d heard about the triathlons, but again, there were probably quite a few athletes in the Met. He stroked his moustache pensively. Corrigan lost patience with him. He was beginning to wonder if Hanlon had been right in her glowing references.

  ‘DI Hanlon has a history of bending or breaking rules, Sergeant, as well you know,’ he said irritably, ‘and she has got away with it so far because she’s been very clever and very lucky. And also because she has a number of people, myself included, who have gone out on a limb for her. Quite frankly, she is the last person anyone would want in charge of this investigation. One of Hanlon’s biggest problems is she does take things personally and this Whiteside business...’ Corrigan shook his head; he didn’t bother finishing the sentence. ‘Hanlon is quite capable, Sergeant, of taking matters into her own hands. God alone knows what she might get up to, or God forbid, do to a suspect.’

  He looked shrewdly at Enver. Corrigan had undertaken a bit of digging into the Anderson arrest. There were several niggling details that had caught his eye, particularly with regards to the information leading to the drugs bust. He didn’t think Hanlon had fitted Anderson up or entrapped him, but something felt fishy. Now he would have to let the thing go. Whiteside was in no position, maybe never would be, even if he survived, to help him. The point was, he, Corrigan had helped Hanlon and she’d repaid him by stabbing him in the back. Don’t ruffle feathers, he’d told her; what had she done, assaulted a chicken. And that was down to her wanting to get even with someone who’d merely outwitted her legally. God knows what she was capable of doing to avenge Whiteside. Hanlon needed to be reined in. Simply making sure she wasn’t part of the investigation wouldn’t be nearly enough. She’d be forever checking up on its progress, interfering, driving the SIO mad. And Hanlon had enough devoted fans in strategic positions to keep her well informed of everything she’d want to know. Reading her the riot act would just be a waste of breath.

  In an ideal world, Corrigan would have seconded her to somewhere far away, Wales or Yorkshire, anywhere out of London. But failing that, he would find her a babysitter. He wasn’t going to share any of this with Enver, but his reputation as a grim, methodical copper might slow Hanlon down. He knew from Hanlon’s memo that she considered Demirel a good policeman and the checks Corrigan had made on his record backed that up. If he teamed him up with her, she’d accept it.

  Corrigan had wondered momentarily if Anderson were behind the shooting of Whiteside by way of revenge. It seemed unlikely. Although the man was certainly capable of murder, had indeed committed it if the stories were to be believed, he was a professional criminal and would accept police activity as an occupational hazard. But you could never be sure. Anderson was capable of crucifying someone he didn’t like; he was capable of anything.

  Enver began to see what Corrigan was getting at. Hanlon would be on the warpath. Corrigan continued, ‘For one thing, she has licences for two hunting rifles, a .22 and a .243, and three shotguns, one double barrel, one up and over and a pump action, and that’s just what she officially owns.’ He had stressed the word ‘officially’. Enver nodded. Hanlon could probably get anything she wanted in London, come to that. Enver could himself if he wanted to. He knew an underworld armourer, two in fact. You could even hire guns on a deposit basis for a couple of hundred quid plus deposit, non-returnable if the firearms were used.

  Enver suddenly thought to himself, Corrigan thinks she might kill whoever did this. This is what it’s all about. ‘Why are you telling me this, sir?’ he asked. He wanted his suspicions confirmed.

  Corrigan poured himself some more tea. The glass looked ridiculously fragile in his massive fingers. ‘Hanlon’s unstoppable, Sergeant, once she’s made up her mind. Why am I telling you this?’ He hesitated and rubbed the bald patch on his crown thoughtfully, ‘Because I like Hanlon a lot and I think you do too.’ He paused. ‘She can be her own worst enemy.’

  ‘What do you want me to do, sir?’ Enver was confused by Corrigan now. He had always thought that Corrigan would hang anyone out to dry who might get in his way. He hadn’t realized the extent to which the assistant commissioner was prepared to shield Hanlon.

  ‘I suppose I would like you to save her from herself, Sergeant. DI Hanlon has enemies in high places who would very much like to sack her. I want you to find out what she intends to do and stop her. That is what I want you to do, Sergeant. Needless to say, this conversation never took place.’

  Sure, thought Enver. And stopping Hanlon doing anything is going to be really easy. ‘Thank you, sir,’ he said, purely to annoy Corrigan. ‘Then what are you doing here, sir? Officially, I mean. For when people ask me what the assistant commissioner wanted to talk to me about.’

  The assistant commissioner didn’t miss a beat. ‘Building bridges, Sergeant, with the London Anglo-Turkish community. My secretary has arranged an interview with Olay Gazetesi and Londra Gazete for later.’

  Enver nodded admiringly. You’re slick, he thought. They were the two Turkish-language newspapers in London. The AC had been in touch with them both. Corrigan had a rare talent for PR. Nothing was wasted.

  ‘I’m looking forward to meeting your uncle, the imam. We’re going to have our photos taken. I gather he’s highly respected,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, here is what you’ll do about Hanlon.’

  25

  At 7 p.m. that evening, Enver was standing under the large Victorian railway viaduct in Bermondsey, a stone’s throw from the Shard. It was still light, but the sky was darkening and the narrow streets around here never really seemed to get much sun. He looked around. It was a strange juxtaposition, the gleaming, futurist construction rising skywards like something out of a sci-fi film, like Metropolis, and the gloomy, red-brick Victorian train viaduct. The enormously tall building looked deceptively short to Enver. This was, he thought, the tallest building in Europe but it certainly didn’t seem that way. It was hard to impress Enver.

  Enver was a North Londoner. South London, the other side of the river, was alien territory. To want to live in South London seemed almost perverse. The very thought almost made him feel ill. To cross the Thames was to cross into another country. London was two distinct nations, but Schengen-like; you didn’t need a passport to travel between them.

  Bermondsey, Enver decided from a short walk around it, was a schizophrenic part of London. It didn’t know what it wanted to be. It was like Barbara Windsor married to Damien Hirst. Bermondsey has a private art gallery, the White C
ube, which is huge, both in reputation and size. Internationally famous artists like Gilbert and George, Anselm Kiefer, Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley show there. Following the art gallery, he guessed, like the Cantona seagulls around a trawler, or asteroids pulled in by the gravitational tug of a giant-like Saturn, came the hipsters, the fashionistas and the art-school students and the media types, and what was once a solid working-class environment had now become an odd mix of contemporary chic flats and Boho apartments in converted warehouses. Enver grimly noted sandblasted walls, lots of glass, nautical-style architectural flourishes, tiny balconies that mirrored ships’ decks, with hawsers as guard rails and panoramas of shiny stainless steel, at exorbitant prices. There were mini-piazzas with fake cobbles. He loathed these chichi details with a passion that surprised him. These bijou flatlets stood cheek by jowl with traditional council estates which Enver personally wouldn’t risk walking around without a local in tow. It’s Hoxton all over again, he thought.

  Enver had been out in his youth with several girls from art-school-style backgrounds. He’d been a big hit with the students of Goldsmiths and St Martins. He was local colour. He was exotic. Art school was a country he’d visited often. He wouldn’t like to live there but he enjoyed staring at the colourful natives. A bit like Turkey. He’d lost count of parties where he’d been paraded as a kind of odd freak for the intellectuals to look at. ‘You must meet my boyfriend, Enver. He’s…’ here the categories had changed over the years but the point, he’s not one of us, had been the same... ‘half-Turkish/a boxer/a policeman/his uncle’s an imam, how weird/his dad’s got a kebab house in Southgate, but not in an ironic way, it actually is a kebab house!’ Perhaps that’s what I share with Hanlon, he thought, stroking his drooping moustache, we don’t fit in, and we don’t really want to.

  Even the defiantly grim railway arches had been colonized by the arty interlopers. Underneath the red-brick, shallow arches of the railway bridge were small businesses and pop-up restaurants, the odd night club and, more prosaically, the occasional road that ran underneath from one side of the construction to the other. Enver was on the pavement of one of these thoroughfares, the vaulted roof of the bridge overhead, the noise of the traffic compressed to a loud, echoing roar by the constrained acoustics of the confined space. Despite the recent dry weather and the unusual heat, it was cold and damp in this shadowy place that never saw the light of day. It smelt of damp and piss and poverty. It was resisting gentrification. Enver patted the clammy, sweating brickwork. Good luck, he thought. Enjoy it before you get claimed as a ‘found’ artwork, dismantled and put in a gallery.

  Some elements of the old Bermondsey remained, however. Halfway along the tunnel was a doorway with a fading sign for ‘Bob’s Gym, Boxer’s Welcome’. Enver knew there was something wrong with the punctuation, with the apostrophe, but wasn’t quite sure what it was. Punctuation wasn’t his strong point. What it did send out was the message that Bob was untroubled by such things. The sign didn’t mention popular quasi-boxing sports such as boxercise or, Enver’s personal bête noir, white-collar boxing, where office workers pretend they’re boxers. You’re such a snob, he told himself. You’re not a boxer any more. Look at you. A city accountant could probably take you, you fat lump. His obese stomach mocked his former slimline self. You wouldn’t need to hit me in a ring these days, just run around, I’d collapse trying to catch you.

  He opened the door and it was like going back in time. His own boxing gym, the one that he’d fought out of in North London, was relatively smart. ‘Gentleman Dave’ Jones, who ran it, a sixty-year-old former middleweight like Enver, but, unlike Enver, annoyingly trim, embraced modernity and was also a cleanliness fanatic. He was an ex-army champion and the army had left its mark not just on his face, his posture and his language, but on his attitude. Everything that could gleam, did gleam. There was usually a smell of paint overlying the scent of sweat and effort that comes with a gym. And if it didn’t smell of paint, it smelt of polish. Not here. Not at Bob’s. Mildew, body odour, grim effort and violence, that’s what was in the air. Enver snuffled it with greedy pleasure. He realized with a pang how he had missed that smell.

  He walked up some steep, shabby wooden stairs. The walls were a dark green and every so often, every few steps, there were old, framed posters for fights featuring long-forgotten names of boxers from the past. The smell of the gym – old sweat, damp, disinfectant – grew stronger; he would be able to guess where he was blindfolded. Enver opened a door at the top to a rudimentary reception area. No Nespresso machine here. Just a kettle. A lime-scaled kettle.

  There was a man of about fifty behind the desk, short and wiry, with a nose that had seen better days. The computer monitor in front of him was old-fashioned and massive and beige. He looked up, his eyes hard and suspicious. ‘We’re closed. Opening hours are listed on the door.’ His tone was unfriendly.

  ‘I’m not here to join,’ said Enver. His own tone was flat and matter-of-fact. His eyes wore their usual sleepy look but the other man recognized a kindred spirit in them. He sat up in his chair to better pay attention. He saw a thirty-year-old man with a gut but he also took in Enver’s powerful musculature, the slightly marked face and the attitude. Enver was impressively menacing.

  ‘How can I help you then?’ the manager asked. Momentarily he wondered if he was going to be made an offer he’d be foolish to refuse. Enver did have more than a hint of gangland enforcer about him. He could be quietly threatening when he wanted to be. Boxers intimidate.

  Enver produced his warrant card and showed it to him. The man behind the desk looked at the ID, singularly unimpressed, and asked, ‘What do you want then, Sergeant?’

  ‘DI Hanlon.’

  The man looked up at him, this time actively hostile, eyes narrowed. He leaned forward slightly in an aggressive way.

  Enver returned his stare with his own heavy-lidded, sleepy look. Come on then, come on! was the message his own look sent out. Enver felt his pulse rate increase and he welcomed it. The brutal truth was that Enver would have been delighted if the manager started a fight. It had been a long, frustrating, highly depressing day, if not week. Not only that, it was complicated. The whole situation was complicated. A simple, satisfyingly violent fistfight would suit him nicely. It wouldn’t be the manager he was hitting, it would be everything that was getting him down. The case, Ludgate, the Whiteside shooting, maybe life in general. Enver would feel a lot better if he beat someone up.

  ‘What if I told you she wasn’t here?’ said the manager. He relaxed back in his chair. It was a submissive gesture; he was backing down.

  Enver sighed. Corrigan had said that every Saturday from six to eight she was here, provided she wasn’t working. And Enver knew that after a piece of really grim news, the Whiteside incident, she’d want to be here, working out her anger, working out her pain. Where else would she go? A support group? Friends? Of course she’d be here.

  Then the man looked again at the warrant card that Enver was still holding and said, with dawning recognition, ‘Demirel, eh? Did you used to box?’ Enver nodded. ‘Were you Iron Hand Demirel?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The gym manager grinned, stood up and proffered his hand. ‘Freddie Laidlaw.’ Enver took his hand and shook it. ‘I saw you fight at the Vauxhall Recreation Club in Luton. I won a monkey betting on you.’ His attitude had changed completely. ‘You were a big hitter, bit slow on your feet, if I recall right.’

  Enver remembered the fight. It was a northern boxer from Blackpool, Jason Clitheroe, that he’d fought then. He’d stopped him in the fourth. He shook Laidlaw’s hand. Laidlaw had become a lot friendlier now he knew that Enver was an ex-boxer. Or maybe it was because he’d won five hundred pounds on him.

  ‘Sorry I was a bit unfriendly,’ he apologized. ‘The DI likes to come here when we’re closed. Some of the members have got form, are a bit tasty, if you see what I mean. I used to think she’d seen enough criminals at work and that’s why she wanted to avoi
d them, but to be honest, I think she just prefers being alone. I can’t imagine any of them would worry her. They’d leave well alone. Do you want to speak to her?’

  Enver shook his head. He decided to tell Laidlaw the truth, or at least a version of it. He seemed a decent man. ‘I’m supposed to babysit her,’ he said. ‘Follow her around, protect her back.’

  Laidlaw was looking at him doubtfully. ‘You’re supposed to protect her? Are you sure?’ He placed a very heavy emphasis on the last two words.

  Enver was stung by the obvious implication he wasn’t up to it. ‘Yes. Yes, I am sure,’ he said. ‘DI Hanlon has quite a few enemies at the moment.’ He didn’t bother adding that they were mainly to be found within the police.

  ‘Oh well, follow me, I’ll take you to her.’ Laidlaw didn’t sound as though he believed Enver was up to it.

  ‘It’s not that simple,’ said Enver. ‘It’s supposed to be without her knowledge.’ Laidlaw frowned. He was obviously puzzled.

  ‘I guess it’s because she’d refuse protection if she was offered it,’ Enver explained. He didn’t like lying but this contained more than a grain of truth. Anyway, thought Enver, it was probably true. Hanlon, from what he knew of her, would not accept protection even if she needed it.

  Corrigan had told him to make sure she didn’t do anything stupid, by which Enver assumed he meant maim or kill someone in retaliation for Whiteside. He’d told him to stick close to Hanlon, intervene if necessary.

  ‘OK,’ said Laidlaw decisively. ‘Come with me and we’ll see how she’s doing. I know her routine.’ He motioned Enver round to a door behind the desk that he opened. More stairs led upwards into darkness. ‘The gym’s got a gallery above it. The lights are out and she won’t see us. Just be quiet and I can work out how much longer she’ll be.’