Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  He knew of Anderson by reputation and had gone out of his way to be helpful. Anderson was offered cigarettes, grass, home-made booze, porn, various drugs. His father’s illness had put Anderson off smoking anything, but he accepted alcohol and some Temazepam to help him sleep. Prison at night could be annoyingly noisy; sounds carried. Someone coughing could keep half the wing awake. He also accepted a very desirable job, cleaning the educational block. This job cost him another five thousand pounds to arrange. He could use his phone in there without being disturbed.

  The educational facility was a brick-built building which stood alone in the prison grounds, unlike the other wings which were interconnected. It reminded Anderson of a village hall, if you pretended not to notice the bars on the windows or the metal door and the building’s unusually stout construction. It consisted of two rooms joined together by an arch, with a small kitchen and toilet and storage facilities in the mid-section. The walls of the educational block were decorated with prisoners’ art and motivational quotations from things they’d written.

  ‘Reform starts from within’ read one.

  ‘Rage = Despair!’ read another.

  That kind of thing.

  Anderson was able to use his time in the block to keep in touch with Terry, his brother, via his illegal mobile and generally relax, although he did do a certain amount of cleaning, just for form’s sake. He could, after all, be in for a very long time, but like all experienced prisoners Anderson lived in the moment. You never serve a ten-year stretch, it’s just one day. That’s all you need to get through. One day at a time. And if you can’t, do one day, do half a day, or do five minutes. That’s the length of your sentence. It’s a permanent ‘now’. If you started thinking of the future, it would be intolerable. It’s how you do a prison sentence. Anderson lived one day at a time. It was OK.

  Peter Reynolds was not an experienced prisoner and he was being kept in conditions that would not be allowed in a UK prison. True, his cell was clean and he was reasonably fed and he had the dog, Tito, for company, but he was in total isolation. That would be regarded in the prison system as wrong, both from a practical point of view, because it tended to reinforce antisocial behaviour, and from an ethical point of view. His mood had changed from terror and incomprehension, to fear, to worry, but what he was feeling now, on this Sunday, was mainly excruciating boredom. The fear and the worry were still there, but they were like an ocean current below the surface.

  He had scratched another two marks on his wall, which by his reckoning made today a Sunday and the current time, the afternoon. Incomprehension was another major part of what he was feeling. Peter was unable to think of a good reason for any of this. He had decided someone must be keeping him here for some sort of ransom, but probably not money. He knew they weren’t poor but he knew his mum didn’t have enough wealth to warrant this kind of attention. It had to be for some kind of unspecified favour or service. It must be something to do with her work. He only had a hazy idea what she did, other than travel a lot, but PFK Plastics made plastic things that went into machines. Maybe ‘they’, his kidnappers, wanted her to sabotage something or maybe ‘they’ wanted her to steal some plans. Maybe she didn’t really work for PFK but was a spy? It had to be something like that. It seemed implausible, but what other answer made any kind of sense? Nobody would kidnap him for himself.

  Salvation for Peter came later that day when two books that had been in his schoolbag were put through the hatch, together with a snack. He now had Animal Farm to read and a book on European history. He never thought the time would come when he would want to read George Orwell, he preferred Artemis Fowl or the Cherub books, but now he opened the dystopian novel with real joy. Anything to take his mind off the situation he was in. He worried about Tito too; the dog must be going mad with the confinement. He certainly was. He hoped his mum would do whatever they wanted her to do quickly. He had a physics textbook too in his bag. He knew that if the day came when he was looking forward to reading that, then he was definitely in trouble.

  He stroked Tito’s thick fur gently and the dog rolled on his back and stretched. ‘Poor love,’ said Peter. He scratched its stomach with his fingertips and the dog groaned in ecstasy. Tito must be craving exercise, he thought. Oh, Mum, please come. Please God, let her come soon.

  It was the worst and longest Sunday of Kathy’s life. At least when Dan was dying she had Peter, she had friends, she even had Dan, although he was slipping away from her. She could at least touch him as he lay in a morphine haze, to try and keep the pain at bay. This day she was in limbo. She couldn’t think, she didn’t want to do anything. There was nothing to do. She sat on the sofa in jeans and a sweatshirt, trainers on her feet, just in case they found Peter, so she’d be ready. A WPC, she’d forgotten her name, another support officer, fielded any telephone calls on her landline. She monitored her mobile and her email. This wasn’t living. It was a living death.

  Hanlon had run ten miles that morning, really pushing her body to extremes, relishing the pain and the tiredness, feeling it cleanse her spiritually. As she ran through the London streets and parks, she thought about the events of the day before. In Hanlon’s mind it was a question of personalities as much as of events and as her legs rhythmically moved and her feet bounded along the streets of London, traffic very quiet on the Sunday morning, she thought of them like a deck of cards, fanned out in her mind’s eye. Hanlon had a very visual memory. Whiteside, the handsome, bearded Jack of Clubs. The Knave of Hearts, Rabbit Bingham; Corrigan, the King of Diamonds; Ludgate, the Jack of Diamonds; the shadowy Queen of Spades, the woman responsible for abducting Baby Ali, her face veiled from sight, obscured by shadow. I’ll get you, you bitch, thought Hanlon. She was sure it was the same woman who had shot Whiteside. She did not believe he would have invited a man he didn’t know into his flat. There was another card too, the Joker, face down so she couldn’t see his face, Conquest’s man, or possibly woman, hiding their true colours behind a Met uniform, one of her colleagues. And behind them all, the Dealer, Conquest himself, with his deck of souls, supplier of children. Every step she took hardened her resolve; every beat of her heart strengthened her will. I will triumph, Conquest, and you will lose. It was as simple as that.

  After Whiteside’s shooting, she had dismissed any idea of going public with what she suspected. Conquest had an informant in the police force and anything they did, any action they took, would be potentially known to him.

  Look at what had happened to the Yilmaz family. Mehmet had said he had new information; a short while later he was dead.

  Look at what had happened to Whiteside. Sent to investigate Conquest; now the victim of an attempted murder.

  At home she showered, dressed and went into work where she checked on the disappeared boy. She felt sure that it was Conquest. She didn’t believe in coincidences. The Somali girl, Baby Ali, both sexual victims, and now a twelve-year-old boy had disappeared.

  She checked on the Whiteside investigation. He was still alive, barely, and they’d induced a coma, hoping that the swelling and bruising to his brain would gradually resolve itself. The bullet lodged in the front of his head had been successfully removed but it had caused a great deal of damage. The effect of that damage remained unclear. The forensics people were checking the bullets recovered from his body to see if they had any matches; the shell casings had been removed by the shooter.

  Hanlon sat alone in her office and thought of what she was about to do. She had no proof that would satisfy anyone. Her actions to date were guaranteed to get her suspended from any investigation, if not the police force.

  She scratched her head and opened a can of Diet Coke while she thought about the situation again. First, what she knew.

  The number eighteen, written on a bunker, on a lock gate, then on a scrap of newspaper, was present at three separate crime scenes. This irrevocably linked the three crimes; it was beyond coincidence.

  Whiteside in his phone message to her had said that e
ighteen stood for Adolf Hitler. Conquest’s dogs were named after Hitler’s animals. It was tenuous, but it was a link between Conquest and the crimes. There was another link too. Conquest was involved with Bingham. That spelled child sex. Two of the crimes were sexual in nature and involved children; the third, Peter Reynolds, was probably sexual in nature.

  Whiteside had found information on Conquest that they didn’t have on their own police records. That was almost certain proof of some criminal connection.

  The Yilmaz family had been silenced after Mehmet had phoned the police and said he had new information about the woman who had taken Ali.

  From these facts Hanlon decided that Conquest lay behind this. He had the temperament, the brains, the organizational ability and the money to carry it out. Hanlon also thought it a safe bet Conquest had someone on the inside. Conquest and Bingham were linked in this somehow. Conquest had at least three other people working for him. There was the woman behind the Baby Ali kidnap and the two men who had taken the Yilmaz family. Then there would be a fourth person, his Metropolitan Police informer. She suspected that Whiteside had obviously trusted whoever had shot him enough to let them into his flat. That’s why she was assuming it was the woman, possibly even Conquest’s contact in the Met. His mobile phone was missing. Hanlon guessed he had recorded the interview on that.

  Hanlon drank more Coke and looked out of her window at the uninspiring view of the brick wall. If only she could find out what Whiteside had discovered. The Shapiro Institute would not allow her access; she would have to tell them she had lied to get Whiteside through their door. They were not an official Israeli government agency and would not be pleased that Saul had provided fraudulent documentation to a Met policeman. They would be very angry indeed at this breach in protocol. She had already, in their eyes, compromised their security and they were frantically, justifiably in their view, paranoid. That avenue was closed to her.

  She wondered how Conquest could have known that Whiteside had been at the institute. Maybe he’d been followed. Maybe he’d mentioned it to Childs who had told someone else. She didn’t suppose it really mattered how he’d found out. Maybe one day she’d have the opportunity to ask him.

  Either way, Conquest had obviously decided that Whiteside, who was, as far as he knew, a bona fide journalist, needed dealing with and he had done just that. He must have got a nasty shock when he discovered he’d been responsible for shooting a Met policeman.

  She couldn’t make public her suspicions. Ludgate was leading the Ali murder enquiry and was in overall charge of the SIOs for the Yilmaz and Reynolds disappearances. He was viewed as a safe pair of hands and particularly good at handling the media. Much as she disliked him, she agreed. If she approached him with what she knew, it would be giving him her head on a plate. She doubted she could begin to calculate all the rules she’d broken, bent or infringed. Corrigan would go crazy. She might as well resign.

  On the plus side, if she kept quiet, she was free to act as she saw fit. Hanlon’s spirits rose slightly. She’d do it her way. She also had a team, if you counted Enver Demirel. She would be unconstrained by police procedural rules. She wasn’t even all that concerned if what she did prejudiced the outcome of a potential trial. She didn’t want a trial; she wanted justice. Hanlon didn’t really want to leave justice in the hands of a system she didn’t trust, that she thought favoured the guilty over the innocent. At least she could rely on herself. She couldn’t trust anyone apart from Demirel and she wouldn’t even trust him fully. Well, luckily, she didn’t need to tell anyone what she was going to do next. She picked up the phone and made a call.

  A while later she replaced the phone on its handset. Rabbit Bingham, she thought. We’ll meet again.

  28

  Alastair Fordham, the governor of Wendover Prison, studied himself in the mirror in his office. As usual, not a hair out of place. Fordham was an ex-Marine and it showed. He was also Cambridge educated and no stranger to the media. If there was a news item on prisons on Newsnight or a documentary, the chances were that Fordham would be there, giving the professionals’ point of view. Fordham was held in high regard at the Home Office and strangely in the prison service, or the National Offender Management Service as it’s officially known, as well. The two bodies rarely agreed on anything else.

  Fordham had ordered his staff to extend all possible help to DI Hanlon. They’d never met but he knew of her and he admired her. He felt they were kindred spirits. Both had records of leading by example. Both had received medals for bravery. Both had been in trouble for disobeying orders.

  At the beginning of the Afghanistan conflict, Fordham’s men had come under withering fire as their patrol had crossed a river. Fordham had risked his life to rescue two young soldiers from certain death. For this action he was subsequently awarded the Military Medal. So he felt a sympathy, a resonance, with Hanlon, as he would with anyone prepared to do what they had both done. They were both prepared to lay down their lives for others. Both had been decorated for it. He had a great respect for bravery. His staff had been ordered to treat her with all possible consideration. He was looking forward greatly to meeting her.

  He was satisfied with his reflection. As he brushed some imagined dust from his sleeve, he thought, I wonder what she wants with Anderson?

  Hanlon waited in the interview room for Anderson to arrive. Prisons made her think of a strange mix of fortress and school. Even the way prisoners addressed the officers and visitors was archaically polite. It was like going back in time to a more mannered age.

  HMP Wendover, one of England and Wales’ hundred and thirty-one prisons, was Victorian. Like most Victorian buildings, it was designed to impress. It had massive brick walls, twenty feet high, the top few feet covered in a decorative, plain stone cladding, so it looked as if it had been capped by a stonemason dentist. The front gate was huge, panelled and studded like something from a medieval fortress. For someone arriving on foot it was a peculiar sensation to walk through the small door within the huge wooden portal. It felt like visiting a giant’s castle.

  Inside the enormous gate, in a side office off the vast, vaulted arch of the entrance, she was searched by an attractive blonde woman officer, signed a visitor’s form and was issued with a pass. The fairytale world of the prison, a fairytale from the Brothers Grimm, not Disney, was emphasized by the discrepancy between the noisy rush outside and the disturbing tranquillity within. The silence was almost oppressive.

  A tough-looking, wiry, silver-haired prison guard, with the twin stars on his uniform denoting he was a principal prison officer, led her into the grounds of the prison.

  From inside you could appreciate how big the place was. The black, tarmacked driveway through the prison that they walked down was very wide and everywhere was immaculately clean. The only signs of life were three prisoners silently tending a flower bed. It was as peaceful and relaxing as a sanatorium out here. She knew that inside the cell blocks there would be a great deal of noise, but it was contained within their walls. Hanlon reflected that prisons were such places of extremes: it was either tranquil or a riot. There was very little in between.

  John, the guard who accompanied her, was a pleasant, laconic individual. Like most prison guards he seemed to have a good sense of humour. Hanlon guessed it was almost a prerequisite of the job; you had to be able to laugh or you’d never last.

  Any prisoner that they encountered greeted them politely. Hanlon was reminded again that prison was a strange place. There was always an atmosphere of strained civility mixed with the constant threat of violence. The last time she’d interviewed someone in a prison, the alarms had suddenly sounded and they’d found themselves in the middle of a lockdown. She found out later one of the inmates had had his throat slashed, the news of which had sparked a riot. She’d sat in a secure room while a flash flood of enraged humanity had seethed down the narrow corridor. Even for Hanlon it had been an unsettling experience.

  In one of the corridors today, she�
�d walked past a large, glass trophy cabinet mounted on the wall. In a school such a cabinet would contain trophies and cups. Here it contained a selection of home-made weapons, mainly shanks or knives, recently recovered. Razor blades set in handles, toothbrushes filed to needle-sharp points, ingenious arrangements of broken glass. There was even a wooden pistol fashioned by one of the inmates. It really didn’t do to underestimate anyone in a Category A prison.

  They were walking past a low prison outbuilding. ‘A wing,’ said John with a jerk of his head. ‘Sexual offenders.’

  Hanlon nodded. Hello, Rabbit, she thought. Enjoying life in your hutch? The sex offenders had to be rigidly separated from the other prisoners, even to a certain extent from each other. The other inmates would have attacked them on sight. They were despised and they acted like a conduit, a lightning rod for the other prisoners’ suppressed rage. There was a rigid social order in prison and the inmates took a kind of pride in their hatred of the sex offenders. It was their way of showing the world they too had morality, they too had standards. The sex offenders were good for the other prisoners’ self-esteem. Whatever they were, they weren’t nonces.

  She thought of Rabbit Bingham, intelligent, witty, entrepreneurial, charming, self-deprecating, in many ways a catalogue of virtues, and a huge risk to any child he came within reach of. He, like virtually all child abusers, was totally without remorse. She doubted if Bingham even realized he was a monster. He’d told her in all seriousness that children often quite liked sex, it was a matter of how it was done. He’d dropped famous names of other well-known sex offenders into the conversation: Oscar Wilde, André Gide, Jimmy Savile, Roman Polanski, Gary Glitter, Stuart Hall. One day, he said, it’ll be legal, like homosexuality. He also pointed out that marriage in many countries was permitted at the age of puberty, or below, and not fixed at some arbitrary figure. He told Hanlon that in some cases he knew of men who’d been led on by eight-year-olds. He himself had been broken in – his term – by a neighbour when he was ten and he’d come to love it.