Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  Anderson would get her the answer she needed. The boy would be in one of Conquest’s properties and Bingham would know where. He would tell Anderson. Anderson would do whatever was necessary to make Bingham talk. Then Anderson would tell her.

  Conquest was not going to stand trial.

  She would see to that.

  30

  Like all the sexual offenders at HMP Wendover, Bingham had to be strictly segregated from the other prisoners. He was a Category C prisoner, which meant staff thought he wasn’t an escape risk (unlike Howe in B wing, who had nothing to lose) but was unsuitable for an open prison. As if by way of compensation, although nobody really felt sorry for him, Bingham had been given a coveted job. He got to clean the library for several hours a week when it was closed to other inmates. Bingham was one of Wendover’s most trusted prisoners. He had no choice but to adhere strictly to security measures; it was what kept him alive. The library job was suitable for Bingham because it didn’t need a team to do it, he was highly literate and, above all, a fanatic about cleanliness and order.

  In fairness to Bingham, he did do a wonderful job. The small library had never been so polished, dusted or well organized. Bingham enjoyed this task immensely. It was a change of scenery from A wing, extremely welcome in itself, and for a brief period of time he felt normal, as if he were doing a normal job in a normal place, like a regular person does in the outside world. He could almost forget he was in prison. He also liked the company of books. In another life he’d have enjoyed being a librarian.

  Books were non-judgemental, unlike people. Here he had the company of other paedophiles: William Burroughs, André Gide, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Jean Genet. It was quite a distinguished list. He felt he belonged in that august company, not with these rough, unhygienic, uncultured criminals.

  Today, however, he was surprised to find that Jardine, a prison officer who he didn’t know well, was taking him, not down the usual series of internal corridors and gates that led to the library but on an unfamiliar route. This ended in the two of them standing outside A wing in the open courtyard that stretched over to a rectangular building. Bingham knew this to be the education block. Jardine looked at him imperiously. The screw was huge, six foot six and extremely powerfully built. He was a committed bodybuilder. Age was taking its toll on his sharply defined physique, and steroid abuse had also taken its toll on his temper and his skin condition, both poor. Unbeknownst to the prisoners but not to himself or Mrs Jardine, the steroids had also affected his virility, which added to Jardine’s ill humour. Faded blue-green tattoos of a nautical style, anchors, mermaids, King Neptune, were inked into his skin. He was ex-Royal Navy. Rumour had it that Jardine was on the take but Bingham wouldn’t know. He had never tried to bribe a prison officer; he wouldn’t dare. Bingham was not a risk-taker; he knew himself deep down to be a coward, frightened of pain, frightened by threats. It was partly what had drawn him to Conquest. Bingham hero-worshipped Conquest’s easy competence with violence. He wished he was brave, but he knew he wasn’t. Jardine frightened him. He hadn’t dared ask where they were going.

  Prison was quite the worse thing that Bingham could have imagined happening to him. It was a terrifying place and he lived in mortal fear of the other prisoners. He had never visualized jail, not in his most vivid nightmares. He had always been so very careful. The only reason he was here was because an ex-sexual partner (Bingham, who was a precise man verbally, would not have used the word ‘boyfriend’, and friendship had never been part of the equation) had shopped him to the police in a plea bargain attempt. What, after all, had he done? Looked at photos that he hadn’t even taken. The regular sex trips he’d made to Thailand and Vietnam hadn’t even come up in the trial. Besides, that was abroad anyway. The work he had done for Conquest had also remained secret. The organized sexual assaults, the recruitment of child prostitutes, the sex parties – none of this had come out.

  Even if it had, he wouldn’t have implicated Conquest. He had kept quiet during his interrogation out of a fear of Conquest as well as his love for the man. The police were sure Bingham knew quite a lot about the provenance of the imagery. This was correct, more than correct, but Bingham knew that if he implicated him, Conquest would have him killed. But it wasn’t just that. He loved Conquest in his way. Love would have closed his lips as effectively as fear. So despite all the offers of reduced sentencing and lesser charges, his lips remained sealed.

  ‘We’ve done some roster changes,’ said Jardine to Bingham as they contemplated the empty yard in front of them. ‘We heard that one of the prisoners was planning an attack on you in the library, so we’re moving you to clean the education block instead.’ He pointed at it. ‘As you can see, it’s isolated so you’ll be safe there. Nobody will be able to get to you.’ He smiled unpleasantly at Bingham. ‘We wouldn’t want anything untoward happening to you now, would we?’

  Bingham caught a smell of halitosis from the officer’s mouth and wrinkled his nose in distaste. Bingham, morbidly conscious of his own teeth, spent a great deal of time, which of course he had in abundance, flossing and cleaning and brushing. Plaque was his sworn enemy. His own teeth gleamed with almost surgical cleanliness. Jardine’s teeth were yellow with dark streaks of build-up between each tooth. Bingham shuddered inwardly. He found the smell of the decay disgusting.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said politely. A prison attack was what he feared most in life, with good reason. He sometimes had vivid nightmares about it. He could imagine with horrible three-dimensional clarity the shank, the home-made knife, ripping into his flesh, his blood spurting out. In his fevered imagination he had suffered this attack maybe hundreds of times. Shakespeare was right about cowards and their multiple deaths. There were three hundred and fifty men within the walls who would all be happy to do it.

  The two of them walked across the tarmac to the building and Jardine let him in. His keys rattled in the metal door.

  ‘In you go,’ he said. ‘Cleaning stuff is in a cupboard by the toilet. It’s ten now, I’ll be back at twelve. I want a good job doing, understood, Paul?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Bingham.

  He watched as the door closed. He frowned to himself. Jardine had departed with suspicious haste. The instructions were unusually vague. Normally everything in a prison was laboriously spelt out as if the assumption was that you were retarded. Things were ticked off on lists. Everything had to be accounted for. In the library the cleaning materials were checked off against columns detailing product type and quantity. They could, after all, be used to poison or blind someone. Due diligence was exercised to a tedious degree. Something did not feel right. The key turned again in the lock. He was alone in the building. Then he sensed movement behind him. He froze in fear. Not good. Not good at all. Bingham turned.

  There, standing looking at him, was a tall, thin man he’d never seen before, dressed in prison denim. Long, unkempt hair obscured his face. The man’s eyes gleamed dangerously. ‘Hello, Rabbit,’ he said softly.

  Bingham’s heart raced uncontrollably and he thought for a second he was going to faint. To be a nonce and alone with another prisoner could realistically only mean one thing. The attack wasn’t planned for the library; it was planned for here and Jardine had delivered him to it. He felt the wet warmth in his jeans as he stared at the other man and lost control of his bladder in his terror. The other prisoner noticed the telltale change of colour in the material from light to dark blue. He shook his head but didn’t seem surprised.

  ‘Oh dear me,’ he said softly and advanced swiftly on Rabbit, who was too frightened to move or speak. Bingham’s nightmare had begun.

  Clarissa and Conquest stood on the quayside and watched as the small lorry carefully reversed off the boat that had come from the lodge on the mainland to Strood Island. The island was comma-shaped, nearly a mile long, and lay about a quarter of a mile off the Essex coast in the North Sea near Walton-on-the-Naze, the nearest town.

  The island had a large nineteenth-
century Gothic-style manor house on it that had been built by a Victorian businessman who had taken up the then relatively new hobby of sailing for pleasure. There was a small natural harbour on the coastal side of the island, protected from the sea by a low hill that rose up behind the house, and the harbour had been enhanced by a mole that ran out from the shore, leaving a gap suitable for a sizeable boat.

  Conquest had bought the island about twenty years ago. It had been dirt cheap. No one wanted it. The house was dilapidated, falling down in parts. It had no electricity or gas, the quay in front of the house on the island was in poor condition and the lodge that went with it on the mainland was in an equally rundown state.

  At the time Conquest was still selling drugs. Ecstasy was the new kid on the block and new strains of grass like skunk were beginning to supplant black as the thing to smoke. The Dutch had control over the E so Conquest was spending a good deal of time going backwards and forwards to the continent. Twice now he’d been stopped, searched and questioned by French border control, alerted by his unusual travel history. With a motorboat, he could just sail over and bypass officialdom. Brittania rules the waves, thought Conquest. He had been using lorry containers from Rotterdam to Harwich to move the ecstasy. He felt he was having to pay too much to bribe HMRC officials and wanted to cut them out.

  The idea of sailing the drugs over had never come to anything. But later, when he started going big with Bingham, the house on the island proved ideal.

  The land surrounding the house had been landscaped to a certain extent and was mostly enclosed by a two metre-high wall built to protect the plants in the garden from the cold winds of the North Sea. There was a gap, however, that led to a field, originally put there for agricultural purposes to provide grazing for dairy cows. It was here that Conquest had decided to put the pigs. The fences surrounding the field had been strengthened and a dozen shelters for the pigs installed, with a wallow created for their comfort, and today the animals themselves arrived. There were six of them, five females and a tusked boar, all sizeable and pink. Conquest knew from Glasgow Brian, who was guiding them off the truck with a board and shouts of encouragement, that they were Large Whites, and they would eventually weigh in at a couple of hundred kilos each.

  When she was a young girl, Clarissa used to have an illustrated copy of the fairy story ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, and the Troll who lived under the bridge was the very image of Brian. Like the Troll he was enormous, obese, very strong and covered in black hair. His teeth were yellowed and irregularly shaped, with occasional gaps where they’d been knocked or kicked out in fights.

  A few years ago, he’d had a body to dispose of. A turf war had got out of hand and a rival biker had died in a fight at a meeting held to establish peace talks. Maybe unsurprisingly, the meeting had turned violent. The peace negotiators had agreed to come unarmed. All had brought knives or guns. Pete had a cottage with land attached and he farmed on a low-key scale. He’d volunteered to get rid of the dead Hell’s Angel. He had experimented by quartering the dead biker and feeding him to the pigs that he kept on his smallholding. It was very successful. Pigs are omnivorous with big appetites and their forty-four teeth are capable of chewing through most organic things. The only drawback really was that small bones, like those of fingers or toes, passed through the pigs’ digestive system fairly intact. They would be readily identifiable as human to the trained eye. They were too small and it was too time-consuming to search for them in the mud churned up by the animals or to go through their excrement.

  It wasn’t a foolproof system but it functioned well enough. It would be possible to work out what had happened, but you’d need to know what you were looking for. It would have to be a pretty painstaking search by the police to find anything incriminating. They’d have to sift through a couple of acres of mud. It wasn’t something you might stumble across. It was certainly better than burial or cremation.

  With these pigs on the island, Conquest would now have a ready-made waste-disposal system and, as he joked with Pete, it was very eco-friendly.

  Clarissa watched the pigs as they nervously explored their new, unfamiliar surroundings. They snuffled the strange salt air with their snouts. Pigs have a keen sense of smell. They hadn’t enjoyed the lorry journey and they were still unsettled. They were not in the best of moods. To Clarissa’s eyes they looked monstrous. She wasn’t a country girl and it was the first time she had ever seen a pig. They were the size of Chesterfield sofas and their eyes were disconcertingly intelligent. They gleamed. I’m not going in there, she thought, staring at their paddock from behind the barred gate where she stood watching them. Not if you paid me. They creep me out.

  She turned and looked at the house behind her. The two downstairs front rooms of the house overlooked the island’s jetty and, beyond that, the flat, green line of the Essex coast. One of the rooms was a lounge; the other, which had been a former snooker room, Conquest used as his office. In the course of his life, he had never bothered to collect art or mementos but occasionally he’d ended up with things salvaged from properties. He’d used these to decorate these rooms. It gave them a homely feel. The London address in the Bishops Avenue was kept on purely as an investment and for impressing clients; he didn’t like living in it. It was the island that felt like home.

  Amongst these random objects – a mounted tiger’s head, stuffed fish, a framed poster for some music hall acts – was a pair of hunting spears, as tall as a man, with long, barbed iron heads, said to have been used by Hermann Goering at his enormous countryside retreat of Carinhall. Robbo, who worked for Conquest and lived in the house’s basement, venerated these. He coveted them. Robbo worshipped the Nazis. The money that Conquest paid him, and he paid him very well, went chiefly on Nazi memorabilia. The spears would have crowned his collection. Frequently he pestered Conquest to let him have them. ‘Over my dead body,’ Conquest said. They were vicious things, designed for boar hunting. Clarissa hadn’t thought anything of them until she’d seen the size of an actual pig. One of the pigs in the field was indeed a boar, with protruding tusks that Glasgow Brian had explained were simply overgrown front teeth. Clarissa wouldn’t dream of approaching it, certainly not armed with only a primitive spear, no matter how sharp or effective it might be.

  Conquest had made a joke about someone called Rabbit and his dental similarities. How old’s the boar? he’d asked Glasgow Brian. About five, said Glasgow Brian. Conquest had laughed and said, ‘That’s the age Rabbit likes them. Maybe a bit too old for him in fact. He’ll be here in a few weeks, I’ll introduce them. They’ll get on.’

  Rabbit Bingham was currently in no position to appreciate jokes. He was fastened to a wooden chair in a capacious store cupboard in the education block. The cupboard was built into the building itself, part of its actual fabric. Its walls were brick, its door metal-panelled wood. His arms had been duct-taped to the chair, his legs to those of the chair with tape round his ankles. More duct tape secured his mouth.

  Bingham’s trousers and underpants were currently around his ankles too and Anderson was looking at him expressionlessly. Anderson had closed the door of the cupboard, which was more like a small room. He sat down on an upturned bucket directly in front of Bingham. Light came from a candle that Anderson had lit, which made the scene look like something from medieval times. A scene from the Spanish Inquisition painted by Goya. Sweat trickled down Bingham’s forehead, occasionally stinging his eyes.

  Anderson said in a conversational tone, ‘These walls are surprisingly thick and so is the door. I don’t think anyone will hear you scream but I don’t like noise, so I’ll leave the tape on for now.’ He paused for effect. ‘Now, doubtless, you’ll be wondering why you’re here.’

  Bingham shook his head helplessly, a wordless pleading for mercy.

  Anderson took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them on slowly and thoughtfully. He had heard that the anticipation of pain is almost as effective as pain itself. He wasn’t sure. O
ne day he would ask but usually when he’d finished with someone, they were in no fit state for measured reflection. They were pathetically grateful to be alive even if the gratitude was mixed with extreme pain.

  He leant forward and said, ‘This isn’t about you, Rabbit.’ He studied his gloved hands carefully. ‘Your friend Conquest has taken a boy and I want to know where he’s put him. That’s fairly simple, isn’t it. You are going to tell me where, aren’t you? I’ll just repeat that for you, you don’t look all there, Rabbit. Do try and concentrate. I want to know where Conquest would be keeping a boy. You’re going to tell me, so you might as well get it off your chest now.’

  It wasn’t a question. Anderson’s freedom, ten years of his life, rested on Bingham telling him what he wanted to know. He would talk. Unable to speak, Bingham’s responses were limited to a yes or a no. A nod or a shake of the head. Had he been able to talk he would have tried to plead ignorance or buy time.

  He knew exactly where the boy would be held. It was where he intended to stay after he left prison. He shook his head. Anderson sighed as if he’d been expecting this. He put his hand in his pocket and took out a Zippo lighter.

  He flicked the lighter and a ragged yellow flame appeared. Anderson and Bingham both looked at the flame, then Anderson shook his head sadly and leant forward with the lighter. His other hand took Rabbit’s penis. Bingham’s agony began.

  A little while later for Anderson, a lifetime later for Rabbit, he extinguished the flame, ‘Well?’ Bingham shook his head. His face was wet with tears. Unable to scream, unable to move, he had just endured pain like nothing he could have ever imagined. Anderson put his head close to Bingham’s.