Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  ‘It won’t get any better. I’ve only just started. Tell me what I need to know.’ Anderson re-applied the flame. A thin plume of dark smoke rose and the smell of burning flesh started to fill the room.

  Bingham’s head started nodding frantically. Anderson put away the lighter and took out a pen and paper. He removed the tape from Bingham’s mouth and listened carefully as he told Anderson the location of the island and where the boy would be held.

  ‘Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?’ said Anderson. He looked with distaste at Bingham.

  Anderson had grown to dislike Bingham greatly in their short meeting. He opened the cupboard door and glanced out to check the time against the clock on the wall. An hour before Jardine would reappear to take Bingham away. He had paid Jardine a great deal of money for this. It was hugely expensive but money was not a problem for Anderson. Included in the deal was another bribe for the warder in charge of the relevant security cameras, another five-figure sum. He’d promised Jardine he wouldn’t kill Bingham. Neither of them wanted Bingham dead. He smiled to himself. Bingham noticed the smile and, like a dog eager to ingratiate itself to his master, smiled back, despite the pain. It was all over now. He had done as Anderson had asked; he had betrayed Conquest.

  Anderson leant forward and replaced the tape, which had been hanging by one corner from Bingham’s cheek. He patted it gently. ‘I guess they call you Rabbit because of your teeth,’ he said conversationally.

  Bingham nodded. He was wary but he’d done everything asked of him. A bargain was a bargain; it was only fair. Surely to God this was the end of it.

  Anderson reached behind him. He had a brick in his hand, a conventional house brick. Nothing special. Without warning he slammed the end into Bingham’s mouth. Bingham’s head snapped back with the force of the blow. Anderson had to restrain his immediate instinct, born of a number of vicious fights in pubs, car parks and streets, to slam the brick, or his hand, into Bingham’s exposed throat. He pushed his fingers against the rapidly swelling skin of Bingham’s upper lip to check the damage he’d done. He felt the ridge of Bingham’s front teeth with the tips of his fingers. They were still surprisingly intact. Blood seeped from around the black strip of duct tape that dramatically punctuated the very pale parchment of the skin on Bingham’s face.

  It took two more blows before Anderson was satisfied.

  Rabbit Bingham would need a new nickname.

  31

  In Brussels, Lord Justice Reece showered carefully and washed his thick, silver-grey hair. He looked at his face critically in the bathroom mirror. He had never been good-looking, his lips were wide and blubbery, his eyes slightly bulging, his face fleshy, but his ugliness had worked to his advantage. People don’t want their lawyers to look like male models. They want ability, they want reassurance, and Reece’s messianic self-confidence, boosted by carefully chosen, high-profile pro-bono work and remorseless media networking, had made him very reassuring indeed.

  Before he had become a judge there were few TV or radio programmes about civil rights that didn’t feature Reece. He’d made his name in the law by championing unpopular causes and the downtrodden, but only if they were also popular media topics. He was also a fixture on the lecture circuit, a regular at places like the Oxford Union and the Cambridge Union Society. He had many friends in the BBC. He had adopted a strategy of professing modesty, but reluctantly appearing in the full blaze of publicity for ‘moral’ reasons. Media fame had brought high-profile cases, which in turn brought the ability to charge astronomical fees. Representing the underdog and fighting injustice was lucrative work for Reece, but of course he’d only do it if there was interest from the intelligentsia. Before becoming a judge, Reece was a multimillionaire from his legal practice but he kept this quiet from the public, who viewed him as an ascetic seeker of truth. Now he had set his sights on bigger things than fame or money. Now he was after power.

  The interviews he had attended in Strasbourg for the presidency of the European Court of Human Rights had gone extremely well the day before, he knew that. He had expected nothing less. The questions he had been asked, the outline of the future for the law he’d been invited to express, could have been expressly designed to play to his strengths. The legal profession usually draws its top tier of lawyers from a particular class, connected, arrogant, ambitious, wealthy; it’s an exclusive club. The role of a senior legal position is not concerned with justice or ethics; it is primarily to safeguard salaries, reputation, power and status for the legal profession. Lord Justice Reece was a highly safe pair of hands and well used to dealing with civil servants, government and the European Union. He spoke their language, bureaucracy, and he spoke it fluently, mellifluously and persuasively – it’s a universal language, the Esperanto of power.

  That morning he would meet the advisers to the French and German Justice ministers – agreeable, civilized, like-minded, legal minds. Then there would be a long lunch and another meeting. In the evening, dinner with the EU Justice Commissioner at Bruneau, one of Brussels’ best Michelin-starred restaurants, centrally located in Avenue Rousting in the shadow of the Koekelberg.

  Reece liked to think of himself as a gourmet. As a child he’d had to endure the horrors of English boarding-school cooking, the lumpy mash, the lukewarm, gristly, grey mince with its congealing gravy, and tapioca pudding. Now he was a Michelin Guide addict. Any trip to any city for whatever reason would find Reece booked into one of the red guide’s entries, and nine times out of ten someone else would be paying. He was particularly looking forward to Bruneau as he’d never been before; he only knew about it by repute. Its chocolate soufflé was said to be superb, as was the cheese board. The rack of lamb was legendary, the turbot alone worth the enormous EU fisheries subsidy.

  The 200 euro set menu came with a selection of recommended wines. Reece was particularly pleased by this. He was knowledgeable about food but choosing the correct wine was such a terrible problem. Choice itself was the first hurdle. You were normally faced with a massive leather-bound menu containing the names of hundreds of wines, making selection haphazard at best. Then there was the question of which vintage to go for. He had an app on his phone which had more or less sorted this problem out. The year 2005, for example, was a superb year for Bordeaux, but which one? You could take a risk and go with the sommelier’s recommendation, which could be, and often was, based on what would give the restaurant the best profit margin, or, scandalously in his opinion, what needed using up. Having the choice made for him lifted a huge burden off his shoulders.

  Then he would fly home on the Wednesday, back to his office in the Inns of Court, and Thursday would see him alone with the boy, for forty-eight hours of pure, sensual pleasure. It would be the culmination of a dream.

  Reece had experimented with rent boys, courtesy of Bingham, over on the island, but lived in fear that one of them would recognize him from his many TV appearances. Bingham thought the chances of this happening were practically zero. How many rent boys, he’d asked Reece scornfully, watched Newsnight or Hard Talk on BBC News 24? Almost certainly zero. But to reassure Reece, he had come up with the idea that the judge should wear a mask, an idea he’d adopted with great enthusiasm. But sex with prostitutes wasn’t what he wanted and he also didn’t like having to take precautions. He wanted a pure, untainted body; he wanted sex free of condoms. He wanted a boy that he could use without fear of contracting AIDS or a pernicious STD.

  Reece felt he had done more than enough to deserve it. It was really what he was due, what he was owed by society for his rare legal expertise. Bingham had reassured him on this. It was only right he should receive his due reward. You are a guardian of civilization; without you we’d be at the mercy of racists and fascists. It’s people like you who preserve decent society, said Bingham, and it’s only right that an exceptional man gets an exceptional reward. He strongly believed that the labourer was worthy of his hire. The law was there to protect children from predatory perverts, but he was the embo
diment of the law. He decided what was just and what was unjust, and only a keen mind like his was able to make these distinctions. He decided what was legal.

  Society is run, Bingham had assured him, on utilitarian principles: good was what was good for the greatest number of people. Since Reece, with his masterly legal mind, a man in a hundred million, had seen fit to devote his stupendous intellect to the good of society, it was only fair that society pay the reward. Reece, in taking Peter Reynolds, would only be taking a tiny part of what society owed him.

  The judge had nodded.

  Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.

  Come Unto Me.

  Hanlon sat in her dusty office, wearing her usual impassive face but inside screaming at her mobile to ring. She hated having to rely on other people, but there was nothing she could do to hurry Anderson. The rolling TV news still carried reports on the missing Peter Reynolds, mainly live from outside New Scotland Yard. It was infuriating that she felt she knew the truth but was powerless to act. She had everything and nothing. There was a figure out of Greek mythology called Cassandra, who had the gift of seeing the future, but her curse was that no one would believe her. That’s what I am, she thought bitterly, a modern-day Cassandra. Come on, Anderson, call me!

  Back in London, Kathy was eating a Ryvita and drinking water. The coarse crispbread scoured her tongue and palate and she found its abrasive texture somehow comforting. She would have liked to be able to hurt herself, to gash herself with a razor blade, for example. The pain would have distracted her, and it would have been a sympathetic magic, as if by drawing bad things down to her own body she could take them away from Peter. She had another piece of crispbread. Normal food would have made her vomit. Until Peter was found, the thought of eating revolted her. She knew she had to have enough to function, so she didn’t collapse, but crackers were all she could really face. Her sleep at night was fitful at best, more like drawing a thin grey veil around her than the oblivion she craved. She lay on her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. She refused sleeping pills. Peter might be found at any time and she had to stay sharp.

  Peter may not have been able to guess why he had been kidnapped but Kathy could imagine all kinds of terrible reasons. She didn’t dare think about them. Her head felt as if it was going to explode, like it had been pressurized. When she was awake, her thoughts virtually shut down. She didn’t want to think. She was like a TV on standby. It wasn’t a comforting, meditative state of non-ego, of awareness; it was a pointless, numb nothingness. She couldn’t bear to think. Life for Kathy was a prolonged, silent, howl of pain, separation and dread.

  Rabbit Bingham was in the prison infirmary. The second degree burns to his penis would require a skin graft; the smashing of his mouth would result in the extraction of what was left of his upper and lower front teeth. The damage to the soft tissue of his lips was also extensive and had required a lot of stitching. Bingham had refused to name his attacker.

  Drifting in and out of consciousness from the morphine they’d given him for the pain, he told the guards he’d fallen down stairs and hurt his mouth. The burns he claimed were self-inflicted. They were a sex game gone wrong.

  Alastair Fordham, the governor, was in a state of understandable rage. He didn’t care about Bingham as a person, nobody did. If the story leaked out to the press no one would care that a paedophile had been seriously injured in prison. But although non-newsworthy, what Bingham most certainly had become was both an administrative headache and the subject of an embarrassing investigation.

  To a certain extent, Fordham didn’t care about the cost and the administrative hassle of Bingham being sent to a mainstream hospital. He was hardly a flight risk. Certainly, with the condition his genitals were in, he posed no threat to children. Added to that, it would be a while before he could even move a muscle in his lower limbs, much less run away.

  What Fordham did object to was being made to look as if he couldn’t control his own prison and the implication, the clear conclusion, that whoever did this had inside help. The assault on Bingham must have had the tacit support of at least one of the prison officers. Almost certainly more than one. Fordham was a pragmatist, he knew that with more than three hundred dangerous prisoners on site, not to mention the ever-present problem of bribery, a certain amount of trouble was inevitable. Prison officers are not well paid, they have difficult working conditions and some of the prisoners in their care have access to huge amounts of money. Blind eyes were often turned inside. The presence of illegal substances, a given. Arguably, anything that calmed a volatile prison population down was not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be a fool to think otherwise. Fordham was not the kind of man to launch a moral crusade over anything.

  But this was provocatively bold. It was an in-your-face challenge to his authority. Bingham had been discovered in the library he was supposed to have been cleaning. There was no trace of the violence that had been inflicted on him to be found, so the assault had obviously taken place elsewhere. A quick enquiry revealed that several key CCTV monitors had ‘malfunctioned’. Certain key officers had become very forgetful, either because they were involved or were unwilling to voice suspicions. The general amnesia seemed contagious. Nobody knew anything. It would be useless asking the prisoners. Nobody would dare implicate Anderson. No one was going to grass.

  The assault also had the effect, like any violent incident in a prison, of creating a hysterically ugly mood. Prisons are very finely balanced places; they rely as much on the prisoners making it work as the staff. They were all in it together. But they are febrile, hothouse environments and the effect of Bingham’s attack was like poking an anthill. The natives were restless. He’d had to cancel leave and put on extra shifts. The last thing he needed was a riot. That really would be the icing on the cake. Fordham was furious about this damage to his reputation. Other governors would be rubbing their hands.

  Fordham personally suspected Anderson. He had the showman’s flamboyant touch, the imagination, that most of the other prisoners lacked. Everyone knew the reason for his ‘Jesus’ nickname. Fordham also harboured a feeling that it might be connected with Hanlon’s visit. He didn’t believe in coincidence. Not in prison.

  When he’d been in the army, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, Fordham had seen torture of suspects first hand, or ‘enhanced interrogation’ as the army put it. He wasn’t squeamish – you can’t fight a war with clean hands – and having met Hanlon, he knew that neither was she. Well, he wasn’t going to launch a complaint to the Met, to Hanlon’s boss, or to air his suspicions; by nature he believed in closing ranks, but he certainly wasn’t going to make life easy for anyone.

  He ordered an immediate cell lockdown on Anderson’s wing and a thorough search. He put his most trusted men on this. Rip the place apart, he’d told them. Prisoners are only allowed a certain amount of personal effects, more or less enough to fill two shoe boxes, but stuff still accumulates. Anderson’s phone, minus its SIM card, was discovered. An incandescently angry Fordham – what else was Anderson up to? – ordered Anderson strip-searched, with replacement clothing issued, and that he be put in a holding cell indefinitely until Fordham had decided exactly what to do with him.

  Anderson paced his solitary confinement cell angrily. He hadn’t had his phone with him when Bingham had grassed Conquest up. It had been in its secure hiding place that had turned out to be not secure at all. He guessed that Hanlon wouldn’t be allowed to see him, no one would be. He’d demanded to see his lawyer and was told his request would be considered. That could be days, maybe weeks. Today was Wednesday; if he couldn’t tell her where Bingham thought the boy was being held by Friday, the deal was off. All of this would have been in vain. Not only would he lose the money, which he didn’t particularly care about, but he would lose his chance to get out of jail. If he’d been in the main part of the prison he could have found someone who was due a visit that week to pass a message on; that wasn’t going to happen now.

  He’
d requested via one of the prison officers that he be allowed to see Hanlon. He was given a frosty reply that the matter would be looked into. He had to get a message to her, but he couldn’t see how.

  As Fordham expected, he received a formal request from DI Hanlon for a further meeting with Anderson. This chimed with the Anderson request to see her. It confirmed the governor’s suspicions. No way, thought Fordham. You’ve got a bloody nerve, DI Hanlon. This was turned down until a thorough review of Anderson’s conduct had been made.

  Hanlon sat in her office, frustrated and worried. She had known that calling the prison would be a bad idea, but she hadn’t been able to resist. Every moment she didn’t find Peter increased the danger he was in and increased the pressure on her. The same thoughts ran over and over in her head like a washing-machine cycle. She knew Conquest had the boy, but she had no real proof. She had nothing she could take to even the tamest of magistrates. Even if Corrigan were to go crazy, throw caution to the wind, and agree with her, she still had no idea where Peter was being held. A man like Conquest, with a property network, could have him almost anywhere. Conquest would never tell her where the boy was. She knew that even if she had incontrovertible evidence – a busload of witnesses, forensic evidence, the whole thing on film even – Conquest wouldn’t talk. It would be beneath his dignity. There was nothing she could threaten him with.

  The thing that really got to her was that she was certain Anderson had fulfilled his part of the bargain. The answer as to where Peter was lay maddeningly close, but just out of reach.

  Suddenly she thought of Cunningham. Her heart leapt at the thought. Momentarily a golden scenario unfolded in her imagination: Cunningham in an interview room alone with Anderson, the information passed on, the lawyer phoning her from the prison car park. Surely Anderson was entitled to see a lawyer? Cunningham could get the access that Fordham had denied her. After her calls to the governor went unanswered, his secretary stone-walling her, she’d called a couple of people she knew in the prison service and they’d made discreet enquiries. They quickly found out what had happened at HMP Wendover and filled her in on Anderson and the sorry state of Bingham. That’s how she knew Anderson had succeeded. If Bingham hadn’t talked, Anderson would have killed him out of annoyance. They also let her know about the governor’s frame of mind. She was persona non grata. Everyone was.