by Alex Howard
Things now started to make sense. She guessed that the wall and the wire were to keep out anti-Semitic attacks. They were on the increase. All over Europe, as ever, Jews were being targeted. A virulent strain of anti-Semitism was now very much back in vogue. Russia, always anti-Jewish; in Hungary, there was Jobbik. In Greece, the Golden Dawn’s symbol looked alarmingly swastika-like. There was a particularly virulent strain of ugly racism in France, adding to a new diaspora of Jews to the UK, USA and Israel. She’d read in an internal Met document that anti-Semitic attacks were up recently by as much as fifty per cent, and a graveyard like this would be a ripe target for desecration.
Hanlon guessed too that the recent Dieudonné Quenelle controversy would almost certainly lead to further attacks on all things Jewish. She’d seen photos recently, selfies that people had taken at Auschwitz, grinning, thumbs up in approval. Another photo, in Oxford Street, a Middle Eastern or Pakistani kid with a straggly bum-fluffy beard and a placard, Kill All Juice. As illiterate as it was hate-filled. If there was one high-profile hate crime, it often led to others. But here there was no sign of heightened security for now.
The gates to the cemetery were open and Hanlon walked in. It was well ordered and tranquil with neat rows of headstones arranged in grid patterns. Some of the headstones were surmounted with angels or decorative motifs. Aside from the odd Star of David here and there and the presence of Hebrew characters on a fair few of the stones, you could have been in any graveyard anywhere in the country. In the middle of the cemetery towards one of the walls she could see a small JCB digger at work. She walked towards it. There were three men there, two workmen and another man in a suit with a clipboard. Hanlon spoke to him and found out that this was indeed the site of the Anderson burial.
‘Are you family?’ asked the man respectfully. Hanlon was wearing a dark tailored jacket and matching skirt. She had pulled her unruly hair into a tight bun. Foundation masked the faint bruising around her eye socket. She looked the epitome of a respectable businesswoman. She owned very little jewellery but she did have an expensive diamond ring; this she’d put on especially. Money reassured people. You didn’t expect the rich to be troublemakers.
‘A business associate,’ said Hanlon, which was true in a sense. Anderson Senior had been a well-known criminal so she guessed they were linked, even if they were on opposite sides. She had a sudden thought that some of her colleagues would almost certainly be turning up to pay their respects. Some would be pensioned-off former Flying Squad, looking forward to getting hammered at the doubtless lavish do afterwards; some would be older police mourning the passing of a generation, the ‘they don’t make them like that any more’ school of thought – they’d get pissed with their age group from the criminal fraternity, old, fat bald men with red noses, bonding about how London was going to the dogs with all the niggers and Pakis and now the fucking Russians moving into Knightsbridge and don’t let me get started on the Arabs. And one or two serving officers would be there, quietly on Dave Anderson’s payroll.
Earlier, she had walked past Edmonton Police Station. The borough seemed a nice enough place, but whoever had designed the local nick had been taking no chances. The modern building looked squat and massive. Bunker-like, its featureless walls looked as if they could withstand attack by a tank. It was like a fortress built in hostile territory. She thought of her new office in Langley, and the rationale of more open, less intimidating, access to the public suddenly made a great deal of sense. Chalk one up to Mawson and his Public Relations ethos, she thought.
She was aware that the man was still looking at her expectantly.
‘It’s eleven o’clock tomorrow, isn’t it?’ she said. She had no idea of the time that the funeral was scheduled for. The man shook his head.
‘Ten thirty,’ he corrected her. ‘Today.’
Hanlon clicked her tongue irritably. ‘I was misinformed, thank you,’ she said.
The cemetery manager nodded and said, ‘We’re expecting quite a crowd. I’d get here early if I were you.’
‘I fully intend to,’ said Hanlon curtly. ‘Thank you for your help.’ She turned and walked away. The manager watched her back as she disappeared from view down the path. He guessed that she was probably one of the doubtless expensive defence lawyers that the Anderson family were forced to engage periodically. Everyone in Edmonton knew of the Andersons. Today, he thought, if you dropped a bomb on this place you’d take out half of London’s top criminals, all coming to share their last respects.
If the first part of his surmise was incorrect, the second was spot-on accurate. The Andersons were A-list criminals.
Hanlon watched the first of Anderson’s security to arrive. She had parked her car on the other side of the busy main road in a small side street, diagonally across from the entrance to the cemetery. She was sitting behind the wheel, with half her mind on the situation outside, the other reflecting on her future.
Above all, she considered the intractable question of Mark Whiteside, in his drug-induced coma, in a hospital less than five miles from where she was sitting. She had looked into the cost of private surgery and the availability of surgical expertise.
It had been made clear to her that the NHS were not simply opposed to the procedure on cost grounds (the National Handbag as Albert Slater might have referred to government funding); it was the likelihood of success that was a major factor too. The chances were slim. And it wasn’t just that. One British surgeon she’d spoken to had pointed out that she had to be aware that the success of the operation could be as devastating as failure. That the damage the bullet had left could be repaired – but it wasn’t yet known at what cost to Whiteside’s quality of life afterwards.
‘Are you prepared,’ he had asked her quietly, ‘for the fact that you could well spend the rest of your life caring for a grown man who has become, to all intents and purposes, a helpless infant? That would be a worst-case scenario, worse in my view than death on the table, but it is a very real possibility.’
Well, thought Hanlon grimly. We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. But if I don’t do something soon there’s a deadline looming and Whiteside will be allowed to die. Meanwhile there was today’s funeral to think about, to take her mind off things. In many ways Hanlon was craving action, as she always did. Action was her way of coping, her solution to everything. Like a drug, it could successfully relieve the intensity of her morbid thoughts about her injured colleague and her part in it.
At nine thirty a black Range Rover with tinted windows arrived and four shaven- headed men in tight-fitting dark suits got out. The family praetorian guard. They were led by the man she had seen at the Beath Street brothel, Danny. The car drove off.
The other three listened respectfully while Danny issued instructions. Two of them nodded and took up positions flanking the gates. The other one, with Danny, entered the cemetery. She guessed that they were here to ensure the safety of Anderson. After the murder of Jordan they would all be feeling somewhat twitchy.
An hour to go, thought Hanlon. She wasn’t a hundred per cent sure why she was here herself. Partly, she guessed, to pay her respects to Malcolm Anderson, whose bravery in the face of his impending death had genuinely moved her, and partly out of curiosity to see which London villains would turn up at the funeral.
She was also interested to see if she’d recognize any police colleagues. A bent policeman had nearly had her killed in the past. Hanlon didn’t feel outraged by the fact. Corruption was always going to be there; it was a question of scale and manageability. And she had known at least one policeman who was an exceptional copper but at the same time dirty. Yin and yang, she thought, as Mawson would have put it, and when you looked at the Taoist image, there was a speck of black in the white and white in the black. Nothing is absolute.
She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and looked around her, an ingrained habit of mindfulness automatically taking over. The ability to concentrate fully was one of Hanlon’s greatest stre
ngths. Whiteside, her faltering career, everything was carefully set aside so she could give all of her attention to the task in hand.
She registered almost without thinking that to her left was a street of terraced houses and to her right, on the other side of the road, a three-storey-high office building with a flat roof that overlooked the road and the cemetery gates at the front, and the industrial estate and tall chimney of the incinerator plant to the rear.
Suddenly the inactivity of sitting placidly in the car enraged her. Hanlon was incapable of doing nothing for long; she lacked the gift of patience. She stepped out of the car and crossed the road. Ignoring the gates of the cemetery, instead she threaded her way through the small estate of houses to its left until she came to the broad path that bordered the Jewish graveyard.
The wall was as high as she remembered it from earlier, some three metres, and she eyed it thoughtfully. It was designed to keep people out, a statement reinforced by the razor wire. But every twenty metres or so there was a tree growing on the side of the wall by the path, a sequence of well-established trees some of whose branches overhung the cemetery.
Hanlon, in her dark, respectable two-piece suit, tailored jacket and skirt, wasn’t dressed for climbing, but the skirt was short so she could run in it if necessary and her boots were flat for the same reason.
She walked alongside the wall in the direction of Edmonton Broadway until she found a suitable tree and glanced around her. Nobody was in sight. In the distance she could see the backs of a couple of women pushing babies in buggies. She took a short run forward and leaped upwards; her strong fingers made contact with the lowest branch of the tree.
It bent alarmingly, but Hanlon wasn’t heavy and she pulled herself up. For her it was simplicity itself; she did a lot of chin-ups and pull-ups in the gym. She liked the sensation of just using the natural weight of her body to exercise. Sometimes she would strap on a couple of weights round her waist for added difficulty, to make her biceps really sing out. Occasionally, if there was an ostentatious, look-at-me kind of guy in the gym – the kind of idiot with a cutaway vest who swaggered with the sort of over-developed look she detested – she’d do a couple of one-armed pull-ups, her face studiously expressionless. The muscle-bound macho man would watch with baffled awe as Hanlon gracefully achieved what he never could. Her body was light, her sinews like thin cables of steel. The ratio of body weight to muscle was formidably on her side. She would seek to meet his eye with a contemptuous glance. Suck on that, Mr Universe, she would think. Let’s see you try.
Once in the tree, she climbed up to the branch that overhung the graveyard and, nimble as a squirrel, careful not to lose a boot, she moved along its length until she was over the wall.
She looked out over the enormous graveyard, an elongated rectangle full of the geometric rows of grey gravestones. Near to the entrance by the wall she noticed what looked like a storeroom, a building almost like a lodge house, with a low-pitched roof slanting backwards towards the road. From there, she would have an excellent view of the mourners by the grave without having to join the throng. Some of those attending she would probably have nicked at some stage or other. She’d certainly had dealings with Cunningham, the Andersons’ coke-addicted lawyer, and he’d be there, that was for sure, glassy-eyed and sniffing loudly. Despite her invite, she’d rather watch informally.
She could see Danny and his helper quickly patrolling the rows of gravestones. It confirmed her earlier theory. If what Iris Campion and Albert Slater said was true, and Hanlon never took information for granted, that Dave Anderson’s brother Jordan had been murdered in some turf war, there was every possibility that those responsible might take the opportunity to have a pop at another Anderson.
The two minders were working their way from the cemetery gates to the back of the graveyard, row by row. It was a simple job, the marker stones virtually all uniform, the monotony varied only occasionally by an angelic statue. It wasn’t like a higgledy-piggledy necropolis full of vaults, mini graveyard housing and other stone follies and monuments – the kind of place that was full of cover. In Highgate Cemetery, a veritable jungle of trees and overgrown bushes and shrubs and jumbled masonry, for example, you could hide a regiment if you were so minded. Here there were just the endless, neat markers written in Hebrew and English. The paths between each row were ruler straight. One quick glance down each row would suffice.
Hanlon swung down from her branch and dropped down gracefully to the stone chippings of the path. She made her way towards the front of the cemetery to the small building she had seen earlier. It was slightly offset from the entrance path and in the corner formed by its side wall and the brickwork of the graveyard perimeter was a large, green wheelie bin. She climbed on top of this, stood on its lid, put her hands on the edge of the parapet, hauled herself up and lay on the roof of the lodge. From this vantage point, as she had worked out earlier, she could see over the top of the gravestones to the place delineated by ropes and discreet bunting where the internment would take place.
She checked her watch, nine fifty-five.
At a quarter past ten the guests started to arrive. First came the pall-bearers, carrying the simple plain pine coffin, followed by the immediate family. Hanlon had a small pair of old Zeiss binoculars in her bag, and she took them out now and adjusted the focus.
There was a stout, balding man with glasses and an officious air, presumably a rabbi; Hanlon knew nothing about Jewish burial protocol. She didn’t even know if this burial was religious at all or secular. The Andersons’ word in Edmonton was law. Whatever religion Malcolm Anderson had been, if Dave Anderson wanted his dad buried here whoever ran the cemetery could either accede to the request or end up here himself. Whatever he was, he seemed to be in charge. There was Anderson himself, tall, thin, his lank hair trailing the thin high shoulders under his dark suit. There was a shorter, fuller-faced version of him that she guessed was Terry, the other brother, and a woman in her sixties with a blonde beehive hairdo that Hanlon thought must be Andrea, Dave’s mother and Malcolm’s ex.
More and more people filed into the cemetery, virtually all of them hard-faced men – various versions of the same type. Her vision, seen through the tunnel-like prism of the binoculars, swept here and there.
The grim faces of the Anderson family; the coked-out, stoner look of Cunningham, the lawyer – how did no one notice? marvelled Hanlon. Even at this distance he looked out of it. The sun was glancing off the bald and shaven heads of London’s most prominent villains, all there to pay their respects.
She idly swept the glasses upwards to look beyond the family by the side of the grave. It was taking her a while to get over the strange sensation of the world as viewed through the constrictive narrowness of the Zeiss lenses of the binoculars. She had lost most of her sense of peripheral vision.
There was an impressionistic sensation of a montage of funeral black, a large amorphous grouping of bodies, with occasional detail. The very stoned face of the lawyer, Cunningham, the hard-as-nails facelifted features of Anderson’s mother, more vicious-looking by far than her dead bank-robber ex-husband had been. The fatter features of Anderson’s younger brother. The plump, bulky rabbi.
She’d noticed a sudden movement and raised the binoculars slightly, looking over the heads of the crowd. There, perched on a gravestone, was a small robin. Its fluttered wings were what had caught her attention on the extremely limited periphery of her vision. If it hadn’t been for the bird she wouldn’t have seen what happened next.
There was a sudden puff of masonry dust and several cracks appeared on the gleaming black surface of the grave marker with its sombre gold Hebrew lettering. The robin flew off, alarmed. For a fraction of time Hanlon looked on, uncomprehending, before she realized that what she had seen was the result of a bullet hitting the grave marker.
She swung her binoculars down to the mourners. They remained where they were, oblivious of the danger. The impact of the shot had gone either unheard or unnoti
ced in the general noise surrounding the burial.
The target was obvious. Hanlon leaped to her feet and looked round to where the bullet must have come from. It had to have come from above. She knew the direction from which it had travelled. Only one place really fitted the bill. The office block over the road.
To think was to act. Hanlon acted.
She leaped to her feet on top of the roof. From there, she jumped onto the parapet of the engirdling cemetery wall, mercifully free of barbed wire on the section that fronted the main road, hung briefly by her fingertips, then dropped on to the pavement.
Danny, standing at the cemetery gates with the other two, Polite Paul and Robby, spun round at the sound of her feet hitting the ground as she sprang down to the pavement a few feet away from them.
It was as if she’d fallen out of the sky. The three of them stared at her in amazement. She had risen up from where her legs had folded under her to take the impact of landing on the hard pavement, pointed to the building over the road and shouted, ‘Gun!’
Danny understood the implication of the word immediately. He turned, shouting, ‘You go with her,’ to Robby and sprinted into the graveyard, pulling his own firearm out of a belt holster where it had been hidden by the cloth of his jacket.
Now, head down, arms pumping, Hanlon ran across the road. Cars braked furiously, horns sounding, as she sprinted towards the office block opposite the cemetery gates. Hanlon hit the far pavement running and accelerated down the pavement opposite her car towards the flat-roofed office block. She was followed by the lean, shaven-headed figure of Robby. From a distance, in their dark, formal clothes, it looked as if they were in some odd white-collar race.
Up on the flat roof of the third-floor office building the uzkoglazik, the Chinaman, clicked his tongue irritably. He glared at Nikita.