by Alex Coombs
The only thing she didn’t like about business travel was eating alone. It was particularly unenjoyable in hotel dining rooms where many of her fellow diners tended to be single businessmen who would surreptitiously stare at her speculatively as she ate, a book or a Kindle propped up on a cruet set in front of her.
Tonight would be different, though. Max was taking her out to dinner and she was determined to enjoy herself.
Peter Reynolds had regained consciousness and was lying on his back, taking stock of his surroundings. He felt remarkably calm, considering. He was feeling very weak and he could feel the hypo coming. This meant his blood sugar was very low and he knew he was not far off fainting. Despite the panic and fear he was feeling at his abduction, he knew he had to get some sugars into his body before he collapsed. He felt in his pockets for his blood-testing kit to check how low he was, then remembered it was in his schoolbag. His blood sugar had to be below four, he thought, the danger level. Four’s the floor. He patted his pockets again, hoping to find a sweet, but it was no good. There was nothing there.
He had no way of knowing what time it was but he guessed,
judging by the way he was feeling, it was probably late on Friday night. He breathed deeply and looked around him again.
It did not take long to complete an inventory. He was in a small, bare windowless room. The walls were smooth brick, painted a battleship grey. It was lit dimly by a recessed light covered with a grille. The metal door of the room was painted a dull green, with two square hatches, one at shoulder level, the other at floor level, and an eyehole. The room was about
the size of his bedroom at home, he guessed. It wasn’t very big but the lack of furnishings made it seem larger than it was. A metal toilet was bolted to the wall, no seat, with some toilet paper next to it. There was a small washbasin, also metal, with a mixer tap, some soap and a plastic cup. In one corner of the room was a fixed shower head and mixer tap, with a drain below it set into the floor. He was lying by the far wall opposite the door on a thick, blue padded plastic mat, rather like they had at school in the gym, with a thin pillow that his head was resting on and a neatly folded blanket by his feet. In the ceiling corner above the door was a CCTV camera so he could be observed. That completed the inspection of the room, apart from one thing that made his misery more bearable. By the door was the dog in its cage.
Peter carefully got to his feet, rubbing his head, and opened
the cage door. The dog flinched in fear. Its brown eyes were troubled and it trembled slightly. The boy put his arm slowly into the cage, allowing the dog to smell his hand to reassure it, and spoke soothingly to it. The animal let him stroke its head and when Peter withdrew his hand the dog crept nervously out of its cage and came to him. It lay down in front of Peter as he stroked its warm fur. It was still trembling. Peter could sympathize. The dog licked his hand and Peter kissed its head. As he did so, he heard footsteps that stopped outside his cell and felt he was being observed through the spyhole. He lifted his head.
‘I’m diabetic and I’m about to go into a coma unless you give me the emergency glucose that you’ll find in my schoolbag. And get me some orange juice.’ He spoke loudly at the blank, metal door. He paused, his head ached so. The coma was no idle threat. ‘I’ll need my blood-testing kit too. I’d hurry if I were you.’
The footsteps on the other side of the door started to move away, much more quickly than they’d arrived. A couple of minutes later he stood up as he heard the bottom hatch in his cell door being opened, and he moved forward to take the two cases that contained what he needed. Then the hands of the unseen person – a man’s hands, he noticed, so not the woman who had kidnapped him – passed him four individual cartons of orange juice. He noticed that the hands of the unseen man were furred with coarse, dark hair and heavily and intricately tattooed with Gothic lettering; the words weren’t English.
Quickly he sat down and tested his blood. He raised his eyebrows. God, he was low. He drank the juice and crunched three of the dextrose tablets between his teeth. He could almost feel the palpable relief in his body as his sugar levels rose. He felt a bit happier now. ‘At least I’m not dead,’ he whispered to the dog.
He sat back on his mat and the dog climbed into his arms, and Peter buried his nose in the animal’s fur for reassurance. Above him the light shone remorselessly and the camera watched over him like a malignant, vigilant eye.
16
The Shapiro Institute was discreetly housed in a small side road off Marylebone High Street. The area was extremely fashionable and, for the residents, reassuringly expensive. As well as its ten-minute proximity to the good end of Oxford Street and Bond Street, it was very close to Harley Street, destination of the wealthy ill or those in need of cosmetic body upkeep. Although he lived in London, Whiteside hadn’t been to this part of the city for years and had forgotten how attractive it was, with its red-brick facades, the windows neatly edged in white stuccoed stone, and village-like feel. He thought, it probably doesn’t have much crime, except tax evasion. It was homely, with everything on a reassuring scale, unlike parts of London built to impress, like, say, Regent Street, or built to overawe, like the City.
He walked up the small flight of steps to the entrance of
what had been a narrow, three-storey town house, looked up at the camera over the door that mutely returned his stare and pushed the buzzer. The intercom crackled into life and he gave his new name to an unseen woman. The door swung open. So far, so good, he thought.
As he walked through into the building, he gave a professional glance at the door, which was unusually – several centimetres
– thick. He noticed it was a kind of sandwich. It was made of
sheet steel between laminated wood with no obvious hinges. They must have been recessed into the wall. You’d need a bazooka to break it down.
Inside the doorway to the street was an entrance room with an airport-style security gate and an X-ray machine for any hand luggage. This was manned by two hard-faced men, one of them wearing a yarmulke, who Whiteside guessed would probably be Israeli ex-forces. Then again, he thought, almost everyone in Israel is in the military in one form or another.
Ex-military usually have a certain air about them. They had it. They eyed him professionally in an unfriendly way. The guards examined Whiteside’s credentials and ID with a far from impressed air. Perhaps Gertler had fired them from embassy security, he thought. As one of them patted him down, a dowdy woman in her late thirties, wearing a tweed skirt, cardigan, thick brown tights and sensible shoes, came down the staircase. ‘Michael Dunlop? I’m Celia Westermann, Dr Cohen’s assis
tant. Would you come with me, please,’ she said.
Whiteside followed her up the stairs while Westermann apologized for the security. ‘Not too intrusive, I hope. Obviously, we have to be a bit cautious, being who we are.’ Whiteside, who noticed such things, thought to himself that Westermann was dressed as though frumpy was obligatory at the Shapiro Institute. Her clothes were like something her mother should be wearing. It was as if she were making some kind of subtle point. He was innately suspicious of people who dressed like their parents or went the other way and aped their children. Both were wrong, in his opinion. He shrugged mentally. Westermann’s attitude, whatever it may be, could hardly affect him, he thought.
As they walked up the broad stairs, they passed a large, gilt
mirror and Whiteside caught a glimpse of his own reflection:
burly, tough, reddish-sandy hair and close-cropped beard, punctuated by a broad diagonal scar on the right side of his jaw. He looked like a streetwise thug, exactly how you might imagine a right-wing terrorist to look. No wonder the guards had been dubious.
They stopped on the first floor. The institute smelt like a college, of carpet and books. ‘Now,’ Westermann said brightly, ‘this is Dr Cohen’s office.’ She knocked and opened the door. ‘If you’d like to go in.’
Whiteside did so. The door closed behind him
and a small, white-haired man stood up from behind his desk. He looked professorial. He was wearing an antique-looking three-piece suit with a fob watch in his waistcoat. His hand was outstretched and Whiteside shook it. He smelt of books and eau de cologne, the scent of academia.
‘Ah, Mr Dunlop. Do come in and sit down, I’m Dr Sol Cohen.’ Whiteside did so. Cohen opened his laptop. That wasn’t old-fashioned: it was a new Apple Mac.
While Whiteside was in the expensive, sought-after suburb of Marylebone, DI Hanlon was in the rather less desirable Wood Green in North London. There is nothing particularly treelined and leafy about Wood Green. It’s the kind of area you might think of if you were going to film a low-budget drama on drug dealing.
‘Do come in and sit down, Sergeant Demirel,’ said DI Hanlon. ‘I take it you remember me.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Enver.
They were meeting in a room at Wood Green police station that was used as a kind of storage area. Storage area was a euphemism: it was a junk room. The office lay at the end of a short corridor that led nowhere. The window looked out on to
a brick wall a few feet away giving it no natural light, just what the brick wall chose to reflect, which wasn’t much. Inside the room there were several desks, chairs and two tables, as well as half a dozen filing cabinets pushed close together. Some old computer monitors were stacked up on top of the tables, there were eleven (Hanlon had counted them) old cardboard boxes containing out-of-date stationery, paper of the sort that used to be used by old-fashioned ink-jet computer printers, the kind that had perforations in strips along its edges and used to fit through a sprocket. Several lever-arch files gathered dust on a table in the corner and there was a National Trust calendar from two years ago on the wall. September 2010 featured Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire in its autumnal glory. Ludgate had made this room available to Hanlon by way of an insult, a calculated snub. You can go in there with all the other unwanted junk was the message.
Ludgate was sure Corrigan had sent Hanlon down to spy
on him and he was not happy. This was one way of showing it. Another was to not copy her in on emails, to not inform her of meetings, in general to ignore her, to pretend she wasn’t there. Hanlon had complained about this and received a grudging apology, Ludgate blaming it on insufficient technical support. The intention behind the room had misfired, though. Hanlon rather liked this secretive, out-of-the-way lair. It suited her nature. She could come and go as she pleased without anyone noticing. And she liked the fact that nobody could suddenly barge in. It was physically impossible. To reach the corner where she sat, you had to thread your way slowly through the labyrinth
of disused office furniture. Enver was doing this right now.
There was no question of a surprise appearance, a casual craning over to see what you were up to. It took time and effort to reach her desk and it helped to be slim.
‘Didn’t you used to be a middleweight, Sergeant?’ said Hanlon, rather pointedly, as Enver squeezed his way through the obstacle course of the room to the spare seat opposite her. He was carrying a good few extra pounds around his middle, she noticed. His paunch had brushed against the disused screens of the old computer monitors and left a wide streak of grey dust across his white shirt.
‘It’s been five years, ma’am,’ he protested. ‘Even then it was a struggle to make the weight.’
She nodded. Enver looked at her. He doubted she carried any surplus flesh. When she moved her head to one side, he could see the long, elegant muscles in her neck stretch. Under her white cotton blouse, where the top buttons were undone, he could see the strong trapezius muscles across her shoulders highly defined under her skin. It was a while since he’d weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, which had been his fighting weight. Strangely, despite the evidence of mirror and scales, he was still in the habit of thinking of himself as slim. It was becoming an expensive habit. He’d bought two new shirts recently in his last size. He’d put one of them on this morning and had to suck his breath in to button it up. When he’d relaxed and breathed out, his stomach pushed tightly against the fabric and he felt his flab redistribute itself around his middle. It’s all going pear-shaped, he thought, quite literally. I look like a pear. He felt a stab of self-loathing, revulsion at what his once beautiful body was becoming. He had looked in the mirror in his bedroom and decided he looked grotesque. His fat was visibly rippling over the waistband of his trousers and was outlined by the shirt’s material. It didn’t disguise it; it emphasized it. I’ll need a bloody kaftan soon, he thought.
Enver had shaken his head mournfully. His dad, dead of
a heart attack, had been fat too. He took the shirt off, his
flab hanging over the waistband of his trousers, hung it up and put on one two sizes bigger. He’d put the shirt in the side of his wardrobe reserved for shirts and suits that no longer fitted. It was a growing collection. The replacement shirt was too long in the arms for him and the cuffs poked out of the end of his jacket sleeves in an odd way. Still, better that than the tight shirt. He didn’t want to look like a beached whale in front of the DI.
Enver was becoming increasingly drawn to Hanlon. Ever since their first meeting by the canal he had found himself thinking about her at odd times. He told himself he didn’t find her attractive but he realized now that he was starting to obsess about her. He thought, I’m doing it again, staring at her thick, black, unruly hair, her dark, graceful eyebrows, her long, strong fingers. He was acutely aware of her clothes and her body and he thought, slightly desperately, I must stop this. Hanlon was looking at him impatiently. Whatever inner turmoil Enver was going through never showed on his face.
He raised his sleepy brown eyes to her grey ones and shrugged apologetically.
‘Who was champion then?’ she asked. ‘Ma’am?’ He was confused.
‘When you were fighting, Sergeant. Who was UK champion?
At your weight.’
‘Howard Eastman, ma’am,’ he said.
‘The Battersea Bomber,’ said Hanlon thoughtfully.
She’d seen Eastman fight. All she could remember was his dyed beard, that and his speed. The beard had looked strange. He’d coloured it yellow, she seemed to remember, and he was black. From a distance he’d looked really old, the beard appearing snowy white under the harsh ring lights, whereas he’d only been about thirty something. Hanlon liked boxing very
much. The discipline, the aggression, the artistry, the nobility, the pain and the purity of the sport, all of these were things she admired most in life. Also, its solitary nature appealed to her. ‘You’re not a team player, Hanlon’ – an accusation, and a true one, that she’d lived with most of her life.
‘Did you ever fight him, Sergeant?’ she asked.
‘No, ma’am. I would have done but, well, the business with my eye put paid to that,’ explained Enver.
Hanlon nodded sympathetically. She placed her hands flat on the table and looked at her fingernails, then she raised her eyes to Enver. Eastman would have slaughtered him, she guessed. ‘So what’s happening with your investigation, Sergeant?
Any further forward?’ Hanlon had read most of the reports and spoken to the personnel concerned, but the collective feeling was this was a case that would go nowhere.
Enver shook his head. ‘Because Mr Yilmaz left it three days to report the child missing, we don’t have any CCTV footage from the supermarket. They wipe it after three days. It occupies too much computer storage space. So no footage of the woman and no footage of whatever vehicle was used to move the child. Nothing useful either from any of the staff. He’s also very vague on what the woman he left looking after the boy looked like. “Very brown eyes” and “young”.’ The sergeant rolled his eyes. ‘Mr Yilmaz is not the sharpest knife in the box.’ Hanlon nodded. In one of the case notes, someone had made the comment that Mehmet Yilmaz had learning difficulties. It didn’t make their lives any easier.
‘Ethnicity?’ asked Hanlon.
‘He�
��s got no idea.’ Enver shrugged. ‘She was wearing a headscarf so he couldn’t see her hair. Not Turkish, Caucasian, that’s as good as it gets.’
‘So you’ve got nothing?’ asked Hanlon.
Enver nodded unhappily. ‘No. Nothing from the supermarket, no witnesses have come forward, no forensic evidence, nothing. We’re going to stage a reconstruction, a walk through, next week, but I’m not optimistic.’ This is London, he thought to himself, not a village. Not only did people not notice things, they didn’t want to notice things. It’s hardwired into the DNA of a city-dweller. If you see trouble, you avert your gaze. We’re in the kingdom of the three monkeys. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. This was particularly true in Wood Green, as he knew to his cost. He’d long ago given up saying ‘Somebody must have seen something’. These days he hardly even thought it.
‘Well, at least it’ll refresh people’s memories,’ said Hanlon. ‘Maybe it’ll get it back into the papers.’
Public response to the case had been disappointing. London could be a callous city and it was as if the population had collectively shrugged its shoulders over Ali’s death.
Enver nodded. ‘The e-fit image the father managed to produce is so generic it’s practically useless. She’s got a nose, two eyes and a mouth, that’s about as far as it goes.’
‘So no question of parental involvement in your judgement, Sergeant?’
‘No, ma’am. Of course, it’s complicated by the fact that the child was never officially here, so we have no health visitor records or GP surgery attendance, but the post-mortem exam showed a perfectly healthy child apart from the injuries, sexual in nature, that were inflicted on him prior to his death.’ She looked at him enquiringly and he shook his head. ‘No semen traces, ma’am. No foreign DNA. Anyway, nothing to link the parents. Nothing indicating long-term abuse.’