The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  Conquest will…’

  Anderson finished the sentence for her in his head. He’ll be dead. It’s what he would do. He wondered if she would be capable of it. She stopped speaking and extended her open hands with a kind of gentle shrugging motion. She looked at Anderson. It was a look he recognized. He had seen it in his own eyes in the mirror a few times. It confirmed his suspicions. It was reassuring to know the kind of person he was about to deal with. Amateurs and weaklings were untrustworthy. He could do business with Hanlon. He had a feeling Conquest wouldn’t be coming to trial – at least, not in a legal sense. Hanlon had already passed judgement.

  ‘Deal,’ he said and they shook hands.

  ‘Before the end of the week,’ she said. He nodded. She pushed the button that would tell the guard to let her out and return Anderson to his cell. John, the principal prison officer, appeared in the doorway to escort her. ‘The governor would like a word, ma’am,’ he said quietly as the two of them left.

  Mountfield, another screw, was standing behind him, ready to escort Anderson back to his wing. Anderson watched Hanlon go.

  He didn’t know who Conquest was but he was glad he wasn’t in his shoes. Conquest, if Hanlon had her way, was a dead man walking.

  29

  It was night, and in her flat overlooking the Thames, flowing black, turbulent and powerful far below – a suitable metaphor for her feelings towards Conquest – Hanlon stood looking out at the water and the lights on the South Bank of the great river, thinking of Whiteside, thinking of Conquest, planning her revenge.

  Enver had been wrong about which part of London Hanlon lived in, but not by much. She lived just off Upper Thames Street, close to Southwark Bridge, in the heart of the City of London. She could see it all now, understand it all, the chess game that Conquest had started and she had become involved in as his default opponent. Conquest’s pieces were currently faceless, the two men who had abducted the Yilmaz family and the woman who had taken the Yilmaz child. They were also responsible for the death of the Somali girl and the attempted murder of Whiteside. Another major unidentified piece on Conquest’s side

  of the chessboard was his informant in the police.

  He had more pieces but she was the White Queen. She could move anywhere; she wasn’t restricted like the others.

  She stood up and moved restlessly around the enormous room that formed the main body of the flat. A spiral staircase in the corner of the room led up to the roof upon which she could sunbathe in the spring and summer. She had a small

  bedroom, just big enough for a double bed, and a kitchen and bathroom. Hanlon rarely had visitors; she didn’t like her personal space invaded by people. Even Whiteside had never been here. Officially, Hanlon’s address was not this one; the flat itself was not in her own name. It’s easy to be anonymous when you don’t have friends.

  She couldn’t relax. The shooting of Whiteside was continually at the back of her mind like a piece of mental wallpaper. She had turned all the lights off in the flat and she paced up and down like a tiger in its cage, staring out across the dark expanse of the water to the lights on the south side. The wall overlooking the Thames was virtually one huge sheet of glass upon which she was projecting her thoughts like on a screen. She conjured up the image of Conquest’s confident, smiling face. Conquest and Bingham. She thought about Rabbit Bingham. She might have guessed their paths were fated to

  cross again.

  Bingham had earned his nickname from his teeth. The front ones were prominent and stuck out; the resulting name was almost inevitable. He had told her during an interview that obviously, as a child, he hadn’t liked it, but things could have been worse. They could have been a lot worse. His face rose up before her like a hologram. Bingham was odd-looking. Tall and flabby with a skull-like face, he had lank, receding blond hair which had started to fall out when he was young. He told her he was already going bald when he was at school. As a kid he had been a strange mixture of effeminate and old.

  He had informed her of all of this in some interview room with real urgency, as if it were important she understood him. He kind of latched on to her almost as if she were his friend. Whiteside he hadn’t liked. He’d refuse to talk if Whiteside was in the room. Hanlon felt another spasm of rage shake her when

  she thought that Bingham would be delighted to hear about what had happened to him.

  Her memory took her back to Bingham. So, all in all, he felt he’d got off reasonably lightly with being called Rabbit. It sounded almost affectionate. It was the kind of name someone with friends had, and he had never been that sort of person. He had grown up, but the nickname stuck. Paul was his real name, yet he found himself telling people, ‘My friends call me Rabbit.’

  After leaving school he’d drifted into IT and discovered a talent for it. His paedophile tendencies, which grew stronger and stronger the older he got, had spurred him on in his studies. It’s not my fault, he told Hanlon, I was born this way, I didn’t choose it. The closed world of child Internet porn opened like a rare flower before the expert stroking of Bingham’s nimble, caressing fingers on the computer keyboard.

  He had served three years for the paedophile image collection on his PC’s hard drive. Now he had only four months to go.

  Conquest must have been combining his money and abilities with Bingham’s paedophile connections and IT expertise, thought Hanlon. It was a kind of hideous, hellishly perfect marriage. Most paedo porn was Internet-based, but you needed a source and she could bet that the dead children had been part of it. Unless she found Peter Reynolds soon, he would be part of it too. Having no knowledge of the Nazi-obsessed Robbo, she was at a loss to understand why Conquest had been flagging up the bodies with the number 18, the Adolf Hitler code. Perhaps he was just crazy.

  She sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of the window. The room was virtually furniture free. Hanlon didn’t like furniture much. The only decoration was a signed, framed photograph of the artist Joseph Beuys, who stared impassively

  down from beneath his trademark hat at Hanlon’s muscular back. She looked out at the night. Southwark Bridge was brilliantly lit above the darkness of the Thames. She was in a perfect lotus pose, but her thoughts were hardly meditative.

  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 tha
t 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 any

  thing. 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.