Alex Howard - Time to Die

She was wearing her hair back in a ponytail today. It had been her lucky hairstyle before she’d been married. Maybe it would work again. She knew she’d be back and forth to Germany with increasing regularity so there was no need to rush things. Then she thought, no, sod it, I’ve had enough of this. If he doesn’t make a pass at me today, I’m going to make one at him. We’re both adults after all, and I’m bloody attractive. She looked at herself in the mirror and pouted, then grinned at her reflection. She tossed her head and watched the ponytail bounce with the motion. I feel frisky, she thought. Who could ever have imagined. She felt happier than she’d done in ages.

She tried Annette’s house again but got the answerphone and left a brief message about Peter, asking her to tell him she’d be picking him up from her house about seven. Annette’s mobile number was on a business card that she’d left in her other purse so all she had programmed on her phone was the landline number.

Annette put down the two heavy bags of shopping with a thud on the kitchen table and filled the kettle to make tea. They were plastic bags and they eyed her reproachfully. The cupboard under the stairs contained the reusable hessian and jute organic shopping bags and a quantity of heavy-duty plastic Bags for Life that she’d bought over the years. These she inevitably forgot when she went to the supermarket. Her husband had taken Sam and his friends to the local swimming pool and the house would be mercifully quiet for the next couple of hours. Thank God, she thought. The house was wonderfully peaceful. She thought, I’ll have a cup of tea and then I’ll lie on the sofa and relax. God, that’ll be wonderful. She yawned and checked her BlackBerry for messages. Nothing.

As she drank her tea she felt the soft, warm weight of Dizzy rolling on to her feet under the kitchen table. Stroking the dog’s warm body with her toes, she thought suddenly of Peter Reynolds who adored the animal. She froze with the teacup in her hand as abruptly as if she were a TV image that had been paused on a remote. No, no, it couldn’t be. She thought, I’m imagining things. Her heart started to pound like a trip hammer. Calm down, she thought, calm down.

She found she was holding her breath tightly. I’m having a panic attack, she thought. She forced herself to breathe deeply and evenly. She had suddenly remembered that Peter should have been at their place the night before. Or should he? Or was this a false memory? Did she think that, or did she think she thought she remembered he should have been there? Had it been discussed with Kathy and then dropped? Now she was confused between what had, and hadn’t, been agreed. If she was supposed to have him, wouldn’t Kathy have phoned by now? She felt very worried indeed. If she had agreed to take Peter and forgotten about it, where could he be? Perhaps he’d gone to another friend’s house. He had lots of friends, he was a popular boy. She looked again at the BlackBerry. Oh God, please let it not be the diabetes. Had he had an attack? Do you get attacks if you have diabetes? Surely Kathy would have phoned up about Peter if he was supposed to have been staying? Or emailed her? She always did that when she went away. She’d already thought that. She was going round in bloody circles. Run over, what if he’d been run over? Someone would have phoned, wouldn’t they? James Ramsden’s mother, she’d have phoned. She’d phone everyone about everything, like when Mrs Taylor the physics teacher left her husband for another woman. I just thought you ought to know. That was her catchphrase. Or it would have been on the news. She hadn’t seen the news. Oh God, this was getting nightmarish. There had to be a perfectly normal explanation. The alternative was too dreadful to think about.

It couldn’t happen. They lived in Finchley, for God’s sake. This wasn’t South London.

She had to grasp the nettle. She picked up the BlackBerry, looked at it, counted one, two, three, go! and called Kathy. She hadn’t any idea what she would say to her. The best-case scenario would be Kathy saying something like ‘hang on a minute, I’ll just get Peter to turn the TV down.’ Or maybe ‘Annette, you dimwit, how could you have forgotten. Thank God Peter had the presence of mind to go to so-and-so’s house.’ That would be acceptable. Otherwise how do you say to another mother, ‘Should I be looking after your child at this precise moment in time? I don’t know where he is.’

She listened with a mixture of relief and worry to the ringtone giving way to voicemail. Hello, you have reached… Why do people say that? It’s not a stop on the way to a destination, the way you might reach Coventry before you get to Birmingham. It was now a problem postponed, not a problem solved. She emailed Kathy and started to agonize over the message. How do you word something like that? She settled on, ‘Please phone me asap. Urgent.’ That set the right tone at least, she thought. Her husband would be in the pool now with Sam. Sam might know, but he hadn’t said anything last night. Did that mean anything? Should she go to the pool anyway and ask him? Annette felt paralysed with indecision. She sat at the table, her tea forgotten and growing cold, staring at the BlackBerry.

Kathy had turned her mobile and her BlackBerry off. She found it passionately annoying when people she was with in restaurants left theirs on. It was so rude. Particularly when they lined them up in front of them like an uninvited guest. She was early for her lunch date with Max and was enjoying sitting by herself at a table, looking out of the window at Schillerplatz and the busy shopping streets of central Stuttgart. She liked people-watching. There was a heavy gilt mirror on the wall opposite and she could see her reflection, a tall, slim woman with an enviable figure and her lucky ponytail. She thought about the contract she’d won, she thought about Max. I’ll have a glass of champagne, she thought. Why not? It’s not every day you have something to celebrate. She looked at her naked left ring finger; she felt incredibly daring. Her heartbeat increased with pleasurable excitement.

‘Entschuldigung,’ she said, stopping a waiter.

The hatch in the bottom of Peter’s door opened and a tray was pushed in. It must be lunchtime, thought Peter. The hatch closed and he took the tray over to the ledge where the blue mat was. The dog watched with interest. He knew it was food. Peter sat down and picked up the small device that tested the sugar level in his blood. He pricked his finger to get a drop of blood, touched it with a testing strip and fed it into the small Accu-Chek machine. The digital readout was a five point one. Peter shook his head ruefully. Imprisonment seemed to be very good for him somehow. He looked at the sandwiches: chicken salad. The spaniel looked at him expectantly and licked his lips. Tito, thought Peter suddenly with delight, that’s what I’ll call you, like the Yugoslav partisan leader we did in history, the one who later became president.

‘Hello, Tito,’ he said and ruffled the dog’s fur. Tito looked at him adoringly and wagged his tail. The two of them shared the sandwiches in companionable silence.

Above him the camera watched silently and in his bedroom, his packing complete, the judge watched the boy eat his sandwiches. He stared in rapturous fascination at the boy’s full lips and beautiful mouth. His breathing quickened. Soon, you little bitch, soon, he thought.

Whiteside had paid off the taxi and let himself into his flat. He now looked out of the large sash window of his first-floor living room on to the generously proportioned grey Victorian town houses opposite. He was still euphoric at the way his morning at the Shapiro Institute had gone. Whiteside, loyal as he was, had been doubtful about Hanlon’s theory that Conquest would be criminally dirty. Dirty, yes, but it was a question of degree. Everyone was, to a greater or lesser extent. Hanlon herself flagrantly flouted the rules as if they didn’t apply to her. True, she wasn’t motivated by money, but money, thought Whiteside, is just a means to happiness and fulfilment and so is altruism. She’d framed, well, entrapped Cunningham to get to Anderson. That was a criminal act in itself. He still had the ex-drug dealer’s clothes that he’d liberated from the property store. That was theft. Where do you draw the line? He expected a certain amount of venality from any property speculator. Tax evasion, bribery disguised as ‘presentations’ in expensive hotels in exotic or luxurious locations. It wasn’t as if it was just the property sector. Everyone was at it. The Met weren’t immune either. Amazing the interest an inter-police liaison forum could create when it was held in the Caribbean in the winter. These were the kinds of things he expected Conquest to be mixed up in. Possibly even direct bribery of local housing authority officials.