Alex Howard - Time to Die

Anderson was silent. She was certainly right. Evidence tampering would raise all kinds of issues: planting of evidence by the police, perjury, conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and certainly reasonable doubt would be established. He’d walk. But could he trust her? He looked at the woman opposite. He knew he could. Hanlon was the real deal.

‘You might even get some form of compensation,’ she said helpfully.

But could he get to this Bingham? His mind was working furiously fast. Could he do it? He wondered. It was, as the DI had said, a problem of time. Yes, he could get to Bingham, but in such a short time? Usually time was in huge supply in prison; not in this case. Then that created the problem of bribing at least one of the screws, almost certainly more than one, to create a situation where he could get hold of Bingham for an hour. Half an hour would do, but Anderson hated being rushed and there’d be cleaning up to be done. It’d be ridiculous to have Hanlon make good on her part of the bargain only to be charged with, and end up doing time for, assaulting Rabbit Bingham. But this was running ahead of things; let’s deal now with the present, and with the most obvious question: ‘This isn’t official, is it? If any of this goes wrong, all bets are off, aren’t they?’ he said.

Hanlon was conducting a vendetta, that much was obvious. Whatever she was planning to do with the information it wouldn’t stand up in court. Tampering with evidence would get her jailed. She must really have a thing about her colleague Whiteside, or really hate this character Conquest. Hate is a powerful emotion; he could sympathize with that.

Hanlon’s mouth performed a smile of genuine sweetness and warmth for Anderson. Her eyes remained cold and hard.

‘Yes, of course it’s unofficial. If either of us gets caught, well, it’s goodnight Vienna. But, Mr Anderson, let’s not dwell on that unpleasant possibility, shall we? I’m sure we’re both optimists at heart. You do your job and I’ll do mine. If all goes to plan, and why shouldn’t it, you’ll be out in a few weeks, and 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.

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.