Time to Die

by Alex Howard

  He stared hungrily, lasciviously, at the boy’s straw-blond hair and licked his thin, juridical lips, lips that were so used to pronouncing judgments with pedantic, legal precision. Watching as the boy stroked the dog, the judge felt himself stiffen. Come Unto Me, that was how the school song had gone. And now he was calling the tune. It would be very soon now. Soon you will Come Unto Me, he thought. Very soon indeed.

  19

  In Germany, in Stuttgart, Kathy had finished her meeting with the line manager and the procurement director from the Siemens subsidiary, and she knew the contract was hers. The trip had gone far better than she could have anticipated. What was particularly pleasing was that the Germans had extended the contract period from three to five years. That was a huge, unexpected benefit to PFK. She was now looking forward to Monday to report to her company how things were going. Pleasant visions of the future danced across her imagination. She’d finish early and meet Peter from school and take him to the cinema for that new action film he wanted to see, the one she’d told him she wouldn’t have time to take him to. She was sorely tempted to call her MD, Tim Morgan, at home to tell him the good news, but decided to leave it until she went in to work. She had a reputation for coolness that she was proud of and she didn’t want to compromise it.

  She was due back on the four o’clock flight to London and had accepted a lunch date from Max Brucker, the Siemens man. She had found herself the night before hoping that he would make a pass at her; she found him extremely attractive. She had spent a year mourning Dan; now she felt it was time to come out of her shell of bereavement. Nothing had happened last night but she knew that if he had tried anything, she’d have flung herself on him. She wanted him very badly. She looked at her left hand. She was looking at her marriage band. Gently, she worked it off her finger. She held it in the palm of her hand, the golden symbol of her past life, and stroked the circular indentation it had left in the skin of the third finger. She said, ‘I’m sorry, darling’ to Dan’s memory and undid the simple gold chain around her neck, then slid the wedding ring through and replaced the necklace. There, she had done it. It was a simple gesture, but a powerfully symbolic one. She was no longer married. She wondered if Max would notice. No, that wasn’t true. She knew Max would notice. How could he not? It was why she’d done it. It was a signal as clear and unequivocal as the ‘Please Make Up The Room’ sign she would hang on her door handle when she vacated the room.

  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.

  20

  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.

  What he hadn’t expected were arson attacks on synagogues, more because of the unusual commitment to violence than anything, drug dealing and other armed robbery. That was one of the virtues of a Bishops Avenue address, he guessed. You wouldn’t be thought of as a gangland criminal. Arms dealer, maybe; armed robber, no way. In many ways, thought Whiteside, I’m being a bit naive. Now I come to think of it I can recall at least one other multimillionaire tycoon with an equally chequered past. Well, I’ll talk about it with Hanlon later. It’ll be the Rabbit Bingham connection that will interest her. Now that is something unusual.

  Whiteside went into his small kitchen, opened the fridge and poured himself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, returned to the lounge and stared out of the window again at the houses opposite. There was hardly any movement in the street. When it was hot, which it was at the moment, London was torpid. Like a reptile, the city dozed in the heat. Upper Holloway was quiet today. Down at the other end of the Holloway Road at Highbury and Islington, where Upper Street began, it would be a different story. There, the affluent young middle-aged would be out feeding their addiction to contemporary or retro furniture and objets trouvés. They’d be sitting outside the bars and cafes or pubs with their Farrow & Ball paint jobs, discussing the new developments at the Tate, the Tanks, the Turner or politics. Islington was getting staid now; it was old hat. The hipsters and medianistas had moved to Old Street or were reclaiming King’s Cross. The more adventurous were going south of the river. The iconic Hoxton White Cube was closing.

  Whiteside loved London. North London anyway; he felt out of touch in East, West or South London. If he could have afforded it, Hampstead would be his ideal location, but it was way, way out of his price range, which is how he’d ended up here. Holloway is probably best known for its women’s prison but it had come into being as a Victorian middle-class suburb, large town houses in a then far-flung area of London.

  In later years most of these houses had been divided into flats. Irish immigrants had moved in; Johnny Rotten, he seemed to remember, was from here. One of these days he’d get a blue plaque. Now there were more diverse incomers but the area still retained its architectural beauty despite the house conversions. The streets, by London standards, were wide. It had a spacious, airy feel. He’d come to like it very much. It was relaxing.

  His phone beeped to say he had mail. He checked it. It was from the Shapiro Institute to say Dr Cohen had some documents for him that he was sending over. The text explained they couldn’t email them because they had to be signed for.

  He texted back thanks, I’ll be in, and drank another mouthful of wine to toast the success of the day. He wondered what they could be about. Conquest, maybe. The Sauvignon was clean and robust against his palate. He thought of ‘Rabbit’ Bingham. He wasn’t clean and robust. He conjured up Bingham’s face, his scant fair hair brushed over his balding head. His pale, pudgy body. What was startling about Bingham was his charm. The word ‘monster’ normally follows ‘paedophile’ but Bingham wasn’t monstrous, he was utterly charming. That was the problem, really. Self-deprecating, witty, humorous; if Whiteside had children he’d probably have entrusted them to Bingham without a second’s thought.

  He’d met Hanlon on that case, when he was working briefly for the Met’s child abuse unit. Hanlon had been investigating a child prostitution murder. Like many paedophiles, Bingham had been uncomfortably bright, and, now he remembered, quite wealthy. He thought of Conquest immediately. Money for services rendered? Was it possible that Conquest was a fellow paedophile? Bingham had worked in IT, he remembered that much. He remembered too that Hanlon had looked into the source of Bingham’s money and drawn a blank. There was a conspicuous gap between Bingham’s earned income and his lifestyle. Hanlon had been sure he was dealing in child porn via secure subscriber websites. The CPS hadn’t been interested in that. Everyone just wanted Bingham sent down with the maximum speed and the minimum fuss. Bingham, like many paedophiles, was very good at hiding things. They’d only arrested him because of a tip-off. Bingham would still be free if it hadn’t been for that.

  Bingham had been jailed in the end for possessing several thousand graphic, sexual images of children and babies. Some of these were now irrevocably lodged in Whitehead’s own memory. Before he’d joined the unit he didn’t know how you had sex with a baby, now he did, and he would have to live with that knowledge for the rest of his life. He’d never really understood the true meaning of depravity until he had seen those images. Unfortunately, they had proved unforgettable. It was the only time in his life he had ever experienced such levels of rage and disgust at others that he’d felt truly murderous. He had looked into the face of true evil. The charming face of ‘Rabbit’ Bingham. For weeks, months even, after he left the unit he’d felt defiled.

  Whiteside, however, was not telepathic. He had no way of reading minds. Other people too had been irrevocably affected by Bingham’s trial. Lord Justice Reece had been the trial judge. He too had seen the images but he’d drawn very different conclusions from Whiteside, very different indeed.

  The judge had pored over them in the rooms reserved for him in the court building. For years he had fought against this side of his nature and refused to acknowled
ge it to himself. Only when he’d been drunk had he allowed himself to think about children. But now the forces inside him were too powerful to control and he felt as if this trial had been sent to free him, to liberate him. The serpent had proffered the apple: take, eat of this fruit of knowledge. And the judge did. And it was good. He could hear the old school song ‘Come Unto Me’ as they’d sung it in chapel all those years ago, ringing in his ears.

  He’d stared at the pictures. The delicate, innocent flesh excited him tremendously. At first he’d resisted, but Bingham’s photo collections were the sexiest, most erotic things he had ever imagined in his life. The pictures gave him a window on a world he had never seen before. He’d intuited its existence but he had never dreamed that such nirvana was attainable, and Bingham had been there. They were the most arousing pictures he had ever seen. Bingham was like an explorer who had returned from an unknown continent that the judge longed to visit.

  He was extremely grateful for the prosecuting QC who had insisted on the most extreme descriptions and illustrations of the degrading sexual acts that had been forced on the children. Bingham’s defence lawyer had kept up a barrage of ‘objection’, Reece a counter-offensive of ‘overruled’. The QC’s intention had been to ensure, without any shred of doubt, the hideous guilt of the defendant in the minds of the jury. The judge had found these commentaries and pictures incredibly erotic. He’d wanted more. He’d been profoundly grateful for the fact he wore long robes during the trial.