The Stolen Child

by Alex Coombs

  ‘I read the report,’ said Hanlon.

  It was sickening, but how could it be otherwise. Aside from the assault itself, what particularly got to her was the way the

  body had just been tossed in the canal near that number eighteen. It was a kind of boast. It was saying, Look at me. I’ve done it again and I’m going to do it again. And what significance did that number have? Once more she briefly considered going to Corrigan with her feeling that this was linked to the Essex case. Once again she dismissed the idea. When she had more evidence, maybe. Right now, both cases were getting nowhere. What good would her contribution be even if believed? She knew there was a strong lobby that would dismiss anything she suggested simply because it came from her. What could you do? Warn everyone there was a child killer on the loose while the police were powerless to act?

  ‘I gather it’s unusual, ma’am, for a woman to be involved

  in what looks like false imprisonment for sexual purposes,’ said Enver.

  ‘Maybe, but not unknown,’ said Hanlon. ‘Look at the Moors murders for a start. Or Rosemary West.’ She looked again at Enver. ‘What do you think happened, Sergeant?’

  ‘The child was taken by a woman either dressed in supermarket uniform, or near as damn it, with a reasonably convincing ID hanging round her neck. Either she’d gone there to abduct any old child or she had possibly followed Mehmet Yilmaz there for that purpose. She almost certainly had an accomplice outside with transport. The child was taken to order, ma’am, that’s what I think, and frighteningly efficiently too.’

  ‘And the disposal of the body? So obviously?’

  Enver shrugged. ‘The most popular theory is the rape and murder took place locally. That stretch of canal is a CCTV blackspot; the killer may have known that or may have just got lucky.’ He stroked his moustache. ‘I’d hate to speculate, ma’am. To be honest I can think of three or four reasons to leave it

  there, including simply it’s as good a place as any. Maybe even just to taunt us.’

  Enver’s phone indicated he had a message. He muttered an apology to the DI. He read it and raised his eyebrows. ‘Well, well,’ he said with something approaching excitement in his voice. ‘That was the incident room. Mehmet Yilmaz has finally been in touch to say he’s remembered something about the woman. He wants me there because he wants to make sure he’s understood; his English is not that brilliant, to put it mildly. Ludgate wants me to go and see him at home this afternoon. One o’clock.’

  ‘That’s encouraging,’ said Hanlon.

  ‘Yes,’ said Enver. ‘I’m not counting chickens, but at least it’s something. It all sounds very vague.’ Enver nodded. In spite of his reservations, he was pleased. About bloody time too, he thought.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Hanlon. ‘I’ll see you in the car park at half twelve. I’ll take you.’

  Enver nodded and stood up. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said. Hanlon watched him thoughtfully as he retraced his steps through the obstacle course that was her office. She was beginning to warm to the gloomily efficient, Eeyore-like Sergeant

  Demirel.

  She turned to her laptop and wrote an email to Corrigan, detailing what had been happening on the Yilmaz case. Her unofficial view rather than Ludgate’s version, although, to give the devil his due, Ludgate had handled everything with consummate ability. He’d even reined in his usual, casual racism. His organization had been exemplary, probably better than she could have done. She’d always been poor at administration, and management in general. It’s what she had used Whiteside for.

  She added a note praising Enver. Corrigan was always on the lookout for talented, ethnically diverse police. An endorsement from me would probably torpedo Enver’s career chances, she thought, but one from Corrigan could send you on your way up the ladder. She finished her email and pressed send. As she did so, she wondered how Whiteside was getting on.

  17

  Whiteside took a seat opposite Sol Cohen. He tried to look journalistic. Although he’d been interviewed innumerable times by journalists, print and TV for various cases, he couldn’t remember what equipment they carried. He’d settled for a notebook. He placed it in front of him, together with his phone. He had a police issue MP3 recorder but thought Cohen might recognize it as such. Through the window came the noise of the London traffic. Once again, he had the feeling, looking at Cohen in this pleasant, airy, book-lined room, of being in an academic’s study, pleasingly isolated from the outside world. Between them lay the desk: modern, sleek, Scandanavian-looking.

  On the wall was a large computer photo-frame and a variety

  of faces, predominately white, jowly, middle-aged, came and went on the screen, one after another, a succession of images. He recognized none of them in the endless video picture parade. He wondered if it might be some art installation, a counter to the framed photos of David Ben-Gurion and Jacob Bronowski on the opposite wall. Cohen noted Whiteside’s interest.

  ‘My rogues’ gallery, my “lest we forget”,’ Cohen said. ‘“Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” I’m sure you know the quote?’ Whiteside nodded wisely. ‘We’re now looking at Gergely Pongrátz,’ noted Cohen, pointing at the screen.

  He suited his name, thought the sergeant. An elderly man with archaic moustaches, silver hair and old-fashioned braiding on his jacket, filled the screen. Whiteside looked at him; the folkloric clothing gave him a deeply sinister air, a character out of Grimm. Whiteside would have picked him out of a line-up as almost certainly the nutter who’d done the axe murder, he had that air of rustic insanity.

  Cohen said, ‘The founder of Jobbik, The Movement for a Better Hungary. Mr Pongrátz isn’t keen on Jews. The party line is we shouldn’t be complaining about this but instead be, and I quote, “playing with our tiny, circumcised dicks”.’ Cohen laughed. ‘Mr Pongrátz has a way with words. Quite popular they are, too, in his country. In fact, according to the Hungarian police trade union, no less, Hungary should be preparing for armed battle with the Jews.’ Cohen’s tone was very much that of a teacher giving a lecture to a slightly dim pupil. Whiteside could begin to see why maybe Cohen didn’t have a particularly rosy view of the police.

  ‘You can’t always trust the law,’ Whiteside said, helpfully, enthusiastically. Cohen shrugged eloquently as Pongrátz faded away to be replaced by another face. ‘Nikolaos Michaloliakos, from the Golden Dawn of Greece, with their trademark, ‘I can’t believe it’s not a swastika’ symbol. You’ll know them from the recent news, they did rather well in the Greek elections.’ Michaloliakos shrank to a corner of the screen. ‘In Athens police are recommending victims of crime go to them for assistance.’ ‘Oh,’ said Whiteside. Now a fat-faced, tough-looking man

  filled the screen.

  ‘Holger Apfel. National Democratic Party of Germany. Bit of a synonym for National Socialism, no?’ Cohen sighed. ‘We monitor anti-Semitism, Mr Dunlop. It’s as old as the Jews themselves and I would say it’s making a comeback;

  these are all current figures, not bogeymen from the past. The truth is, anti-Semitism never went away. In Britain alone we logged six hundred anti-Semitic incidents last year. So, as you can see, the reason for our funding is as important as ever. Plus of course we have Iran that wants to destroy us completely – well, and all the Arab countries. Unfortunately, our future here at the institute looks extremely secure. If only we weren’t needed I’d be a happy man.’ Cohen picked up a small remote. ‘There’s a lot more stored on the files for that photo-frame,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to give you a flavour of what we do, put a face to our persecutors.’ He pressed a button and changed the right-wing portraiture for a blue-green picture of an attenuated violinist, floating dreamlike in a night sky over a village.

  ‘Marc Chagall,’ said Cohen. ‘Let’s cheer ourselves up a bit.

  Some positive Jewish artistic achievement, eh.’

  He looked at Whiteside with disconcertingly intelligent eyes. ‘So, how can we be of assis
tance?’

  ‘Harry Conquest,’ said Whiteside. He spelt the surname for Cohen.

  ‘OK then, Mr Dunlop.’ Cohen smiled as he said the name.

  It sounded ridiculous to Whiteside himself. Who thought of that name? Perhaps they were working their way through tyre brands. He could have been Bridgestone, Pirelli, Marangoni, Goodyear or Michelin. Presumably not Continental. Mr Continental.

  Cohen opened a laptop and typed away. ‘Ah ha,’ he said. ‘Well, we do have Mr Conquest on our files.’

  Despite himself, Whiteside nearly jumped with surprise. He hadn’t been expecting that.

  Cohen swivelled the screen round for Whiteside to see. ‘Do you read Hebrew?’

  ‘Unfortunately not.’

  ‘Never mind. I’m sure you can use shorthand,’ said Cohen, nodding at Whiteside’s notebook.

  At that moment there was a knock on the door and Celia Westermann came in with coffee. Whiteside glanced at her. She looked so self-effacing he had the strange sensation again that, like the clothes, it was some kind of act. She behaved as if she was playing a secretary from the past. Cohen ignored her. Perhaps this was normal for the institute. As she busied herself pouring the coffee, Whiteside wondered if journalists these days did know shorthand. It sounded archaic. He wondered if it was some kind of joke by Cohen, like an apprentice being sent to buy tartan paint or a sky-hook.

  ‘I’ll just record what you say on my phone, Dr Cohen. Dyslexia,’ he said ruefully by way of explanation. ‘Dyslexia, a journalist’s nightmare, Doctor.’

  Cohen nodded. It was now obvious to Whiteside he didn’t believe a word of anything he said.

  ‘Well, well, here he is.’ Cohen pointed to the sturdy Hebrew characters filling the screen with the end of a biro. Whiteside looked suitably blank. ‘Better switch your phone on then, Mr Dunlop,’ said Cohen. There was now surely no mistaking the ironic inflection in the elderly Jew’s voice. He looked at Celia. ‘Do you want to stay, Celia?’

  ‘No, Dr Cohen,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’ She smiled benignly at Whiteside and left the room.

  The gist of Cohen’s file entry was short and to the point. Conquest had been born in Lewisham in South London in the early Sixties. He had left school at fifteen. In the late Seventies, aged seventeen, he’d joined the Hell’s Angels, what later became the infamous Windsor Chapter, and also become a member of Combat 18.

  ‘What’s that?’ Whiteside had asked sharply. He’d never heard of them, but the number caught his ear. It was part of what Hanlon had wanted him to ask about. Cohen’s reply was, ‘18 is 1 + 8. What’s the first letter of the alphabet? Mr Dunlop?’

  ‘A,’ said Whiteside.

  ‘That’s right, and now the eighth?’ ‘H.’

  ‘Mm hm,’ said Cohen. ‘Put them together and you have A.

  H. Now, who do you think that might possibly refer to?’ ‘Adolf Hitler,’ said Whiteside. Cohen nodded happily. Well,

  he thought. Hanlon was right. He also thought, so what? Conquest liked Nazis.

  Cohen explained that Combat 18 was a small and disorganized racist group. The members were more of a threat to themselves than anyone else. Very much so. In fact, their founder was inside for murder, having killed a fellow member in some internal dispute. At the time, the major right-wing party, the then BNP equivalent, was the National Front, but Combat 18 believed in direct action. Luckily, the only people they had killed were each other.

  In 1980 Conquest served a year at Feltham for petrol-bombing a synagogue in Stamford Hill. It was this that had brought him to the attention of the Shapiro Institute. All UK anti-Semitic attacks were logged by them and this one had their highest rating in terms of threat level. In 1982 he was acquitted of dealing Class A substances (amphetamines) and in 1985 he was acquitted of armed robbery of a Hatton Garden jewellers. ‘A Jewish business,’ said Cohen. In both the last two cases, witness intimidation and tampering with evidence had been cited as the reasons for the trials’ collapse.

  This was more like it, thought Whiteside. Ludgate could hang out with former Nazis till the cows came home; for all

  anyone knew Conquest had long changed his political or racist views, or become a Buddhist, an advocate of rational peace and harmony, but consorting with a drug-dealing armed robber would take some explaining.

  In 1985 he started Albion Property, funded, according to the file, by the robbery proceeds. And that, said Cohen, is more or less that. He disappeared off our radar. He looked at Whiteside’s impassive face.

  Whiteside considered the implications of what he’d just learnt. For Whiteside, the absence of Conquest’s record from the PNC was the most important thing. It was a very serious matter indeed. He remembered the year before a court official had been sent down for three years for taking bribes to delete motoring offences from the police national database. He knew too, historically, that a great deal of police information had been transferred from paper records to fledgling computer systems in the early Eighties and a lot of low-grade crime records had simply been destroyed or junked. They’d been deemed not worthy of keeping. Conquest’s records were too important for that. Someone in the criminal records system had deliberately removed them. Conquest had to have had some serious influence.

  Well, Hanlon had been proved right. Conquest did have a

  record. He was, or had been, dirty. He wondered, though, if what he’d learnt was remotely important. It could be argued that Conquest was a triumph of the system. He had done time for his crimes, well, one of them anyway, and had built himself a successful, legitimate, life. But he knew Hanlon too well for her to be satisfied with that. Hanlon believed that, on the whole, leopards don’t change their spots. Something else was going on other than redemption for Conquest to have paid a great deal of money to have his records expunged. Property was a good way

  to launder money. He thought of Conquest’s lavish lifestyle, the former connections with drug dealing. He remembered what Hanlon had said about the money he was spending outstripping the reported income. He guessed that’s what Hanlon was assuming, money laundering, but he didn’t know.

  If Hanlon had any faults in Whiteside’s opinion, it was that she played her cards too close to her chest. But then again, Whiteside wasn’t overly concerned with larger pictures. One thought occurred to him as he switched his phone off.

  ‘Dr Cohen, does that file mention any known associates?’

  Cohen glanced at the screen. ‘He set up Albion, the name of his business – the poet Blake would be turning in his grave

  – with a partner, a Paul Bingham, in the Eighties, but there’s no more mention of him.’

  Whiteside felt a surge of elation and excitement inside. Bingham. Paul Bingham, could it be? He struggled to keep the tension out of his expression. ‘This Bingham, does he have a nickname?’

  Cohen raised his eyebrows and peered at the screen. ‘Yes, he does,’ he said. Please God, please let it be Rabbit, prayed Whiteside. ‘Rabbit. Does that help?’

  ‘Yes, yes, it does,’ said Whiteside. Oh my God, yes, it does. ‘Will there be anything else?’ Cohen asked.

  Whiteside shook his head. Rabbit Bingham. No wonder Conquest wanted any criminal details keeping off his record. If Conquest was involved with crime it was something far more disturbing than drugs. Far worse. He could see now why Conquest would do anything to keep off the police radar. No wonder he was trying to find out what the DI wanted the other night. He must have been shitting himself when Hanlon, a woman with a fearsome reputation for direct action, had turned up on his doorstep.

  ‘Thank you very much for your time, Dr Cohen. I’ll see myself out.’ Whiteside could have punched the air with elation. Bingham!

  As he walked down the stairs Whiteside thought, now I know what you’re thinking, Hanlon. Child sex abuse and murder. You lift a stone and what do you find under it. Rabbit Bingham. And now Conquest. He couldn’t wait to see Hanlon’s face.

  When she was delighted, she would raise her left eyebro
w. Grim satisfaction, Hanlon’s version of happiness, was a wintery smile. What he now had was maybe enough for the two together. As soon as he was outside in the street he phoned the DI. Her phone was switched off so he left a message. ‘Ma’am, you were right. Most importantly, Rabbit Bingham, yes, that Rabbit Bingham, was one of Conquest’s associates. Oh, last thing, that number question: 18 is A. H.’ He wouldn’t need to explain what that meant. Hanlon would know. Those bloody dogs of Conquest’s. If he’d called them Rover and Spike, Whiteside

  wouldn’t even be at the institute.

  Whiteside wasn’t Hanlon. He didn’t hide emotions. He grinned as he flagged down a taxi. Time to go home and celebrate.

  Celia Westermann sat upstairs in what had been an attic room at the top of the building and watched Whiteside on one of the twelve CCTV monitors she had on her desk. Her face was no longer that of the amenable, put-upon drudge. It was implacable and cruel. There was no trace now of the downtrodden secretary. Invisible, a malignant ghost sitting at her desk, she had tracked Whiteside’s progress on camera down the stairs, back through security, past Zev and Reuben, the guards on the door, and into the street. She clicked on the icon on her screen where she had herself accessed Conquest’s file and picked up her

  own phone while she looked at the image of Whiteside as he talked on his mobile.

  People say that there are two requisites for betrayal: love and hate. Eta Westermann, Celia’s mother, had dementia. Physically, she was fit for her age, she could live for years, but mentally was another story. She was a seventy-eight-year-old baby. She had a baby’s needs: nappies, washing, feeding, attention. The home that she was in was wonderful. The staff were highly trained and motivated, the building light, airy, clean. It was also extremely expensive. Celia could not afford it on her salary. That was where the love came in. Then there was the flip side of love.

  Celia felt she practically ran the institute. She had been here for twenty-six years now, running virtually all of the administration, from IT to wages, and got as much thanks as the expensive computer equipment that surrounded her. Less maybe. She was regarded by the predominantly male workforce as an old maid, practically pitiable despite the fact she probably did three people’s jobs. Indeed, to replace her, they would need three people. Zev and Reuben earned more than she did – she authorized their pay checks for God’s sake, and what did their jobs entail, looking menacing and checking bags. A dog could do that job. A chimpanzee could do it. A retard could do it. And they had the gall to look down their noses at her.