The Stolen Child Read online

  Hanlon nodded. He thought of Mehmet, twisting his fingers nervously as he’d watched him and his uncle discussing his future. He thought of his little daughter, Reyhan, and their hopes for her future. He thought of the tiny body bag that had awaited Ali by the side of the canal and he thought too of Grey Rabbit. It was the toy that was maybe the clinching factor. He felt his eyes moisten and he was glad of the protective darkness of the room. He wouldn’t have wanted Hanlon to see. This is for you, Grey Rabbit. Enver took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’m going to help you then.’

  27

  HMP Wendover, thirty miles west of London, is a Category A prison. There are four bandings in the penal custodial system, which refer to the danger posed to the general public by the prisoner. Category A is for the most dangerous inmates. Dave ‘Jesus’ Anderson was now a high-risk prisoner in a high-risk jail.

  He was currently on remand after his arrest for possession with intent to supply five kilograms of uncut cocaine with a conservative value of a quarter of a million pounds. He had been taking delivery of it with two of his men when Whiteside and the drug squad had busted him. It was a textbook scenario, a large lock-up garage, car, sports bag, bench, scales, drugs. It had looked to the police like a film set for a drugs bust. The photos that SOCO had taken alone would probably ensure a conviction.

  Anderson knew immediately that someone had grassed him up, the moment the police had burst through the door. He had been over and over candidates for the informer’s identity in his head more or less continually from the second the handcuffs went on him up to now, but with no credible suspect. He could not understand how anyone who knew would dare to do it. Who would have the balls to do this? Somewhere out there was a dead man walking.

  He had been in Wendover for some time now. He had been arrested, appeared in court the following day; bail was denied, even with Cunningham passionately arguing his case. He hadn’t been surprised by the decision and he was now here waiting on a court date for his trial. There had been a work-to-rule by the PCS Union and this had delayed legal proceedings. Meanwhile, he had tried to make the best of things. He was no stranger to prison.

  Anderson’s family were drug dealers. They were career criminals; Anderson was born into it. All ancillary crime, the beatings, the money laundering, intimidation, the occasional killing, were professionally driven. It was a family business, started by Malcolm, his father, thirty years ago and run now by Dave and his two brothers, Terry and Jordan. Dave, the middle brother, was the head of the operation. Terry would have been capable but was fundamentally lazy and Jordan had neither the brains nor the temperament. All three brothers were violent, both by nature and nurture, but the temper that burnt inside Dave Anderson was controlled. It was like a blowtorch: it was always there, usually on a pilot light, but when he wanted he could turn up the gas to a white-hot, incendiary degree. Jordan couldn’t restrain himself when it came to violence. He would explode unpredictably. He was currently doing ten years in Armley Prison in Leeds for attempted murder and GBH over a pointless road rage incident. His absence made Dave’s incarceration all the more troublesome. It had taken him two days and ten grand to get a mobile phone inside Wendover. He guessed he would have to run things from in here for a while. Malcolm, his father, was being treated for lung cancer, in fact had recently had a lung removed, and was in no frame of mind to work. They all knew, Malcolm included, the future was not rosy. Life had given him a sentence

  and the sentence wasn’t life.

  Anderson’s cell was in B Wing. There were five wings at Wendover, A to E. They were ageing, red-brick structures, following the usual prison pattern of cells built on several floors, three high at Wendover, around a central, netted well. The net would catch anyone who jumped, fell or was pushed from one of the galleries, before they hit the ground.

  Anderson hadn’t been inside for a while, but it all came flooding back quickly enough. Nothing had changed. The echoing acoustics of prison were what he noticed first. Everything was metal, stone or brick, with the qualities of a claustrophobic swimming pool. Any sound was instantly magnified, from the slam of a door to a barked command. From a whisper to a shout. Then there was the smell of prison. Canteen cooking and men’s bodies, and air that was never quite fresh enough, overlaid with pungent disinfectant. The noise was constant. It was multilayered. The jangle of the screws’ keys on their belt and the squeak of their shoes on the flooring, the shouting, even the quietest of conversations, added to the hubbub. Just about all sound was amplified in here. And he’d forgotten too, the colours of prison, the yellow paint. Prisons always seemed to favour yellow. Anderson guessed some study must have claimed it soothed people – either that, or it was cheap – and then there were the blue denim uniforms of the prisoners and the dark ones of the warders, the grey of the ubiquitous metalwork. Finally, there was the durability of everything: iron staircases, iron bars, iron doors, stone walls, reinforced glass. Everything was designed, unlike normal places with comfort or style in mind, so it couldn’t break or be broken, or smashed or used as a weapon. There was nothing soft in prison, nothing soft except flesh.

  B Wing was controlled by a mass murderer. To be classified

  as such, you had to have killed at least four people and he just

  qualified for this. He had killed them without any ‘cooling down’ time and so was not deemed a serial killer. He was an old-timer called Andy Howe, who had butchered his father, his stepmother and two other people in one blood-drenched, murderous evening. He had used a machete. Andy was never going to be released. He’d been sentenced to a whole life tariff which meant he would never be freed unless by order of the Home Secretary. Nobody, Andy included, believed this would ever happen. This gave him a certain cachet in the small world in which he lived. He had quasi-celebrity status. Both guards and inmates were wary of Andy. In the fifteen years he had been inside, he had occasionally been challenged by other prisoners. It had been a mistake on their part.

  He knew of Anderson by reputation and had gone out of

  his way to be helpful. Anderson was offered cigarettes, grass, home-made booze, porn, various drugs. His father’s illness had put Anderson off smoking anything, but he accepted alcohol and some Temazepam to help him sleep. Prison at night could be annoyingly noisy; sounds carried. Someone coughing could keep half the wing awake. He also accepted a very desirable job, cleaning the educational block. This job cost him another five thousand pounds to arrange. He could use his phone in there without being disturbed.

  The educational facility was a brick-built building which stood alone in the prison grounds, unlike the other wings which were interconnected. It reminded Anderson of a village hall, if you pretended not to notice the bars on the windows or the metal door and the building’s unusually stout construction. It consisted of two rooms joined together by an arch, with a small kitchen and toilet and storage facilities in the mid-section. The walls of the educational block were decorated with prisoners’ art and motivational quotations from things they’d written.

  ‘Reform starts from within’ read one. ‘Rage = Despair!’ read another.

  That kind of thing.

  Anderson was able to use his time in the block to keep in touch with Terry, his brother, via his illegal mobile and generally relax, although he did do a certain amount of cleaning, just for form’s sake. He could, after all, be in for a very long time, but like all experienced prisoners Anderson lived in the moment. You never serve a ten-year stretch, it’s just one day. That’s all you need to get through. One day at a time. And if you can’t, do one day, do half a day, or do five minutes. That’s the length of your sentence. It’s a permanent ‘now’. If you started thinking of the future, it would be intolerable. It’s how you do a prison sentence. Anderson lived one day at a time. It was OK.

  Peter Reynolds was not an experienced prisoner and he was being kept in conditions that would not be allowed in a UK prison. True, his cell was clean and he was reasonably fed and he had the dog, Tito, fo
r company, but he was in total isolation. That would be regarded in the prison system as wrong, both from a practical point of view, because it tended to reinforce antisocial behaviour, and from an ethical point of view. His mood had changed from terror and incomprehension, to fear, to worry, but what he was feeling now, on this Sunday, was mainly excruciating boredom. The fear and the worry were still there, but they were like an ocean current below the surface.

  He had scratched another two marks on his wall, which by his reckoning made today a Sunday and the current time, the afternoon. Incomprehension was another major part of what he was feeling. Peter was unable to think of a good reason for any of this. He had decided someone must be keeping him here for some sort of ransom, but probably not money. He knew

  they weren’t poor but he knew his mum didn’t have enough wealth to warrant this kind of attention. It had to be for some kind of unspecified favour or service. It must be something to do with her work. He only had a hazy idea what she did, other than travel a lot, but PFK Plastics made plastic things that went into machines. Maybe ‘they’, his kidnappers, wanted her to sabotage something or maybe ‘they’ wanted her to steal some plans. Maybe she didn’t really work for PFK but was a spy? It had to be something like that. It seemed implausible, but what other answer made any kind of sense? Nobody would kidnap him for himself.

  Salvation for Peter came later that day when two books that had been in his schoolbag were put through the hatch, together with a snack. He now had Animal Farm to read and a book on European history. He never thought the time would come when he would want to read George Orwell, he preferred Artemis Fowl or the Cherub books, but now he opened the dystopian novel with real joy. Anything to take his mind off the situation he was in. He worried about Tito too; the dog must be going mad with the confinement. He certainly was. He hoped his mum would do whatever they wanted her to do quickly. He had a physics textbook too in his bag. He knew that if the day came when he was looking forward to reading that, then he was definitely in trouble.

  He stroked Tito’s thick fur gently and the dog rolled on his

  back and stretched. ‘Poor love,’ said Peter. He scratched its stomach with his fingertips and the dog groaned in ecstasy. Tito must be craving exercise, he thought. Oh, Mum, please come. Please God, let her come soon.

  It was the worst and longest Sunday of Kathy’s life. At least when Dan was dying she had Peter, she had friends, she even

  had Dan, although he was slipping away from her. She could at least touch him as he lay in a morphine haze, to try and keep the pain at bay. This day she was in limbo. She couldn’t think, she didn’t want to do anything. There was nothing to do. She sat on the sofa in jeans and a sweatshirt, trainers on her feet, just in case they found Peter, so she’d be ready. A WPC, she’d forgotten her name, another support officer, fielded any telephone calls on her landline. She monitored her mobile and her email. This wasn’t living. It was a living death.

  Hanlon had run ten miles that morning, really pushing her body to extremes, relishing the pain and the tiredness, feeling it cleanse her spiritually. As she ran through the London streets and parks, she thought about the events of the day before. In Hanlon’s mind it was a question of personalities as much as of events and as her legs rhythmically moved and her feet bounded along the streets of London, traffic very quiet on the Sunday morning, she thought of them like a deck of cards, fanned out in her mind’s eye. Hanlon had a very visual memory. Whiteside, the handsome, bearded Jack of Clubs. The Knave of Hearts, Rabbit Bingham; Corrigan, the King of Diamonds; Ludgate, the Jack of Diamonds; the shadowy Queen of Spades, the woman responsible for abducting Baby Ali, her face veiled from sight, obscured by shadow. I’ll get you, you bitch, thought Hanlon. She was sure it was the same woman who had shot Whiteside. She did not believe he would have invited a man he didn’t know into his flat. There was another card too, the Joker, face down so she couldn’t see his face, Conquest’s man, or possibly woman, hiding their true colours behind a Met uniform, one of her colleagues. And behind them all, the Dealer, Conquest himself, with his deck of souls, supplier of children. Every step she took hardened her resolve; every beat of her heart

  strengthened her will. I will triumph, Conquest, and you will lose. It was as simple as that.

  After Whiteside’s shooting, she had dismissed any idea of going public with what she suspected. Conquest had an informant in the police force and anything they did, any action they took, would be potentially known to him.

  Look at what had happened to the Yilmaz family. Mehmet had said he had new information; a short while later he was dead.

  Look at what had happened to Whiteside. Sent to investigate Conquest; now the victim of an attempted murder.

  At home she showered, dressed and went into work where she checked on the disappeared boy. She felt sure that it was Conquest. She didn’t believe in coincidences. The Somali girl, Baby Ali, both sexual victims, and now a twelve-year-old boy had disappeared.

  She checked on the Whiteside investigation. He was still alive, barely, and they’d induced a coma, hoping that the swelling and bruising to his brain would gradually resolve itself. The bullet lodged in the front of his head had been successfully removed but it had caused a great deal of damage. The effect of that damage remained unclear. The forensics people were checking the bullets recovered from his body to see if they had any matches; the shell casings had been removed by the shooter. Hanlon sat alone in her office and thought of what she was about to do. She had no proof that would satisfy anyone. Her actions to date were guaranteed to get her suspended from any

  investigation, if not the police force.

  She scratched her head and opened a can of Diet Coke while she thought about the situation again. First, what she knew.

  The number eighteen, written on a bunker, on a lock gate, then on a scrap of newspaper, was present at three separate

  crime scenes. This irrevocably linked the three crimes; it was beyond coincidence.

  Whiteside in his phone message to her had said that eighteen stood for Adolf Hitler. Conquest’s dogs were named after Hitler’s animals. It was tenuous, but it was a link between Conquest and the crimes. There was another link too. Conquest was involved with Bingham. That spelled child sex. Two of the crimes were sexual in nature and involved children; the third, Peter Reynolds, was probably sexual in nature.

  Whiteside had found information on Conquest that they didn’t have on their own police records. That was almost certain proof of some criminal connection.

  The Yilmaz family had been silenced after Mehmet had phoned the police and said he had new information about the woman who had taken Ali.

  From these facts Hanlon decided that Conquest lay behind this. He had the temperament, the brains, the organizational ability and the money to carry it out. Hanlon also thought it a safe bet Conquest had someone on the inside. Conquest and Bingham were linked in this somehow. Conquest had at least three other people working for him. There was the woman behind the Baby Ali kidnap and the two men who had taken the Yilmaz family. Then there would be a fourth person, his Metropolitan Police informer. She suspected that Whiteside had obviously trusted whoever had shot him enough to let them into his flat. That’s why she was assuming it was the woman, possibly even Conquest’s contact in the Met. His mobile phone was missing. Hanlon guessed he had recorded the interview on that.

  Hanlon drank more Coke and looked out of her window at

  the uninspiring view of the brick wall. If only she could find out what Whiteside had discovered. The Shapiro Institute would

  not allow her access; she would have to tell them she had lied to get Whiteside through their door. They were not an official Israeli government agency and would not be pleased that Saul had provided fraudulent documentation to a Met policeman. They would be very angry indeed at this breach in protocol. She had already, in their eyes, compromised their security and they were frantically, justifiably in their view, paranoid. That avenue was closed to her
.

  She wondered how Conquest could have known that Whiteside had been at the institute. Maybe he’d been followed. Maybe he’d mentioned it to Childs who had told someone else. She didn’t suppose it really mattered how he’d found out. Maybe one day she’d have the opportunity to ask him.

  Either way, Conquest had obviously decided that Whiteside, who was, as far as he knew, a bona fide journalist, needed dealing with and he had done just that. He must have got a nasty shock when he discovered he’d been responsible for shooting a Met policeman.

  She couldn’t make public her suspicions. Ludgate was leading the Ali murder enquiry and was in overall charge of the SIOs for the Yilmaz and Reynolds disappearances. He was viewed as a safe pair of hands and particularly good at handling the media. Much as she disliked him, she agreed. If she approached him with what she knew, it would be giving him her head on a plate. She doubted she could begin to calculate all the rules she’d broken, bent or infringed. Corrigan would go crazy. She might as well resign.

  On the plus side, if she kept quiet, she was free to act as she saw fit. Hanlon’s spirits rose slightly. She’d do it her way. She also had a team, if you counted Enver Demirel. She would be unconstrained by police procedural rules. She wasn’t even all that concerned if what she did prejudiced the outcome of

  a potential trial. She didn’t want a trial; she wanted justice. Hanlon didn’t really want to leave justice in the hands of a system she didn’t trust, that she thought favoured the guilty over the innocent. At least she could rely on herself. She couldn’t trust anyone apart from Demirel and she wouldn’t even trust him fully. Well, luckily, she didn’t need to tell anyone what she was going to do next. She picked up the phone and made a call. A while later she replaced the phone on its handset. Rabbit

  Bingham, she thought. We’ll meet again.