The Stolen Child Page 26

  helped by Fordham not making official his feelings that Hanlon was behind the Bingham attack. His own concerns about the DI’s behaviour he kept to himself.

  Looked at dispassionately, Hanlon created chaos. She was anarchic. Arguably, it was her fault Whiteside had been shot. She had undeniably already got one prisoner severely injured, with another locked down, and induced a state of simmering tension into a maximum-security prison. He suddenly wondered how Julie would react to being asked to help the person indirectly responsible for all of this. The person who had created havoc at HMP Wendover, her place of work.

  Enver shrugged to himself. He was innately fatalistic and he knew, deep down, he believed in Hanlon. He’d keep helping until some kind of conclusion was reached. To that end, he picked up the phone and called his cousin.

  Conquest stepped into his car and drove out of the underground garage he’d had built under the mansion in the Bishops Avenue, then headed for the North Circular. Underground was the new black for property developers. Whole streets in Knightsbridge, in Camden and Chelsea were being underpinned as builders – despite the anguished objections from neighbours, lives blighted by dust, noise and vibration – dug deep down to add extra floors to already large houses. Conquest’s own property company didn’t handle very much high-end housing but he often thought to himself, who would really want an underground swimming pool and an underground cinema? How often were things like that ever used? They were the multimillionaire’s equivalent of a pasta-maker. Nobody ever used them. In years to come, he thought, a new generation of property developers will be ripping all this out, wondering what had got into people at the time. He smiled at the thought. He was hugely happy.

  He slid a CD of Furtwängler conducting Wagner’s Die Meistersinger into the slot on his Bose in-car music system, and pointed the Maserati in the direction of Essex. Now there was something that had stood the test of time. Music and sex, they’d go on forever. He pressed the accelerator and felt the surge of power and the roar of the engine complementing the beauty of Wagner’s opera. The Yilmaz family was gone; in a fortnight the investigation, although officially open, would cease. Whiteside was no longer a threat; soon his police insider would start rumours it was a gay ex-lover who might be behind it, and according to his police source, the Reynolds investigation was going nowhere. The music was golden, the car was golden, everything was golden, especially his future.

  The judge relaxed with a glass of champagne at Brussels Airport, waiting for his flight to City Airport London. It had been a productive couple of days. For the judge, productive was synonymous with fun. He had a huge capacity for hard work, and the meal last night at Bruneau had been memorably wonderful – even better than he had expected. It was over the chocolate dessert, as miraculously light as he’d hoped, that he’d learnt unofficially the job was now his for the taking. That meant many more agreeable Michelin-starred lunches, as well as a wonderfully generous pension when he retired and first-class travel complete with chauffeured limousines. But these were fripperies. These were his already.

  The best thing about his new job, of course, was the power

  aspect. To be President of the European Court, that had a ring to it that the judge found exceptionally pleasurable. He would be more powerful than a Prime Minister or Chancellor or Home Secretary. They would come and go on the whim of an electorate, while he carried on, above all of that. His

  judgements could determine the fate of states. What enhanced the feeling was the knowledge that two of his UK colleagues, who he knew coveted the post, would not get it. When you reach the judge’s eminence, when you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain, it’s not just enough that you succeed; others must fail. He lifted the champagne flute aloft in a silent toast to his own glittering future.

  But later, as he took his seat on the small BAE 146 Whisper Jet that would fly him back to his luxury penthouse in the City, it wasn’t the career triumph that was foremost in his mind. It was the delights that were waiting for him on Strood Island.

  Come Unto Me.

  The judge didn’t know the name of the boy, or his background. These were unimportant and, anyway, he didn’t know or care what would happen to the child after he had finished with him. He would cease to exist, Conquest would see to that. But before he met his maker, the boy would fulfil a destiny of sorts as the boy bitch for Europe’s most brilliant legal mind. He would be wearing his mask, as suggested by Bingham.

  He owed Bingham a lot for that suggestion. It had been so liberating. Before the mask he had been consumed with fear that he might somehow be recognized by one of his infrequent boy-prostitute lovers. Bingham had mocked this idea. Rent boys do not know the faces of prominent judges. But he could envisage a chance glimpse of his face on TV or a newspaper, the rent boy phoning a red-top, the reporters digging deep. If only we had a sensible anti-privacy law, thought the judge, like they do in France, then I wouldn’t even need to worry about things like this. The Leveson Inquiry would put the brakes on journalists, who the judge feared more than anyone, but it wouldn’t stop them. He turned his mind away from thoughts about how best to muzzle the press. In Europe he’d have more

  power to try to curb their excesses. It would be a tragedy for the law if unwelcome journalistic investigations were turned on the judiciary. Ordinary people did not understand how judges’ minds worked and they should not be accountable to the electorate. They were the ones in charge; they served Justice itself.

  The judge found himself salivating at the thought of enjoying the child, of running his learned tongue over the boy’s flesh that evening. Every night he’d thought about the boy and what he would do to him in great detail. He had dreamed about removing his clothes, running his wrinkled hands over the boy’s smooth body. The judge had a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness, he was proud of it, and Peter Reynolds would get to appreciate this gift in the flesh. Not many people have the chance to make their dreams come true. The judge was one of the select few.

  You were allowed to use your phone on the plane. The judge emailed Conquest to see if he could come down that night. The answer came back immediately: yes. The judge smiled in delight and sent some instructions as to how he wanted the child preparing for that evening’s entertainment. He would have three days with him. He breathed deeply in excited anticipation. Three days, seventy-two hours. He would make the most of every minute. Carpe diem. It’s what he deserved. It was, after all, only just. God, he was excited.

  Peter counted the scratches on his cell wall. One scratch per injection, that meant four scratches per day. He now had eighteen, so he figured that today was still Wednesday. When there was no clock, no natural light, it was hard to keep count. The hatch on his door rattled and opened and his evening meal, tonight a pasta salad with tuna, was delivered. Today he’d given

  in to unhappiness and, hiding his head in Tito’s fur so no one could see, cried a little. He was so alone and he didn’t know why he was here or, worse, how long this would last. The dog sensed his misery and gently licked his face and hands, which comforted him a little. He so wanted his mother.

  He drank the lemon-flavoured water that had come with his meal and gave himself an insulin injection based on the carb count on the tuna salad packaging. Shortly after he’d eaten, he started yawning deeply. He was feeling very tired all of a sudden. It crossed his mind that he might have been drugged but he was too sleepy to care, and before he did actually fall asleep, he thought, I don’t mind anyway, perhaps when I wake up it’ll be in my own bed, perhaps I’m going home.

  * * *

  And forty miles away in London at the City Airport, Lord Justice Reece walked down the metal staircase from the plane, down to the black tarmac. There was a smile of happy anticipation on his lips. Tonight’s the night, he thought, tonight’s the night.

  33

  Julie Demirel had known Enver more or less as long as she’d known his cousin Hassan, now her husband. Julie was an attractive blonde in her early thirties,
her good looks, in her opinion, let down by her legs. I’ve got fat thighs, she would think to herself gloomily. Thunder thighs. Hassan didn’t seem to mind. It was all right for him, she thought, he had lovely legs. Now she was the mother of two small children, aged four and six, and she was too preoccupied with them and her job to worry about the lower half of her body. She was pleased to be seeing Enver, she liked him a lot.

  Most people found it strange that she worked in a male prison but Julie didn’t mind it. It was unsurprising, people’s surprise. Prison is a place universally dreaded. In her experience, people assumed you were locked in a life-or-death struggle with insanely violent depraved criminals. Well, in twelve years as a prison officer there had undoubtedly been moments, but what her friends failed to realize was that you had to be firm, not brutal, and most of the inmates were reassuringly normal. Anyway, prison for Julie had run in the family. It was normal for her. Her dad had been a prison officer, most of his mates had been in the service, one of her brothers was in the probation service and she’d grown up with it. Now, many of her friends struggling financially or with job insecurity were looking at

  her job in the prison service with a certain amount of envy, although in Julie’s opinion few of them would last five minutes. You had to be tough to survive in there and most civilians, she felt, with a certain amount of good-natured contempt, simply couldn’t hack it.

  The attack on Bingham had undeniably hit the prison hard. Every officer fears a riot and a good deal of prison rules are there to create an atmosphere of normality, of acceptance, so that everyone could get along with as little friction as possible. She guessed it was like being stuck on a submarine. There had to be a certain amount of consensus, give and take on both sides. No matter what happened, you couldn’t just storm out or slip away. You were trapped in it. The Bingham episode was similar to throwing a large piece of concrete into a small pond. It had landed with one hell of a crash. It had created a very ugly atmosphere.

  Like everyone in the prison, from governor to cleaner, from the lowest- to the highest-profile prisoner, she had speculated on who, why and how it had happened. More or less everybody suspected Anderson. Why he had done it was a question more for the guards than the prisoners. Why not, the prisoners would have answered. Who cares? Shit happens. Some of the murderers had committed their crimes in an alcoholic- or drug-induced blackout and couldn’t remember why they’d killed, indeed sometimes who they’d killed. One or two of them had very tenuous grounds for murder. ‘He looked at me in a funny way’ was one reason frequently given. The last question, how it had happened, was particularly pertinent for the authorities.

  In Julie’s opinion, at least three staff would have to be

  involved. She could think of half a dozen likely candidates. It would be such an easy thing to rationalize. Bingham was a child sex offender, no one really cared what happened to him,

  no tears would be shed. It would be hard to find the culprits. They would all, herself included, close ranks. The prison officers had a siege mentality stronger than the prisoners. More or less everyone who was not a prison officer was an enemy. Anyway, those responsible would say, if ever they were found, well, no one escaped. No one innocent had been hurt. So what. Easy for others to talk, they didn’t have to live on a prison officer’s salary.

  The main issue raised was, of course, one of corruption. A great deal of money must have changed hands. And now Enver, who she liked a lot, was explaining that a police officer had sanctioned the assault. Well, thanks a bunch, DI Hanlon, for shitting on our living-room carpet. You don’t have to deal with an enraged prison governor, three hundred plus over-excited prisoners, an enquiry, and an internal affairs audit of your finances and spending to check you haven’t suddenly become unaccountably rich.

  Well, she thought, that answers the why to a certain extent. Because of the bloody Metropolitan Police. Hassan, her husband, didn’t seem to understand. So what? A prisoner assaults a prisoner. Who cares? Julie knew there was little point explaining to him there had to be rules of justice. She found the whole thing scandalous above and beyond the temporary annoyances. She was a deeply moral person. How would the Metropolitan Police like it if the Prison Service started meddling in their work? Outrage was tempered, though, by the victim’s status. She would cheerfully kill anyone who harmed Aydin and Rifat, her boys, something Enver was exploiting none too subtly. ‘There is a missing boy, a twelve-year-old, and if we don’t find him soon he’ll die,’ said Enver. He’d used this argument

  several times already.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ replied Julie.

  Enver shook his head. He looked at Julie, who he could see was getting angry. Her cheeks were dangerously red. ‘It’s exactly the point, Julie. We’ – by ‘we’ he means ‘me’, thought Julie – ‘we have the choice. We can either save him or we can choose to do nothing. And then he’ll die horribly after being sexually assaulted. Repeatedly sexually assaulted. I was there when a toddler, a baby almost, was pulled from a canal after being raped at least a dozen times. We’re not talking about abstract justice. That could be your child, Julie.’

  ‘That’s enough, Enver,’ said Hassan. He was getting cross himself now. He repeated himself in Turkish. ‘Yeter, Enver.’

  And in one sense it was enough. Julie agreed to do what he was asking. It was enough to make Julie agree to speak to Anderson the following day. Enver felt no sense of triumph or victory. He felt ashamed of himself for the moral blackmail. ‘We just need to know where,’ said Enver urgently. ‘Just an address.’

  ‘Just an address,’ said Julie, ‘and no one will ever know where it came from? I won’t be implicated? Fordham won’t find out? He’d go spare.’

  ‘No,’ replied Enver. ‘This is all very much unofficial. That much is certain.’

  On Strood Island, Conquest, Clarissa and Robbo, who was the permanent caretaker there, looked at the TV monitor that showed Peter’s cell. The cell had been a former wine store in the cellar underneath the house and modified for its current purpose a couple of years ago. The boy was now sound asleep from the Rohypnol that had been added to his juice. The judge, in his rather detailed instructions, had wanted the boy unconscious when he arrived. He wanted about five hours, while he explored his unresisting body, before he woke the sleeping beauty up.

  Robbo was an expert at drugging victims. He’d had quite a bit of experience now, working for Conquest.

  ‘Shall I take him upstairs now?’ asked Robbo with a grin. When Conquest had first met him, back in the Eighties, a fellow Hell’s Angel, Robbo had quite long hair. Now he was a neo-Nazi skinhead, a devotee of tattoos, or body art as he preferred to call it. Most of Robbo’s tattoos had a similar theme: eagles, iron crosses, provocative slogans. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘Work makes you free’ – the words above the gates at Auschwitz, were tattooed across his shoulders. He was a dedicated bodybuilder and the steroids that he took to enhance his muscle mass had left him with a perpetual acne-covered

  back and an eternally angry mood.

  The ‘upstairs’ to which he was referring was a large double bedroom, fitted with a bank of cameras that were motion sensitive and would record the action automatically so the judge would have a permanent record of his activities for future, pleasurable viewing. Robbo would edit them to form a coherent, sexually exciting, whole. The judge liked to dress up. Robbo, like some repellent butler, had already laid out upstairs the costume the judge liked to dress up in. He would be wearing a black, latex mask whose eyeholes were covered in a fine silver mesh, preventing any form of recognition. There was a wide selection of sex toys in the room, mainly relating to pain: whips, handcuffs, nipple clamps, tongue screws, the full range of S&M panoply. Conquest liked to call the room the Bridal Suite. It seemed appropriate.

  Conquest hoped the judge wouldn’t be too enthusiastic,

  wouldn’t get too carried away. He didn’t want the boy dead too soon from internal or external injuries. He needed to film him w
ith Robbo and Glasgow Brian for Internet distribution after the judge had finished and before disposing of him. Peter

  would fetch a very high price. Conquest always needed funds. There was a potentially very large market for what would be Peter’s one and only sex film.

  Outside the house, in the field, the pigs had been put on strict rations. Conquest wanted them starving by the time everyone in the house had finished with the boy. Pigs can be very aggressive. He was toying with the idea of putting Peter in with them while still alive and seeing what would happen, how long they would take to finish him off. The pigs had been brought up to eat dead and occasionally dying animals. It would be interesting to see what they would make of the boy. He would get Robbo to film it anyway. He was sure there would be a specialist market out there for that kind of thing. Bingham would know. He missed Bingham and his technical expertise as well as his infallible commercial sense.

  Conquest looked at the boy, still wearing his school trousers

  and shirt. His arm was curled round the dog. He smiled, pleased with his foresight. He had put the dog in with the boy and given him the books because he hadn’t wanted the child to go to pieces. He wanted Peter to look his best for the judge and not be some gaunt, sobbing, hysterical mess. He’d learnt from experience. A previous guest in the cell had committed suicide in a state of despair. It was rare for children to do this – unlike adults they could have no conception of the horrors that awaited them and they were valuable commodities, things in which he’d invested a great deal of time and effort. It paid to look after them. He’d keep the dog once Peter was gone. Conquest quite liked dogs. He looked at his watch; the judge would be here in an hour or so. Then his fun could begin.