‘What do you want?’ said Cunningham. Eventually. It was not the voice of despair. She had arrested professionals before, white-collar workers with no criminal history who had burst into tears at the thought of their careers being destroyed, the shame they’d brought on their families, feelings not shared by the majority of her clients to whom arrest was either a nuisance or an occupational hazard. Cunningham seemed more resigned than anything else.
‘Information leading to the arrest of David Anderson.’ Hanlon looked at the lawyer speculatively. It was like a raise in poker; the question was whether or not Cunningham would call her bluff or fold. She was asking a lot. Would the dangers posed by betraying a man they both knew to be a killer outweigh the end of Cunningham’s life as a lawyer? Hanlon had told herself that Cunningham’s ego would not allow him to consider the possibility of failure. He would rather take the risk of Anderson than the certainty of the loss of his livelihood. The latter was of course her gigantic bluff. His arrest was based on a lie; she could not carry the charade further than the confines of the car.
For Cunningham, an entrapment defence would be tricky since he’d have to prove or show that he wouldn’t have acted illegally unless the police had talked him into doing it. It would be hard to make a jury credibly believe that you’d been sweet-talked or bullied into buying five hundred pounds’ worth of coke by an undercover officer and then stuck a load of it up your nose. However, her sting operation was not officially sanctioned. The drugs that he’d been busted with had been supplied illegally. She could imagine, if she chose to, the scene in court. ‘And where, Sergeant Whiteside, did you obtain these drugs?’ Kicking Toby’s door in and threatening him was certainly beyond the remit of the police. Theoretically, Whiteside wasn’t simply posing as a dealer: he had been dealing. She had no case, but Cunningham didn’t know that. The end of her career or Anderson behind bars instead of swaggering around his North London estate like some lord of the manor: the outcome lay in Cunningham’s frazzled mind.
For Hanlon, it was a perfectly acceptable gamble. She felt completely calm. If she’d been hooked up to a monitor her heart rate would have shown fifty beats per minute. Cunningham stared at her for what felt like a very long time.
He must know, she thought. He must realize that he’s been set up rather than nicked randomly.
What Hanlon didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that because Cunningham had, for a while now, been behaving so outrageously professionally, been involved in so many lies through his habit, he had come to expect this moment in some form or another. To him it had an air of terrible inevitability. He knew all the things he’d been up to and he suspected that others must know too. His view of the world was skewed through the drug bombardment he was subjecting himself to. Paranoia is a common side-effect of prolonged cocaine abuse and Cunningham had been very edgy for a while now. Reality was a hazy concept for him these days. That he should be arrested came as no real surprise. For Cunningham, sitting in the police car, it had not been a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’. He was prepared to bow to the inevitable. He felt he might as well get it over and done with.
‘OK,’ he said simply. ‘What do you want to know?’
Hanlon blinked in surprise. She had won. She was startled by how easy it was all proving to be, but it didn’t show. Her face was impassive. The heart monitor would have remained unchanged. She took a notebook out of a pocket and explained. Cunningham listened carefully.
‘I won’t have to testify, of course, or appear as a witness,’ he said.
‘No,’ replied Hanlon. ‘It’ll all be off the record, I’ll make sure your name doesn’t appear anywhere.’ Cunningham nodded. He started talking.
He talked quickly and fluently: names, dates, times and methods of delivery. He wanted to get back to his flat and do some more coke. He certainly wasn’t going back to work. Not after all this. The quicker this was over, the better. Hanlon’s pen moved over the paper, Anderson’s fate sealed in biro with his lawyer’s complicity.
7
Detective Sergeant Enver Demirel was not a happy man. If he had read his horoscope in the newspaper he’d found on his desk, it would have promised him a challenging twelve hours ahead and that was certainly the kind of day he was having. Challenging. Today’s challenge was not to feel too despondent. When police work went well, Enver thoroughly enjoyed his job. When he had days like today, it felt like trying to empty the sea with a bucket: utterly futile. A five-week, painstaking investigation into a prolific local burglar was now, to all intents and purposes, dead in the water. All that time, all the hopes they had raised of burglary victims who felt that for once the police were doing something more constructive than issuing them with a case number to facilitate insurance claims, wasted.
It had really irritated him because it was the kind of policing he felt they should be doing. Proper policing, not faffing around with celebrities or distractions like bloody Plebgate. Haringey, the London borough that his patch Wood Green lay in, had about a quarter of a million people living in it. It was probably the population of Iceland, thought Enver. It was certainly big enough. Last year there had been about three thousand reported burglaries. Percentage-wise it was over double the national average. The burglar they’d been after had caused misery throughout Wood Green. Many of these people would have been uninsured. There were big pockets of poverty in the borough and premiums were high. It was the kind of crime that most people worried about, that and being mugged or attacked. The kind of crime that directly affected them. It wasn’t just the nicked electrical goods or jewellery. It was the door kicked in, the smashed window, the ransacked flat, the feeling of invasion.
Phil Johnson, their target, was a prolific criminal and his arrest would have shown the local community that the police were working for them, not against them. It would have won hearts and minds. It would have been a high-profile statement that the police were doing something useful, catching criminals, not just issuing crime case numbers for insurance claim purposes. Yesterday the case against him was rock solid. But now, all this had changed. As of this morning, he had a key eyewitness who was refusing to cooperate and a suspect who’d left the country for the Caribbean, indefinitely. Despite the other evidence they still had on him, Enver knew that once the momentum was lost Johnson would slip down to a fairly low position on the ‘to do’ list when he returned. And now, courtesy of his own extended relatives, he had this new problem to deal with.
Today, in his lunch hour, he was in the back room of a mosque in Wood Green while family pressure was gently but ruthlessly applied by the imam of the mosque, his Uncle Osman. The small room with its wooden floor smelt of furniture polish overlaid with acrimony.
The conversation was taking place in heavily accented Turkish, which Enver, who was born in London, didn’t really speak too well, and English. He had to keep interrupting, to ask for clarification.
‘So, let me get this straight. He,’ Enver pointed an accusing finger at Mehmet who sat unhappily and powerlessly in his chair while these two men, the policeman and the imam, decided his future, ‘didn’t come forward on Thursday to report his child missing because he’s here, in the UK, illegally and didn’t know what to do?’ Enver’s tone of voice was incredulous. ‘It’s a missing child investigation, not visa fraud! What was he thinking?’
Osman nodded wearily. He looked hard at his nephew, Enver Demirel. He knew he was emotionally blackmailing him, but it was in a good cause. Mehmet Yilmaz was in the most terrible trouble a parent could be in and it was their duty to help. Whether or not mistakes had been made was neither here nor there. What’s done was done. He could appreciate Enver’s rage. But that would pass. Enver was a good person and Osman was sure he’d deliver. It was just that Enver was judging Mehmet using British frames of reference. If you were in trouble in Turkey, the police were not automatically your first choice for help. Family and community were. Turkey, as Turkey, had only really been around for a century or so. It was a strange mix of the new and the old. Corruption ran deep at most official levels and the police were no exception. He looked into Enver’s angry brown eyes.