The 200 euro set menu came with a selection of recommended wines. Reece was particularly pleased by this. He was knowledgeable about food but choosing the correct wine was such a terrible problem. Choice itself was the first hurdle. You were normally faced with a massive leather-bound menu containing the names of hundreds of wines, making selection haphazard at best. Then there was the question of which vintage to go for. He had an app on his phone which had more or less sorted this problem out. The year 2005, for example, was a superb year for Bordeaux, but which one? You could take a risk and go with the sommelier’s recommendation, which could be, and often was, based on what would give the restaurant the best profit margin, or, scandalously in his opinion, what needed using up. Having the choice made for him lifted a huge burden off his shoulders.
Then he would fly home on the Wednesday, back to his office in the Inns of Court, and Thursday would see him alone with the boy, for forty-eight hours of pure, sensual pleasure. It would be the culmination of a dream.
Reece had experimented with rent boys, courtesy of Bingham, over on the island, but lived in fear that one of them would recognize him from his many TV appearances. Bingham thought the chances of this happening were practically zero. How many rent boys, he’d asked Reece scornfully, watched Newsnight or Hard Talk on BBC News 24? Almost certainly zero. But to reassure Reece, he had come up with the idea that the judge should wear a mask, an idea he’d adopted with great enthusiasm. But sex with prostitutes wasn’t what he wanted and he also didn’t like having to take precautions. He wanted a pure, untainted body; he wanted sex free of condoms. He wanted a boy that he could use without fear of contracting AIDS or a pernicious STD.
Reece felt he had done more than enough to deserve it. It was really what he was due, what he was owed by society for his rare legal expertise. Bingham had reassured him on this. It was only right he should receive his due reward. You are a guardian of civilization; without you we’d be at the mercy of racists and fascists. It’s people like you who preserve decent society, said Bingham, and it’s only right that an exceptional man gets an exceptional reward. He strongly believed that the labourer was worthy of his hire. The law was there to protect children from predatory perverts, but he was the embodiment of the law. He decided what was just and what was unjust, and only a keen mind like his was able to make these distinctions. He decided what was legal.
Society is run, Bingham had assured him, on utilitarian principles: good was what was good for the greatest number of people. Since Reece, with his masterly legal mind, a man in a hundred million, had seen fit to devote his stupendous intellect to the good of society, it was only fair that society pay the reward. Reece, in taking Peter Reynolds, would only be taking a tiny part of what society owed him.
The judge had nodded.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.
Come Unto Me.
Hanlon sat in her dusty office, wearing her usual impassive face but inside screaming at her mobile to ring. She hated having to rely on other people, but there was nothing she could do to hurry Anderson. The rolling TV news still carried reports on the missing Peter Reynolds, mainly live from outside New Scotland Yard. It was infuriating that she felt she knew the truth but was powerless to act. She had everything and nothing. There was a figure out of Greek mythology called Cassandra, who had the gift of seeing the future, but her curse was that no one would believe her. That’s what I am, she thought bitterly, a modern-day Cassandra. Come on, Anderson, call me!
Back in London, Kathy was eating a Ryvita and drinking water. The coarse crispbread scoured her tongue and palate and she found its abrasive texture somehow comforting. She would have liked to be able to hurt herself, to gash herself with a razor blade, for example. The pain would have distracted her, and it would have been a sympathetic magic, as if by drawing bad things down to her own body she could take them away from Peter. She had another piece of crispbread. Normal food would have made her vomit. Until Peter was found, the thought of eating revolted her. She knew she had to have enough to function, so she didn’t collapse, but crackers were all she could really face. Her sleep at night was fitful at best, more like drawing a thin grey veil around her than the oblivion she craved. She lay on her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. She refused sleeping pills. Peter might be found at any time and she had to stay sharp.
Peter may not have been able to guess why he had been kidnapped but Kathy could imagine all kinds of terrible reasons. She didn’t dare think about them. Her head felt as if it was going to explode, like it had been pressurized. When she was awake, her thoughts virtually shut down. She didn’t want to think. She was like a TV on standby. It wasn’t a comforting, meditative state of non-ego, of awareness; it was a pointless, numb nothingness. She couldn’t bear to think. Life for Kathy was a prolonged, silent, howl of pain, separation and dread.
Rabbit Bingham was in the prison infirmary. The second degree burns to his penis would require a skin graft; the smashing of his mouth would result in the extraction of what was left of his upper and lower front teeth. The damage to the soft tissue of his lips was also extensive and had required a lot of stitching. Bingham had refused to name his attacker.
Drifting in and out of consciousness from the morphine they’d given him for the pain, he told the guards he’d fallen down stairs and hurt his mouth. The burns he claimed were self-inflicted. They were a sex game gone wrong.
Alastair Fordham, the governor, was in a state of understandable rage. He didn’t care about Bingham as a person, nobody did. If the story leaked out to the press no one would care that a paedophile had been seriously injured in prison. But although non-newsworthy, what Bingham most certainly had become was both an administrative headache and the subject of an embarrassing investigation.
To a certain extent, Fordham didn’t care about the cost and the administrative hassle of Bingham being sent to a mainstream hospital. He was hardly a flight risk. Certainly, with the condition his genitals were in, he posed no threat to children. Added to that, it would be a while before he could even move a muscle in his lower limbs, much less run away.
What Fordham did object to was being made to look as if he couldn’t control his own prison and the implication, the clear conclusion, that whoever did this had inside help. The assault on Bingham must have had the tacit support of at least one of the prison officers. Almost certainly more than one. Fordham was a pragmatist, he knew that with more than three hundred dangerous prisoners on site, not to mention the ever-present problem of bribery, a certain amount of trouble was inevitable. Prison officers are not well paid, they have difficult working conditions and some of the prisoners in their care have access to huge amounts of money. Blind eyes were often turned inside. The presence of illegal substances, a given. Arguably, anything that calmed a volatile prison population down was not necessarily a bad thing. You’d be a fool to think otherwise. Fordham was not the kind of man to launch a moral crusade over anything.
But this was provocatively bold. It was an in-your-face challenge to his authority. Bingham had been discovered in the library he was supposed to have been cleaning. There was no trace of the violence that had been inflicted on him to be found, so the assault had obviously taken place elsewhere. A quick enquiry revealed that several key CCTV monitors had ‘malfunctioned’. Certain key officers had become very forgetful, either because they were involved or were unwilling to voice suspicions. The general amnesia seemed contagious. Nobody knew anything. It would be useless asking the prisoners. Nobody would dare implicate Anderson. No one was going to grass.