One of Enver’s worst fears as well was that Corrigan was right. That she was going to take the law into her own hands and he would end up arrested as an accomplice to a police execution. That Hanlon would blow Conquest’s head off in revenge for Whiteside. He certainly believed her capable of it. His own defence would look pathetic. I helped her because I believed in her. That was no defence at all.
Enver’s own emails to Corrigan had been masterpieces of selective information and factual avoidance. He had been greatly 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 judgments 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.