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.