by Alex Coombs
‘Bye-bye, Mrs McIntyre,’ said Michaels. His voice emphasized the ‘Mrs’ in a pointed way. She glared at him venomously and strode off and out of the pub, her heels clicking on the tiled floor. Momentarily, Hanlon wondered if the two of them had some kind of history together. It was that kind of look, enraged familiarity with a hint of carnality. Stephen took a mouthful of Peroni beer and shook his head. ‘What a bitch.’ he said quietly for Hanlon’s ears only. ‘The trading floor! Will you listen to the woman.’ He mimicked her voice. ‘Rustle up some food.’
‘You two don’t much like each other then,’ said Hanlon. He took another mouthful of beer and shook his head.
‘No,’ said Michaels, ‘I think she’s a snob. Maybe it’s because she’s a teacher at some exclusive girls’ school and she looks down her nose at me. I do, let’s not forget, work in a kitchen. I’m one of the hoi polloi.’ He laughed easily but there was an edge to it. ‘Let’s put it this way, Hannah was not the only sex- obsessed one around here. Or who reputedly swings both ways.’ ‘Oh,’ said Hanlon. It was surprisingly easy to imagine Jessica
McIntyre as sexually rapacious.
They sat together in a companionable silence for a while and then Michaels asked her some easy-to-answer questions about her work, more out of politeness than interest. Hanlon asked him about his. He was in charge of supervising the banqueting and canteen chefs, and worked with the head chef on the fine- dining evenings. Hanlon wasn’t paying much attention either. Nothing about food, other than its dietary value, interested her. She particularly disliked cookery programmes and people who described themselves as ‘foodies’. She had her own descriptive words for them.
She let him go on, until finally she got the chance to ask, ‘What do you think of Fuller?’
‘Well,’ said Michaels, ‘he’s good at his job and that’s the main thing, but I think he’s a creep personally and if I was a woman I wouldn’t want to be alone in the same room as him.’ ‘Why’s that then?’ asked Hanlon, with feigned, lazy
curiosity.
Michaels said offhandedly, ‘Hannah mentioned once or twice that he belonged to some kind of weird bondage club that he went to on a Thursday evening. I don’t think it’s the kind of club that specializes in middle-age swingers. Hannah said it was hard-core. Jessica McIntyre may say it’s a load of old hooey but if you ask me, Fuller looks like just the sort of sad-sack pervert who’d be into that kind of thing. I mean, I’m all in favour of live and let live and God alone knows, I’ve met enough weirdos in kitchens in my time, but who cares what a chef gets up to, it’s not relevant, unless it becomes a hygiene issue, but I think there should be standards for teachers. It’s a position of responsibility and it’s open to abuse.’
He drained the bottle of Peroni and stood up.
‘Not that anyone gives a monkey’s what I think, particularly not Dame Elizabeth. She’s full of the rights of man, but try getting a pay rise for you and your staff and it’s a different standard altogether.’ He grinned and shook his head ruefully. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ll be off.’ He yawned. ‘I’ve got a canapé party for fifty members of the philosophy faculty to prepare for tomorrow, I’d better go.’
Hanlon watched him walk out of the pub with a long-legged easy grace. His jacket was closely tailored and Hanlon could see that he had an excellent figure. She wondered why he disliked Fuller quite so much. Maybe it was simply a reaction to Jessica’s endorsement of the man but she felt there was more to it than that. There was a real undercurrent of hostility in his voice.
She shook her head and gently ran a finger along the ridge of scar tissue under her thick hair. It was where she’d had the skin split open a few months ago when she’d been knocked unconscious. She found herself touching the healed wound whenever she was deep in thought. She had also managed to get her friend and partner Whiteside shot in the head and Enver Demirel nearly killed.
She smiled bitterly to herself. At least during this investigation things should be risk-free.
8
Dr Gideon Fuller shrugged up the collar of his raincoat and stepped quickly along Gower Street; it ran arrow straight from the Euston Road in the centre of London down to the British Museum. This was university land. More or less every building of the featureless, ugly street was connected with academia.
It was the land of Bloomsbury, spiritual and physical home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the artist, of Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, the art critic. Fuller always felt uplifted by their rarefied ghosts. Like them, he felt morally, intellectually and spiritually superior to the mere mortals who surrounded him.
It was also the street where Hannah Moore had lived, dreamed, loved and died. That was something Fuller managed to successfully ignore. Compassion was not part of his vocabulary.
Fuller didn’t believe in love.
He didn’t notice the slim figure of Hanlon following him, with her customary expertise. She had a natural ability to blend in with the background when it suited her. They had now reached the top end of Gower Street and she could see the British Museum, its great dome floodlit against the inhospitable dark of the wet night. Cars and black taxis swished by on the rain-drenched road. Fuller crossed the road into Store Street, heading for the major thoroughfare of the Tottenham Court Road, Hanlon a dark, insubstantial wraith behind him. Now she could see the lights of Centre Point, the landmark sixties’ office block, glistening through the rain.
She had nearly caught up with him and she was forced to conceal herself in the shadows of Heal’s Furniture Store. Then, once Fuller had crossed the road, she ran after him as he disappeared down one of the side streets into Fitzrovia.
If Bloomsbury was famous as a kind of dessicated, intellectual powerhouse, then Fitzrovia, a warren of narrow streets and restaurants and pubs, had been well known for hellraising, famous for drunken writers, drunken artists and generally dissolute behaviour. Like everywhere in London now, money was having a sterilizing effect and it was becoming sanitized, characterless.
On one level, Hanlon disapproved, but London was a city of permanent change, so it made little sense to complain. Nevertheless the steady erosion of the past saddened her. She didn’t have any relatives and she often wondered if her love of London history was an attempt to forge some kind of identity. I’ve created a family of historical ghosts, she thought, following Fuller at a ten-metre distance from the opposite pavement.
Fuller didn’t linger. He was moving south towards Oxford Street and Hanlon noticed that his stride had lengthened, his back straightened and he’d started playing with his hair again, like he did in class. He radiated excitement. She guessed that the end of their journey was near in the gathering darkness.
What Hanlon didn’t know was that while her thoughts were full of Fuller, by some strange parallel symmetry, his thoughts were full of Hanlon.
As he walked the slick, wet streets of central London, Fuller was involved in a sexual fantasy, in which he brutally ordered Hanlon to undergo various painful and humiliating acts. Fuller had a very vivid imagination. He was still smarting from his run-in with Hanlon over her name.
Bloody lesbian civil servant, he thought angrily, I’ll show you retribution. Women are all the same, they need disciplining. You need a good Teacher. That’s how he liked to think of himself. As a Teacher. The word ‘lecturer’ was arid, sterile. It gave an image of someone standing behind a lectern, reading from notes. He didn’t lecture; he taught. He taught people things in class and he liked to think he taught the women in his life to respect him. And if they didn’t, they needed correction. He liked the word ‘correction’. He corrected essays, he corrected mistakes, he corrected women when they needed it.
His thoughts moved away from the pornographic fantasies, to the practicality of how to get a good few photos of her on his phone. Once he’d done that, he’d be able to transfer them to his PC and Photoshop her head on to suitable-looking images from his S&M pornography collection. How best to take the p
hotos, though? He waited in the rain for a break in the traffic and for inspiration.
She was no idiot, that was for sure. He’d have to blindfold her, or make her wear a hood. He couldn’t take those hard, grey eyes looking at him; it would unman him.
Hanlon watched Fuller’s back as he crossed Oxford Street from Rathbone Place into the seedy underworld of Soho. This was London at its most bohemian and raffish. She followed Fuller across the small, green expanse of Soho Square and into Dean Street. Hanlon knew the area in incredible detail. She could almost have found her way around Soho blindfold. Despite the bad weather, Soho’s narrow streets were full, its pavements crowded and noisy with chatter, its myriad restaurants busy. The pubs they passed, the Pillars of Hercules, the Carlisle Arms, the Crown and Two Chairmen, the Dog and Duck, were busy and gaggles of hipsters with beards and tight trousers and women from the production and media companies of Soho, drawn here for an evening out, were hanging outside the bars smoking, and not just cigarettes. Several times she wrinkled her nose against the strong smell of skunk drifting through the wet night air; she passed laughing and chattering groups of businessmen and women staggering along the streets. Older media types – balding, fat, offsetting the advancing years with expensive glasses, too-tight red trousers emphasizing their paunches, and pointy shoes – drank too heavily and laughed too loud and too desperately.
Down the road was Old Compton Street, with its gay bars and discos, where she occasionally used to go with Mark. Bouncers were standing outside the gay clubs, the same shape and build, and with the same haircuts as a lot of their muscle- Mary clients. There was a transgender bar in Brewer Street where she used to drink occasionally and Madame JoJo’s, the famous drag bar.
Open doorways with handwritten signs promised massages upstairs with young models.
Strip clubs designed for the expense-accounted businessman, like Stringfellows or the Windmill.
Clip joints for the unwary Soho tourist.
Soho whispered sex the way the City whispered money. And it spoke in many languages and many accents, and right now it was speaking to Fuller.
Loud and clear.
Fuller disappeared into an alleyway just off Dean Street. It was journey’s end, Fuller’s destination. Hanlon knew the alley went nowhere. Once, years ago, as a rookie PC, she’d hidden in the alley waiting to nick street drug dealers. A tramp had pissed over her shoe. Very little had changed. Now she noted the three cameras pointing their electronic eyes to cover its entrance and immediately decided to return the following day. She did not want Fuller catching sight of her on a monitor inside the building.
She lingered just long enough to see which of the three doors facing on to the alley Fuller used, and then she disappeared into the neon-rich Soho night, with its explicit promise of sleaze, sex, drugs, alcohol and oblivion.
9
Like a raddled, old whore or an ageing rent boy, a brothel at ten o’clock in the morning is not at its best. Even Soho itself had felt tired and lethargic, with hardly anyone around. Bleary- eyed front-of-house staff stood outside pubs and restaurants, smoking and drinking coffee, delivery vans blocked streets and the only people looking as if they weren’t nursing hangovers were the cyclists.
Hanlon wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of urine in the alleyway where Fuller had disappeared the night before. It had taken her about five minutes of intermittent pounding on the heavy red-painted door to get anyone to open it.
A burly, unshaven man, smelling of stale sweat, cheap, penetrating cologne and cigarette smoke, dressed in a tracksuit, stood with his aggressive, stubbled face revealed in the gap between door and frame. He said something unintelligible in heavily accented English. Hanlon was in no mood to waste time. Warrant card in her right hand, she shouldered the door aside, its heavy base scraping the man’s hairy, naked feet. He protested angrily, rubbing his injured foot with an expression of outrage.
‘Police, you big Eastern European baby,’ Hanlon said to him. ‘I want to speak to the manager.’
She shook her head in mild disbelief at what she’d just said.
The manager. She sounded like she was in John Lewis. She looked around her.
She wasn’t in John Lewis.
She was standing in a small entrance hall with a front desk and a couple of armchairs against the wall opposite. There were three monitors on the wall showing the alleyway, the images clicking jerkily this way and that as the cameras changed angle, on the other side of the door.
Beyond the desk were a couple of ormolu chairs and a rug on the floor; in front of them a richly carpeted staircase twisted upwards. The colours of the furniture and wallpaper were dark, black, gold, crimson. Hanlon guessed that at night the place would look mysterious, darkly erotic. At this time of day, however, the cracks showed.
You could see where the paint was peeling, where the Persian rug was frayed, the odd cobweb in the cornice. The place reeked of stale smoke, alcohol, cheap perfume and sex. It smelled of what it was.
The man stood there still, rubbing his sore foot against his other leg in an aggrieved way.
‘Vot are you vanting?’ The accent was Eastern European, the tone unhelpful.
‘I want to speak to whoever’s in charge and I want to do it now, or I’ll nick you,’ said Hanlon, annoyed.
‘On vot charge!’ protested the man.
‘Obstructing a Police Officer in the Execution of His Duty,’ said Hanlon. She leaned over the desk. Amongst the paper- work, there was an ashtray with several cigarette ends and a half-smoked joint. ‘And knowingly permitting the consumption of drugs on licensed premises contrary to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.’ She straightened up. ‘That good enough for you?’
There was a heavy silence for a minute or so while the Slav pondered what to do about Hanlon. She started drumming her fingers on the top of the desk impatiently.
A door by the side of the stairs concealed by a mirror opened. ‘I’m in charge,’ said a woman quietly, standing framed in the now revealed doorway. Hanlon looked at her. She was an imposing sight. Tall and bulky, she was dressed in a pink, silk dressing gown. She was wearing fluffy slippers to match. Hanlon introduced herself and the big woman scrutinized her proffered ID carefully.
‘Do come through and join me, Officer,’ she said. Her accent was London, through and through, and her tone imperious.
She ushered Hanlon into the room behind her. Hanlon felt like Alice in Wonderland following this apparition into the concealed back room. Her host gestured in a make-yourself- comfortable kind of way and Hanlon sat down in a small, lace- draped armchair in an overly chintzy small room, looking at the ‘Manager and Proprietress, dearie,’ of the Krafft Club, Soho.
It was a strange room, more like the drawing room of an old lady than of a manageress in the vice trade.
Copies of Victorian sentimental pictures, like Bubbles and some depressed-looking Highland cattle On Rannoch Moor hung on the walls, and there were shelves of porcelain figures, shepherdesses, twenties-style flappers, that kind of kitsch. Once again, it struck Hanlon that it was the sort of room that should have belonged to an elderly spinster. Knowing it was on the premises of a sex business made it seem sinister. It was as if the rosebud and cupid statuary were masking some unpleasant secret.
At first glance, Hanlon had mistaken the madam for a drag queen. It was an easy mistake to make. The woman in front of her was not conventionally feminine. Iris Campion – ‘Like the flower, but not as pretty’ – was at least six foot tall and burly with it. She had massive, flabby arms, revealed by the short-sleeved dressing gown, like a shot-putter gone to seed. Hanlon, though, a good judge of physique, guessed there was still a great deal of strength under there. Her hair was close-cropped and dyed a henna-red; her face, mannish, good-naturedly brutal. Two deep scars, one on each cheek, were clearly visible. Hanlon guessed they’d been put there as a punishment, at some stage in her life.
Campion must have divined what Hanlon was thinking because she laughed. It wa
s a self-mocking laugh, designed to deflect any sympathy, but Hanlon could feel the sadness underlying it.
‘Looking at my beauty marks are you, DCI? I was sixteen when that was done. Bit of a career handicap for a young tart, eh? Damaged goods, you might say.’
Her voice was hard, and so were her brown eyes, but just momentarily, a flicker of pain ran across the woman’s face and Hanlon felt she had a sudden glimpse of a terrified sixteen- year-old, a child, being held down by at least one man, while another carefully sliced through the flesh on her cheeks. The scars were ruler-straight, sharp-edged. It showed practice.
He’d have used something like a Stanley knife or even an old- fashioned cut-throat razor, thought Hanlon. ‘Striping’, it was called. She remembered, years ago, being in a north London pub with an old-fashioned DCI – DCI Norman Tremayne, that was his name – who’d been her boss at the time. One of the regulars had been striped for trying to stop some kids vandalizing his car. Which one was it? Hanlon had asked in all innocence. The DCI had rolled his eyes and pointed at a bunch of guys standing by the bar, one of them with both cheeks covered with wadded surgical dressings taped into place.
‘Take a wild guess, Hanlon,’ he’d said wearily.
Then the madam’s professional face, a face as concealing as any mask, was clamped on again. Hanlon suddenly knew, with a flash of clarity, that she’d be furious if she thought Hanlon might pity her.
‘So you moved into bondage then,’ said Hanlon briskly. It made a great deal of sense, sex where your face could be covered, or where facial scarring itself would be arousing for some.
There’s a market for everything.
Iris nodded. ‘You’re not thick are you, dear,’ she said. She reached behind her to a small table and undid a bottle of Macallan whisky, adding a quadruple to the coffee in its china cup. Breakfast of champions, thought Hanlon.
‘There’s a market for everything,’ Iris said, as if reading her thoughts. It was the Scotch that had done for Tremayne, she thought. Towards the end, you could smell him coming from fifty metres away. She wondered if they’d ever known each other, they were of a similar generation.
