The Innocent Girl

by Alex Coombs

  The legendary Hanlon seemed a bit of a let-down, if she were honest. She looked tired, careworn, and the remains of a black eye didn’t help. Her face was sour and unwelcoming. Quite frankly, thought Melinda, she seemed a bit of a bitch.

  Her colleague, though, was a different story. Melinda liked her men to be men. She had no time at all for the effete metro- sexual kind, or for the urban chav. Central Oxford was packed with the first type, scrawny men in skinny jeans and beards. The outskirts of Oxford – Cowley, Headington, Iffley and Botley – were packed with the other, tattooed youths in stonewashed jeans, gold chains, sovereign rings and hoodies.

  She found both equally unappealing.

  Her eyes drank in Enver’s powerful neck and shoulders, the large, strong hands. He wouldn’t have a man-bag, or wear moisturizer or use words like ‘spritz’, or try to get seconded to police the Glastonbury or Reading festivals so he could watch the bands.

  He wouldn’t use expressions involving the word ‘artisanal’. He wouldn’t eat or make sourdough, thank God. He certainly wasn’t Superman. You couldn’t imagine him bounding over a building, or wearing tights, but he absolutely looked more than capable of running through a wall, even if he couldn’t hurdle it.

  Melinda wished to God she could have him by her side in some of the grim places she had to work. Oxford is much more than the Dreaming Spires; it’s also the Blackbird Leys estate and rough pubs in Cowley. She found herself thinking dreamily, I bet he wouldn’t just be good in a fight.

  She liked his drooping moustache, the sleepy, slightly sexy bedroom eyes. She liked the ridge of his broken nose and the scar tissue by the side of his eyes. She swallowed hungrily.

  ‘Please follow me,’ she said and as she did so, she caught Hanlon looking at her with sardonic amusement and she knew, with a terrible flash of clarity, that the witchlike DCI had more or less read her mind. Hanlon watched, expressionless as an Easter Island statue, while a hot, crimson flush of embarrass- ment spread over DI Huss’s face from her neck up, like mercury rising in a thermometer.

  I hate you, you cow, thought Huss venomously. Coming up here from London, telling us what to do in Thames Valley CID where you obviously think we don’t know our arse from our elbow.

  ‘DCI Templeman started without you,’ she said as they walked down the blue-carpeted corridor. She smiled warmly at Enver.

  Huss led them through a door into a small room that adjoined the interview room. There was a one-way mirror separating the two rooms and through it they could see Fuller, accompanied by a lawyer – presumably the duty solicitor, thought Hanlon – opposite them an owl-faced, overweight policeman in his late fifties and a much younger colleague.

  ‘DCI Templeman,’ said Huss, pointing towards the older man. He had a monotonous, Scottish accent that betrayed no emotion as he spoke.

  ‘You lied to us about being in your hotel room at the time of the murder of your student, Jessica McIntyre. You are unable to account for the presence of gloves in your possession similar to those we believe the killer may have used. Is there anything else that may have slipped your memory, Dr Fuller?’

  Hanlon was used to seeing Fuller confident and in control of his class. Here he looked understandably nervous. Even his bouffant-style hair looked lank and lifeless, and when he bowed his head, Hanlon could see the pale scalp beneath. She could see deep lines on his face and suddenly realized that Fuller must have been wearing some form of foundation make-up in class. Here, in the police station, he seemed to have aged ten years.

  Fuller said something inaudible to his lawyer, who nodded. ‘No comment,’ said Fuller.

  Templeman nodded. He took his glasses off, cleaned then replaced them. He continued the investigation in his robot- like Scottish voice, leaving almost palpable pauses between sentences. You could almost count to three in the silent gap between the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. His enunciation was very precise. It was the kind of voice that after a while would drive you mad with its grinding monotony. ‘And you weren’t in the college when the crime was

  committed?’

  His lawyer intervened. ‘None of us, DCI Templeman, knows exactly when that was,’ he said. ‘How can my client possibly be expected to answer that?’

  ‘I’ll rephrase the question. When did you arrive at the college, Dr Fuller?’

  ‘About seven o’clock.’

  Templeman nodded. ‘Were you anywhere near the college prior to that?’

  Fuller shook his head. Templeman pointed to the small microphone between them. ‘Please answer audibly, Dr Fuller.’

  ‘No.’

  Templeman produced a black-and-white photo from the blue file in front of him. It was sealed in a transparent evidence bag. With maddening slowness, Templeman made a point of carefully locating the identifying tag.

  ‘We are now looking at exhibit 5 AC. This was taken by the college CCTV at four fifty p.m. It clearly shows you, Dr Fuller, outside the college gates. Would you care to elaborate?’

  ‘No comment,’ said Fuller.

  ‘It would help us to believe you, Dr Fuller, if you cared to share with us the reason for your presence. May I remind you why we are here. One of your students has been murdered. I would have thought you might want to cooperate with us.’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘But you were there, Dr Fuller, and a minute or so ago you said you weren’t. It’s difficult for us to work out what happened, when you keep changing your story.’

  ‘No comment.’

  The interview carried on. It was obvious that Fuller was evading the truth. The relentless, monotonous questioning continued, until Templeman produced another photo, this time of a pair of black bikini briefs and some brown hairs in a small plastic bag, the kind used for change in a bank.

  ‘We are now looking at exhibits 8 ED and 12 ED, a pair of ladies’ black bikini briefs, size 8, and a plastic bag, containing a swatch of brown body hair. And these were found in your hotel room, Dr Fuller. Could you explain?’

  Templeman didn’t alter the pitch of his voice, but the tension in the room increased. Fuller’s lawyer looked questioningly at him.

  In the adjoining room, Hanlon and Enver looked questioningly at DI Huss. ‘The McIntyre woman was missing her pants and a section of pubic hair had been removed.’ She smiled at Enver, blanking Hanlon out. ‘I’d say Dr Fuller has some explaining to do.’

  Hanlon was unimpressed. She herself was size eight. I knew McIntyre, she thought. I knew her shape. That woman was five eleven and no way was she a size eight; more like a twelve. When those come back from forensics it won’t be her DNA on them.

  Fuller leaned forward. He showed no sign of emotion other than profound weariness as he spoke into the microphone.

  ‘No comment,’ he said.

  * * *

  On the drive back from Oxford to London, Enver tried to engage Hanlon in conversation but she was in a foul mood.

  ‘Well, where did he get those pants then?’ said Enver. ‘Why won’t he say where he was that afternoon?’

  London’s not the only place with brothels, thought Hanlon. ‘I bet you fifty quid they’re not hers,’ was all she’d say. That and, ‘If you choose to prefer Miss Barnyard’s judgement over

  mine,’ spoken with real vitriol, ‘that’s your business.’

  Enver was hurt by Hanlon’s tone. He couldn’t for the life of him see what he’d done, or said, to warrant her evident rage. Or DI Huss come to that. Presumably she was Miss Barnyard.

  As they’d reached the car, Hanlon had flung her jacket into the back, crumpling up the innocent material with real venom. She’d rolled her sleeves up and was gripping the steering wheel so hard that her knuckles showed white through the skin. Even her hair seemed to bristle with anger, and as she drove she kept pushing it back and upwards with her left hand so it stood up in manic corkscrews. Her lips were compressed tight as the powerful car reached a hundred down the motorway. He didn’t question her competence as a driver; she w
as perfectly in control. The muscles stood out in her forearms. Enver watched her admiringly. She looked incredibly attractive when she was angry, he thought.

  Enver sighed at their speed. If Traffic stopped her, God knows what would happen. An automatic ban maybe. He badly wanted a Jelly Snake to soothe his nerves but feared her reaction.

  I must stop comfort eating, he thought.

  Before they’d got in the car, Hanlon had checked the messages on her phone. One, unknown caller, had read simply:

  They want to pull the plug on Whiteside. See Lansdale, union rep.

  19

  Dame Elizabeth sat in her office, thinking about Hanlon and thinking about Kant. She didn’t know it, but she had come to the same conclusion as Hanlon. Most of her life, she had been advocating, and believing in, ruthless honesty, and now she suspected that it had all been easy because she had never needed to make a difficult decision.

  Now that time had come, she’d flunked it.

  Nearly forty years ago – God, so long ago, she thought – she’d been a young postgraduate student doing research for her Ph.D. at Berlin’s Humboldt University. One of the lecturers, not that much older than herself, had been a man called Jonathan Hanlon. His field was the philosophy of art and aesthetics and he epitomized the title of his discipline. He was devastatingly attractive.

  That wasn’t hyperbole on her part. People stared at him surreptitiously in public. He had done modelling work, highly unusual in the seventies, but his beauty marked him out. There was something of his looks in Hanlon’s face – the cheekbones, the set of the jaw, the full mouth, above all the grey eyes. But where hers were cold and unforgiving, his had been warm, life-affirming.

  Most of all, Jann Hanlon had charm.

  He also had a beautiful wife who he said looked very much like Ophelia in Rossetti’s painting. That’s where Hanlon would have got her corkscrew curly hair from.

  Dame Elizabeth had flung herself at him. She hadn’t cared that he was married. She hadn’t cared about anything; she was like a woman possessed. She was burning with lust. Not that she’d needed to do much flinging; it would have been like charging at an open door. Jonathan, Jann as everyone called him, was an intense womanizer and Dame Elizabeth had been very attractive. And for six wonderful months, he was hers.

  It was the best time of her life. It was exhilarating. They went to wild parties with the Fluxus crowd (Jann was a friend of the famous artist Joseph Beuys), they held court at the Adlon Hotel, they went to openings at Berlin’s galleries, they did soft drugs with avant-garde Berlin musicians, they went to decadent thirties-style nightclubs where Jann was a big hit with the drag queens.

  This was the seventies before Berlin had become the fashionable place to be in Europe, and the shadow of post-1945 destruction still hung heavily. Jann introduced her to Grunkohl with smoked sausage, Eisbein and Konigsberger Klopse, beef dumplings with capers in cheap restaurants. They drank huge quantities of beer and wine.

  They hung out with Andy Warhol, when Jann had helped organize an exhibition of his work at the Kunsthalle, and they had endless sex in her cheap apartment, that smelled of hash, patchouli oil and incense, in Alexanderplatz, overlooking the Berlin Wall.

  The pace that he lived his life was feverish; there was never any time to reflect or consider. Any money he earned he would squander. Jann never saved or worried about the future. She remembered him saying, Zeit ist Geld und Geld ist gut. Time is money and money is good. An unfashionable view at the time.

  She remembered lying naked in bed with Jann in January while outside a bitterly cold wind blew in from the east and snow gently and silently fell, her bedroom warmed by an old thirties stove and his heat. He had a marvellous body; she guessed that was something else Hanlon had inherited from her father.

  She remembered a particularly groundbreaking Anselm Kiefer exhibition. Afterwards they’d walked hand in hand down the Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor. She had been so much in love with Jann at that moment in time it was almost ecstatically painful.

  She remembered shopping in the flea market at Rathaus Schöneburg, where Kennedy had made his Ich bin ein Berliner speech. And Jann had bought her the bracelet that now Hanlon was wearing.

  Then came the inevitable split. A huge row, Jann had a terrible temper. Unforgivable things were said on both sides, the typical, lacerating wounds of love gone wrong. Jann went back to Ophelia (Catherine, that was her name, Dame Elizabeth remembered now); angrily and dismissively, she returned the jewellery he’d given her and came back to England, back to Oxford. Jann was a distant memory, a footnote on one of the many pages in the book of her life.

  Then two years later, in the late seventies, 1979 it would have been, came a shocked phone call from Germany one night. Jann was dead, a stupid, perfectly avoidable, car crash. Not murdered by a jealous husband, or dead of a romantic disease. A car crash. A stupid, stupid car crash. Jann had always driven too fast, too aggressively. He drove like he lived, without evaluating risk properly, heedless of consequences. In some ways it was typically Jann, infuriating and thoughtless.

  It was such a waste, a dumb, pointless way to die.

  She wondered if DCI Hanlon had the same tendency to charge in without thinking.

  Dame Elizabeth was a good judge of character. She rather suspected she had.

  Until two days ago she had hardly thought of him in years. Earlier that day, she’d phoned the man who’d given her the news of the fatal car crash, another academic, now at Belfast University. He’d told her of Catherine’s unravelling after Jann’s death, the depression that settled over her like a thick, impenetrable fog. There had been one botched suicide attempt then, one evening, she strode out in front of an Inter City 125 train. No mistakes there. No cry for help. The real thing. The daughter, given up for adoption, had now resurfaced

  before her very eyes, in her university.

  Dame Elizabeth was technically unsure where she stood on the subject of fate, but what she did know was that she had a duty to tell Hanlon what she knew of her parents. Well, about her father anyway. What Hanlon chose to do with that information would be up to her, but Dame Elizabeth would have acted properly.

  With a sinking heart, she took Hanlon’s card from her purse and texted to ask her to meet her in the lecture hall where they had first met, at seven p.m on Sunday. The terse reply came almost immediately, a graceless yes.

  20

  Hanlon looked out of her window at the commuters hurrying eagerly away from the City and at the traders standing in noisy, expensively suited groups outside pubs. I need a distraction, she thought.

  Endless images of Whiteside in his hospital bed mixed with thoughts of Jessica McIntyre and Fuller, like some crazy snow- globe of memory. She remembered how McIntyre’s engagement ring, below her wedding band, had sparkled in the light when she had moved her left hand. No, no, it hadn’t sparkled, it had blazed, almost as if it had supernatural powers. Hanlon had never really thought about diamonds before, except in crime terms; now she did. It must have been unbelievably expensive, she thought.

  She wondered what Hannah had made of Jessica, with her Mulberry handbag and Manolo Blahniks, her leggy beauty, her poise and her wealth, all that Hannah was not or did not have. The two of them united in death. The two of them victims of the same killer.

  Oh, this is hopeless, she realized. She suddenly thought of Michaels. Perhaps he could shed some light on the relationship between Fuller and McIntyre. He had disliked McIntyre, she knew that, and he was no friend of Fuller’s. But once the chip on his shoulder had been taken into consideration, he could well provide some valuable insights.

  I wonder, mused Hanlon.

  Will be in Bloomsbury. Fancy a quick drink? she texted him.

  * * *

  White Horse, 5.30, half an hour, have to be back at work for 6 p.m., came the reply.

  Perfect, thought Hanlon, texting back a yes. Let’s see what the chef has to say.

  21

  Hanlon met
the union rep, Derek Lansdale, on Saturday morning. He made it clear that Hanlon had absolutely no say in Whiteside’s fate. He made it more than clear; he positively revelled in telling her.

  He reiterated that Hanlon had no claim on Whiteside; she wasn’t family or in a relationship with him. Unlike his parents, who were the ones who had decided that enough was enough, that it was time to let their son go. He even brought up the cost of keeping Whiteside alive. Besides, he said, maybe Whiteside would prefer to be dispatched cleanly, food and drink withheld until Nature had run her course, than languish in this hospitalized limbo.

  Lansdale strongly disliked Hanlon. He also was entirely happy to let his feelings show. For more or less the first time in his unionized police life, he wished that management would sack someone. Her. He didn’t like women in the police force in general and he disliked her in particular.

  He rationalized his thinking to read that she was a bad example to the police force and that if individual police made a habit of recklessly endangering their own lives, it would create a dangerous precedent. The obvious implication, although he didn’t actually say it, was that it was Hanlon’s fault Whiteside was where he was.

  It didn’t help her feelings that she often did blame herself for his condition. He was where he was because she had put him in the firing line. The fact that she hadn’t ordered him to go, having no authority at the time, but that he had volunteered because he liked and admired her, only made things worse.

  Hanlon felt her temper rising dangerously, but managed to control it. The arguments about quality of life and parental rights left her unmoved. The first was a temporary issue in Hanlon’s mind anyway. As for the second, Whiteside was not on speaking terms with his mother and father. Lansdale himself, Hanlon despised as a gutless desk-jockey.