The Innocent Girl

by Alex Coombs

  Fuller had been found by one of the cleaners at six in the morning, still shackled to the whiteboard. Once the cleaner and his colleagues had finished staring, and, as it transpired, taking photos, they had to phone maintenance to find some bolt cutters to free him. Half an hour later the pictures, several of them, had been uploaded to the Internet. It had become the most talked about thing at the university, although so far Fuller had remained silent about what had happened and who had been involved.

  Enver had hoped, when he first heard about it, that maybe the incident was related to Fuller’s peculiar sex life, but deep down he had suspected Hanlon’s involvement and sure enough, here it was.

  ‘Fuller won’t complain,’ she said confidently.

  Since the day before, when she had obtained the information she needed from Arkady, Hanlon had been feeling much more like her old confident self. In his lessons – ironically he had given one called ‘Well-Being’ – Fuller had provided a quotation from his beloved Nietzsche on happiness that summed up her current feelings.

  A yes, a no, a straight line, a goal.

  After the incident on the island, she’d been feeling not exactly depressed, but flat. Life seemed to have lost its savour.

  She wondered if it could be some form of post-traumatic stress. If it was, she’d deal with it in her own way. She didn’t want to see a police shrink; she had a paranoid feeling that she’d be recommended as mentally unsuited to return to active duty.

  That would suit many of her colleagues.

  Mind you, she felt she had reason enough to feel down. Her best friend was in a coma, for which she blamed herself. It had been her unofficial investigation into a child serial killer that had got Mark shot in the head.

  Hanlon was perfectly aware that her unorthodox actions might have unexpected consequences, but it was a risk she was impelled to take. She was, at heart, a gambler and the highest stakes were when she was playing with her own life. When you won on a bet like that, the reward was tremendous. She was also prepared to pay the price for her actions herself. If it meant being sacked, so be it. If it meant being beaten up or injured, so be it. If it meant death, well, that would be that and obviously she’d be in no position to complain.

  It was also a step in her quest for vengeance to punish Dame Elizabeth’s killer. From a selfish point of view, she’d had the chance to learn about her father snatched away from her. Hope can be so cruel. Revenge can be so strong.

  In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man. Another quote from the German philosopher, courtesy of Fuller. She should have reminded him of it as she tied him to the boom of the overhead projector, given him something to ponder.

  Basically, she’d felt out of control of her own life, but the Arkady incident had made her feel a great deal better. Positive action at last.

  A Yes.

  She had managed to confirm that she was right to be suspicious of the Oxford incident, even if it did weaken the police case against Fuller.

  A No.

  ‘He won’t complain,’ she said again to a dubious Enver. ‘You say he won’t complain now,’ said Enver. ‘But when he’s

  standing in court facing a murder charge he might feel very different. Particularly, ma’am, when there’s a picture of him chained to that blackboard,’

  ‘Whiteboard,’ corrected Hanlon.

  ‘Chained to that whiteboard with his nose broken and his face covered in blood. Both of which you did.’

  ‘Don’t forget, he tried to assault me!’ protested Hanlon. ‘It’s your word against his,’ said Enver.

  ‘I’ve got it on film, thanks to him and his perverted camera and porn obsession,’ countered Hanlon. ‘And it’s his camera. He can hardly claim he was unaware his image was being recorded. I think it would be ruled in as admissible evidence.’ ‘What you did to him, it does look awfully like torture,

  ma’am,’ said Enver.

  Hanlon shrugged. ‘He started it,’ she said mutinously. Enver thought, I won’t even begin to answer that.

  ‘Well, ma’am, I’m sure his lawyer will say, why didn’t you arrest him?’

  ‘I don’t think he did those murders,’ said Hanlon, simply.

  Enver stared at her in amazement. ‘Why not? He even had a choke chain with him when he attacked you.’

  ‘Because he has an alibi for the time the Oxford killing was committed,’ she said confidently.

  Enver looked at her with surprise. ‘Who alibied him?’

  Hanlon went through her story of the day before with the two Russians. Enver stared at her aghast. The Fuller business was bad enough. This was off the scale.

  I’m glad I don’t drink, he thought. This would drive anyone down the pub.

  ‘So,’ Hanlon said smugly, ‘I have every reason to believe him, and before you say anything, I think it’s highly unlikely that Arkady Belanov is going to log a complaint to the Oxford police about an assault. It’s not really his style.’

  ‘No, no, it’s not, ma’am. But I’m sure that what is his style is to have some form of surveillance camera in the reception and bar area at least, and I’m also sure that there’ll be at least one of our colleagues in Oxford on the Belanov payroll. That’s going to be his style. Really it is. He’ll know exactly who you are by the end of the week, if not sooner.’

  He put his hand back into his thick hair for comfort. It was so typically Hanlon, blithely convinced of her own indestructibility. She’d been careful enough not to leave fingerprints and then almost certainly allowed herself to be filmed.

  She never thinks things through, not fully, he thought. It’s action, action, action, no planning.

  ‘You might as well have taken a photo and sent it to him on SnapChat or Instagram. Or a selfie. Please tell me you didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Enver,’ said Hanlon. ‘You’re such an old woman. He’ll put it down to business. One of those things. It’s an occupational hazard for a criminal.’

  ‘Ma’am, you threatened to blow his balls off,’ said Enver, shaking his head in disagreement. ‘He’s not going to forgive that in a hurry.’

  ‘Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’ Hanlon sounded flippant, but she had to admit that maybe Enver had a point. Someone from the brothel would have eventually found and released Arkady and Dimitri and while obviously no one would have dared take photos, as had happened with Fuller, it was the kind of story that would inevitably leak out. They’d been made a fool of by a woman and this would add insult to injury. A very big insult probably. They couldn’t afford not to do anything.

  ‘I don’t know what Murray is going to make of this, ma’am,’ said Enver.

  Now it was Hanlon’s turn to look alarmed.

  ‘Surely you’re not going to tell him about any of this?’ she said. He looked at her mournfully. He couldn’t play the them- and-us game any more. Enver shook his head.

  ‘We’ll have to tell him about Fuller, ma’am. Just in case. I think it would be better coming from you. You can claim you were upset. Get your side of the story in first.’

  ‘I was upset, Detective Inspector. First he tried to assault me, then he said he enjoys masturbating while thinking of me. Who wouldn’t be upset,’ said Hanlon. ‘And he questioned my sanity.’

  I wonder why he’d do that? thought Enver to himself sarcastically.

  ‘Exactly, ma’am. So upset, your judgement was clouded temporarily, but now you want to make sure everything is done by the book, now you’re less upset. Luckily you’ve got photographic evidence showing Fuller attacking you. It’s all very much out there in the public domain, isn’t it, as you said. I agree that the Belanov incident shouldn’t come out, but what are we going to do about the fact it points to Fuller’s innocence?’

  Hanlon felt that there had been some kind of seismic shift in their relationship. Although Enver was technically lower in rank, he seemed very much to be dictating the agenda. It was like talking to a junior version of Corrigan. She reluctantly conceded that
he did have a point.

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to find the real killer, won’t we?’

  A Straight Line.

  ‘We have no suspects. Nobody except Fuller,’ pointed out Enver. ‘And let’s not forget that the only person who really thinks he’s innocent is you, and that’s based on evidence that would be totally inadmissible in court.’

  Now it was Hanlon’s turn to get annoyed. ‘What I have managed to do is prove to my own satisfaction that Fuller, weirdo creep though he is, did not kill Jessica McIntyre and very probably, almost certainly, did not do the other murders. It may have been a bit irregular, but I think now you can put some pressure on Oxford to recheck their investigation.’

  A Goal.

  Enver shook his head dejectedly. It’s up to me then, is it? I wonder what I can say to DI Huss.

  ‘Well, I’ll see what can be done,’ he said.

  Hanlon stood up and walked away from Enver’s desk without a backward glance. It was a deliberate snub. Enver felt undervalued and upset as he watched her slim, elegant back leaving the office. He sighed and picked up the phone on his desk and dialled Summertown. Hopefully DI Huss might be able to help.

  43

  DI Huss was having troubles of her own. This problem, too, had a human face, DS Ian Joad.

  Every office, every place of work, has someone who is generally universally reviled, and Summertown nick had Joad. DS Joad, with nearly thirty years’ history of taking small bribes, sexual coercion of prostitutes, fiddling expenses, complaining and generally being a pain in the arse.

  The last few years he had added ‘stress’ to his repertoire of annoying habits and two or three times a year would come down with it. He would signal these bouts of stress in advance with dramatic sighing and waving of his arms, pantomime panic attacks. Then he’d be off for a month. It was, of course, illegal to enquire too much about Joad’s stress, because that in itself would be inherently stressful. No senior officer doubted Joad’s ability to keep just the right side of the law, and that included employ- ment legislation. No senior officer underestimated his cunning. One memorable time he tried to submit an expense claim for overtime at a court appearance he’d scheduled for himself, when he knew it was a rostered day off and he could claim a day’s extra pay for a five-minute showing. The ‘stress’ had got in the way of the actual court appearance, but he argued that had he not been stressed, he’d have received the money and so should be paid it.

  It was the day Templeman exploded. No one had seen anything like it before or since. The mild-mannered, church- attending Scot had screamed, ‘Is that meant to be some sort of fucking joke, Joad?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Not exactly.’

  Even Joad was alarmed. He’d pushed the DCI too far. ‘I’ve never seen a bigger disgrace than you in my life, Joad.

  Now get out of my sight.’

  Joad was bloodied but unbowed.

  Templeman had a new prayer he added to his daily list. ‘Dear God, in Thy infinite wisdom, may DI Joad apply for a transfer.’ Huss looked again at the papers in front of her. The first problem, or irregularity, had been the CSI team missing the killer’s escape route at the scene of crime in the college. That had been bad enough. Now there was this. Huss was looking at the Scene Attendance Log for the day of the second search of Fuller’s room at the Blenheim Hotel. She corroborated this with the crime scene log, in case there were any discrepancies. The senior officer rostered was DI Joad. DS Ed Worth was also listed as present at the scene, and a forensics man called

  Davies, who she didn’t know.

  Huss had seen Worth not ten minutes earlier in the canteen, which is where, stony-faced, she headed now.

  Worth was drinking coffee with a couple of guys from Traffic.

  ‘Hi, Melinda,’ said one of them. She smiled sweetly and said, ‘I need to have a word with Ed, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Sure, no problems.’ The pair from Traffic got up and gathered their things. Goodbyes were said.

  ‘So, Melinda,’ said Ed Worth, ‘how can I help?’

  Worth had one of those curiously old-fashioned faces, square-jawed with a broad, high forehead and matching haircut, that made him look as if he’d wandered out of a thirties-era film. He was a bright guy, though, and Melinda knew he detested Joad. Working for Joad meant doing two people’s jobs. Joad’s mastery of the system made getting him dismissed for incompetence very unlikely. The best they could do was cross their fingers and hope Joad committed an actual crime of a serious nature or was harvested by nature, as a result of his heavy drinking and smoking.

  ‘It’s the Fuller case,’ she said.

  ‘What about it?’ asked Worth warily. Huss’s attractive but no-nonsense face was wearing a frown. She could be quite frightening when she was angry. She was used to ordering stockmen who worked with cattle and farmworkers, tough, aggressive men, around. She was used to command.

  Whatever it is, thought Worth, I bet Joad’s got something to do with it.

  ‘When you returned to re-examine Fuller’s room, was the search scene still intact?’

  ‘Well, the tape was still there and the door showed no signs of being tampered with, so yes.’

  ‘And Joad didn’t interfere with anything?’

  ‘By that,’ said Worth, ‘I assume you’re meaning plant evi- dence. No. He couldn’t have. It was pretty well hidden. The slit in the mattress was maybe a centimetre and the fabric is striped, so it’s not like it was some gaping slash. There was a tacking stitch holding the edges together, we bagged the complimentary sewing repair kit to check against the thread in the stitch, and the forensics guy said it looked like being a match.’

  Relief ran through Huss’s body. When she’d heard that Joad had found them, she’d automatically assumed something dodgy was going on. Now it looked as if she was mistaken.

  Worth continued, ‘If it wasn’t for the DCI’s suspicion that Fuller was guilty, we would never have been back a second time and he’d have got away with it.’

  Huss nodded. She knew that Templeman thought the initial underwear and hair had been left by Fuller in order to confuse the investigation. The thinking was he’d come back for the real souvenir at a later date. It was unlikely that the mattress would have been changed by the time he wanted to use the room again.

  ‘And you checked that the room hadn’t been accessed?’ ‘I already told you. It definitely hadn’t.’

  ‘No. No, you didn’t,’ said Huss. ‘You said the door didn’t look tampered with.’ She emphasized the word look. ‘The hotel have got records of when rooms are accessed via the swipe-card key. Did you confirm it with them?’

  Worth looked uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t know that. Maybe Joad checked.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ said Huss. Her displeasure was plain to see. Worth winced. He liked Huss.

  The Blenheim Hotel was only a short distance from the police station and Huss walked there, oblivious of the tourists and students around her. She went up the imposing steps of the battleship-grey hotel, which always seemed grim and unwelcoming, scowling across the road at the Ashmolean Museum. The doorway to the hotel was in the form of an oddly pointed arch that looked as if it had come from a church.

  The duty manager who saw her was a charming, good- looking young Pole. He ushered her into his office, typed in Fuller’s room number and clicked on the access history to the room.

  He said, in his faultless, slightly accented English, ‘Well, to answer your question, no guests or cleaners have been in during time you specified.’

  Huss noticed he had the Eastern European habit of dropping the word ‘the’ when he spoke English.

  ‘Good,’ said Huss. That cleared that up. She guessed she could now relax. The manager held his hand up, palm outwards in a warning gesture.

  ‘I am not finished. There is manager’s card like this one,’ he took his wallet out and showed her a credit-card-sized piece of plastic, ‘that is slightly different.’

  ‘How so?’ Huss a
sked. Irek, the manager, smiled. ‘Cleaners’ keys will allow them access to rooms and storage

  areas for linen, cleaning products, stuff like that, but not for restricted areas, where food or alcohol is stored, valuable things. My card gets me in anywhere I want. More importantly, it doesn’t show up on the system.’

  ‘So, there’d be no record,’ said Huss.

  He nodded. ‘It’s a system flaw,’ said Irek. ‘One I pointed out, actually. We do have someone working on it now from head office. We’re part of chain, and I can get them to check. But it’ll take two working days.’

  ‘But it can be done,’ said Huss. ‘Oh yes, it can be done.’

  Huss gave him her business card. ‘Please make sure it is, Irek.’ ‘I absolutely will do that, DI Huss. I will call you in two days.’ She exited the Blenheim feeling slightly happier. With luck, she’d be able to prove incontrovertibly that the crime scene had been completely undisturbed. She couldn’t see any way a manager at the Blenheim could be bribed into allowing someone intent on planting evidence access to the room. Not that it was impossible to believe, but that it would be risky.

  But it was all too easy to believe that one of the cleaners on a minimum wage and a short-term contract, maybe someone not even in the country now, maybe with fake ID working illegally, could be persuaded to let someone into the room.

  ‘Here’s a hundred quid, just open this door and go away

  for five minutes.’

  Well, that hadn’t happened. Joad hadn’t misbehaved. It was all good.

  But Huss came from generations of farmers. Caution and pessimism ran through her like a strand of DNA double helix.

  Two days. She’d believe she was clear when it happened.

  44

  Arkady Belanov, as Enver had correctly predicted, was not in a forgiving mood. He was not a forgiving kind of man at the best of times. Revenge was very much on his mind, now that the immediate aftermath of Hanlon’s visit had been dealt with. He was particularly infuriated that Hanlon was a woman.