The Innocent Girl

by Alex Coombs

  Tuesday nights in this particular meeting room were pre- booked all term by the al-Nahda (in Arabic it meant ‘renaissance’) society. They were a moderate group of Muslim intellectual students, who debated the perennial issues gripping the Arab world. Israel, American foreign policy, democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood, the usual. More importantly for Fuller, he knew their routine. He had been a guest speaker at their meetings a couple of times, and a lot of them, particularly the overseas Middle Eastern students, smoked. The emergency door was propped open to allow exit to the outside for this purpose.

  Prayer time for early evening tonight was six thirty p.m. Fuller lingered in the shadows outside, until he heard the opening of the Shihaada in the Adhan, the call to prayer:

  ‘Allah u Akbar.’

  He knew this meant God is Greatest. More importantly, he also knew that it would be repeated three times and that everyone inside would be facing the Qibla, the direction of the Ka’aba in Mecca in Saudi Arabia. Fortunately for Fuller, this was opposite the door he was about to use. Everybody’s back, without exception, would be turned.

  He slipped through the door unseen. He was in the corridor outside the meeting room and he could see the backs of heads of about forty Islamic students engrossed in their devotions. Nobody looked round; nobody saw him.

  Unseen and unnoticed, he slipped into the main university building.

  In the capacious pockets of his jacket he had a choke chain and mask.

  He was ready for her this time. This time he knew she wouldn’t say no.

  54

  Enver sat in the kitchen with Alison Vickery. Her cooking was every bit as good to taste as to smell. A while ago he had started to feel major guilt pangs about eating so much and mentioned this to Alison. She was one of those people who he met occasionally that he just clicked with. Like the missing piece of a particularly irregular cut in a jigsaw. She rolled her eyes impatiently.

  ‘Shut up, Enver,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with a healthy appetite.’

  Enver had taken his jacket off and Alison Vickery could see his powerful ridged pectoral and shoulder muscles; she could guess at the iron-hard sinew beneath the skin.

  ‘You’ve got a lovely body,’ she said to him. She meant it. ‘I’m overweight.’ said Enver gloomily. ‘I eat too much.’

  Sex was off the agenda, but Alison was one of those women that he felt an affinity with. Usually he was very shy with women, but not with her.

  ‘Well, you’re not size zero, that’s for sure. But if girls want to date Mo Farrah, they’ll hang around more athletics meetings,’ said Alison. ‘You look pretty good to me. Now, have you got any more questions?’

  He looked round the sizeable kitchen for inspiration. He didn’t want this moment to end. He felt at ease in his skin.

  The room was functional. She hadn’t tried to turn it into a farmhouse kitchen, or a Sunday-supplement version of one. Enver knew that Huss’s mother’s kitchen, which was a real farmhouse kitchen, was full of dog baskets, bits of machinery like distributor caps, Defra correspondence and tools. It drove Huss mad.

  Only Alison’s utility room, seen through an open door, showed any signs of non-culinary activity. On top of the cupboards above a double sink, and extending to some ancillary shelving, were various industry awards that had been presented to her over the years, old framed photos, cups for netball and ice skating that she’d won, and even a stylized John Travolta in his trademark pose out of Saturday Night Fever. Things she didn’t want to throw away, but equally didn’t want to display. Enver was terrible at dancing. He thought he probably looked like a tormented bear. On the dance floor he felt like everyone

  was pointing at him and sniggering.

  ‘So, you dance as well,’ he said aimlessly, looking at the dance trophy.

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Alison. ‘That’s not mine, that belongs to my ex. He loves dancing. It’s an obsession.’

  55

  Hanlon ordered a bitter lemon at the pub near the British Museum while she waited for Michaels. She felt oddly conspicuous in her new dress and matching shoes with a slight heel. Generally speaking, she dressed so as not to be noticed, or if she was competing in a triathlon, the only thing that distinguished her from the others was usually a race number fastened to her top. Invisibility was the intended objective.

  She suddenly thought, what if Michaels thinks I’ve made the effort for him?

  So tonight was unusual. She had become aware of several men looking surreptitiously at her, when they thought she wasn’t going to notice. Hanlon scowled irritably. She was beginning to feel overdressed. Had she made a mistake in wearing this to the ‘Women in Policing’ do? She was not a fine judge of dress code. She suddenly had a morbid fear of being laughed at. She recognized this to be stupid but there was nothing she could do about it. Well, it was far too late to go home and change.

  To take her mind off this train of unproductive thought, she recalled her afternoon with the Whitesides. It was a minor victory, but it had left a taste in her mouth as sour as the slice of lemon in her drink.

  The last time she had been to see the Whitesides it had been as a supplicant, a beggar. This time it was like threatening a criminal. No, it wasn’t like that, it was that. Whiteside senior had been manifestly guilty of defrauding the Department of Work and Pensions. If he was well enough to carry his heavy crate of religious pamphlets into Lambeth market and stand for a couple of hours, haranguing the locals on the need for repentance and to call on the Lord to forgive their sins, then he was well enough to work. Well enough to realize he was lying, when he said he was suffering from crippling back pain that kept him housebound.

  A five-thousand-pound fine, plus paying back what you owe, said Hanlon, that’s what is coming to you. And the possibility of three months in prison. Then the public disgrace. Then the interview I will personally give to the local press, about how a policeman decorated for bravery, a role model, cut down in the line of duty was betrayed, Judas-like, by his parents. It might even go national, she said.

  Mrs Whiteside had silently cried, the tears tracking down her face, while Hanlon twisted the knife with sadistic relish. Her husband had glared, with true biblical hatred, at Hanlon.

  What do you want? he’d asked.

  Six months, Hanlon said. I want six months of his life and then, win or lose, I’ll leave you alone. You can go ahead and get your court order to kill your son and I won’t try to stop you. Whitehead senior nodded. What else could he do. She saw herself out, resisting the temptation to turn round and kick

  the door viciously.

  To a certain extent the current crisis had forced her to act. It was actually a good thing, she thought. Up until now she had buried her head in the sand; now was the time to look reality in the face. She realized she had been hoping that, somehow, the situation might just resolve itself. That Whiteside would just sit up in bed one morning.

  She recognized that there were three options. Either she got some form of treatment organized, or he recovered by some unforeseeable miracle of the sort believed in by his parents, or she let him go. It would have to be the first. She had read about Persistent Vegetative States and how people who had been written off as brain dead had made recoveries. She owed it to Whiteside. There was a hospital in New England, near Boston, that was regarded as the best in the world. All she needed was a couple of million dollars. Perhaps I should kidnap Arkady Belanov, she thought. I bet he’s got it. Her phone beeped and brought her back to the here and now.

  She checked her phone and saw that she had a message from Michaels. For a moment she thought he was going to cancel their drink, leaving her with the problem of killing time alone before her dinner. But it was to tell her he was running late at work and to meet him, if possible, in the main downstairs kitchen. She frowned uncomfortably. The downstairs kitchen was the one where she had endured the cold, painful and uncomfortable few hours locked in the freezer. He wouldn’t know that, of course, how could he, but it seemed a
strange place to choose

  to meet.

  She texted Yes, and almost immediately he was back in touch with instructions as to how to access the kitchen via the fire doors at the rear. Seemingly there’d been a clampdown on access to the university after the murder and she would have trouble with security.

  Now Hanlon was feeling puzzled. Michaels was not the kind of man who would put up with this kind of thing. The kitchens were his kingdom and he would decide who came and went on official business. Oh well, she thought, I’ll ask him about it later.

  She texted, See you in ten minutes.

  She switched her phone off, dropped it in her bag and left the pub. She felt a dozen pairs of eyes glued to her backside as she strode through the door. She was relieved to be out of there. She walked past the British Museum with her loose-limbed athletic stride. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window opposite. I look good, she thought, with surprise. She started

  to look forward to her evening out.

  I’ll have fun, she thought. The police dinner will be fine. It’s just a question of having the right mental attitude and being in superb shape, like for a race meeting.

  Perhaps I ought to strap a number to my chest.

  For the first time in weeks, she smiled a genuine smile.

  56

  ‘So,’ said Enver, ‘your ex is a champion dancer? What, like Strictly?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Alison. ‘That’s not his kind of thing at all. He was a good northern soul dancer. That and disco dancing. It’s how we met, in a disco. He’s a bloody good dancer. I’m not bad but he’s practically professional level. Personally, I much prefer northern soul to all that Hi-NRG stuff. He won loads of trophies from the weekenders at Camber Sands. He’d practise for hours, it was all really tightly choreographed.’

  She folded her arms in front of her and looked up at the ceiling. ‘But of course, disco, particularly Donna Summer, Sylvester, all the gay stuff – odd when he was so heterosexual – was really his thing. Stephen Michaels, the disco king.’

  ‘Your ex-husband is called Stephen Michaels?’ said Enver stupidly.

  ‘Yes. Vickery’s my maiden name. Abigail preferred it to Michaels so that’s what she was called.’

  Perhaps it’s all just simply coincidence, thought Enver, feeling stunned. But of course, he knew it couldn’t be.

  ‘What does he do?’ he asked casually.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, stifling a yawn, ‘he’s a chef, a very good one. Very sought after. Went down south when he was a kid. Did his apprenticeship at the Dorchester, three years there, worked up here in a couple of Michelin-starred and rossetted places, but he’s down south again now, I think. The last I heard of him, he was somewhere in Oxford, some flagship hotel, the Blenheim, is it? That and doing agency for the colleges. He told me he’d worked in all the big ones.’

  Enver thought of the other things she’d said about him. He had a truly bad temper.

  He was always getting into fights. It’s a miracle he never killed anyone.

  But it looked as if he had. It really did. As he sat opposite Alison, things slotted comfortably into place.

  Enver knew a great deal about working in kitchens. His family background involved catering. He’d become a boxer, and when that career finished thanks to injury, a policeman, to avoid it.

  He knew the terrible, endless, grinding hours, the sixty-hour weeks, the shouting, the stress, the continual air of hysterical violence, hanging as heavy as the heat, in the kitchen. He’d grown up with it. He knew the implacable attention to detail, the concentration needed.

  He thought of what Hanlon had told him of Michaels’ sense of injustice, which he could see now flourishing in this febrile background. The chef brooding at the seduction and killing of his daughter by some poncey intellectual that the law refused to punish. The feeling that they were all in it together, Fuller, McIntyre, Dame Elizabeth. One law for them; one law for the likes of him.

  He thought of the care with which Hannah Moore had been killed. He thought of her affair with the married man. That would technically fit Michaels, who was separated but not divorced.

  Then the Donna Summer as he killed her. The Disco King.

  The choreography, again the attention to detail.

  The knowledge of the layout of St Wulfstan’s. He’d worked in all the big colleges.

  That would almost certainly have included St Wulfstan’s. A chef like Michaels, a senior agency chef, would have wanted to know where a dumb waiter in his kitchen led to. And after the murder, in his chef’s whites, mingling with the other chefs, he’d have been part and parcel of the kitchen furniture. Who’s the bloke with the beard? Oh, some guy from the agency. In the rabbit warren of the college kitchen, he’d have been unnoticed, unchallenged.

  He’d worked in the Blenheim too. The kitchen staff in a hotel always did their level best to sleep with as many waitresses and cleaners as possible. They were usually eager to reciprocate. Michaels, good-looking, charismatic, important, a god in the kitchen, could easily have persuaded some employee to help him, or even better, would have known where keys were kept and how to get them.

  As a former senior chef, and a respected one, all the staff would have treated him like an honoured guest. He could bet that when Michaels popped into the Blenheim all his drinks were free, meals wildly undercharged, rooms upgraded or mysteriously never showing up on the bill. To have slipped into Fuller’s room would have been simplicity itself.

  Enver thought, maybe he’s insane. Some imbalance that had surfaced in a different form in his daughter. Hanlon had mentioned in her report about the murder of Dame Elizabeth the way he was interacting with her corpse, almost dancing with it, the choreography again. The disco music as he had killed Hannah. Well, mental health wasn’t his field. That would be for others to decide.

  Maybe he just liked killing people.

  Then the choice of the kitchen to hide in when being pursued by Hanlon, an instinctive choice for Michaels, safe, familiar ground.

  And finally, of course, a motive. Michaels bent on revenge on the man who he saw as having killed his daughter. Death would have been too good for him. He could have killed Fuller but instead presumably wanted him broken – everything he had worked for, the career, the reputation, the livelihood, all taken away.

  Fuller would find prison hellish and he would be very much at the bottom of the food chain.

  Well, that would certainly be enough to bring Michaels in for questioning. Mentally, he congratulated Hanlon.

  It hadn’t been Fuller. She’d been proven right again.

  57

  Hanlon walked around the electric barrier leading to the steep ramp that dropped down to the subterranean concrete yard at the back of the huge basement kitchen. Outside the kitchen doors, she looked upwards. It was like being at the bottom of a wide, square well, and she could see the evening sky above her, framed by safety railings.

  The fire doors were propped open and the silver links of the metal fly screen hung down, obscuring her view of the kitchen. Hanlon parted the chain with her left hand, careful not to snag the bandaged cast on her right wrist or her handbag in the metal curtain, and walked through into the kitchen.

  The steel links jangled quietly and percussively as they parted in front of her.

  She shook her head to free her hair, which had caught in a couple of the tangled links of the chain. She stood stock still, unable to move, momentarily transfixed by the sight of Fuller in front of her.

  When you are faced with a sight you simply do not expect, you don’t feel alarm or shock: it’s a what-on-earth-is-happening sensation. The brain is trying to assimilate what the eyes are telling it.

  Hanlon was having one of those moments.

  Fuller was the last person she had been expecting to see that evening. After dominating her professional life for nearly a month, for once, she simply hadn’t thought about him. But here he was. She stood in her short, shimmery dress, holding her handbag, dressed for
her formal evening out, and stared. She had even put make-up on, dragged a comb through her protesting thick hair and sprayed a discreet amount of perfume over herself. And here was Fuller.

  The philosophy lecturer was standing looking towards the door and Hanlon, who was framed by the silvery backdrop of the fly screen, as if she had just walked on stage. His skinny jeans and Calvin Klein underpants were down around his ankles. His sweatshirt and T-shirt lay in a crumpled heap by his feet.

  His eyes stared imploringly at Hanlon.

  58

  DI Melinda Huss was annoyed with herself for about five minutes after losing Joad, but then decided not to waste emotional energy. In Huss’s view there was never any point in crying over spilled milk. If something went wrong, you fixed it. Tractors, machinery, fences, bent coppers, all one and the same. As soon as she saw his thin, high shoulders and greased-back hair disappear into the department store, she realized she had lost him. She turned round and pedalled back to the station.

  She chained her bike up and, helmet in hand, went in search of Worth. Fortunately, he was still at work. He looked up admiringly from his desk at the sweat-stained form of Huss. Worth found DI Huss extremely attractive. There was a lot of Huss and here she was, kind of gift-wrapped in her damp, Lycra finery.

  ‘Melinda, can I help you?’ he said eagerly.

  ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘I want Joad’s username and password for his PC. Do you know them?’

  Worth grinned. ‘Do you really think that Joad would be thick enough to write important stuff like that down on a Post-it note and stick it underneath a drawer?’

  Her face fell and his smile broadened. ‘Absolutely he is.’

  He pushed his chair backwards on its castors to his colleague’s desk, opened a drawer, felt underneath and removed the yellow piece of paper. Huss copied down the information.