Cold Revenge (2015)

by Alex Howard

  Dame Elizabeth was a proselytizer. She was a passionate believer in the value of philosophy and wanted to share its virtues with an almost messianic zeal. She was also aware of falling student numbers, probably because of the high cost of tuition fees and a perception that philosophy would have little relevance to finding postgrad. employment. Hence her creation of a reasonably priced year-long course that came with an impressive accreditation.

  She had needed a good lecturer, and not only that, one who physically looked good. Ideally she’d have had someone like the French intellectual Bernard Henri Levy, the one with the tousled locks and unbuttoned shirt, but younger. She needed a poster-boy for the department. Fuller, young, gifted, charismatic, had seemed the answer to a prayer.

  Academically he was superb. A starred first in philosophy from Magdalen College, Oxford, a Ph.D. supervised by one of Cambridge University’s leading philosophers, two books and articles in Mind, the prestigious academic journal, as well as popular journalism and guest spots on Start the Week and The Moral Maze. Later, of course, she’d been reminded of the old cliché, be careful what you wish for.

  Everyone has their flip side. Fuller was no exception. She knew of his background troubles; Fuller had brought the Abigail Vickery allegation up himself. She liked that. He was either very honest or savvy enough to know that it was the kind of story she would have eventually heard about. Either suited Dame Elizabeth just fine.

  Besides, she was firmly of the opinion that to produce a pearl, you need grit. Show me someone who has never made a mistake and I’ll show you someone who has never tried to do anything difficult or important was a credo she believed in.

  One of his colleagues had warned her about rumours of his drinking, but Dame Elizabeth was broad-minded and Fuller was relatively cheap to hire. And until this Hannah Moore business, he’d performed extremely well.

  So when he was accused of the murder, Dame Elizabeth pulled strings and arranged for what was, in effect, an internal investigation to take place. She was sure that it would exonerate him.

  Hanlon, after attending the first of his lecture/tutorials, could see why he had been hired. Despite what she knew about Fuller, Hanlon was impressed with his teaching abilities in the few lectures she had attended. He was genuinely talented.

  He managed to be informative and witty without being patronizing. His lessons were that rare combination of being fun and extremely educational. Her classmates, veterans of years of study in one form or another, were uniformly supportive of Fuller. When word had leaked out about his arrest following the Moore murder, more or less everyone took his side.

  ‘That girl was such a bitch.’ This comment was from Jessica McIntyre, the alpha-female student. Tall, blonde, wealthy and opinionated, she was the class leader. Most of the other students deferred to her.

  It was a predominately female class; there were only three men amongst the students and it was more or less the class opinion.

  Hanlon fulfilled another stereotype, the class loner. The group had accepted Hanlon as the kind of oddity that you get in every classroom, yet cool by virtue of not wanting to belong, not caring if she were liked or not.

  Hanlon had stamped her authority on the class from the moment she opened her mouth. Fuller had asked her name.

  ‘My name is Gallagher,’ she had said.

  ‘I know your surname,’ said Fuller mildly, ‘Would you like to tell us your first name?’

  ‘No,’ said Hanlon simply. She spoke quietly but there was no mistaking the forceful resolve. The class started to pay close attention now. It was a direct challenge to Fuller’s authority, to his control of the class, and everyone knew it. A ripple of interest ran through the students. Hanlon stared intimidatingly at Fuller, her swollen black eye adding a threatening note.

  ‘Would you care to share your reasons with us?’ said Fuller. He smoothed his hair with the palm of his hand as he spoke, as if to reassure himself it was still there. It was a gesture he often made when he was nervous. Teachers hate having their authority tested. If you start to lose that, everything can unravel. The question was an attempt to wrest his hold over the students back from Hanlon. The strain between the two of them was palpable, like the electrical charge in the air before a thunderstorm.

  ‘My name was given to me by a man,’ said Hanlon, keeping to the feminist script provided by Corrigan. ‘It’s a phallocentric gender construct. I chose to reject it.’

  Relief washed through Fuller. Thank God, he thought. He could debate gender politics till the cows came home. He had done so on numerous occasions. He could do it on autopilot. It was safe, familiar ground. Familiar comforting names like Luce Irigaray, Bordo and Lloyd swirled round his head. This was much more like it. Not like naked disobedience from students. He’d dreaded being told to mind his own business. A dozen years in the lecture hall and tutorial room had left him with a keen sense of which battles to fight and which to bow gracefully out of. He just knew that Hanlon would never back down. Fuller was a good judge of character and he could tell that she was a fighter.

  The Hannah Moore business had shaken him and he was not as self-confident as usual. He felt twitchy and paranoid, that people were discussing him behind his back. These weren’t unusual feelings but they were magnified greatly as a result of the police questioning. The last thing he wanted was a trouble-making student. Just one could ruin the comfortable dynamic of his class.

  ‘Fine,’ he said with one of his winning smiles. ‘We’ll be covering gender isssues later in the term. Now,’ he clicked a key on his laptop and a selection of quotations appeared on the interactive whiteboard screen, ‘could you work with your neighbour and match these quotes on the nature of reality with,’ another keyboard click, ‘these names of philosophers. Five minutes. Go!’

  Hanlon too was pleased with her answer, but it established her credentials, gave her a reputation as one not to be messed around with and neatly avoided her having to give her name, something she never did in her own life. She happily settled down with her neighbour, a woman from legal, ensuring compliance in the energy sector, to discuss their questions.

  Across the classroom a shrewd pair of hard, brown eyes studied Hanlon appraisingly. Stephen Michaels, a man used to judging quality points, in his work, liked very much what he saw.

  At the end of the first lesson some of the class had elected to go for drinks in a pub locally. Hanlon was invited, her colleagues in slight awe of the mysterious stranger and wanting to get to know her better, but she declined.

  Socializing could wait. She was keen to observe Fuller.

  Hanlon was a great believer in following people, something she was very good at, and she intended to follow Fuller. You could learn a huge amount about their character from the way a person behaved when they thought they were unobserved.

  She had watched as Fuller had dropped his briefcase off in his small room that adjoined the classroom. The two were connected by a door that she noticed he didn’t bother locking, then he headed off towards the lifts. It was a significant indicator that he might have told Enver the truth. Anyone could have had access to Fuller’s office. Anyone could have searched his bag and desk.

  Hanlon had run down the stairs ahead of the lift, which was showing its age in lack of speed, and waited outside the huge art deco building that was Queen’s College, designed by Charles Holden in the thirties and looking like a gigantic, elongated Mayan pyramid thrusting into the sky, a backdrop straight from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Inside it still had many of its vintage fittings; it was like being inside a thirties’ ocean liner. It was a hymn to plywood, concrete and tubular steel.

  Students of all nationalities, shapes and sizes walked past her, and for a moment she wondered if she’d managed to miss him. Then she saw his Byronic profile appear. More than a few students greeted him as he strolled across the square towards the main road. He was obviously well known.

  She followed Fuller as he turned into Gower Street and walked northwards, head bowe
d as if tired and depressed, towards King’s Cross.

  Despite its refurbishment, King’s Cross, to Hanlon’s jaded police eyes, meant cheap prostitutes, very much down on whatever little luck they had, dodgy drug deals and alcohol-fuelled violence in the grotty pubs that surrounded the station. The kind of pubs that had low-level blue lighting in the toilets, so junkies would find it harder to jack up in the cubicles. Great strides had been made to clean the place up and the restored St Pancras Hotel and British Library lent a welcome touch of class to the area, but it was still King’s Cross. You might situate Google’s new headquarters here, but it was still King’s Cross. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.

  It’s an ancient part of London. It had been inhabited from time immemorial; there had even been an ancient river crossing of the Fleet River here. The river is now bricked over and culverted, but its filthy waters still flow below the shiny new buildings and Hanlon, who knew her subterranean London, thought it wouldn’t surprise her at all if the whole area wasn’t slightly cursed.

  As below, so above.

  Hanlon hoped that cheap sex was the reason for him being there, but Fuller had ignored the whores and the few sex stores that managed to linger despite the steep rental rises in the area, and then disappeared into the Uunderground, followed by Hanlon.

  He caught the Piccadilly Line, to where he lived in Finsbury Park. She’d cycled through it just a few days before.

  A blameless academic returning home at the end of a worthy day.

  She followed him from the station, back to his nondescript flat, and watched from across the road as he let himself in. The journey had taken about thirty minutes, door to door. It would take about the same time from Hannah’s bedsit, easily done. An hour out of his day would be all the time that Fuller would need to kill and get safely back home.

  After the lesson the following Tuesday, Hanlon went for a drink with several of her classmates to a nearby pub. They’d by now become characters as well as known faces to her. The legal woman she sat next to was there, as was alpha woman, Jessica. They were all women apart from one man. He rarely spoke in class and she couldn’t remember his name, apart from the fact it was unremarkable. Someone asked her what she did and Hanlon replied, ‘I’m a consultant on EU Proposed Directive on Gender Equality Rights (491).’ She was wearing her Home Office security pass on its lanyard as if it were a talisman to ward off awkward questions. It worked. As Corrigan had predicted, everyone’s eyes glazed over.

  The hot topic was still the murder of Hannah Moore, which was being picked over with the kind of relish only reserved for the death of someone whom nobody had really liked. The general consensus was that the police were baffled, Fuller was innocent, if foolish, and that Hannah probably had herself to blame. Her blog was at last being read and discussed, but not in a way she would have wanted.

  Hanlon noticed that the only person not to join in the general character assassination was also the only man in the group. He was tall, slim, dark and balding, with a closely trimmed beard. She guessed he might have Spanish blood in him because his eyes were a Mediterranean brown, as was his skin. He was ascetic-looking, with slightly saturnine features. He was dressed for the office in a suit and tie, but Hanlon’s eyes, sharp as ever, were drawn to his hands. They were slim and strong-looking, the wrists below the cuffs of his striped shirt, powerful. His fingernails were trimmed very short, and on his hands there were several deep, ugly cuts; on the inside of his left wrist, a painful-looking red weal where the new skin had regrown.

  She also noticed his body, which had a swimmer’s build – tall, rangy, with muscular shoulders. He’s very powerfully built, she thought.

  He caught her eye looking at him and he smiled warmly. ‘I’m Stephen Michaels. I work at Queen’s.’

  His voice was deep and he had a northern accent she couldn’t place – accents were not something she was good at – a cross she thought between Liverpool and Manchester.

  ‘Are you a lecturer?’ she asked. He certainly didn’t look like one. He shook his head and opened his hands in a rueful, revealing kind of gesture. ‘I’m one of the chefs here. This is my chance to get some culture.’

  He smiled again. ‘I get staff discount,’ he said.

  He had startlingly attractive eyes, assured and watchful. Hanlon found herself warming to him. He had that kind of hard, self-deprecating self-confidence that she found very attractive.

  She spent her life dealing with people, both police and criminals, who seemed to feel the need to act tough. She was so tired of people’s lies and that included the image that people liked to project. Sometimes she felt like screaming, just stop it will you. Stop the bullshit. It was refreshingly unusual to be with someone free of macho bluster. Hanlon hated it. If you can walk the walk, you simply don’t need to talk the talk.

  She looked more closely at him. Like calls to like, type to type. Hanlon had issues herself and she sensed that Michaels really wasn’t the kind of man you wanted to argue with.

  When she was a child she could remember there’d been a craze for T-shirts with slogans. ‘Just Do It,’ had been one. Just do it. It was a sentiment she believed in absolutely. She felt instinctively that Michaels was in the same camp.

  Don’t talk about it, just do it. And if you can’t do it, as her old boss DCI Tremayne had succinctly put it, ‘Give up and get a fucking paper round.’

  Jessica McIntyre was still on the subject of Hannah Moore.

  ‘And my God, that girl was a liar, and a fantasist too. You can’t believe a word she ever said. All this nonsense on her blog about Gideon being some sort of bondage addict.’ She shook her head disapprovingly. ‘They say you can’t libel the dead, they should have added something about the dead not being allowed to libel the living. She was sex-obsessed. She’d jump on anything that moved.’

  ‘I liked her,’ said Stephen Michaels.

  Jessica gave him a baleful look, her eyes a glacial blue under the waterfall of platinum blonde hair. She was extremely attractive in a highly manicured, cared-for way. Michaels returned her look evenly and carried on.

  ‘She had a good heart,’ Michaels continued, unmoved by Jessica McIntyre’s disapproval. ‘Did you know she used to volunteer for one day a week at Battersea Dogs Home?’

  ‘Well, she’d have felt quite at home there then,’ said Jessica unpleasantly. She stood up to leave, swinging her expensive handbag, its LV initials shining in the light of the pub, on to her cashmere-adorned shoulder with easy grace.

  Hanlon looked at her in a calculating way. Two lovers, Hannah had mentioned, one a woman and married. There was a wedding band on Jessica’s finger. She was about forty, Hanlon guessed, but lithe and athletic, the kind of girl who’d have been games captain and probably head of house while Hannah languished on the subs bench or was sent for a cross-country run with the other no-hopers. She had the air of being very much the kind of woman who was used to getting her own way, to being in control.

  She could well imagine Jessica tying someone up; she was naturally dominant.

  ‘Well, I’m off. My husband’ll be back from the trading floor soon, I’d better go and rustle him up some food. See you all next week.’ She tossed her head and her long, blonde hair swished imperiously.

  ‘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 becaus
e 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.’