by Alex Howard
Hanlon had no doubt either about who would win in a fight. If the worst came to the worst, she would have no hesitation whatsoever in using the knife. She knew how effective it could be. It had once been used on her. She still had a small, centimetre scar to the left of her navel where it had gone in as far as the handle. She’d kept the weapon as a souvenir.
He disappeared around the corner closely followed by Hanlon, who was just in time to see the doors of one of the three elevators close and the lift indicator, an art deco sunburst effect, light up. Going down.
There was a staircase to the right of the lifts and Hanlon ran down, keeping more or less the same speed as the lift. Occasionally she would leap down the bottom four steps, saving even more time.
But fast as she was, the lift was faster. Third, second, first, ground floors as the lift descended, then the basement.
The stairs dog-legged here, adding a couple of seconds’ time penalty to Hanlon’s pursuit. She burst into the basement corridor just in time to see two large double doors flapping shut a little further ahead. Hanlon ran up to them, brushing her hair back from her sweat-soaked forehead with her forearm. She approached the doors cautiously and peered through the glass panel.
The killer was somewhere inside.
She guessed she should really call for assistance, but her phone was in her bag five floors up. She toyed with the idea of smashing the fire alarm to summon help. Presumably the security guard was completely ignorant of what was going on. There were very few internal CCTV cameras in the university because of student objections over privacy and data protection issues.
But more to the point, she wanted the killer for herself. He hadn’t just killed Hannah Moore and Jessica McIntyre. He hadn’t just deprived Dame Elizabeth Saunders of her life; he’d deprived Hanlon of the only chance to get to know her father. She wanted answers, she wanted revenge, and she wanted these things free of witnesses and PACE regulations.
Hanlon knew she would be most vulnerable coming through the doors. In the past she’d been attacked while doing just that and she wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. She appreciated too that she was facing a very level-headed, very violent man.
She pushed one door open with her left arm, the right holding the knife. She moved fast and in a low crouch.
She was through, unscathed and standing in one of the university kitchens. She looked around her; there was no one in sight. This particular university kitchen was not just big, it was huge.
She knew from her conversations with Stephen Michaels, the chef, that there were quite a few kitchens dotted throughout the huge edifice that was the main university building. There was the open-plan one for the main refectory, where she’d eaten her lunch, and there were several satellite ones, like the one that serviced the executive dining room or other eating areas. There were also kitchens for functions either academic or civil (the university was rather cannily hiring itself out as a venue for conferences and weddings, trading on its art-deco good looks), and there was this one for the university restaurant.
It was the first time she’d been inside a large, commercial kitchen. She made a quick inventory: three six-burner gas stoves, a bank of sizeable ovens built into the wall, steel prep tables. Like all commercial kitchens it was brightly lit, and this one was high-ceilinged and airy. Its clinical lines, white tiling and steel tables reminded her of a morgue.
On one of the prep tables was a large machine for slicing meat. It was missing its guard. Its razor-sharp cutting edge gleamed in the overhead kitchen light. It was plugged into a waist-high socket on the wall. Some kitchen artist had decorated it with a sign featuring a vividly drawn skull and crossbones and the words Be careful. I’m dangerous! written on it. Hanlon eyed it sardonically. So am I, she thought.
She guessed that somewhere there would be a walk-in freezer and a walk-in fridge. And there would be a storeroom, a dry store, for the pasta, rice, oil and so on. Right now, she was looking for hiding places.
He had to be here somewhere. She was so tense, so much adrenaline fuelling her body, that the atmosphere was almost surreal, hyper-real. She could feel her heart thudding, sweat beading her lean body from the chase.
There were three pillars supporting the ceiling, rectangular tiled blocks, which ran down the length of the kitchen. They were not wide enough to hide behind, so she was able to discount those. She turned her attention elsewhere.
The ovens were big enough to climb inside, but glass-doored. She looked hard. He wasn’t there. There was a huge stockpot, the size of a dustbin, standing on its own gas ring on a reinforced plinth. She stood on tiptoe and looked inside. Nothing.
She moved slowly and silently on her stockinged feet, the tiles cold against her skin, her ears straining for any noise. All she could hear was the hum of the refrigerators.
She walked past a knife rack on the wall, its collection of chefs’ knives and a couple of Chinese cleavers making her own knife look stupidly inadequate. She picked up a rolling pin from under one of the prep tables. It was a cylinder of heavy plastic a metre long. It was hard and as heavy as a baseball bat. That felt better. She retracted the blade of her knife and held it loosely in her other hand. She walked down the centre of the long room, swinging the rolling pin menacingly.
Come out, come out, wherever you are! she said to herself.
In the centre of the kitchen the floor was wet and there were a couple of yellow, plastic A-board signs warning of slippery surfaces. There was a drain-like plughole recessed into the floor. Water had collected around it in a two metre-wide lake. Close to the puddle was a walk-in fridge.
From the outside it looked like a long refrigerated container from the back of an HGV. It more or less was that. From where she was standing, Hanlon could see down the rest of the kitchen to the fly chains hanging inside what would be the double doors, opened by a lever mechanism that led to the yard outside. Nobody was visible.
She walked further into the kitchen, all her acute senses straining for a hint of his presence. Hanlon had assumed from her vantage point that the fridge was fully recessed into the walls of the kitchen. It was, however, a free-standing unit and its rear was not flush with the wall at the end. Instead there was a half-metre gap between wall and fridge, where the kitchen staff normally left the several mops and brushes used for cleaning the floor. He wasn’t there.
Now she was running out of places to search. There was a door that led to a walk-in freezer; she checked it just in case: nothing. Just neat shelving containing tubs and boxes of frozen food. She checked the fire door at the end of the kitchen. The lever-action bar to open it was still secure; he couldn’t have got out that way.
She looked back down the kitchen. It had to be the fridge. She looked dubiously at its heavy door. Come into my parlour, said the spider to the fly, she thought.
Enver would have called for backup. Hanlon, supremely confident and spoiling for a fight, had absolutely no intention of doing so.
The rolling pin would be useless in a confined space. She put it down, clicked her knife open and pulled the door with her left hand. It swung outward into the kitchen, and she stepped inside and into the fridge.
From the corridor, through the perspex door panel, he had watched Hanlon as she moved slowly down the kitchen. Unknown to Hanlon and unnoticed by her in the excitement of the chase, there was a large cupboard used for storing the floor cleaner next to the kitchen entrance. Its door had been made to look like the panelling of the walls. He’d had time to push the heavy, hinged kitchen doors open, then release them so they’d still be in motion and conceal himself.
Distracting her by their motion, the tactic had worked. He had considered slipping away up the stairs and immediately rejected the possibility. He didn’t want to encounter the security guard and for all he knew, the police were on their way. No, the kitchen-door exit would be the best bet.
Hanlon had thought the danger to her would lie in entering the kitchen. The opposite was true.
No
w she was in the fridge, he immediately changed his plans. Gallagher was obviously highly competent. He didn’t want to kill her now; it didn’t fit in with his plans. He was also worried about leaving a DNA trace if he got scratched or cut in the inevitable struggle. Gallagher certainly wouldn’t go down without a fight, that was for sure. The chase down here had certainly proved that. The gleamingly clean surfaces of the kitchen with their shiny metal worktops were the ideal hunting grounds for a forensic team. The same could be said about the spotless corridor.
He wanted urgently to neutralize the woman and get out. He had toyed with the idea of running for the far door, but Gallagher would be on him, and by God, could she run. He also had no idea if the door was locked. It shouldn’t be. It was clearly marked as a fire exit, but you never could tell.
Back in the fridge, adrenaline was coursing around Hanlon’s body and her heart was pumping. It was a good feeling. It was what she had been missing for the last couple of months.
Hanlon loved action. It stripped away all worries, all concerns, all the futilities of daily life. It was the here and now, a glorious kind of freedom.
Lights came on inside as the door opened fully. She stood in the doorway, looking down the length of the fridge. Tubular, steel shelving ran down both sides to the end where a noisy compressor blew chilled air. It was incredibly neatly organized and the tubs of prepared food all bore colour-coded date and product labels. There was nowhere to conceal a person that she could see.
He opened the kitchen door and slipped inside. He saw the tips of her fingers on the door jamb. It was now or never. He ran for the open door of the fridge.
His original plan was to throw all his weight at the door and send it smashing into her outstretched fingers, breaking them all. He’d forgotten about the wet floor. As he reached the metal of the door, his foot slipped beneath him and he skidded, depriving himself of momentum. The noise from the compressor inside the fridge was extremely loud, but Hanlon must have been aware of something subliminally because she straightened her arm fractionally, so that when the heavy door slammed to, it struck her just above the wrist of her right hand.
The force of the blow fractured the bone with an immediate, agonizing pain. Hanlon snatched her arm back in an unthinking, automatic reaction and as soon as her hand was out of the way, there was a loud click as the fridge door slammed. Then she heard a dry scraping noise as he forced the steel of the cylindrical-shaped knife sharpener he’d picked up from the wall-mounted rack through the metal bracket designed to take a padlock, so the fridge and its contents could be secured. Hanlon was locked in.
The fridge’s internal temperature stabilized, the compressor cut out, and she could hear the rattle of the fly chain and the metal clang of the bar that operated the kitchen fire doors leading to the yard, as he let himself out.
She was alive, but trapped. She clutched her injured arm to her chest with her left hand and her eyes narrowed with the pain. But that was only the initial shock. Then a second wave of agony broke over her and she felt her knees buckle beneath her.
She nearly blacked out with the pain. A wave of nausea crashed over her. It was the kind of pain you felt deep down inside your gut, in the pit of your stomach. She sat down heavily on a sack of Yukon Gold potatoes, trying to control her breathing.
Blood was trickling through the fingers coiled around the wrist and she rested her forearm on her knees as she carefully let go and assessed the damage. The skin was already rising like bread dough as the swelling increased, and each beat of her heart amplified the pain as the blood was forced through the constricted vessels.
She suddenly shivered violently from the cold. Hanlon was wearing the grey silk dress and it had short sleeves. Fine for a hot, summer’s night; not so good as fridge wear.
She watched the goosebumps rising on her arms. She could see a temperature gauge on the wall opposite, telling her it was six degrees. It had been twenty-two Celsius outside when she’d parked her car.
She wondered how long it would take them to find her.
However soon it was, it was going to feel like a long, long time.
33
‘Four hours, I was in that fridge before they found me,’ fumed Hanlon to Enver. It was midnight and they were sitting in the Euston police station where Enver was based. He looked at her thoughtfully. It obviously wasn’t the fridge that was bothering her, he thought. If anyone could sit locked in a fridge with a fractured, bleeding wrist for hours without worrying about it, that person was Hanlon. And he thought her attitude was uncalled for. The response, once the body of Dame Elizabeth had been found by the security man doing his rounds, had been extremely efficient.
The police really could not have done a better job. The university building was vast, labyrinthine, and once the dog team had arrived, they’d led them straight to Hanlon, while their colleagues, who’d started at the top of the building, were still working their slow way down, floor by painstaking floor. More or less every square metre had to be checked out.
She’d had her arm X-rayed and strapped up at nearby University College Hospital. She’d given a statement and Enver had filled her in on what they had so far on the progress of the murder investigation. It was getting nowhere fast. Nothing on what few internal cameras there were. No trace evidence left by the killer.
Hanlon was more shaken than she cared to admit by Dame Elizabeth’s death. She’d always been profoundly affected not so much by the waste of a life inherent in murder, but by the incredible selfishness of the murderer. Dame Elizabeth had been a woman whose life had been a beacon to others. She had touched maybe thousands of people for the good. Hanlon didn’t doubt she had flaws, but her life had been extinguished by some creep with less worth in her mind than a cockroach.
Three women, possibly four, if the theory of Abigail Vickery’s death as a sex killing proved correct, were dead. To add insult to injury, she’d seen the killer playing with the body of Dame Elizabeth as if it were some sort of toy. And it was an insult. It was deliberately degrading to the corpse.
Then of course there was the personal aspect. Hanlon had expected the evening to end with a sense of finally knowing who she was and where she came from, and now this had been snatched away from her by the murderer. He’d killed Dame Elizabeth and he’d killed her dreams.
Hanlon wanted revenge.
She had been unable to identify anything about the man in the mask. No forensic trace had been found. Gloved, masked, careful as ever, it could have been anyone.
Fuller was another dead end. Murray had gone round to Fuller’s flat in person. Fuller had answered the door. He’d been drinking. Murray told Hanlon he’d looked considerably the worse for wear, unshaven and bellicose. He refused to allow them in; they had no warrant. He’d said, ‘Yeah, I’m really going to let you in so you can fit me up like you did in Oxford.’ Or words to that effect. Arrest me or go away was the gist of his message.
Familiarity with the police was obviously breeding contempt in Fuller’s mind.
As a defence it worked well. Murray had no grounds to arrest Fuller. Even if he had, he would have been unable to question Fuller until the man was legally sober enough, and by then his solicitor would have got him out. There was really very little he could do.
Murray was far from assertive as a policeman and he decided to let Fuller come to the station in the morning to give a statement, although he did put a plain-clothes in the street just in case Fuller emerged from his flat.
When this officer was relieved the following day, Murray gave instructions that Fuller be escorted round the back entrance of the station. There’d be quite a media scrum out there on Monday, he guessed.
Meanwhile the phone calls and emails to the station about Dame Elizabeth were accumulating rapidly. Her murder was very much in the public domain now, and was tweeted and retweeted as well as being hot news on other social network sites. She had touched thousands of lives and her students and legions of ex-students were media savvy. TV was n
ow getting involved.
Murray was the ideal choice to handle this kind of thing. Unassertive he may have been, but he was unflappable and possessed of a certainty that everything would be all right in the end. He gave a mini press conference, confirming no details other than that the police were investigating a suspicious death. The press knew Murray; they knew he could stonewall indefinitely.
Well, Hanlon thought, my involvement is practically at an end. Fuller’s philosophy course would be suspended indefinitely, so her undercover role was over. She had Murray’s blessing to tie up the loose ends regarding Fuller’s potential whereabouts in Oxford on the day of the murder, and that was more or less it. By Friday, it would all be history.
34
He opened another bottle of wine and reread Dame Elizabeth’s letter that he had snatched from her desk. It was very moving. How sad never to have known your parents. Even if you couldn’t stand them, it was important to know where you came from. And the father sounded so interesting too. But it was the mother that was vital; the mother was the key to everything. Nietzsche had understood this. He had written:
‘Everyone carries within him an image of woman that he gets from his mother; that determines whether he will honour women in general, or despise them, or be generally indifferent to them.’
He despised them.
He recognized now that DCI Hanlon was the woman he had previously known as Gallagher. He sipped his wine and thought of how he could best use this unexpected development to his advantage. Nothing sprang immediately to mind, but that didn’t matter. Time was not particularly pressing at the moment. It did amuse him, though, that he knew practically everything there was to know about her father, while she knew nothing. It was like a Norse myth. By killing Dame Elizabeth he had somehow gained control of her memories, like Odin, drinking some magical potion brewed by dwarves or giants, able almost to see the future.
