by Alex Howard
‘If you don’t help,’ said Hanlon, ‘I’ll find him anyway and I’ll tell him where he can find you.’ She spoke very quietly. Her face was half in shadow, her black eye partially obscured by some unruly curls of her thick dark hair. One grey eye gleamed menacingly at the Russian girl.
‘Tell her what she wants,’ said Campion warningly.
Tatiana looked at Hanlon with utter disgust. ‘You are not crazy, you are bitch.’
‘I’m waiting,’ said Hanlon. Tatiana sat upright in her chair, as if she were at school, and told Hanlon what she needed to know.
38
Fuller had managed his morning well. The police interview was farcical. He was getting used to what had once been a novel situation, police interrogation, with surprising ease. Then again, essentially a police interview was not too different from a viva or oral exam, which he’d had to do as part of his Ph.D. The subject matter was different, in this case the murder of Dame Elizabeth Saunders and his innocence thereof, but the principle was the same. He’d always done well in exams; this was no different. He walked it. They had nothing to tie him to Dame Elizabeth’s murder. He knew it and they knew it.
Suck on that, DCI Murray, he thought to himself.
The expected press scrum had failed to materialize. There had been two or three photographers outside the police station, but the magic needed to grab a paper’s imagination seemed to be missing.
Fuller thought wryly how upset Dame Elizabeth would have been. In many ways she had thought extraordinarily highly of herself. And the world she inhabited had reflected the image back to her.
This public indifference to her fate would have been most galling.
It was an official world Dame Elizabeth lived in and so she was forever in London’s heartland. The Houses of Parliament for committee work, the Mansion House, the London Assembly, the RA, Whitehall. It was against London’s finest and most imposing backdrops that Dame Elizabeth flourished. But it was a world that meant little to most people, one of cosy civil service patronage, agreeable long lunches and formal dinners, prestigious but undemanding meetings, albeit in the most spectacular of surroundings. The fact that most people didn’t care about these things and nor would they shed a tear that she would never now take her seat in the House of Lords, or become the head of the BBC Trust, would have upset her greatly.
Fuller looked as if he was from that world, but he wasn’t. He was very much an outsider and was made to feel one. The establishment’s rules were as codified as S&M and its motives every bit as self-gratifying, just as self-satisfying. Just as ridiculous in many ways.
Ironically, it was also a world of which the Home Office bitch Gallagher was part, although she was but an insignificant cog in the machine.
The woman preyed on his mind. There was some quality about Gallagher that attracted Fuller hugely. When he closed his eyes at night, he thought of her face. He felt somehow, no, he knew, that deep down, she was like him. He was certain of it. He hadn’t felt so sure of being with a kindred spirit since he had met Abigail Vickery.
If you’re gay, you’re supposed to have a gay radar. Sado-Masochism is similar. He felt he could tell fellow S&M spirits, and by that he meant people who didn’t simply play at suffering, but people who knew what suffering was. People who didn’t fear hell; people who’d experienced it. Gallagher had, somewhere, somehow, he knew it. She was damaged like he was.
Like calls to like.
Fuller was obsessed with her.
Well, tonight he would find out. Tonight he would tell her everything. It was time to gamble, as if he was in a casino, playing roulette. He would take the pile of chips he had amassed during his life and put them all on one number, then spin the wheel.
He typed the email address he had from the university for her into the address section of the Compose Mail box.
My office 8 p.m. tonight. We need to talk.
He pressed send.
He’d get there for seven. Rig his digital camera up to film them. That way he’d have some record of what happened, even if things didn’t go according to plan. If things did go the way he wanted, he would of course have more tangible souvenirs. He had absolutely no doubt that she would be there.
OK came the reply.
He nodded. It was all going to work out fine.
39
Hanlon looked thoughtfully at her phone. Fuller’s was an invitation she couldn’t turn down. It was possible that he might make a clean breast of the killings; it was equally possible that he might attack her. Hanlon felt more than equal to the challenge.
She dismissed Fuller from her mind and looked around the police station office. After the Whitesides and Campion, she had felt the need to see someone she trusted, someone normal, and was now sitting at Enver’s desk, waiting for him to come out of a meeting with Murray.
She took in the details of the crowded office with jealousy. Everyone, naturally, knew each other. There was the typically low-key noise of such a place, quiet conversation, phones ringing, the chatter of printers, laughter. It must have been at least a year since she’d been part of station life and although she’d never been exactly popular, she’d been accepted. It had enabled her to have her cake and eat it. She’d managed to be both solitary and part of the herd.
She shook her head angrily, annoyed with herself for feeling self-pity.
The staff around the office were virtually all staring surreptitiously at Hanlon, whose status was approaching legendary. The newly bandaged arm added to the mystique.
She had seen the murderer.
She had pursued the murderer.
She had been attacked by the murderer and locked in a fridge.
There was a general feeling of jealousy towards Enver from his male colleagues, for being so close to the most talked about woman in the Metropolitan Police.
Now Enver crossed the room and joined Hanlon at his desk. He thought she looked haggard, more tired than usual. Perhaps she over-exercises, he thought, all that running around can’t be good for you. His chair creaked ominously beneath him as he sat down.
‘How did it go with Fuller?’ she asked.
Enver rolled his eyes. ‘It was a disaster,’ he said. ‘His solicitor’s very good, for a start, but we had absolutely nothing on him.’
‘Alibi?’ asked Hanlon. Enver shook his head.
‘Between you and me, I have a feeling that Dr Fuller is a bit of a recluse,’ he said. ‘I spoke to a couple of colleagues of his and Fuller doesn’t attend functions or parties, not unless practically ordered to. He’s quite antisocial. He doesn’t even have Facebook. That’s pretty odd these days for a university lecturer.’ He looked directly at Hanlon. ‘What about last night, do you think it was him?’
‘I wish I knew,’ she said. ‘I keep changing my mind about him. He’s very contradictory.’ She paused, then continued. ‘When I first saw him, when Corrigan showed me his photo, I thought he was a kind of weak-looking individual, that he wouldn’t have the balls for this kind of thing. But I’m beginning to wonder. I think he’s very bright and he learns quickly. I’ve listened to the recording of that first interview, he was shitting himself. Now he’s self-possessed. I think I was wrong about him. He does have balls.’
Enver nodded. ‘Well, that pattern, I mean the ability to adapt to a learning curve, would fit the killings too. An initial fail-safe strangulation, the victim willingly subdued, and then the McIntyre woman, a ratcheting up of violence, and after that the Dame Elizabeth murder. It’s a clear progression in confidence and technique.’
‘I still find it hard’, said Hanlon, ‘to work out the forensic evidence that was found in the first murder, the hairs, and the underwear in the second, given the level of sophistication of the planning.’
Enver shrugged. ‘Maybe he wants to be caught. One thing we do know with certainty about Fuller is he likes Sado-Masochism. What could be more sadistic than murder? And what could be more masochistic than making sure you got punished for it? I read your report
on what he was doing to that professor, that’s pretty crazy stuff. Perhaps that’s the explanation for his carelessness, he’s just crazy.’
We need to talk. Hanlon thought about her email from Fuller. We need to talk. Maybe he does want to be caught, or maybe he’s crazy, or, possibly, he’s innocent.
She wondered whether or not to tell Enver about her meeting with Fuller and immediately decided against it. Enver would be horrified and would insist on coming with her.
She looked at Enver over the desk. He was like an old mother hen. She smiled, remembering his inept attempt to trail her once in a Corrigan-inspired desire to watch her back, to stop her doing anything stupid. He’d do the same again if he had any idea of what she was about to do.
If he told Murray, it would be officially cancelled. Either that, or turned into some form of police circus with surveillance, recording equipment and some form of SWAT team lurking in a broom cupboard.
‘Speaking of Dame Elizabeth,’ she said casually, ‘she knew my father and was going to give me something of his.’ Like details of his life, she thought grimly. ‘I don’t suppose crime scene found anything?’
Enver had, of course, no idea what she was talking about.
His own family story was textbook immigrant. Father arrives in the early seventies, gets job in a restaurant in Turkish North London, where language skills aren’t an issue, works his way up to head chef and opens a successful kebab house, marries local Tottenham girl; the business is transformed by Enver’s two brothers, Aunt Demet and some cousins into three upmarket Turkish restaurants. It was a life short on family drama, long on back-breaking work. Everyone was too busy for introspection.
If anything, Enver felt he knew rather more about the family history of the Demirel family than he wanted to, from his great-grandfather’s role at Gallipoli to his grandfather’s achievements in secondary education in Rize province, to his father’s early struggles in the restaurant trade.
‘No. Just those dates about your father,’ he said.
When he’d seen the short text, the name Hanlon, the words born and died, he had shivered inside. It didn’t make him think or wonder about her family history. It made him horribly aware of the fact that he might well be writing something similar for the woman in front of him. Her obituary. He’d have to order her tombstone too, if she wanted a church burial. DCI Hanlon born... died... He looked at the slim figure of Hanlon opposite, so tough and yet so fragile.
I worry about you, he wanted to say. Hanlon would go crazy with rage if he said that. She was always pushing her luck and Enver didn’t believe in good luck lasting forever. Things revert to an average mean, he thought. Every bit of good luck has a corresponding amount of bad.
‘And what about her computer?’ said Hanlon. ‘Any leads there?’ Again, what she really wanted to know was if they’d found a folder marked with her name, rather than the unlikely existence of a folder marked Killer: Definitive Proof. Dame Elizabeth was a woman with forty years’ experience of note-taking and the written word. Writing was as natural to her as breathing. Hanlon found it unthinkable that she would have called her over to what was essentially a meeting without some sort of agenda. There would have been at least a list of what she’d got to say.
The eye-catching announcement of her father’s death on the interactive whiteboard had been a demonstration of how the professor had planned to treat their meeting, as much a lecture as a confidential talk.
Her mind went back to the moment when she stood at the top of the stairs looking down at Dame Elizabeth, her face a ruined sheet of blood, the masked figure standing executioner-style behind her. She forced herself to think, to remember. He had scooped up a small red bag, and something else, something beige – an envelope?
It wasn’t the kind of thing she could swear to in a court of law. She couldn’t deny the possibility that her mind was imagining it, but it’s what she believed she had seen, and it fitted her theory perfectly. A letter, to her. Perhaps even now, Fuller was reading it, if it had been him there the night before.
Was that why he wanted to meet with her now? She had to know.
Again, Enver shook his head. ‘Sergeant Gustafson has made a start on her PC, but it’s full of philosophy notes, ideas for lectures, old emails and memos. Quite frankly, I think the case will be closed one way or another by the time he gets through it. I guess it will all end up with her executors.’
‘Oh well,’ said Hanlon. So it’s down to you, Fuller, she thought. Down to you to tell me about Dame Elizabeth. Down to you to hand me over what was in that envelope. Down to you to give me back my past.
40
It was when Fuller first grabbed hold of her that Hanlon decided to headbutt him.
As he reached his hands towards her, seizing the lapels of her jacket, it was a decision that made itself. The cast on her damaged right wrist had effectively immobilized it. She couldn’t use that hand. She knew that if she hit him, not only would the pain be excruciating, but she wouldn’t be able to get enough power behind the punch.
Fuller’s handsome face was covered in a faint sheen of sweat and she could smell the sweet, sickly residue of alcohol on his breath, as he brought his face closer and closer to hers.
They had been standing at the front of the classroom, the plastic chairs for sixteen students laid out in a classic semi-circle, facing the interactive whiteboard that dominated the front of the room. It was mounted on its high-tech metal frame and had a metre-long projector boom jutting out from the top at right angles. It looked a bit like a street lamp welded on to the top of the whiteboard.
Hanlon had known from the moment she received Fuller’s cryptic email, telling her it was urgent they meet up, that it would probably end in trouble, but she couldn’t afford not to. She also felt more than able to rise to whatever threat Fuller posed. Hanlon’s self-confidence was reckless. Enver would have pointed out that only a few hours ago her attitude had got her attacked and locked in a fridge. Hanlon wouldn’t have listened.
If Fuller was the man who had killed Dame Elizabeth, then he had already run away from her once and hadn’t had the guts to tackle her in the kitchen. If he wasn’t the killer, then he was just an ineffectual university lecturer with a sad sex life. But she had to meet him. She had to know. There was too much to risk losing had she refused. She hadn’t, however, been expecting this.
Fuller’s office and the adjoining classroom were on the fourth floor, above what had been Dame Elizabeth’s lecture hall. Memories of the previous night flashed through her mind.
A deserted public building at night is an eerie place. The space, designed for large numbers of people, is unsettling when you are the only one in it. Noises are magnified; shadows proliferate. As she walked down the long, wide, empty corridors, lit by recessed bronze art-deco light fittings in the shape of bas-reliefs, reminiscent of Roman torches, she half expected a masked figure, like she had seen the previous night, to leap out at her.
She was fully prepared for that. It was a possibility she actively welcomed.
Hanlon was wearing a loose jacket and her strapped right hand was inside the diagonal slash of the pocket holding her knife. To bring it out would take under a second. In some ways Hanlon was itching for a violent confrontation. She had held herself in check for the union rep and for Whiteside’s parents; she’d had dreams and hopes created for her only to see them destroyed in front of her; she’d been attacked and imprisoned. It was a sizeable debit column and only a great deal of hurt to a guilty party would wipe it out.
She was tired of self-restraint. She wanted action.
As she approached Fuller’s office, she could see the door open, a light inside. She wondered again about the man. It wasn’t that he was a mass of contradictions; it was as if Fuller was hiding some vital part of his personality, putting on an act. Everyone has a public face and she wondered what the real face of Fuller would look like under the public mask. She found it hard to believe that violence lay under his skin; God know
s she’d seen enough of that over the years, it was commonplace to her. Fuller managed to project something more like a terrible despair. There was a little-boy-lost quality about the man that she felt, but couldn’t understand.
Hanlon wasn’t quite sure how she knew this. She had never regarded herself as empathetic, or gifted with the ability to see people’s souls; generally speaking she couldn’t care less, but something about Fuller called to her.
It was undeniable but true. There was something compelling about the man.
Fuller was sitting on the table in front of the whiteboard in chinos, patterned shirt and polished brogues. He was looking very Sunday supplement trendy lecturer. He was Boden man, staring at the floor, lost in thought. He raised his head, to see her framed in the doorway.
‘Do come in,’ he said. He sounded a little strange, his speech slightly strangulated. It was only as Hanlon approached him and smelled the alcohol that she realized Fuller was very drunk.
‘You said you wanted to see?’ she said. The hand in her pocket toyed idly with her knife. She was expecting Fuller to produce the letter that she was sure Dame Elizabeth would have written to her.
‘That’s right.’
She walked up to him, mentally downgrading Fuller’s threat level. He stood up and swayed gently, his eyes unfocused. He didn’t look as if he’d be able to stand unaided, much less attack anyone. That’s where she was wrong.
As she came within reach, moving with surprising speed and grace, almost like a dancer, propelling himself forward, Fuller grabbed hold of her jacket. Using the momentum of attack, he swung her round.
‘Come here,’ said Fuller thickly, his voice low and vibrant. He could smell her hair, feel her surprisingly solid body in his hands. She looked insubstantial, but it was only now that he realized how strong she probably was.
‘I want you,’ he whispered, his mouth against her face.
