by Alex Howard
‘Call me Starshi,’ he said.
‘Yes, Starshi,’ she said meekly.
Starshi meant old one. It was used to refer to the leader in a cell block. Another thing she’d learned from Tatiana.
Wordlessly, Dimitri handed her a length of rope and resumed his position, leaning against the wall.
‘Are you staying?’ asked Hanlon. She really could have done without him there, she thought. Dimitri nodded.
‘After Arkady Mikhailovich finishes with you, is my turn,’ he said, matter-of-factly. It was the prison way, where they’d both grown up. In a corrective labour institution, an ITU, in Perm region where in winter the temperature averages minus twenty degrees Celsius. In your dreams, thought Hanlon grimly.
She folded the rope in half and trussed Arkady up, more or less in the same way as a butcher would a chicken. The rope wound around his hands in front of him, running back down his body, around his ankles, back again on itself and around his armpits, secured with a tight reef knot on his broad, fleshy back. The Russian was kneeling on the couch, supported by his elbows and forehead, his huge backside, dimpled with cellulite, pointing to the ceiling. She made sure that the rope passed around the couch so Arkady was tied to it. He was going nowhere.
The rope bit cruelly into Arkady’s ample flesh until it was practically invisible in places, buried in the flab. He flexed his body against it and groaned against its constrictive pleasure. He was enormously well-endowed and the pleasure he was finding in this rope-play was extremely obvious.
While Hanlon was doing this she had been surreptitiously scanning Arkady’s office for something to use against Dimitri.
The bodyguard was probably not much bigger than opponents who she had demolished in a boxing ring, but this was no boxing ring. There were no rules and no referee. No one to say ‘Break!’ All Dimitri would need to do to defeat her, would be to fall on top of her. She’d be pinned to the ground under that bulk and he could beat her to unconsciousness or worse. Similarly, if he got those massive arms of his round her and squeezed hard, he could break her bones.
Ideally, she could have done with a baseball bat and Dimitri looking the other way. What she did see was something nearly as good.
Propped against Arkady’s desk was a double-barrelled shotgun. On top of the desk, next to the monitor, was a box of cartridges.
Hanlon had no intention of shooting anyone. She didn’t even know if the gun was loaded, but she did know that a shotgun usually weighs four to five kilos and she knew what it felt like when someone hit you with one like a club. She unconsciously rubbed her left arm; it’s how that had been broken, by a rifle butt.
She walked up to Dimitri. His hair was closely cropped and stood up like coarse bristles.
‘Can I have some more rope, please?’ she asked, with a salacious smile.
He nodded, went over to the desk, opened a drawer and handed her another couple of metres of rope. It looked like the kind you could get in specialist sports shops for climbing. Hanlon took it with a murmured thanks and turned away, breaking eye contact with Dimitri in case he got an inkling of what was coming.
There are two types of headbutt. Using your forehead, as she had on Fuller, and the side-head strike. She had moved her head to one side, so Dimitri was looking at the dark, tight, curly hair on the side of her head. That is the beauty of a side headbutt; there’s no eye contact, so the recipient has no idea it’s coming. Now she whipped her head round with a mighty flick of her neck, so the top of her forehead smashed into his face.
Hanlon was lucky with the blow. Her tough skull made contact with Dimitri’s eye socket, fracturing the bone beneath the skin. It hurt the Russian like hell.
‘Suka’, bitch, he hissed.
Hanlon had hoped that Dimitri would instinctively put his hands up to his face, allowing her a split second in which to grab the shotgun by the end of its metal barrel and swing it into his head. No point even trying it against his body.
This didn’t happen. The big man gasped with pain, but he’d been hurt too many times before, in fights, to allow his opponent to dictate terms. Unlike Fuller, he was no pushover.
He swore viciously in Russian and lashed out at Hanlon with his left arm. She ducked and his meaty fist swung over her head, grazing her hair. Then it was her turn to gasp with pain, as his strong fingers closed over her bandaged right wrist.
He yanked her hard towards him. She knew that in a nano-second, his left hand would clamp on to her, probably in her hair, and she’d be his, unable to escape.
The power in the Russian’s huge arms was immense.
Hanlon threw herself forward to break free. Dimitri grinned, as he tugged her backwards as hard as he could. He was expecting her to resist, but Hanlon half-spun herself back into his body, using the power in her legs. They were now both facing the same way, like in some extreme tango dance, and she slammed her left elbow as hard as she could into his solar plexus.
It drove the wind out of the Russian and he gasped for breath. He literally couldn’t breathe. He tried to suck in a lungful of air, but nothing happened. He was on the edge of blacking out. Now Dimitri let go of Hanlon’s wrist, as he attempted to steady himself with his hand on the edge of the desk. He was momentarily bent double, trying desperately to get some oxygen into his body and also trying to disregard the terrible pain.
Hanlon snatched up the shotgun and brought the butt smashing down and round in an arc on the side of Dimitri’s jawline just where it met his chin. It drove the Russian’s head sideways with massive force. The impact to his brain, as it was driven against the wall of his skull, must have been terrific.
Dimitri collapsed on to the floor, temporarily unconscious. He was still stirring, though, and Hanlon straddled him and tied him up with the climbing rope. She did this with extreme speed. Even now his eyes were fluttering and any second consciousness might return.
This time there was no finesse, no artistry. She lashed his wrists together and brought the rope down to secure his ankles. He was now completely immobilized. In one of the desk drawers she found a reel of Sellotape and this she used to wind round and round Dimitri’s mouth so the bottom half of his head looked like a badly wrapped parcel.
Only then did Hanlon allow herself a thirty-second rest, while she assessed the situation.
Arkady was immobile. Lashed as he was to the couch with Hanlon’s beautifully executed rope-work, this was hardly surprising. She crouched over Dimitri to take a better look. He was very pale but she pressed her index and middle finger down by the hugely defined muscle in his neck and windpipe, and felt a good strong pulse from the carotid artery. In all honesty, Hanlon didn’t particularly care one way or another about Dimitri’s fate. Arkady was not the kind of man who would dream of involving the police. Neither would he have any particularly strong feelings regarding Dimitri. Still, on balance, Hanlon was pleased the man was still alive.
The door to the study had been bolted shut earlier by Dimitri and there was a large sash window which overlooked a well-tended lawn. That’s my exit, she thought.
‘Who sent you?’ Arkady had up till now been completely silent. Now, naked and bound, utterly helpless, he exuded a kind of impressive aura of calm. He had spent a lot of time in prison and in the army. He’d endured a lot of pain. He had been officially classed as an Osobo opasnyi retsidivist. Nobody had ever broken his spirit. Hanlon looked at him.
‘It wasn’t Paul Molloy,’ he said speculatively. ‘None of his people are your quality.’
Hanlon ignored him. She continued her investigation of the office. She picked up the shotgun and broke it open. The circular brass ends of two cartridges stared back at her. The blow to Dimitri could well have caused the hammer to fall, even though, as she noticed, the safety catch was on.
She took the two cartridges out and examined them. SG shot. A typical twelve-bore cartridge, say a Number 4, 3.1 mm, will have about thirty to forty tiny spherical metal balls inside. That’s the kind of shot you’d use for
a bird. SG shot is much larger. You’d get eight or nine pieces of lead in there. You could kill a deer with SG shot.
Hanlon automatically looked up at the ceiling. If the gun had gone off, there would be a huge great hole up into the bedroom above.
She opened the drawer where she had found the tape she’d used on Dimitri, and took out a Swiss army penknife she’d seen in there. She also took out a cigarette lighter that caught her attention.
She opened the main blade of the penknife and ran it down the outer layer of adhesive bandage strapping her right wrist. She peeled this back and took out the carefully folded piece of paper that had been hidden underneath. She unfolded it and held it in front of Arkady.
‘This is Dr Gideon Fuller,’ she said.
‘I do not know this man.’ Arkady’s voice was perfectly level.
Hanlon sighed. ‘This is Dr Gideon Fuller,’ she repeated. ‘I just need to know if he was here last week.’
There was silence from the Russian. Hanlon sat down in the chair by the desk. Arkady’s eyes stared at her balefully. He watched as, with the penknife blade, she carefully cut open the crimped end of the shotgun cartridge and shook the shot out on to the polished wooden surface of the desk.
‘What on earth could you be wanting to shoot with this, Mr Belanov?’ she asked, holding up a piece of shot. ‘Planning a trip to Magdalen College deer park, are you? Or had you planned on something more two-footed?’
She did the same with the other cartridge.
She now had eighteen pieces of shot in front of her.
Next, she removed the wadding out of the cartridges and dropped it neatly in the bin.
She surveyed her handiwork critically. ‘If anyone else had said that they couldn’t remember a customer, well, I’d probably believe them. But you’re famous for three things, aren’t you. Your retentive memory, Mr Belanov, the fact that you like to hurt women, and your enormous penis. The last one’s true, obviously. I can well believe the second, and that gives me hope for the first.’
Hanlon took Arkady’s iPhone from its docking station and prised it apart with the blade of her knife. She dropped the back cover in the bin and placed the other half in front of her. She now had what was in effect a shallow plastic tray filled with circuitry.
‘I have nothing to say. I do not know this doctor,’ spat Arkady. Fuller was nothing to him, but his pride was a different matter. Arkady didn’t talk. It was hardwired into him.
‘Oh well,’ said Hanlon indifferently. ‘If you say so.’
She tipped the contents of the cartridge into the shallow tray of the half iPhone and then added the back cover.
‘Hope you’ve got all your information backed up, Belanov,’ she said solicitously. The nitro gunpowder was made up of lots of tiny blue rectangles like confetti. They reminded Hanlon of microtabs of acid that she’d seen once in a drugs bust.
Arkady was starting to look nervous. ‘There’s no point trying to hurt me,’ he said. ‘I like pain. It’s my friend.’
Hanlon shrugged. She looked down at the pile of nitroglycerin gunpowder, then she picked up the lighter and struck it, staring momentarily at the flame. Its burning light reflected in her eyes as she looked at Arkady. They reminded him of the eyes of a wolf. She smiled horribly at him.
She placed the explosive-filled half-phone, now a shallow tray full of gunpowder, carefully underneath his groin.
‘I’m not going to hurt you, Arkady. I’m going to blow your balls off,’ she said conversationally.
From the floor Dimitri moaned faintly. Hanlon took a tissue from a box on the desk and rolled it into a spill to light the gunpowder.
Arkady was very conscious of the explosive just below his heavy, dangling balls. His scrotum visibly tightened. He reached a decision.
‘Thursday. Two weeks ago. Three to five thirty. He was here, with Oksana,’ he said.
Hanlon lit the paper she was holding and looked at the flame. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Now, please...’
Hanlon looked at his face. She was fairly sure that he was telling the truth. He certainly looked anguished enough.
Hanlon dropped the lighted spill into the gunpowder. Arkady screwed his eyes tightly shut, in anticipation. Instead of the explosion he had been dreading, the little pile of blue rectangles caught fire and burned with a hot yellow flame. It licked upwards. Arkady let out a stream of what Hanlon took to be Russian swear words as the flames singed the pubic hairs off his scrotum and perinaeum. A horrible smell of burned hair filled the room.
‘You should learn something about how ballistics work,’ said Hanlon, ‘given your fondness for firearms.’
‘You bitch,’ said Arkady. ‘Who sent you?’
For some reason Hanlon suddenly thought of the quiet, dignified old man in his archaic uniform, selling The Watchtower, outside Mark Whiteside’s hospital. There was an air almost of sanctity about him and Hanlon, despite her lack of religious beliefs, always bought a copy.
If only Mark had been here, she thought.
She picked up Arkady’s Y-fronts, held his nose, and when Arkady opened his mouth to breathe, she stuffed them inside, careful not to let him bite her through the fabric. She secured them with tape.
She leaned forward and whispered in his ear, ‘The Salvation Army.’
Then Hanlon picked up her Burberry and put it on. She opened the sash window, climbed into the garden and was gone.
42
‘You did what!’ said Enver, horror-struck. He remembered a saying of which his mother was particularly fond, I was literally tearing my hair out. That’s what he was practically doing now. His powerful fingers were laced into the hair on his head, tugging at the roots as Hanlon calmly tipped another bucket of outrageous behaviour over his head.
I’m beginning to understand how Corrigan must feel, he thought.
Enver was no fool and he could sense how promotion was gradually beginning to change him. He’d had to deal with two cases of good police work being undone by methods that would not stand up in court. He was beginning to learn that unaccountable actions led to unfortunate consequences. He’d always known this, of course, but now he was responsible for the actions of others he was beginning to take a more managerial view of things: that having a system, even though it inevitably contained flaws, was better than anarchy.
And anarchy was what he was looking at now. He had seen a couple of the photos of Fuller, looking as if he’d received the most terrible beating, with the handcuffs round his wrists.
What if this makes the papers? That was his immediate thought.
‘Please tell me they weren’t your cuffs, ma’am,’ he said to Hanlon. She shook her head innocently.
‘No, mine are SpeedCuffs. These ones are a different make. They’re his all right.’
The meeting with Fuller, the chief suspect in a murder enquiry, was bad enough. It was irregular, but it would pass muster. If it did come to trial, though, it would be a gift from heaven to the defence lawyer. Coercion would be the first thing to spring to mind, followed by police brutality.
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 ‘W
ell-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.
