Cold Revenge (2015) (12 page)

Hanlon made a derisive noise. ‘You’re based in Euston, Enver. You’ve got UCL, Queen’s, bits of Westminster Uni, language schools. Are you particularly interested in students? Or trains come to that, what with being near two major stations. Or books – you’ve got the British Library too.’

Enver remained unruffled by Hanlon’s sarcasm. She had washed her hair and he could smell her shampoo. The diagonal slash of her seat belt against her white cotton blouse, pulling the material in, emphasized her figure.

His own stomach strained against his seat belt; he guessed it too, emphasized his figure, but not in a good way. I’m starting to ripple, he thought unhappily, like a fleshy waterbed. However, he almost enjoyed the sensation of support the seat belt gave him. He’d been finding belts too tight lately; they were leaving terrible red marks when he took his clothes off at night. Soon he’d have to wear braces.

He had to slim down. Losing weight was imperative. Thinking of Rize made him think of his father; he’d died of a massive heart attack aged fifty when Enver was a teenager. The warning signs were there.

But there was always tomorrow.

Losing weight was proving a failure, so he decided, as a temporary measure, to disguise his weight gain rather than fight it. He was wearing a new jacket he’d bought. That in itself had been stressful. He’d read in a
Grazia
magazine belonging to a WPC that stripes were slimming and had bought, at considerable cost, a blue and cream striped linen jacket from an expensive shop in Covent Garden. It had provoked sniggering at work. The same PC, Liz Mallowan, the unwitting
Grazia
owner, had begged him to take it back to the shop, over a quiet drink in a local pub. ‘People are laughing at you, sir. They say you look like an ice-cream salesman.’

She adored Enver; she hated her colleagues for making fun of him.

He had been wondering about the hummed snatches, behind his back, of ‘O Sole Mio’, or ‘Just One Cornetto’ as it’s better known in Britain. Now he knew the reason why.

The new jacket had a check design. He wondered if it suited him. At least no one had said anything. He took a packet of Jelly Snakes out of his pocket and offered one to Hanlon.

‘Jelly Snake, ma’am?’

She turned her gaze away from the road. They were exiting the A40 and joining the motorway. She looked at him incredulously.

‘Do I look like a woman who eats Jelly Snakes?’ she demanded.

‘They’re organic,’ said Enver defensively. ‘Made with real fruit juice. They’re probably good for you.’

Hanlon shook her head wonderingly. ‘Put the Snakes away and concentrate on Dr Fuller, please.’

The car surged forward and Enver caught sight of the speedometer as they hit both the M40 and ninety miles an hour. Oh well, he thought.

‘According to DI Huss, she works for the SIO, he lied about his movements that afternoon. He claimed to be in his hotel room at the Blenheim between three and six p.m, but the room key is linked to a computer and it shows that he was absent from three to five fifty. The Blenheim Hotel is about a five-minute walk from the college.’

He was going to say that the Blenheim was a big hotel in the middle of Oxford, but he felt it would draw a sarcastic comment from Hanlon.

Hanlon nodded. Fuller’s inability to provide an alibi had echoes of the Hannah Moore case, compounded here by the fact that it was a total lie.

‘So plenty of time for Fuller to have killed McIntyre and returned to the hotel.’

‘Exactly, ma’am,’ said Enver and continued. ‘His hotel room was searched and a pair of black leather gloves were found. He could give no coherent explanation for the gloves. It was twenty-one degrees Celsius in Oxford the day of the murder; not exactly glove weather. The gloves are now with forensics, as are his clothes. They also found an item of women’s clothing, whatever that may be.’

‘I think we can guess,’ said Hanlon grimly. ‘So presumably they’ll hold him without charge, until they get the results back from the lab.’ Thirty-six hours was the length of time the Oxford police could hold him without formally charging him, from the moment the custody clock started ticking.

‘Any other potential souvenirs?’ she asked.

‘Yes, ma’am. A swatch of pubic hair, and yes, there was hair missing from the deceased.’

She fell silent as they drove, thinking of the dead Jessica McIntyre, so tough, competent and abrasive in life. Hannah Moore had been one of those people who had ‘victim’ almost tattooed on their forehead. You couldn’t say that about McIntyre. Hanlon was surprised there hadn’t been more signs of a struggle; she wasn’t the kind of woman who would go meekly to her death.

She’d been a champion of Fuller, had stood up for him. Had she, Hanlon wondered, been Hannah Moore’s female married lover and if so, did that have any relevance? Had she been Fuller’s lover, come to that?

They reached Headington, on the outskirts of Oxford, and Enver explained about the meeting he’d arranged with the DCI in charge of the McIntyre investigation. DCI Templeman wanted to hear from the two of them face-to-face before he restarted his interview with Fuller.

‘It should only take half an hour or so, ma’am,’ said Enver.

‘I hope so,’ said Hanlon. She hadn’t visited Whiteside for two days and was beginning to feel guilty.

She thought of him now, alone and unconscious in the airy hospital room in Seven Sisters in North London. It was like
Sleeping Beauty
in reverse, Whiteside the handsome prince and she the very-much-awake maiden.

She had tried to remember if she’d ever actually read
Sleeping Beauty
. She doubted it. Mark’s parents had never read it to him. He said they didn’t like any books except the Bible. Perhaps one day they’d tackle
Sleeping Beauty
together.

The Audi threaded its way through the complex street system into the centre of Oxford where the colleges were. Enver hadn’t realized that Oxford was such a large place.

It seemed prosperous and smugly pleased with itself. The traffic was gridlocked. It took nearly three-quarters of an hour to drive the relatively short distance across town to the police station.

Hanlon parked and they went into reception. Both she and Enver were aware of the curious glances they attracted and the fact that when they walked in the place seemed practically deserted, yet a few minutes later there was quite a bit of traffic as officers tried to catch a glimpse of the notorious Hanlon.

She had become a minor celebrity within the force, after the island killings. Before that she had been mainly known in the Met for a controversial policing incident when she’d rescued a fellow officer and hospitalized several of his attackers (or innocent bystanders, depending upon who you believed). But now her fame had reached a larger audience.

The Met had clamped as many reporting restrictions on Hanlon’s last case as it could, and she herself never spoke about it, but people talk. If anything, the tale had grown in the telling, unhampered by truth, fed on rumour. Now here she was in person, accompanied by her bulky, scary-looking minder, Enver Demirel, the ex-boxer turned cop. Enver looked as if he could wrestle bears and still come out on top.

A competent-looking, burly young woman came up to them.

‘Hello. I’m DI Melinda Huss. You must be DCI Hanlon, DI Demirel.’ She had a pleasant, open face with blonde hair and a scattering of freckles. There was a healthy look about her as if she worked on a smallholding, out in the open air. Her shrewd blue eyes assessed the two of them.

The legendary Hanlon seemed a bit of a let-down, if she were honest. She looked tired, careworn, and the remains of a black eye didn’t help. Her face was sour and unwelcoming. Quite frankly, thought Melinda, she seemed a bit of a bitch.

Her colleague, though, was a different story. Melinda liked her men to be men. She had no time at all for the effete metrosexual kind, or for the urban chav. Central Oxford was packed with the first type, scrawny men in skinny jeans and beards. The outskirts of Oxford – Cowley, Headington, Iffley and Botley – were packed with the other, tattooed youths in stonewashed jeans, gold chains, sovereign rings and hoodies.

She found both equally unappealing.

Her eyes drank in Enver’s powerful neck and shoulders, the large, strong hands. He wouldn’t have a man-bag, or wear moisturizer or use words like ‘spritz’, or try to get seconded to police the Glastonbury or Reading festivals so he could watch the bands.

He wouldn’t use expressions involving the word ‘artisanal’. He wouldn’t eat or make sourdough, thank God. He certainly wasn’t Superman. You couldn’t imagine him bounding over a building, or wearing tights, but he absolutely looked more than capable of running through a wall, even if he couldn’t hurdle it.

Melinda wished to God she could have him by her side in some of the grim places she had to work. Oxford is much more than the Dreaming Spires; it’s also the Blackbird Leys estate and rough pubs in Cowley. She found herself thinking dreamily, I bet he wouldn’t just be good in a fight.

She liked his drooping moustache, the sleepy, slightly sexy bedroom eyes. She liked the ridge of his broken nose and the scar tissue by the side of his eyes. She swallowed hungrily.

‘Please follow me,’ she said and as she did so, she caught Hanlon looking at her with sardonic amusement and she knew, with a terrible flash of clarity, that the witchlike DCI had more or less read her mind. Hanlon watched, expressionless as an Easter Island statue, while a hot, crimson flush of embarrassment spread over DI Huss’s face from her neck up, like mercury rising in a thermometer.

I hate you, you cow, thought Huss venomously. Coming up here from London, telling us what to do in Thames Valley CID where you obviously think we don’t know our arse from our elbow.

‘DCI Templeman started without you,’ she said as they walked down the blue-carpeted corridor. She smiled warmly at Enver.

Huss led them through a door into a small room that adjoined the interview room. There was a one-way mirror separating the two rooms and through it they could see Fuller, accompanied by a lawyer – presumably the duty solicitor, thought Hanlon – opposite them an owl-faced, overweight policeman in his late fifties and a much younger colleague.

‘DCI Templeman,’ said Huss, pointing towards the older man. He had a monotonous, Scottish accent that betrayed no emotion as he spoke.

‘You lied to us about being in your hotel room at the time of the murder of your student, Jessica McIntyre. You are unable to account for the presence of gloves in your possession similar to those we believe the killer may have used. Is there anything else that may have slipped your memory, Dr Fuller?’

Hanlon was used to seeing Fuller confident and in control of his class. Here he looked understandably nervous. Even his bouffant-style hair looked lank and lifeless, and when he bowed his head, Hanlon could see the pale scalp beneath. She could see deep lines on his face and suddenly realized that Fuller must have been wearing some form of foundation make-up in class. Here, in the police station, he seemed to have aged ten years.

Fuller said something inaudible to his lawyer, who nodded.

‘No comment,’ said Fuller.

Templeman nodded. He took his glasses off, cleaned then replaced them. He continued the investigation in his robot-like Scottish voice, leaving almost palpable pauses between sentences. You could almost count to three in the silent gap between the end of one sentence and the beginning of another. His enunciation was very precise. It was the kind of voice that after a while would drive you mad with its grinding monotony.

‘And you weren’t in the college when the crime was committed?’

His lawyer intervened. ‘None of us, DCI Templeman, knows exactly when that was,’ he said. ‘How can my client possibly be expected to answer that?’

‘I’ll rephrase the question. When did you arrive at the college, Dr Fuller?’

‘About seven o’clock.’

Templeman nodded. ‘Were you anywhere near the college prior to that?’

Fuller shook his head. Templeman pointed to the small microphone between them. ‘Please answer audibly, Dr Fuller.’

‘No.’

Templeman produced a black-and-white photo from the blue file in front of him. It was sealed in a transparent evidence bag. With maddening slowness, Templeman made a point of carefully locating the identifying tag.

‘We are now looking at exhibit 5 AC. This was taken by the college CCTV at four fifty p.m. It clearly shows you, Dr Fuller, outside the college gates. Would you care to elaborate?’

‘No comment,’ said Fuller.

‘It would help us to believe you, Dr Fuller, if you cared to share with us the reason for your presence. May I remind you why we are here. One of your students has been murdered. I would have thought you might want to cooperate with us.’

‘No comment.’

‘But you were there, Dr Fuller, and a minute or so ago you said you weren’t. It’s difficult for us to work out what happened, when you keep changing your story.’

‘No comment.’

The interview carried on. It was obvious that Fuller was evading the truth. The relentless, monotonous questioning continued, until Templeman produced another photo, this time of a pair of black bikini briefs and some brown hairs in a small plastic bag, the kind used for change in a bank.

‘We are now looking at exhibits 8 ED and 12 ED, a pair of ladies’ black bikini briefs, size 8, and a plastic bag, containing a swatch of brown body hair. And these were found in your hotel room, Dr Fuller. Could you explain?’

Templeman didn’t alter the pitch of his voice, but the tension in the room increased. Fuller’s lawyer looked questioningly at him.

In the adjoining room, Hanlon and Enver looked questioningly at DI Huss. ‘The McIntyre woman was missing her pants and a section of pubic hair had been removed.’ She smiled at Enver, blanking Hanlon out. ‘I’d say Dr Fuller has some explaining to do.’

Hanlon was unimpressed. She herself was size eight. I knew McIntyre, she thought. I knew her shape. That woman was five eleven and no way was she a size eight; more like a twelve. When those come back from forensics it won’t be her DNA on them.