Cold Revenge (2015) (29 page)

The Thames was huge and powerful this morning, the movement of its brown, smooth water muscular, as it ran under the piles of Tower Bridge. There was very little river traffic around at this hour, only the occasional working barge cruising up and down the river.

As she ran, she felt an unusual joy at the strength in her body. She was too used to taking it for granted, she thought. She never savoured its power and beauty. She spent hours effectively torturing it day after day, week after week, so she could run, cycle or swim a few seconds faster than some equally deranged female obsessive from, say, Vilnius or Glenrothes, at some sparsely attended triathlon meeting in the middle of nowhere. It was all utterly pointless really. She never kept trophies or cups or medals. She binned them. Whiteside had a couple of the more prestigious ones that he’d saved. ‘Just so your grandchildren know you didn’t make the whole thing up,’ he’d said.

But today, for some reason, she was happy to feel her shapely, powerful thighs and calves pounding along the concrete walkway, no feeling of tiredness or stress in her muscles. She felt like she could run forever.

She ran past a play-park and paused for a minute by some monkey bars. She couldn’t put any stress on her damaged wrist but she jumped up, caught one of the welded tubular metal bars and performed ten, graceful, one-handed pull-ups, slowly and perfectly.

Then back to her run.

She returned to her flat an hour later. She did half an hour of yoga, her resilient body stretching and flexing, then showered.

She looked critically at her body in the full-length bathroom mirror. Her long, shapely legs, her washboard stomach. Even Hanlon was pleased with what she saw.

She pulled on some underwear and walked into her lounge. She had a text message from Michaels.

Are you free tonight for a drink?

I wonder what he wants, she thought to herself. She checked her calendar on her phone. God, she was supposed to be Corrigan’s guest at a fund-raiser to improve women’s profiles and women’s issues in the Metropolitan Police. It was at the Mansion House too. She’d nearly forgotten. Corrigan would have gone crazy. It started at eight p.m.

Yes, she wrote, 6 p.m.?

Yes. Usual place.

She put the phone down. I hope he’s got some idea of another suspect besides Fuller, she thought, and I hope he doesn’t drone on about unappreciated he is.

Her thoughts turned to the Mansion House.

I’d better buy something to wear. My only good dress is now in the bin.

Enver walked out of Leeds station into the wide streets and the anonymous, modern architecture of Leeds city centre. Leeds, after London, seemed hugely spacious, the roads wide, the sky and horizon limitless. Even his own heavy body seemed lighter on these northern pavements. Maybe it was the air, he thought, or maybe the eight and a half million or so people who lived in the capital city generated their own kind of gravitational pull, so that walking in London was inherently harder. Whatever it was, he felt it was a far more relaxing cityscape than the one he was used to.

He had half an hour to kill before he was due to meet Alison Vickery, the dead Abigail’s mother. He had a coffee in Costa and sat there quietly, marvelling to himself at the strange northern accents that he could hear all around him. It was a reminder to him of how metropolitan-fixated he had become. Everywhere outside London seemed alien. Even on the train ride north, he found things like pylons and wind turbines novel. They weren’t part of his internal geography, his own sense of being.

He finished his coffee and caught a taxi out to Headingley where Alison Vickery lived, wondering at the comparatively empty roads and the free-flowing traffic. You had a feeling, too, with Leeds that it had a defined beginning and a defined end. Here was Leeds, here wasn’t. He was fully aware of the green belt around London and the girdle of the M25, but the city felt endless. This was different.

It was manageable; it was explicable.

The taxi dropped him off outside a pleasant, sizeable terraced house with a neat front garden.

He rang the bell, the door opened, and he found himself facing a tall, attractive blonde woman in her early forties.

‘Hello, I’m DI Enver Demirel,’ he said. ‘I believe you’re expecting me.’

‘Alison Vickery. Do come in.’ Her greeting was relaxed, friendly. He had been dreading a hostile, resentful reception.

They sat in Alison Vickery’s front room, which was comfortably and classically furnished. Enver looked around him. He got to see a strange selection of living rooms in the course of his job, everything from charity-shop/found-in-a-skip-furnished to the contemporary, a puzzling (to his eyes) mix of distressed and hard-edged minimalist, to show that the peeling paint and exposed brick was ironic, rather than born out of necessity.

Then, of course, there were the tragic wreckages of some homes. Waste piled high, the stink of rotting food and blocked drains, the smell of shit and misery. He had once been round to a flat where an old man had died and his body had lain undiscovered for several months. There was a human-shaped stain on the fabric of an armchair where he’d seeped into the material over time. It was like the Turin shroud.

This living room told him its owner had money and safe, predictable taste. That was fine by Enver. It was forthright, and looking at Alison Vickery, he felt she’d give him forthright answers. She wouldn’t go off on a tangent about politics or contemporary life.

Her sofa was huge, comfortable and just the right height, so he wouldn’t need to struggle in it, thrashing around to regain his centre of equilibrium before standing up again. He was grateful for that. He strongly disliked low furniture.

Alison Vickery had very long legs and at six foot was the same height as Enver. She had long, shapely fingers, pale blue eyes, a beaky nose and a slightly sad face in repose. Her fine hair was the colour of straw. Enver thought she was very attractive.

They’d been looking at a succession of photos of her daughter on the high-definition flat-screen TV. Alison’s computer was hooked up to it, so it was as if Abigail was a third person in the room.

The images came and went. In none of them did the girl look happy.

‘I always knew something terrible would happen to Abi,’ she said softly. ‘She was always bright but so withdrawn, so quiet.’

Enver nodded sympathetically. He didn’t know what to say. What could you say? A photo now of a teenage, Goth-looking girl filled the screen. Black suited Abigail. She was darker skinned than her pale mother, with Mediterranean colouring. But there was no mistaking the bitter look of contempt and anger on her face.

Enver remembered a girl he’d once gone out with, who was a film fanatic. She was always quoting a line from a film, from the fifties, about youth rebellion, when one character asks, ‘What are you rebelling against?’

To which the reply was, ‘What have you got to offer?’

That seemed like the kind of thought Abigail Vickery would have.

Alison Vickery said, ‘She was always angry. But mainly at herself. It was always internalized. Her father and I are long since separated but we never got round to getting divorced.’ She looked at her daughter. ‘Maybe that was just cowardice on my part. He had a truly evil temper, and he’d take it out on others. He never internalized his anger, he’d lamp you.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘He was always getting into fights. But that’s Leeds for you, Detective Inspector, we’re supposed to be very mean, in money terms, and tough. If you get a good kicking you don’t complain.’

‘It’s the same where I grew up,’ said Enver. ‘Maybe it’s a class thing. You don’t involve the police. You don’t grass people up.’

‘Maybe it is,’ she said. They both silently contemplated the British caste system.

She looked at her daughter again. ‘Oh, Abigail. And you had nothing really to be sad or angry about. That was the terrible thing. She had looks, brains, everything going for her. She told me once she thought she was probably crazy because she had nothing to complain about but she still felt angry.’

‘And she went to university and met Dr Fuller,’ said Enver, hoping to steer the conversation more in the direction of the investigation.

‘Yes,’ said Alison. She shifted in her seat. He noticed again her spectacular legs. He felt a stab of guilt that he found the woman he was talking to exceptionally desirable.

‘She had got a First in philosophy from Durham.’ She sipped her tea and sighed, ‘You’d have thought that would have helped. I think,’ she frowned and corrected herself, ‘no, I know, she did philosophy to try and make sense of the world as she saw it. But of course it didn’t help. If you’re born that way, that’s the way you are, I think. When she got her First, I was so pleased, so proud. She was furious, and depressed.’ She shook her head. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? Can you imagine that? I go to people’s houses and they have graduation photos of their children on the wall, holding their degrees in their robes. They all look pleased as Punch. Why wouldn’t they? Not Abi.’ She drank some more tea. ‘I knew she’d got a First because I found a scrunched-up letter from the uni in the bin. Anyone would have thought they’d tried to insult her.’

Her eyes filled with tears suddenly and she fished a tissue out of her sleeve. Enver started to say something, but she blinked back the tears and shook her head to indicate she’d be fine. ‘She’d come down to get coffee about twelve, lunchtime, just holed herself up in her room. I remember wishing – this is going to sound crazy – that she’d been on drugs. That way I’d have had something to blame.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘But no, it was all her, she was naturally fucked up. She didn’t need drugs or booze.’ She looked sadly at the TV screen.

‘So, she was mooning about the house, not this one, a different one. Still in Leeds. I was doing well financially. I run a software company. Anyway, I said, why don’t you do a Ph.D., here at the uni. I can afford it. It’s well-regarded. I thought she might make some new friends.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘In a sense she did.’

‘Fuller?’

Alison nodded. ‘I knew they were having an affair. It wasn’t maternal instinct or anything. She told me. In John Lewis of all places. In soft furnishings.’

‘It is a good shop,’ said Enver solemnly. ‘Never knowingly undersold.’

Alison gave him an exasperated look. It reminded him of Hanlon somehow. I never say the right thing, he thought. I’m useless with women. ‘Anyway, that’s how I knew. I met him a couple of times. I thought, well, if he makes her happy, who am I to judge?’

‘And what did you make of him?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He was what you’d imagine a lecturer to look like. Unremarkable. Boden lite.’

Enver nodded. ‘And when...’ He didn’t really know how to finish the sentence. Alison did it for him.

‘And when she died, no, I didn’t blame him. I don’t think he’s a murderer, not unless he’s very good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes. A master of deceit. Her dad – my ex – did, still does, almost certainly. He was convinced. He’s sure Fuller killed her. But then again, Steve’s as mad as a hatter. And he likes being angry. Me, I think it was suicide. When my dad was ill with cancer, in a lot of pain, he more or less turned his face to the wall. He wanted to die. Life had nothing left for him.

‘I don’t think Abigail was murdered. I think she just found being alive too painful. That’s what I think. I think she just turned her face to the wall.’

‘Thank you,’ said Enver. Well, he thought, that’s two people, her and Hanlon, convinced of Fuller’s innocence.

As for himself, he wasn’t so sure. A master of deceit. Could that describe Fuller? It sounded horribly possible.

Hanlon’s case seemed to rest on the testimony of a Russian gangster, who thought he was going to lose his genitals and was quite likely to say anything he thought she might want to hear, and the fact that Fuller had come up with some sort of insane defence after he’d unsuccessfully tried to rape her. He began to wonder if Fuller might not be able to get away with anything. He seemed to have a strange knack of convincing people of his innocence in the most unlikely ways.

Well, Fuller was going to walk, by the looks of things.

He was lost in thought when he heard Alison say, ‘Would you like more tea?’

‘Yes, that’d be great.’ He followed her into her sizeable kitchen. It was almost as big as Enver’s one-bedroom flat. A laptop was open on the kitchen table, an Apple Mac in the corner of the room, a tablet on one of the work surfaces. Everything gleamed and sparkled. The surfaces were spotlessly clean; nothing was lying around.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ Alison said.

There was a baking rack with scones that had been cooling on the grey marble-effect Corian surface of the worktop. They smelled as good as they looked. Enver stared hungrily at them. Alison noticed and smiled.

‘Would you like one?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

‘Cream? Jam? It’s home-made.’

Oh God, yes, he thought. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

She laughed. ‘No, it’s always nice to have an appreciative audience. You look like a man who likes his food.’

While Enver pondered the meaning of her sentence, she opened a large shoulder-high fridge and took out some double cream, then bent down gracefully to get a steel mixing bowl from a low cupboard. She plugged in a small hand mixer and whipped the cream.

Enver stared, watching it thicken. Her movements were deft and precise, her face frowning gently while she judged the consistency of the cream.

She noticed Enver looking at her. ‘Nothing worse than over-whipped cream, don’t want it turning to butter.’ Her mobile phone rang and she glanced at it, picked it up.

‘
Ciao. No, sono occupata adesso
...
Poi, domani
...
si
...
si
...
è vero? Non è possibile senza Claudia
...
Si, in bocca da lupo! Ciao Paolo, a domani, ciao.
’

Her face changed as she spoke in Italian. She was commanding, dominant. Her posture was different too. Her back straightened, her voice hardened. Her work face, her work persona. It made him think of Hanlon. She was very different: there was only one side to Hanlon. Work, social life, sport, be it triathlon or boxing, it was all the same to her. She was indivisible.