Cold Revenge (2015) (32 page)

A five-thousand-pound fine, plus paying back what you owe, said Hanlon, that’s what is coming to you. And the possibility of three months in prison. Then the public disgrace. Then the interview I will personally give to the local press, about how a policeman decorated for bravery, a role model, cut down in the line of duty was betrayed, Judas-like, by his parents. It might even go national, she said.

Mrs Whiteside had silently cried, the tears tracking down her face, while Hanlon twisted the knife with sadistic relish. Her husband had glared, with true biblical hatred, at Hanlon.

What do you want? he’d asked.

Six months, Hanlon said. I want six months of his life and then, win or lose, I’ll leave you alone. You can go ahead and get your court order to kill your son and I won’t try to stop you.

Whitehead senior nodded. What else could he do. She saw herself out, resisting the temptation to turn round and kick the door viciously.

To a certain extent the current crisis had forced her to act. It was actually a good thing, she thought. Up until now she had buried her head in the sand; now was the time to look reality in the face. She realized she had been hoping that, somehow, the situation might just resolve itself. That Whiteside would just sit up in bed one morning.

She recognized that there were three options. Either she got some form of treatment organized, or he recovered by some unforeseeable miracle of the sort believed in by his parents, or she let him go. It would have to be the first. She had read about Persistent Vegetative States and how people who had been written off as brain dead had made recoveries. She owed it to Whiteside. There was a hospital in New England, near Boston, that was regarded as the best in the world. All she needed was a couple of million dollars. Perhaps I should kidnap Arkady Belanov, she thought. I bet he’s got it. Her phone beeped and brought her back to the here and now.

She checked her phone and saw that she had a message from Michaels. For a moment she thought he was going to cancel their drink, leaving her with the problem of killing time alone before her dinner. But it was to tell her he was running late at work and to meet him, if possible, in the main downstairs kitchen.

She frowned uncomfortably. The downstairs kitchen was the one where she had endured the cold, painful and uncomfortable few hours locked in the freezer. He wouldn’t know that, of course, how could he, but it seemed a strange place to choose to meet.

She texted
Yes
, and almost immediately he was back in touch with instructions as to how to access the kitchen via the fire doors at the rear. Seemingly there’d been a clampdown on access to the university after the murder and she would have trouble with security.

Now Hanlon was feeling puzzled. Michaels was not the kind of man who would put up with this kind of thing. The kitchens were his kingdom and he would decide who came and went on official business. Oh well, she thought, I’ll ask him about it later.

She texted,
See you in ten minutes.

She switched her phone off, dropped it in her bag and left the pub. She felt a dozen pairs of eyes glued to her backside as she strode through the door. She was relieved to be out of there.

She walked past the British Museum with her loose-limbed athletic stride. She caught a glimpse of herself in a shop window opposite. I look good, she thought, with surprise. She started to look forward to her evening out.

I’ll have fun, she thought. The police dinner will be fine. It’s just a question of having the right mental attitude and being in superb shape, like for a race meeting.

Perhaps I ought to strap a number to my chest.

For the first time in weeks, she smiled a genuine smile.

‘So,’ said Enver, ‘your ex is a champion dancer? What, like
Strictly?
’

‘Oh no,’ said Alison. ‘That’s not his kind of thing at all. He was a good northern soul dancer. That and disco dancing. It’s how we met, in a disco. He’s a bloody good dancer. I’m not bad but he’s practically professional level. Personally, I much prefer northern soul to all that Hi-NRG stuff. He won loads of trophies from the weekenders at Camber Sands. He’d practise for hours, it was all really tightly choreographed.’

She folded her arms in front of her and looked up at the ceiling. ‘But of course, disco, particularly Donna Summer, Sylvester, all the gay stuff – odd when he was so heterosexual – was really his thing. Stephen Michaels, the disco king.’

‘Your ex-husband is called Stephen Michaels?’ said Enver stupidly.

‘Yes. Vickery’s my maiden name. Abigail preferred it to Michaels so that’s what she was called.’

Perhaps it’s all just simply coincidence, thought Enver, feeling stunned. But of course, he knew it couldn’t be.

‘What does he do?’ he asked casually.

‘Oh,’ she said, stifling a yawn, ‘he’s a chef, a very good one. Very sought after. Went down south when he was a kid. Did his apprenticeship at the Dorchester, three years there, worked up here in a couple of Michelin-starred and rossetted places, but he’s down south again now, I think. The last I heard of him, he was somewhere in Oxford, some flagship hotel, the Blenheim, is it? That and doing agency for the colleges. He told me he’d worked in all the big ones.’

Enver thought of the other things she’d said about him.

He had a truly bad temper.

He was always getting into fights.

It’s a miracle he never killed anyone.

But it looked as if he had. It really did. As he sat opposite Alison, things slotted comfortably into place.

Enver knew a great deal about working in kitchens. His family background involved catering. He’d become a boxer, and when that career finished thanks to injury, a policeman, to avoid it.

He knew the terrible, endless, grinding hours, the sixty-hour weeks, the shouting, the stress, the continual air of hysterical violence, hanging as heavy as the heat, in the kitchen. He’d grown up with it. He knew the implacable attention to detail, the concentration needed.

He thought of what Hanlon had told him of Michaels’ sense of injustice, which he could see now flourishing in this febrile background. The chef brooding at the seduction and killing of his daughter by some poncey intellectual that the law refused to punish. The feeling that they were all in it together, Fuller, McIntyre, Dame Elizabeth. One law for them; one law for the likes of him.

He thought of the care with which Hannah Moore had been killed. He thought of her affair with the married man. That would technically fit Michaels, who was separated but not divorced.

Then the Donna Summer as he killed her. The Disco King. The choreography, again the attention to detail.

The knowledge of the layout of St Wulfstan’s.

He’d worked in all the big colleges.

That would almost certainly have included St Wulfstan’s. A chef like Michaels, a senior agency chef, would have wanted to know where a dumb waiter in his kitchen led to. And after the murder, in his chef’s whites, mingling with the other chefs, he’d have been part and parcel of the kitchen furniture. Who’s the bloke with the beard? Oh, some guy from the agency. In the rabbit warren of the college kitchen, he’d have been unnoticed, unchallenged.

He’d worked in the Blenheim too. The kitchen staff in a hotel always did their level best to sleep with as many waitresses and cleaners as possible. They were usually eager to reciprocate. Michaels, good-looking, charismatic, important, a god in the kitchen, could easily have persuaded some employee to help him, or even better, would have known where keys were kept and how to get them.

As a former senior chef, and a respected one, all the staff would have treated him like an honoured guest. He could bet that when Michaels popped into the Blenheim all his drinks were free, meals wildly undercharged, rooms upgraded or mysteriously never showing up on the bill. To have slipped into Fuller’s room would have been simplicity itself.

Enver thought, maybe he’s insane. Some imbalance that had surfaced in a different form in his daughter. Hanlon had mentioned in her report about the murder of Dame Elizabeth the way he was interacting with her corpse, almost dancing with it, the choreography again. The disco music as he had killed Hannah. Well, mental health wasn’t his field. That would be for others to decide.

Maybe he just liked killing people.

Then the choice of the kitchen to hide in when being pursued by Hanlon, an instinctive choice for Michaels, safe, familiar ground.

And finally, of course, a motive. Michaels bent on revenge on the man who he saw as having killed his daughter. Death would have been too good for him. He could have killed Fuller but instead presumably wanted him broken – everything he had worked for, the career, the reputation, the livelihood, all taken away.

Fuller would find prison hellish and he would be very much at the bottom of the food chain.

Well, that would certainly be enough to bring Michaels in for questioning. Mentally, he congratulated Hanlon.

It hadn’t been Fuller. She’d been proven right again.

Hanlon walked around the electric barrier leading to the steep ramp that dropped down to the subterranean concrete yard at the back of the huge basement kitchen. Outside the kitchen doors, she looked upwards. It was like being at the bottom of a wide, square well, and she could see the evening sky above her, framed by safety railings.

The fire doors were propped open and the silver links of the metal fly screen hung down, obscuring her view of the kitchen. Hanlon parted the chain with her left hand, careful not to snag the bandaged cast on her right wrist or her handbag in the metal curtain, and walked through into the kitchen.

The steel links jangled quietly and percussively as they parted in front of her.

She shook her head to free her hair, which had caught in a couple of the tangled links of the chain. She stood stock still, unable to move, momentarily transfixed by the sight of Fuller in front of her.

When you are faced with a sight you simply do not expect, you don’t feel alarm or shock: it’s a what-on-earth-is-happening sensation. The brain is trying to assimilate what the eyes are telling it.

Hanlon was having one of those moments.

Fuller was the last person she had been expecting to see that evening. After dominating her professional life for nearly a month, for once, she simply hadn’t thought about him. But here he was. She stood in her short, shimmery dress, holding her handbag, dressed for her formal evening out, and stared.

She had even put make-up on, dragged a comb through her protesting thick hair and sprayed a discreet amount of perfume over herself. And here was Fuller.

The philosophy lecturer was standing looking towards the door and Hanlon, who was framed by the silvery backdrop of the fly screen, as if she had just walked on stage. His skinny jeans and Calvin Klein underpants were down around his ankles. His sweatshirt and T-shirt lay in a crumpled heap by his feet.

His eyes stared imploringly at Hanlon.

DI Melinda Huss was annoyed with herself for about five minutes after losing Joad, but then decided not to waste emotional energy. In Huss’s view there was never any point in crying over spilled milk. If something went wrong, you fixed it. Tractors, machinery, fences, bent coppers, all one and the same.

As soon as she saw his thin, high shoulders and greased-back hair disappear into the department store, she realized she had lost him. She turned round and pedalled back to the station.

She chained her bike up and, helmet in hand, went in search of Worth. Fortunately, he was still at work. He looked up admiringly from his desk at the sweat-stained form of Huss. Worth found DI Huss extremely attractive. There was a lot of Huss and here she was, kind of gift-wrapped in her damp, Lycra finery.

‘Melinda, can I help you?’ he said eagerly.

‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘I want Joad’s username and password for his PC. Do you know them?’

Worth grinned. ‘Do you really think that Joad would be thick enough to write important stuff like that down on a Post-it note and stick it underneath a drawer?’

Her face fell and his smile broadened. ‘Absolutely he is.’

He pushed his chair backwards on its castors to his colleague’s desk, opened a drawer, felt underneath and removed the yellow piece of paper. Huss copied down the information.

‘Thanks, Ed,’ she said.

Worth watched Huss’s broad back disappear across the office. She was a big girl, he thought, but oh so sexy. Mentally he wished her luck in her feud with Joad.

Back at her own desk, Huss logged on as Joad and went to his history folder. There, amongst what were almost certainly porn sites, was a request for number-plate identification. Hanlon’s number plate. Her address was of course listed.

Bingo, Huss thought.

She sat at her desk, thinking, tapping her strong white teeth with the end of a pen. She had the following day off, so she could stay in London if she wanted, or come back to Oxford on the last train.

Joad and Hanlon; Hanlon and Joad.

What could it be about?

Well, she thought, I can discount the journalist theory. No writer would be after information like that, post-Leveson. Hanlon’s disciplinary record, yes; her car registration, her address, no way. So who else would possibly want to know a policewoman’s home address and why?

She could think of several reasons, none of them pleasant.

Well, one thing was for sure, she’d get nothing from Joad. She wouldn’t be able to do anything at all official with the information, but she could pass it on to Enver. He could act on it and say it came from an informant, which would be essentially true, and keep her name out of things.

She got her phone out and texted him.

Enver was on the train back from Leeds. He was in a strange mood, in which elation and sadness were mixed.

On the one hand, he had almost certainly succeeded in solving the crime. He had been over and over in his head what he had learned about Michaels. It simply had to be him.

He tried to think of a scenario in which Michaels was an innocent party. It didn’t work. If Fuller was innocent, it must have been him.