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.
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 knows 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.
He pushed her back so she could feel the edges of the teacher’s table in front of the whiteboard against the back of her legs. His face moved closer to hers as he tried to kiss her. The grey eyes under her dark, shapely eyebrows narrowed. She was nearly his, he thought.
It was then that Hanlon struck.
When you headbutt someone, it helps if they’re taller than you, otherwise you run a high risk of a clash of heads. That achieves little. It’s the softer, more vulnerable areas of the face that you want, the nose, the mouth, the cheekbones. Fuller, two inches taller than Hanlon, was an ideal height.
She stepped in towards him and swung her arms upwards, breaking the hold he had on her clothing. Now it was her turn.
She seized the lapels on his jacket and pulled him suddenly towards her. For one delirious second Fuller thought she wanted to embrace him. As she did so, she drove her head forward with all the strength in her sleek, powerful neck muscles. Headbutting someone is a real art and she did it perfectly.
Fuller was taken completely by surprise; the speed with which Hanlon’s head descended was awesome. The iron-hard bone of her forehead smashed into the soft tissue of Fuller’s nose. It caught him just on the bridge.
The bone broke with a thud and Fuller instinctively brought both hands up to his ruined face. Just as instinctively, as not everyone who’s headbutted goes down and it’s always best to have a backup plan, Hanlon kicked Fuller as hard as she could between the legs.