Who would mourn her?
Enver, she thought, and felt a huge wave of affection for her gloomy colleague. Enver will be distraught.
Michaels would lead her to the centre of the puddle where the drain was and the water was deepest. He would sweep her legs away and lower her down face first, in a kind of baptism, and almost certainly sit gently on the base of her lower back while he held her face against the tiles. So long as her nose and mouth were underwater, it would be enough. Within two to three minutes she’d have lost consciousness, and he could afford to relax. She guessed that Michaels would wait around for a quarter of an hour to check she was quite dead.
She raised her head and looked into Michaels’ brown eyes. His face looked as calm as ever. She turned her head to look at the water and he did too.
Behind her back was the waist-high electrical socket for the slicer machine. The one the sign had warned against, the one missing its safety guard. Despite the warnings, it was plugged in.
Unseen by the chef, Hanlon’s fingers located the switch and she pressed it down.
Behind Michaels’ back, on its steel work-table, the unguarded slicing machine started into action. There was nothing between the blade and the air, no guard, no protection at all. Its razor-sharp cutting blade spun so fast it looked almost stationary, any noise it made being drowned out by that of the fans. It was about a metre behind Michaels’ back. He didn’t notice it. His attention was focused on Hanlon.
She nodded at the water. ‘Please,’ she said imploringly, ‘not that way, please, I beg of you.’ She got down on one knee in front of him submissively. She bowed her head and kept her gaze fixed on the floor; she didn’t want Michaels to see the look in her eyes. She made a weeping noise, or tried to. It wasn’t a natural sound for her.
She heard him say in an exasperated tone, ‘At least show some dignity, Hanlon. Whining won’t do you any good.’
The blade of the slicer spun behind him. It was industrial spec. You could push a partially frozen ham as thick as your thigh through, using your little finger, and it would effortlessly cut it in two, it was that sharp.
‘Please don’t kill me,’ moaned Hanlon, as pathetically as she could.
‘Oh, for God’s sa—’
He didn’t get to the final syllabic ‘k’ of the word. With all the strength in her legs, all that power accumulated from years of cycling, running, swimming, endless punishing squats in the gym with heavy weights on the bar, she drove herself forwards and upwards into Michaels’ chest.
Her shoulder smashed into him with irresistible force and the impact of her body knocked him backwards into the revolving blade of the slicer.
Michaels roared with pain and anger, as the razor-sharp steel of the spinning disc cut deeply into his flesh.
Hanlon, hands bound behind her back, took a step backwards and watched as Michaels stood upwards and away from the machine whose shining silver blade was now a bloodsoaked crimson disc. Fine droplets of blood spattered the white-tiled walls behind him and the floor in front of him. He turned and stared in disbelief at the machine, before looking at Hanlon.
She was a fearsome sight, scarcely human. Until now, obsessed with his own plans, Michaels hadn’t really paid her much attention. He’d been too preoccupied; Hanlon had been an abstraction.
Now she stood facing him, her dark corkscrew hair matted and covering her face, mottled with Fuller’s blood. Her torn, bloodstained dress clung to her slim, muscular figure and her lips drew back in a snarl from her sharp, white teeth. Her feral grey eyes shone through her curly hair with hatred and bloodlust. There was no rationality there, no compassion, no humanity.
The right sleeve of Michaels’ chef’s jacket was now a very dark red, as the blood soaked into the fabric. His hand and arm hung uselessly at his side. He started to feel faint and sick. The blade had severed nerves and tendons. Every second that passed played into Hanlon’s hands. The deep wound was not going to stop bleeding and the human body can only afford to lose so much blood before it collapses.
Michaels was now one-handed and weakening. Hanlon, of course, didn’t have the use of either of her hands, so the advantage still lay with Michaels. Hanlon grinned savagely at him. Whatever happened, his plan to frame Fuller had now come to nothing. There was enough of Michaels’ DNA bleeding out of him to paint this whole end of the kitchen, let alone cover a slide for a forensics specimen.
The chef looked around for a weapon. I need a knife, he thought. He blinked rather stupidly. Loss of blood, shock and the extreme pain in his back were slowing his thought processes. He shook his head angrily. I’m the head chef, he thought, I own this kitchen.
The obvious place to get a knife was the magnetized rack on the wall. It was full of them. But Hanlon stood between him and it, and in his weakened state he didn’t want to get close to her. Hanlon continued to grin crazily at Michaels. All normal thought had more or less departed. She wanted him dead. She bared her sharp, white teeth at him and snapped her jaws. She didn’t have her hands, but she had teeth, canines, incisors and Michaels had a throat.
Under the long metal table that supported the still spinning slicer and a couple of microwaves, was a long, metal shelf with steel mixing bowls, colour-coded plastic chopping boards and the huge, three-kilo plastic rolling pin that Hanlon had picked up the other day.
To see it was to act. He bent forward to grab it. You can suck on this, bitch, he thought, as his fingers stretched out for it. As his body reached a ninety-degree angle, Hanlon kicked him as hard as she could in the stomach.
Hanlon lacked the advantage of Michaels’ steel-toed workboots but she was kicking for her life and she put every fibre of her hatred of Michaels into it. He was unbalanced, slightly dizzy now. His blood pressure was falling and he was low to the ground, his centre of gravity off-kilter.
The force of the kick spun him backwards and his foot skidded on the treacherously slippery floor. Ordinarily, when you slip over, you put your arm out to break your fall. Michaels’ arm was useless to him.
He fell on to the open door of the lower oven, which protruded outwards like a shelf. It was hinged at the bottom rather than at the side so it could open up and down. He crashed down hard on top of it, but it held. The Germans make very good kitchen equipment. He lay there momentarily on the glass door, winded, with his useless right arm trapped under his body. The glass of the oven door was immediately slick with blood.
He put his left palm down on the floor of the kitchen to help push himself up and Hanlon stamped as hard as she could on it. All her weight was concentrated on the two-centimetre heel of her shoe, which crashed down like an industrial press, squarely on the back of the chef’s hand. She felt flesh and bone give beneath her foot and she cried out in triumph.
Michaels shouted in pain and involuntarily curled up with agony, snatching his hand back towards him. Hanlon put her foot against his knees and shoved him backwards from the shelf, deep inside the oven.
His blood on the glass shelf acted like a lubricant and he slid further back across the glass on to the polished, steel floor of the metre-deep oven. Hanlon stepped back, placed the tops of the toes of her right foot under the lip of the oven door, and slammed it shut.
Unlike a walk-in fridge or freezer, there is no inside safety catch, no inside handle, in an oven. Why bother? You’re not supposed to go in. The oven door is, however, designed to click shut and stay shut, so it can’t be accidentally knocked open.
Hanlon stood for a second or two, breathing hard, then she stepped back and looked through the reinforced glass of the oven door. Michaels was an indistinct dark mass inside. She could see him moving as he tried to get some leverage. He was trying to squirm round inside so he could kick at the door, but there wasn’t enough room. The door rattled gently, but showed no signs of giving way.
Hanlon looked down at her torn, bloody dress. She had looked so pretty wearing it in the shop. Now she looked like one of the living dead.
She suddenly thought of the ‘Women in Policing’ dinner she should be attending right then. Perhaps I ought to go as I am, she thought, they’ll be impressed. She stifled a laugh of pure hysteria.
With almost hallucinatory clarity, she remembered the shop assistant asking her, ‘Is it for a date?’
‘Yes,’ she’d said proudly. ‘Yes, it is.’
Her stockinged foot idly traced a pattern in the water on the floor that had been destined as her final resting place.
She thought of Michaels’ words to her, something along the lines of, you banged your head and collapsed. Well, I’ve taken enough of a pounding for that to occur, she thought. I guess round about now, amnesia will set in. That’s what I’ll tell everyone.
I can’t remember a thing.
‘This is for you, Michaels,’ she said out loud.
She remembered Michaels showing her how the ovens upstairs worked. These were the same, just bigger. Hanlon pressed the power switch on with her forehead. The LED display for the oven temperature flashed, displaying 000. The inside light came on and she could now see his face.
The oven must have been soundproof. She could see his lips moving, but no noise came out.
‘This is for Hannah and Jessica.’
She turned round, back to the oven, selected the steam function of the Hobart and pressed the on button. The machine made a loud, metallic
Kerchunk
sound as its function changed from fan oven to giant steamer.
‘This is for Dame Elizabeth and my father.’
Michaels must have known what was happening. His face was agitated; she could see he was shouting and his body jerked frantically, as he tried to break free. It was a pointless struggle. The oven door was toughened glass. You’d have needed a sledgehammer to break it.
‘And this is for me!’
Hanlon turned again and pressed the temperature setting. Michaels had told her he usually had it at a hundred and seventy degrees Celsius, so in tribute she selected that.
Her face was set and impassive while she calmly watched the LED display on the oven change incrementally, recording the speedily rising temperature, as the scalding steam hissed into the oven.
In the breast pocket of his jacket, Michaels had placed Dame Elizabeth’s letter to Hanlon. As the steam filled the oven, transforming it into a scalding coffin, he had clawed it out of the thick cotton material. Soaked in his blood and superheated steam, the paper dissolved into illegible shreds. In destroying Michaels, Hanlon had obliterated her past.
At fifty degrees Celsius, Michaels started thrashing around like a madman, trying desperately to move his skin away from the agonizingly hot metal. His mouth was open in a soundless scream.
At about seventy degrees Celsius, he must have lost consciousness, for he stopped moving.
She looked at the motionless body inside the oven and nodded curtly to herself.
Hanlon crossed the kitchen floor carefully and walked down to the freezer.
Her bag was on the floor still and she upended it. Make-up, tissues, purse, phone and keys fell out. On one of the key fobs was a small universal handcuff key and sitting on the floor, with great difficulty, and several false starts, she managed to get it into one of the locks and twist. She felt it give.
Her hands were free.
Quickly she opened the freezer door and dragged out the freezing, but still breathing, body of Fuller.
She wrapped him as warmly as possible in her coat and called the emergency services. Then still holding her phone, she walked back up to check on Michaels.
She looked at his dead body, gently cooking away. What was it he’d told her?
‘
It’s as if my internal temperature was seventy degrees. I’m tough and dry inside.
’
Her lip curled in contempt.
The oven purred along contentedly at a hundred and seventy degrees. She guessed he’d take a while to cook through.
Slowly, she walked down the kitchen to open the double doors so she could go outside and call Enver.
She could hear sirens approaching.
They hadn’t got far to come.
Enver and Huss reached the end of the road paralleling the one with the Hanlon address, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. He took it out. It was Hanlon herself. Relief washed over him.
‘Where are you?’ he asked. The tone of his question, angry and concerned, jumped the memory of the twenty-seven-year-old Huss back to when she was a teenager, to those few occasions, mainly Young Farmers’ Balls, when she’d worried her father. Enver sounded exactly like him. She half expected him to say something like, ‘I’ve been worried sick.’
Huss watched intently while the conversation continued. She could piece together what was happening from Enver’s side of things.
Fuller, alive, innocent.
Michaels, dead, guilty.
Hanlon, about to be taken to hospital for her head injuries, but otherwise OK.
Enver’s face was one of acute concern. ‘I’ll see you there in about an hour. What am I doing? Oh, nothing much. No, I’m having a walk with DI Huss, showing her London by night. Yes, I’ll see you soon. Bye.’
Enver sat down heavily on someone’s wall and passed his hands wearily over his face. When he put them down on his thighs, Huss could see his eyes were wet. She decided diplomatically not to notice.
‘So what do you want to do now, Enver?’ she asked. It was clear that whatever had happened, or was going to happen, Hanlon would be in no danger from this direction tonight. But the decision was Enver’s to make.
She wondered what had happened to Hanlon, what sort of condition she was in. A part of her was extraordinarily jealous of the woman. How could she possibly live up to such a role model in Enver’s eyes?
‘What I want to do is send a message, Melinda,’ he said, with finality. ‘Let’s go and find Curtis’s friend.’
Enver hadn’t been able to protect her from Michaels but the least he could do was protect her from Arkady Belanov.
He stood up and put his hand in his pocket, and took out a pair of soft black leather gloves. Huss looked at him questioningly.