The Innocent Girl

by Alex Coombs

  ‘I felt sorry for her,’ he yelled over the noise of the kitchen. ‘She seemed so, well, pathetic.’

  It was incredibly hot in the small kitchen; everything seemed to generate heat. The six-burner stove, the ovens, the flat-top stove, the grill (or salamander as she learned to call it), the metal pass with its scaldingly hot lights and its capacious metal storage cabinet for plates and bowls, all were roasting.

  Hanlon’s hair was heavy and sodden, sweat trickled down her face in the forty- to fifty-degree-Celsius heat. She could feel her clothes sticking to her. Michaels seemed cool and unaffected.

  ‘I think that’s why she ended up with a reputation as the class bike. She couldn’t say no to people,’ he said, slicing and arranging two pink duck breasts on beds of dark Puy lentils.

  ‘And Fuller?’

  ‘Exploited it,’ said Michaels. ‘I think, no, I know, he’s the kind of man who preys on women.’

  The noise of the kitchen was intense and Michaels had to practically shout. The roar of the extractor fans was like being on an airport runway. All the pans were of course metal, so they clanged as they got bashed around on the stove, and there was a continuous percussive beat to the rhythm of the kitchen as oven and fridge doors were opened and slammed shut.

  ‘You really think that’s true?’ shouted Hanlon. ‘Absolutely, hang on.’ He barked instructions to an attentive

  waitress standing next to her. ‘Table Five away, Ellie. Now, where were we. Anyway, Hannah told me about a girl called Abigail Vickery. She died because of him. Either he killed her or he encouraged the S&M stuff that did her in.’

  The printer on the pass, connected to the waitresses’ electronic order pads, made a high-pitched, tearing noise while it operated, and this would translate into a food order which Kieran would detach from the machine, keep one copy for himself and put the other on the cheque grabber above the pass for Michaels to read.

  ‘Dessert cheque, Kieran,’ he said, then turned his attention back to her. ‘He really doesn’t like women, did you know that? He’s always running them down, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Oh, and he’s got a huge porn collection by all accounts. I heard him boast about it once. He was smashed at some do and let it slip.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hanlon.

  Michaels nodded. ‘Doesn’t like women, he’s a pervert, drink problem, past history and now another dead girl. Whichever way you look at it, he’s guilty.’

  ‘Why are you in his class then, if you dislike him so much?’ As she asked the question, the machine printed off several cheques, one after another, each a separate food order. Michaels

  rolled his eyes.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. He busied himself at the stove.

  Eventually, like a water main gradually being turned off, the gaps between orders grew longer and longer, the pile of completed cheques grew higher on the metal spike and Hanlon heard Michaels say, ‘Right. That’s the last order out. Come on, Gallagher, let’s get some air.’

  Thank God, she thought, that’s all over. She’d had quite enough of the kitchen. She wondered how they could bear it in there for fifty to sixty hours a week. She looked up at the clock on the wall: two thirty p.m. Kieran and Michaels had done about forty meals in a couple of hours.

  She did a quick calculation. Twenty mains per hour plus thirty starters, seventy plated meals, thirty-five an hour, one meal every two minutes, all done by two people. And it was all done to order, all expertly cooked, all perfectly arranged. It was staggering really. Michaels was extremely good.

  She followed him out through a side door, past a room marked Dry Store and down a corridor lined with several bags of potatoes, then through a beaded, chain curtain, a fly screen to a small roof terrace outside.

  By the fly screen Michaels pointed to a staircase. ‘That’ll take you out down to the main corridor below.’

  They stood side by side, looking out at the rooftops of central London. She could see the sparkplug-like shape of the Telecom Tower from here. It was amazingly tranquil.

  The terrace was small and intimate, a secret place high up in the ziggurat of the Senate building. Michaels grinned at her. He had grabbed a couple of bottles of Nastro Azzurro out of one of his fridges and he prised the tops off, using a cigarette lighter that he kept for the stove. He handed one to Hanlon and then sat down with his back against the wall, looking out through the railings at the city stretching away westwards.

  ‘Why am I in his class?’ He drank some beer thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t know anything about him until Hannah filled me in. She was trying to pump me for information. She thought that because we worked for the same uni we’d mix.’ Just like I did, thought Hanlon. He gave a bitter laugh. ‘God, she was naive. She’d have made a terrible journalist. As if he’d mix with a peasant like me.’

  ‘Are you saying he’s a snob?’ asked Hanlon.

  ‘Too right,’ said Michaels. ‘They all are. Intellectual snobs.’ Hanlon could hear the bitterness in his voice. ‘I’d love to see them try and cope in the real world.’ He shook his head disparagingly. ‘Ivory towers, Gallagher, ivory towers.’ Hanlon decided to change the subject.

  ‘It’s not always that busy, is it?’ she said. Michaels shook his head.

  ‘We’re one chef down.’ he answered. ‘Normally we’d have one on starters and desserts and one on veg and sauces, leaving me with just the mains and the plating up, and of course we’d have a KP for the washing up. But not today. Never mind, it all went well.’

  Michaels stood up and stretched his arms. His jacket rode up, and Hanlon caught a glimpse of his washboard stomach and a trim line of hair descending southwards from his navel into the very white waistband of his Armani under- wear. She could see that some women might find him very attractive.

  ‘Nothing like a bit of action to get the adrenaline going,’ he said. ‘Eh, Gallagher.’

  Now she did smile, albeit ruefully. ‘That’s what they say.’ ‘Right, well, I’d better go and sort that kitchen out,’ said

  Michaels. She looked surprised. ‘Don’t you have cleaners?’ she said.

  ‘Not in a kitchen, are you mad?’ Michaels grinned and shook his head. ‘No, we get all the excitement, us chefs. Cooking, cleaning, it’s a fun-packed world. Shall I see you this evening?’

  Hanlon nodded. ‘Yes. See you tonight,’ she said.

  She watched as Michaels disappeared back the way they had come.

  Fuller was obviously not quite the man of the people he liked to portray himself as, and, if Michaels was to be believed, dangerous to women.

  She drank her beer thoughtfully.

  11

  Laura logged off Outlook Express, with a well-deserved feeling of satisfaction. She had confirmed the lecture hall, she had double-checked that the JCR dining room would be reset for the buffet meal at half past eight and she had confirmed that Dr Gideon Fuller would indeed be giving, in person, the second of the two lectures, on Nietzsche, the controversial German philosopher.

  Fuller was an acknowledged Nietzsche expert. She thought about Fuller for a moment. She’d met him once and been highly impressed. She found him very attractive. Despite his good looks there was something haunting in his eyes, a hint of danger that hung over him like a dark perfume. She wondered what she would do if he made a pass at her; she rather hoped he would.

  She ticked the last item on her to-do list. Laura was a big believer in lists.

  She stood up, stretched and studied her reflection in the antique mirror that was said to have belonged to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Laura doubted this. Wittgenstein was surely more of a Cambridge philosopher, but it was a nice story and it could have happened. If it had, it would be strange to think of the tormented Viennese philosopher being reflected in its polished surface just as she was now.

  Laura had long, dark hair and a slim figure, and to her own eyes she looked about fourteen rather than the sexy under- graduate she aspired to be. Only her mouth, full and sensuous, matched her dreams.
That and her neck, long and elegant. She took her glasses off and peered at the mirror. She grinned goofily at herself and made her eyes go crossed. Oh, it was hopeless. She may as well face it: people were going to spend the next few years, as they had the last few years, saying she looked really sweet.

  It’ll be written on my grave, she thought. Here lies Laura, she was really sweet.

  I don’t want to be really sweet, thought Laura. I want to be sophisticated and elegant. Oh well.

  She kicked off her shoes, lay down on her narrow bed and picked up her copy of Twilight of the Idols.

  12

  Laura was not the only person with Nietzsche in mind. Thou goest to woman, do not forget to take thy whip! His pen circled the passage in Thus Spake Zarathustra, as memory called up the beautiful face, the intelligent, wide eyes. There would be no need of a hood when they met again at the college.

  This time he wanted to see her face as she went, as she slipped away into darkness. Hannah was simply not the kind of person you would want to see die. In life she’d been clumsy, gauche. As he choked her, she would probably have looked off-putting.

  That wouldn’t be the case with his next encounter. She was beautiful, vital. She had a great body and he couldn’t wait to see her wide, generous mouth, the full lips parting sensuously, the tip of her tongue provocatively visible, as she breathed her last.

  Revenge, he thought, revenge.

  They say it is a dish best eaten cold.

  He also knew the secret of Wittgenstein’s mirror. Soon it would have something truly remarkable to reflect.

  He didn’t know that much about Wittgenstein, his ideas were a bit too mathematical, but he did know the famous quote, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

  Soon, witness and victim, mirror and woman, would prove the truth of this dictum.

  He knew the college well. There were few premier-league colleges in Oxford that he hadn’t worked in at one time or another. He even knew the room intimately. It couldn’t have been better chosen, if he’d done it himself. It was perfect for the purpose.

  All would go according to plan. The music for their final meeting had been selected. ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).’ The song was particularly apposite; her death would indeed make him feel mighty real.

  The long, delicate fingers underlined another passage by the German philosopher. To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. He felt he knew a great deal about suffering.

  Now it would be someone else’s turn.

  13

  Hanlon met Enver at his new office in Euston. The area was still menacingly sleazy. The enormous red-brick building of the British Library with its windswept, rain-drenched piazza, where litter blew like tumbleweed in a Western, made Hanlon almost nostalgic for the old days. She could remember the giant gasworks that used to be there, the gasometers rising out of the ground like enormous, circular, filigreed napkin rings designed for a race of giants. It was round here that the then DPP had been nicked years ago, for picking up prostitutes. That the Director of Public Prosecutions should be using prostitutes was no real surprise, but a King’s Cross prostitute? The area by the gasworks was a kind of elephants’ graveyard for clapped-out whores, famously dreadful. There had been a piece of prominent graffiti on a wall after the event, The DPP kerb crawled here. Maybe, thought Hanlon, they could put a blue plaque up in his honour.

  Enver had a space in a quiet corner of the station. To Hanlon’s eyes his desk was irritatingly cluttered. He bustled around and fetched her a cup of coffee, which she sniffed suspiciously. It had that over-stewed scent of filter coffee which has been hanging around too long. It smelled horrible.

  Enver looked content in his new job. Hanlon thought he could never be described as happy; he was a worrier by nature.

  He worried about case details, leaks to the press, his mobile phone being hacked, and he was always concerned about his weight, although he never seemed to do anything about it.

  It was a common problem with ex-athletes, she thought, particularly boxers who have to make a certain weight. Once they stop they tend to go the other way.

  He was looking quite trim today, she noted, his good- looking, sad face brightening at the sight of her. His very dark hair was sleek and glossy. Thank God for that, she thought. It was bad enough him obsessing about his stomach without adding a baldness crisis to the equation.

  Briefly, succinctly, Hanlon ran through what she’d learned about Fuller, both in person and from the other students and Iris Campion.

  ‘So Dr Fuller enjoys pretending to strangle women, enjoys hurting them, basically,’ said Enver.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hanlon. ‘We’re unusually privileged to have this kind of information, face it, Enver, most people’s sex lives are pretty mysterious. And we have it on good authority that he is not the kind of person to slip up while he’s doing it, he’s had plenty of practice. So if it was Fuller then it was murder, not some sex game gone wrong. It’s not like it was some kind of first-time mistake.’

  Enver nodded. ‘I looked into the story about the girl, his former student, the one who killed herself, or was killed by Fuller in some sort of S&M game. Abigail Vickery,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  Enver scratched his heavy moustache. His sleeves were rolled up and Hanlon could see the powerful muscles in his forearm move as he did so. Promotion definitely suited him, she decided. As a sergeant, he’d been depressed-looking, the problem, maybe, of responsibility without power. Now he seemed more confident, easier in his own skin. The trouble with Enver, she thought, was that he was a very decent man who cared a bit too much. Now he had a lot more latitude in the way he operated. Corrigan would see to that. To the politically minded assistant commissioner, having a photogenic non- European, particularly of Turkish origin, in a senior position was a godsend. It would play well with the gallery and in North London, with a Turkish community of an estimated four hundred thousand, Enver was worth his weight in gold. He’ll go far, she suddenly realized. Not like me. I’m too untrustworthy.

  I wouldn’t promote me any further than I am now, she thought.

  ‘It’s maddeningly inconclusive,’ he said. ‘Murray had me check further. She’d been treated for depression’, he flicked through his notebook, ‘with SSRIs, which are a kind of drug they use for that sort of thing. It’s quite a controversial treatment, seemingly. Anyway, she’d made a previous suicide attempt, there was a history of mental illness. The coroner put it down as an open verdict, I guess maybe to spare the family, but it was a good verdict. She was found hanging from a doorknob. Could have been a sex game, could have been suicide.’

  He drank a mouthful of the revolting coffee, not seeming to mind the taste. ‘It was only later that stories started to sur- face about Fuller and the girl. He told a colleague they were kindred spirits.’

  He shrugged helplessly. His mournful brown eyes reminded Hanlon of a seal.

  ‘Hannah’s Facebook entry said she was having a relationship with a married man and a married woman,’ said Enver. ‘Do you think Fuller was that person? Wouldn’t she have been more specific?’

  Hanlon shrugged. My turn now, she thought.

  Her face, decided Enver, had become even more mask-like since the last time they’d worked together. He was having trouble getting used to Hanlon’s stylishly cut hair. Previously it had no attention lavished on it whatsoever. Enver, who much to his own irritation, was deeply obsessed with her, was busy wondering if she had done it to please another. He could see that the idea was slightly crazy, that Hanlon would do such a thing seemed out of character, but Enver was jealous; it was that simple, and he couldn’t hide it from himself. Perhaps he should try following her. He’d done it before, disastrously. He smiled at the memory.

  ‘Stop grinning like an idiot,’ said Hanlon, annoyed. ‘Sorry, ma’am,’ apologized Enver, slightly slavishly. He liked it when Hanlon was cross – the pugnacious cast to her jaw, the angry look in her eye,
the way her hair seemed to bristle. Anger suited her.

  ‘Hannah Moore wanted people to read her blog, Enver,’ said Hanlon. ‘She wasn’t necessarily telling the truth. Yes, she was having a relationship with someone and yes, it does look as if it contained an S&M dimension and yes, that is Fuller’s thing. The removal of her underwear, presumably as some sort of souvenir or memento or trophy, is also linked to Fuller, but all of this is circumstantial.’

  She pushed the coffee away from her so she didn’t have to smell it.

  ‘Fuller is not married any more,’ she said. ‘That lasted a couple of years and finished five years ago. He was working in the USA at the time, Harvard, so it could have simply been a visa thing, to get green-carded, who knows. But Hannah might not have known that the marriage had ended. Having a wife is a useful excuse for men who have no wish to take a relationship beyond the bedroom.’ She made a gesture of dismissal. ‘It could mean nothing, it could mean a lot, we don’t know. Remember, we do have a married woman classmate of hers certainly strong enough to do it, and with a reputation for being sexually liberal.’

  Enver looked startled. ‘We hadn’t thought about that,’ he said. ‘Do you think she was. . .’ He searched for a suitable word. Hanlon rolled her eyes. ‘Polysexual,’ she said, ‘or poly- amorous, that covers wider ground, possibly. You shouldn’t

  be so cut and dried in these things.’

  Enver shifted in his seat. He was old-fashioned and disliked talking about sex, particularly with a woman.

  Hanlon was thinking of what Michaels had told her about Jessica McIntyre. ‘Have you checked the alibis of her other classmates?’

  Enver shook his head. ‘It didn’t seem relevant at the time.’ ‘I would,’ said Hanlon, ‘particularly Jessica McIntyre.’ Enver raised an interrogative eyebrow and she briefly explained why. ‘Do you know if Fuller gets off on music?’ asked Enver unexpectedly.