by Alex Coombs
. . . if you’re interested.
Well, that would be a classic understatement.
All her conscious life, since she could remember, she’d wanted to know more about the man whose surname she bore and, paradoxically, almost just as strong was the desire not to know. Everyone else knew where they came from it seemed, but she did not. She had no parents, no siblings, no family. Nothing.
Sometimes this was a thing of pride, sometimes a source of unhappiness.
Then again, she was honest enough to realize that she almost certainly could have found out if she’d so chosen. There would be public records to consult, established procedures for this kind of thing, existing protocols. She could even have used police resources, blind eyes would have been turned, and lastly she could have utilized the network of people who owed her favours, or simply did her bidding.
She’d done none of those things. She wondered if at the back of this lay cowardice. The worry that she might discover some highly unpalatable truth about her parentage. What if her father had turned out to be a rapist, a worthless junkie, insane? She already knew she had a mother crazed enough to commit suicide, that much her adoptive parents had told her.
Even worse maybe, depressingly normal. An accounts clerk with hairy ears and a cardigan.
She’d turned her back on her past, but now the past had risen to claim her. As Dame Elizabeth had found out, you can ignore the truth but it won’t go away.
‘Fine,’ replied Hanlon, tapping the word in. She lay back down on the mattress. Her grey eyes for once lacked their usual angry certainty. Tonight would be the first time in her life that anybody had told her anything about her father.
If I’m interested, of course, she thought.
25
DCI Hanlon was not the only person with family on their mind. Fuller too lay on his bed, a bottle of vodka on the table beside it, thinking about the past. He’d got to Oxford like Laura, but by a very different route.
He was sixteen when he did his A levels, nearly two years younger than everyone else in his class. Big’s career at the BBC had crashed and burned. Uncle Phil, steadily climbing the corporate ladder, had ditched her for younger meat.
Big was axed from TV. She’d been judged by the Corporation as too old and unattractive to be in the public eye. The flat in central London was now gone and Monica Fuller spent most of her days and nights drowning her sorrows at The Queen’s Head pub round the corner from their new flat in Acton, in a far from glamorous part of West London. She told the regulars that she was involved in community dance projects. They didn’t care. Nobody who drank there cared about anything any more. To be a regular at the Queen’s was to be a card-carrying failure. It was a truly terrible pub.
Gideon Fuller’s academic career was beginning to unfurl like a triumphant banner.
When they left central London, he had left the private school where he’d been a scholarship student and had wound up at the local comprehensive. Learning moved at a more sedate pace there. Fuller, through a mix of streaming, and a headmaster worried that the new kid whose public-school accent marked him out so dramatically might come to an unpleasant end, was fast-tracked.
Fuller, lost in unhappy memories of the past, poured himself another vodka. He picked away at the recollections of the past like a scab. His eyes narrowed. He was remembering his last day at home. His ability to recall events was amazingly good. He must have relived this event thousands of times. His free hand held Vulture gently. Vulture had been there too.
It must have been in August, twenty years ago. The results had come in the post, which would have been nine thirty a.m. There were two letters, one for him, one for Big, as he had come to think of her.
He remembered holding the envelope that contained the key to his future. He knew he had done well, but how well remained to be seen. He had opened the buff envelope with his name on, four grade As. If he passed the Oxford University entrance exam which he was signed up for in the autumn (and he knew he would – fish swim, birds fly, I pass exams, thought Gideon), he’d be in and away from all this mess. That was the expression he used to himself, mess. Gideon never swore. He didn’t want to be like Big, with her foul mouth, and he would never drink for the same reason.
He showed Vulture his results. Vulture was delighted for him. He waggled his neck and his beak jumped up and down with excitement. Gideon felt a surge of happiness. It was an unusual feeling and one he had learned to associate with achievement, with things, not people.
Things make you happy; people just hurt you. It was an axiom.
In the present day, his phone started ringing. Fuller ignored it. He was reliving his past in every excruciating detail. His memories were startlingly vivid and detailed.
As if on cue, Monica Fuller’s bedroom door had opened. ‘Morning, Mum,’ he said. His mother gave him a look of
angry disgust.
‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ she demanded. Big was still drunk from the night before, but only too aware of how bedraggled she was looking. She’d slept in the clothes she’d been wearing and a residual smell of The Queen’s Head, the ghost of Christmas Past, lingered on the fabric. She noticed Gideon wrinkle his nose slightly and a wave of anger against her prissy, goody-goody son surged through her. Who did he think he was to judge her, the little bastard. She badly wanted to hurt him. Let him share her pain. Do you think it’s fun being me, she thought, does it look like I’m having a laugh? She took a cigarette from the packet on the table and lit one. She knew he hated smoking.
She snatched the letter from him, holding it at arm’s length so she could focus, one eye half closed against the smoke rising from the cigarette in her mouth, and read through it. Well, no joy there. Her lips curled. Academic results, big deal, what use are they in the real world?
She opened the other letter. It was from his drama and dance teacher at the stage academy Big sent him to. It was disastrous, an unambiguous demolition of Big’s hopes to see Gideon in the West End. It might as well have said, Two Left Feet and can’t act. She knew, deep down, that he was not cut out for life as an actor but she was unwilling to let go of her dreams. There was no place in life for her as an academic’s mother. There was, however, a role for her as a stage mother; indeed she might build a second career on its back. She could be an agent or maybe get a choreographic role. She knew he could act, she knew he could dance, it was in his genes. He’d just chosen not to. She was furious, and still very drunk.
‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘And after all the sacrifices I made for you. You ungrateful little bastard.’
Gideon stared at the floor in misery. ‘You didn’t even try, did you?’
‘I promise I’ll learn to dance, Mummy. I’ll make you proud of me.’ He wasn’t sixteen any more. He was ten. His mother snorted in derision. Vulture was still sitting on the kitchen table. Big’s eyes alighted on it.
‘God, you’ve still got that horrible thing,’ she said, picking Vulture up.
‘Give him to me,’ said Gideon. Big laughed, gratified by his obvious distress. Got your attention now, haven’t I? she thought. It felt good.
‘Playing with toys at your age, you little poof,’ she said.
Then it happened. She took her cigarette out of her mouth and stubbed it out in Vulture’s left eye. There was a hiss, a plume of thin smoke and a smell of burning rubber.
‘Give him to me,’ repeated Gideon.
If Big hadn’t still been half-cut from her three a.m. session she would have noticed the change in his voice. Big sneered. She had noticed there was a deep cut in the rubber where the wing of the bird joined the body. With one brutal, downward motion, she tore the wing off the bird and threw Vulture out through the open kitchen window of the second-floor flat. The wing followed.
She turned to look at her son in triumph and was sent flying, as Gideon’s open palm slammed into her cheek. Her glasses flew off and Gideon stamped on them as if he was crushing a venomous insect. He looked at her cowering from
him. His hand hurt; God knows what her cheek must have felt like. He felt the triumph spreading through his body as he saw her pain.
Big was no coward, nor was she a stranger to being knocked around by men, but this unexpected attack seemed to paralyse her. She steadied herself on the table and Gideon slapped her again. It felt even better. Big whimpered. He liked that. In fact, it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.
Then he grabbed hold of her throat with his right hand and squeezed. Now he could see the pain and terror in her eyes. How do you like it? he thought. Sixteen years I’ve had of this, you drunk old bitch. Now it’s payback time.
He increased the pressure on her throat and her bloodshot, slightly yellow eyes bulged. If I keep going, thought Gideon, she’ll die. It was a tempting thought. He pushed her away roughly and his mother staggered across the kitchen.
‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out. When you come back I’ll be gone and don’t even think of looking for me.’
‘Fine,’ hissed his mother. ‘That’s just fine by me.’ And with as much dignity as she could muster, she left the flat in her stockinged feet.
It wasn’t the first time she had done the walk of shame, but usually, of course, it was homeward bound. Ten a.m, walking to the pub through the streets of Acton, half-dressed and without shoes or money was a first. As she rounded the corner her nose started bleeding. A woman passer-by stared at her in a concerned way.
‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ snarled Monica.
Gideon packed a sports bag with his best second-hand clothes. It didn’t take long. Then he picked up his school ruck- sack, much heavier. He’d need that. He closed the door of the flat behind him and went down the stairs, then out of the rear door to the service road where he found Vulture lying on the tarmac. His sightless eye was a puckered socket, but the good one still looked at Gideon with unstinting affection.
Gideon picked him up, kissed him and said, ‘I’ll make sure nothing bad happens to you again.’ He couldn’t see Vulture’s wing anywhere. He put the bird inside his shirt and walked off to the Tube station. He had nowhere to go.
The first night he climbed over the railings into Holland Park in central London, near Notting Hill, and slept under a bush. He was woken up at seven a.m. by an angry parks employee and told never to be found there again. The second night found him on Hampstead Heath. He was cold, shivering and very hungry. A man came up to him and asked if he was OK. Fine, said Gideon. Do you want to come home with me, said the man. Gideon nodded.
He knew there would be a price to pay, but it would be worth it.
The first time the pain was intense, agonizing, but he got used to it and it was better than being at home.
Anything was.
In October he passed his entrance exam to Oxford.
He was on his way.
26
DI Huss looked at the crime-scene photos from the Jessica McIntyre murder with increasing puzzlement and irritation. She’d been infuriated by Hanlon’s sceptical attitude at first, but was growing more and more uncomfortable with some of the points she’d raised, both directly and indirectly.
She had tried ignoring Hanlon’s objections, but she was too honest and too good a policewoman to succeed. She would have to deal with them somehow; she couldn’t sweep them under the carpet.
Could Fuller’s room have been accessed after his arrest? The brutal answer was yes, it could. The discovery of McIntyre’s underwear after the room had been searched once was worrying. It could have been planted. It was certainly what any defence lawyer would argue. So the admissibility of the underwear as evidence was highly problematic.
Then there was this other problem. There were two doors to the room where Jessica’s body had been found: the heavy outside one, the ‘oak’ as they called it, and the internal one. She looked at Laura’s statement again.
The outside door had been locked, as had the inside one. But the inside one had a Yale lock, you could just pull it closed. The oak door had an old-fashioned mortice key. And there was the key, clearly photographed by forensics, lying on the desk in front of the window. How had the killer locked the door, from the outside, and made the key appear back inside the room?
She hunted for Laura’s mobile number and called her. Per- haps the girl could help.
Half an hour later she was in the Junior Common Room with the absurdly young-looking philosophy student.
‘It was so strange,’ the girl said to Melinda Huss. ‘I thought it was a joke at first, well, momentarily anyway.’ She would make a great witness, thought DI Huss. Laura’s replies to questions were measured and thought out; she considered her words before she spoke. She was utterly credible. ‘Then it was more like something from a horror film, those bruises around her neck.’ She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes large and serious behind the severe frames of her glasses. ‘I haven’t been back in the room since. Well, obviously. I don’t think I really want to. Do we have to go back right now?’
Huss shook her head. ‘No, Laura, no, we don’t, but if you would I’d be very grateful. A couple of things don’t really add up.’ Laura stood up. She really was remarkably small, thought DI Huss, who rose too, feeling large and lumbering by contrast.
She put a determined face on.
‘Oh well, DI Huss, maybe no time like the present.’
The two women walked together round the cloisters that surrounded the quad and then stopped outside the staircase. The college was projecting its usual aura of deep calm. It was hard to imagine a more unlikely setting for a murder. To Huss, her surroundings radiated an almost tangible sense of privilege. Huss, despite her reasonably privileged background on a large, commercially successful farm twenty miles from Oxford, felt the familiar stab of resentment that the non-student population of Oxford usually feel towards the student body. It was the Hooray Henry mentality. The percentage of students who belonged to the Bullingdon Club was statistically negligible, but they cast a very long shadow indeed. Privilege rather than ability was suggested by the Oxford brand.
The university students all seemed so smug, although she exempted Laura from this.
They stopped outside the staircase and Laura’s fingers pushed at the mortar between the honey-coloured bricks. She worked a small fragment of cement loose and looked at it critically.
‘It needs repointing,’ she said to Huss. ‘Sorry, Dad’s a builder.
I was brought up to notice these things.’
Huss felt a stab of contrition. She had written Laura off as the by-product of privilege. It hadn’t occurred to her that her background might be one of good old-fashioned proletarian graft.
They walked up the stairs and stood in front of the heavy outside door. ‘This was closed and locked when I arrived,’ said Laura. ‘Is it OK to go in?’
‘Yes, we’re finished here,’ said Huss. Laura unlocked it with her key. ‘How many keys are there to this door?’ Huss asked. ‘Two,’ said Laura. ‘I left one for Jessica McIntyre at reception;
I had the other one. I guess they keep a master copy there too.’ They entered the room via the secondary, internal door. ‘What are the things that are troubling you?’ she asked
Huss. She shivered slightly. She didn’t know if she’d ever want to return here again.
DI Huss indicated the window desk. ‘That mortice key, or rather its twin, was found lying there on that desk. So it’s an interesting question as to how the killer left the room, other than by climbing out of the window.’
Laura raised a conspiratorial dark eyebrow. ‘It’s easy if you know how,’ she said. Huss looked puzzled. ‘Let me show you,’ Laura said.
The study walls were panelled with wood and Laura walked over to where the mirror hung. ‘Can you give me a hand to move this?’ she asked Huss.
The two women propped the mirror up against the other wall. The panel behind it had a small circular knob. Laura tugged at this and the panel, which was obviously some kind of cupboard door, opened on its hinges. The edges of th
e door were so well tailored to the panelling they were practically invisible.
We should have found this, thought Huss angrily. Which dumb ass was in charge here? For some reason she thought of Hanlon. It’s not the sort of thing Hanlon would have missed.
Inside the cupboard a rope suspended from a pulley hung down, disappearing into the depths below. ‘It’s a dumb waiter,’ said Laura. ‘This room used to be for one of the dons here; they had to live in college by university law. Anyway, this connects down to the kitchens. I think it was so that the don could get food and drink any time he wanted, otherwise he’d have been stuck with High Table in the Senior Common Room.’
Huss noticed a faint flush of embarrassment to her cheeks.
‘How do you know where it goes?’ asked Huss.
‘Well, you can fit in it, you see,’ said Laura, glowing red with shame. ‘And get lowered down and maybe, well, liberate some food and get hauled back up again.’
‘Not booze then?’ asked Huss. Laura shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, with a tinge of sadness. ‘They store that locked up in a kind of cage to keep the chefs away from it. You won’t tell the college, will you, I only did it a couple of times.’ She looked anguished.
Huss shook her head. ‘No, I’m not going to tell the college. But I will need you to make a statement and I do want you to show me where the thing comes out at the bottom in the kitchens.’
As they walked down the stairs Huss got on her phone to set the wheels turning to bring back a forensic team to examine the dumb waiter and help for interviewing all the kitchen personnel.
Fuller had been lecturing from seven o’clock that evening, but if he had threaded his way through the kitchen, he’d have blatantly stood out from the chefs in their whites or the waiting staff, who for a start, were almost all half his age. He would have stood out like a sore thumb. How on earth could he have got away without being noticed? What else have we missed? thought Huss angrily.