by Alex Howard
She’d seen pictures of his father leaving court thirty years ago. He had been a bit of a ladies’ man. He’d looked like a seventies’ footballer, leather bomber jacket, big-collared shirt, sideburns and tight, flared trousers with zip-up ankle boots. He’d have worn Brut and driven a souped-up Ford Capri.
Dave Anderson made no such concessions to the fairer sex or ‘the ladies, God bless ’em’, as his dad would have put it. He was just violence in human form, dangerous and highly intelligent.
They sat in a room at the back of the small pub, a poolroom with two tables, the baize scuffed and stained. His personal worth, as they say in Rich List terms, must have been several million but financial success, thought Hanlon sardonically, hadn’t changed him. He was still the man who’d nailed someone to a door, the kind of man who would methodically torture you then knock your teeth out with a brick for fun, the kind of man whose only publicized regret, in a particularly brutal killing, was that the victim had died far too soon.
‘Hello, DCI Hanlon,’ he said.
Hanlon nodded politely. Very few people could have known about her promotion. It was Anderson’s way of letting her know how powerful he was; his way of telling her he had an informant in the force. She had expected nothing less. You’d always find a bent copper somewhere or other. They’re like rats; you’re never less than a few feet away from one. She looked around her, making the usual, careful inventory of her surroundings.
The back bar room they were in had no natural light, no windows, and was dimly lit by cheap imitation-candle wall fittings, with dirty, brown shades. Most of the fittings were crooked and the wallpaper old and nicotine-stained. It had been there for years. Some of the marks on the green of the pool-table baize looked suspiciously like blood. She guessed it was in here that Anderson would mete out punishments.
It looked that sort of place.
There was a strong element of theatricality in Anderson’s brutality, thought Hanlon. If you were brought in here against your will, just his reputation would suffice. And this room was like a stage set. It looked like the kind of place where a London hard man would kick you to death. Just looking around would lower anyone’s spirits.
Anything in here would look like an instrument of torture or death, from the stained pool table, to the small plumber’s blowtorch standing on the end of the bar next to a pair of pliers. In a workman’s toolbox, pliers were an innocent, useful device, but with Anderson, pliers conjured up images of teeth, nipples, genitalia, any soft tissue, in their metal jaws.
Even the pool balls ceased to look innocent and more like something useful to be stuffed inside a sock and used as a makeshift club.
‘Mr Anderson would like a word.’ Not what you would want breathed into your shell-like.
Anderson indicated a table with two chairs. She’d forgotten how big his hands were. They sat down and he offered her a drink. She declined with a shake of the head. One of Anderson’s employees stood attentively behind the chair that he was sitting on, like a large, none-too-bright Alsatian, at his master’s heel.
‘So, what did you want to talk about?’ asked Anderson. He had immediately agreed to see Hanlon. She intrigued him, maybe not least because she was one of the very few people he’d ever met who wasn’t afraid of him. Others in that category had been either criminally insane or unbelievably stupid. He didn’t wonder at all how she got her black eye. Such things were commonplace in his world.
‘A specialist S&M brothel in Oxford. It’ll be centrally located off St Giles, I’d guess off the Banbury or Woodstock Road,’ she said.
He smiled, or rather his mouth did. ‘It’s a bit off my manor.’
‘I realize that. But Iris Campion would know, wouldn’t she.’
Anderson laughed. ‘Soho Iris. You move in peculiar circles, DCI Hanlon.’ He turned to the bodyguard behind him. ‘Danny, go and tell my dad I’ve got a copper here asking about Soho Iris. That’ll give him a laugh.’
Danny gave Hanlon a warning glance, as if to say don’t you dare do anything while I’m gone, although quite what he had in mind she couldn’t begin to imagine. He turned and left the room.
‘So how’s your sergeant then, the one that was in a coma?’
‘Still in a coma,’ Hanlon replied. Then she asked, ‘And your dad?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Still dying.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Busy planning his funeral. It’s going to be huge. He’s working out seating arrangements now. For the meal afterwards. People get very touchy about things like that. He was always good at planning, Dad. He never felt he got the credit he deserved for his jobs. He was always Mad Malc, oh fuck, it’s Malcy with a sawn-off, Malcy’ll break your legs, but I tell you something for nothing. Seventeen armoured vans before he got caught, he was the brains and it was only because he was grassed up by that Maltese Alex, that he ever did serious time.’
Nothing like a stroll down memory lane, thought Hanlon. Happy days, blags, the Sweeney, armoured cars, shooters. Dave Anderson would have been a baby when all this was going on. She knew the names only from old-timers she’d worked with. DCI Tremayne would have recognized the name. She’d been thinking a lot about him of late.
‘Disappeared didn’t he, Maltese Alex,’ said Hanlon.
‘Did you know that Edmonton incinerator’s chimney is a hundred metres high,’ said Anderson elliptically. ‘They started it up in 1971. Lot of things have been burned there over the years. Gone up in smoke. Cremated.’ The two of them contemplated Maltese Alex’s demise, his dust particles scattered to the North London winds. ‘He wasn’t even Maltese, you know, he was from fucking Pinner.’ He shook his head in contempt. ‘What a tosser,’ he added with real scorn.
Danny appeared at the door. ‘He wants to come down, boss.’
Anderson rolled his eyes and stood up. ‘He won’t have a stair lift put in. He says it’s for old people. I’ll be back in a minute.’
A short while later he reappeared, carrying his father in his arms, as you would a child. He didn’t look much heavier than one now. The old man had one arm around his son’s neck. Hanlon guessed the skeletal Malcolm Anderson would weigh in now at under six stone. Danny was behind with a small oxygen tank and, with a free hand, pulled an old armchair forward that was in the corner. Dave Anderson settled his father down in it. The old man gestured for the oxygen and put the ends of the clips from the tubing connected to the cylinder in his nose. He closed his eyes and breathed as deeply as he could.
His skin was waxy, translucent, and his breathing was laboured from the cancer. He’d had one lung removed and the other was barely functioning. His pupils were dilated from opiates, but his eyes still had the same angry look as his son’s.
Hanlon had stood up out of respect. Now the old man indicated she should sit down. She waited until he’d caught his breath. Malcolm Anderson looked at her appreciatively and spoke. ‘Always a pleasure when David brings a nice girl home.’ He gave a kind of wheezing laugh. ‘And I hear you’ve got a steady job too.’
Hanlon found herself grudgingly drawn to the terminally ill old criminal, who could still keep a sense of humour in the face of death, now only kissing distance away. Grace under pressure.
‘It’s only our second date. Don’t get your hopes up,’ said Hanlon.
Malcolm Anderson smiled and grimaced, as a wave of pain struck him. He adjusted something on a belt around his waist. Hanlon guessed it was a pump for morphine.
‘So, tell me about Iris, I haven’t seen her for ages.’ His voice was little louder than a whisper.
Hanlon told him about the brothel without mentioning Fuller. He was particularly amused by her description of Iris’s maid.
He closed his eyes and fell silent. ‘I knew her before, before you know.’ He brushed one sunken cheek with his fingertips, miming a cutting action. ‘Razor Lewis, he was called. Obvious reasons really. I was glad I killed that cunt for her.’ He gave a wheezy, faint laugh. ‘I can say that now, no one’s going to nick me. I’ve done a few things I
regret now, too late of course, but not that. Razor Lewis, that takes me back.’ He closed his eyes momentarily and a smile both wistful and ominous played over his lips. For a second Hanlon could imagine him as he was before the illness.
He opened his eyes and now they were hard and unforgiving. ‘I hated that bloke. He was so fucking...’ he paused, searching for the right word, ‘uncouth.’
His eyes closed again. ‘You go and see her, see Iris. Tell her I told you she’d help. Give her my love, darling.’ He hissed to himself from the pain. ‘Up we go, David.’
Gently, Dave Anderson lifted his father up, much as he in his turn had been carried up the same stairs as a sleepy child by his dad years ago.
The door closed behind them and Hanlon stood up. ‘Say thank you to your boss,’ she said to Danny. She looked round the empty pool room. The impassive Danny, hands folded in front of him, stood quietly in a corner. He nodded and watched Hanlon leave the back bar.
Out in the street the kids were gone and her Audi was unscathed. She got in and drove slowly home through the North London streets.
Hanlon thought to herself, that’s the first time anyone has called me darling in a very long time.
24
Sunday morning and the City, London’s financial square mile, was practically empty. It always felt strange to her, the eerie silence that enveloped the district at weekends, like being in a zombie film or some post-apocalyptic disaster movie.
Hanlon rode through the deserted streets on her Fuji triathlon bike, enjoying the freedom and the absence of traffic. Tomorrow, Monday, three hundred thousand workers would be decanted into the area. Today, on a Sunday, there’d be fewer than seven thousand and most of those would be invisible. Weekends were a great time to cycle around the City, particularly a Sunday, when she had no training to be done. Sunday was a rest day and she limited herself to light exercise, like cycling around just for fun. Sometimes she just liked to enjoy her body for a change.
She ate breakfast at a café, chewing her way without enthusiasm through an omelette, and returned home. She felt restless and irritable. The following day she’d decided to go and see Campion at the brothel.
Fuller was preying on her mind.
She couldn’t work out if he was a killer or if, as he claimed, someone else was doing the crimes and framing him. DI Huss, however, had irritatingly put the problem very well. If Fuller was the killer, he was still at large and if anyone else died they were going to look increasingly negligent. The press would certainly have a field day. She could almost see the headlines now.
Why was this man free to kill again?
Incompetent cops bungle investigation.
The real Dr Evil.
She was mildly surprised that there had been nothing yet in the papers, almost certainly because the second murder had happened down in Oxford and no connection had yet been made.
In one of his last classes she’d been to, Fuller had touched on Utilitarianism, the theory that you can measure if something’s good by its impact on society. On that basis, they should put Fuller behind bars immediately for the public good. If he was guilty, the murders would stop, because he could no longer commit them. If someone were trying to frame him, the murders would have to stop too.
When she found the brothel in Oxford that she was sure Fuller had attended, she could maybe get confirmation one way or another. They’d never be able to use it in court, but it’d help clarify her mind. She knew that this was a very arrogant way of looking at things, but she was getting increasingly disillusioned with the police force. She decided that if her superiors discovered what she was up to and tried to discipline her, then she would resign. She would resign very publicly too.
Hanlon had never sold information or stories to the press; she despised them. But she did know several journalists she had a grudging respect for and she was sure they would leap at the opportunity to publish any Hanlon-led revelation. And she did know a lot of dirt.
She looked around her one-room apartment for inspiration as to what to do with her day. Hanlon was terrible at killing time. In truth, work was her drug. Her boss, Corrigan, had once wondered to himself what motivated Hanlon. The answer was simple. It was work. It gave her something interesting to do. It filled time. She didn’t have the kind of distractions that most people have. She didn’t have any friends to see, any real hobbies other than triathlon, if that could be called a hobby, and today was supposed to be a rest day. The triathlon was more a way of mortifying the flesh than a desire for sporting achievement. Six days a week she worked her body till it screamed in pain, Sundays she deliberately did nothing, to let it recover. It was the hardest part of her training.
She had no TV. Television annoyed her, as did film and music. In fact, most things annoyed Hanlon. She could have gone out for lunch, but eating was not done for fun. In truth restaurants slightly sickened her. She particularly disliked the elevation of food to a quasi-religious experience with its own hagiography, its own priesthood and its own liturgy. It had got seriously out of hand, in her opinion. Even the process of eating, moving food around in her mouth, she found faintly disgusting.
She had a book to finish on the Spanish Civil War but didn’t feel like it at the moment. It was hard to work out who was what, through the thick forests of acronyms – the POUM, the CNT-FAI, the UGT, the PSUC, it was bewildering. The book was, however, one of the few things in her flat to read; the picture on the wall, a signed black-and-white photo of the German artist Joseph Beuys, the only thing to look at.
The only link to a father she never knew.
Art was one of the few things she did enjoy and she was surprisingly knowledgeable about it. When she was young, a man had come to the house where she lived with her adoptive parents and left the photo, signed and framed, of the artist sitting in a corner of his studio wearing work boots, jeans and his trademark fisherman’s vest. Under the brim of his hat, Beuys looked sad and slightly worried. His eyes had a haunted look. Her adoptive parents had told her that the photo had belonged to her father and that she should have it. It was the only thing of his that she owned.
She unrolled her futon mattress and lay on it, staring at the ceiling. She ought to be visiting Whiteside’s parents to try to talk them out of their decision, but she feared her temper. There were times when she envied Anderson’s freedom of action. He would have made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. But Hanlon knew she could never physically assault a couple in their sixties. That being the case, there was no point threatening them. Like Anderson, Hanlon didn’t make threats. Their method was to point out to the other person the consequences of non-obedience.
It was then up to that person to choose their fate.
For lack of anything better to do, she took her phone out and texted Dame Elizabeth to see if they were still OK for their meeting.
Dame Elizabeth responded almost immediately in the affirmative, seven p.m., then she added casually: I think I might be able to tell you something about your father, if you’re interested.
Hanlon stared in disbelief at the screen. She read the message again to make sure there was no confusion on her part, that she hadn’t somehow misunderstood.
...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 d
id 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.