Cold Revenge (2015)

by Alex Howard

  He finished his coffee and caught a taxi out to Headingley where Alison Vickery lived, wondering at the comparatively empty roads and the free-flowing traffic. You had a feeling, too, with Leeds that it had a defined beginning and a defined end. Here was Leeds, here wasn’t. He was fully aware of the green belt around London and the girdle of the M25, but the city felt endless. This was different.

  It was manageable; it was explicable.

  The taxi dropped him off outside a pleasant, sizeable terraced house with a neat front garden.

  He rang the bell, the door opened, and he found himself facing a tall, attractive blonde woman in her early forties.

  ‘Hello, I’m DI Enver Demirel,’ he said. ‘I believe you’re expecting me.’

  ‘Alison Vickery. Do come in.’ Her greeting was relaxed, friendly. He had been dreading a hostile, resentful reception.

  They sat in Alison Vickery’s front room, which was comfortably and classically furnished. Enver looked around him. He got to see a strange selection of living rooms in the course of his job, everything from charity-shop/found-in-a-skip-furnished to the contemporary, a puzzling (to his eyes) mix of distressed and hard-edged minimalist, to show that the peeling paint and exposed brick was ironic, rather than born out of necessity.

  Then, of course, there were the tragic wreckages of some homes. Waste piled high, the stink of rotting food and blocked drains, the smell of shit and misery. He had once been round to a flat where an old man had died and his body had lain undiscovered for several months. There was a human-shaped stain on the fabric of an armchair where he’d seeped into the material over time. It was like the Turin shroud.

  This living room told him its owner had money and safe, predictable taste. That was fine by Enver. It was forthright, and looking at Alison Vickery, he felt she’d give him forthright answers. She wouldn’t go off on a tangent about politics or contemporary life.

  Her sofa was huge, comfortable and just the right height, so he wouldn’t need to struggle in it, thrashing around to regain his centre of equilibrium before standing up again. He was grateful for that. He strongly disliked low furniture.

  Alison Vickery had very long legs and at six foot was the same height as Enver. She had long, shapely fingers, pale blue eyes, a beaky nose and a slightly sad face in repose. Her fine hair was the colour of straw. Enver thought she was very attractive.

  They’d been looking at a succession of photos of her daughter on the high-definition flat-screen TV. Alison’s computer was hooked up to it, so it was as if Abigail was a third person in the room.

  The images came and went. In none of them did the girl look happy.

  ‘I always knew something terrible would happen to Abi,’ she said softly. ‘She was always bright but so withdrawn, so quiet.’

  Enver nodded sympathetically. He didn’t know what to say. What could you say? A photo now of a teenage, Goth-looking girl filled the screen. Black suited Abigail. She was darker skinned than her pale mother, with Mediterranean colouring. But there was no mistaking the bitter look of contempt and anger on her face.

  Enver remembered a girl he’d once gone out with, who was a film fanatic. She was always quoting a line from a film, from the fifties, about youth rebellion, when one character asks, ‘What are you rebelling against?’

  To which the reply was, ‘What have you got to offer?’

  That seemed like the kind of thought Abigail Vickery would have.

  Alison Vickery said, ‘She was always angry. But mainly at herself. It was always internalized. Her father and I are long since separated but we never got round to getting divorced.’ She looked at her daughter. ‘Maybe that was just cowardice on my part. He had a truly evil temper, and he’d take it out on others. He never internalized his anger, he’d lamp you.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘He was always getting into fights. But that’s Leeds for you, Detective Inspector, we’re supposed to be very mean, in money terms, and tough. If you get a good kicking you don’t complain.’

  ‘It’s the same where I grew up,’ said Enver. ‘Maybe it’s a class thing. You don’t involve the police. You don’t grass people up.’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ she said. They both silently contemplated the British caste system.

  She looked at her daughter again. ‘Oh, Abigail. And you had nothing really to be sad or angry about. That was the terrible thing. She had looks, brains, everything going for her. She told me once she thought she was probably crazy because she had nothing to complain about but she still felt angry.’

  ‘And she went to university and met Dr Fuller,’ said Enver, hoping to steer the conversation more in the direction of the investigation.

  ‘Yes,’ said Alison. She shifted in her seat. He noticed again her spectacular legs. He felt a stab of guilt that he found the woman he was talking to exceptionally desirable.

  ‘She had got a First in philosophy from Durham.’ She sipped her tea and sighed, ‘You’d have thought that would have helped. I think,’ she frowned and corrected herself, ‘no, I know, she did philosophy to try and make sense of the world as she saw it. But of course it didn’t help. If you’re born that way, that’s the way you are, I think. When she got her First, I was so pleased, so proud. She was furious, and depressed.’ She shook her head. ‘Crazy, isn’t it? Can you imagine that? I go to people’s houses and they have graduation photos of their children on the wall, holding their degrees in their robes. They all look pleased as Punch. Why wouldn’t they? Not Abi.’ She drank some more tea. ‘I knew she’d got a First because I found a scrunched-up letter from the uni in the bin. Anyone would have thought they’d tried to insult her.’

  Her eyes filled with tears suddenly and she fished a tissue out of her sleeve. Enver started to say something, but she blinked back the tears and shook her head to indicate she’d be fine. ‘She’d come down to get coffee about twelve, lunchtime, just holed herself up in her room. I remember wishing – this is going to sound crazy – that she’d been on drugs. That way I’d have had something to blame.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘But no, it was all her, she was naturally fucked up. She didn’t need drugs or booze.’ She looked sadly at the TV screen.

  ‘So, she was mooning about the house, not this one, a different one. Still in Leeds. I was doing well financially. I run a software company. Anyway, I said, why don’t you do a Ph.D., here at the uni. I can afford it. It’s well-regarded. I thought she might make some new friends.’ She laughed bitterly. ‘In a sense she did.’

  ‘Fuller?’

  Alison nodded. ‘I knew they were having an affair. It wasn’t maternal instinct or anything. She told me. In John Lewis of all places. In soft furnishings.’

  ‘It is a good shop,’ said Enver solemnly. ‘Never knowingly undersold.’

  Alison gave him an exasperated look. It reminded him of Hanlon somehow. I never say the right thing, he thought. I’m useless with women. ‘Anyway, that’s how I knew. I met him a couple of times. I thought, well, if he makes her happy, who am I to judge?’

  ‘And what did you make of him?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He was what you’d imagine a lecturer to look like. Unremarkable. Boden lite.’

  Enver nodded. ‘And when...’ He didn’t really know how to finish the sentence. Alison did it for him.

  ‘And when she died, no, I didn’t blame him. I don’t think he’s a murderer, not unless he’s very good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes. A master of deceit. Her dad – my ex – did, still does, almost certainly. He was convinced. He’s sure Fuller killed her. But then again, Steve’s as mad as a hatter. And he likes being angry. Me, I think it was suicide. When my dad was ill with cancer, in a lot of pain, he more or less turned his face to the wall. He wanted to die. Life had nothing left for him.

  ‘I don’t think Abigail was murdered. I think she just found being alive too painful. That’s what I think. I think she just turned her face to the wall.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Enver. Well, he thought, that’s two people,
her and Hanlon, convinced of Fuller’s innocence.

  As for himself, he wasn’t so sure. A master of deceit. Could that describe Fuller? It sounded horribly possible.

  Hanlon’s case seemed to rest on the testimony of a Russian gangster, who thought he was going to lose his genitals and was quite likely to say anything he thought she might want to hear, and the fact that Fuller had come up with some sort of insane defence after he’d unsuccessfully tried to rape her. He began to wonder if Fuller might not be able to get away with anything. He seemed to have a strange knack of convincing people of his innocence in the most unlikely ways.

  Well, Fuller was going to walk, by the looks of things.

  He was lost in thought when he heard Alison say, ‘Would you like more tea?’

  ‘Yes, that’d be great.’ He followed her into her sizeable kitchen. It was almost as big as Enver’s one-bedroom flat. A laptop was open on the kitchen table, an Apple Mac in the corner of the room, a tablet on one of the work surfaces. Everything gleamed and sparkled. The surfaces were spotlessly clean; nothing was lying around.

  ‘Sorry about the mess,’ Alison said.

  There was a baking rack with scones that had been cooling on the grey marble-effect Corian surface of the worktop. They smelled as good as they looked. Enver stared hungrily at them. Alison noticed and smiled.

  ‘Would you like one?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Cream? Jam? It’s home-made.’

  Oh God, yes, he thought. ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  She laughed. ‘No, it’s always nice to have an appreciative audience. You look like a man who likes his food.’

  While Enver pondered the meaning of her sentence, she opened a large shoulder-high fridge and took out some double cream, then bent down gracefully to get a steel mixing bowl from a low cupboard. She plugged in a small hand mixer and whipped the cream.

  Enver stared, watching it thicken. Her movements were deft and precise, her face frowning gently while she judged the consistency of the cream.

  She noticed Enver looking at her. ‘Nothing worse than over-whipped cream, don’t want it turning to butter.’ Her mobile phone rang and she glanced at it, picked it up.

  ‘Ciao. No, sono occupata adesso... Poi, domani... si... si... è vero? Non è possibile senza Claudia... Si, in bocca da lupo! Ciao Paolo, a domani, ciao.’

  Her face changed as she spoke in Italian. She was commanding, dominant. Her posture was different too. Her back straightened, her voice hardened. Her work face, her work persona. It made him think of Hanlon. She was very different: there was only one side to Hanlon. Work, social life, sport, be it triathlon or boxing, it was all the same to her. She was indivisible.

  What you see is all there is.

  Alison rolled her eyes and clicked her phone off. ‘Milan,’ she said. ‘Like headless chickens. I’ll have to go over there tomorrow now.’

  She stopped the machine and dipped a finger in the cream. He watched as she held it up to her mouth and saw the pink tip of her tongue as she licked it.

  There was a feeling in the room like the heavy electrical charge you get before a savage thunderstorm. He could feel the hairs on his head and arms bristle.

  She took the whisk attachments off the machine and put them in the sink. Then she smiled and moved towards Enver.

  He suddenly knew with a terrible clarity that she felt the same way about him as he did her.

  He could imagine closing his eyes in ecstasy as he felt her arms around him, her body pressing against his.

  He could imagine kissing her and tasting the cream on her tongue.

  He could imagine moving upstairs with her, still clinched together, she walking backwards, step by step, their bodies pressing into each other, then, on the landing, as she said at the door of the spare room, ‘In here. No one goes in my room apart from me.’

  But he didn’t. Alison Vickery was still a witness in a murder enquiry, but above all Enver knew he would feel, rightly or wrongly, that he had somehow taken advantage of her. He was an old-fashioned kind of man. He coughed and smiled despairingly at her and she, divining his thoughts, smiled sadly and ruefully back.

  What might have been and now never was.

  ‘More tea?’ she asked again.

  He nodded; he didn’t trust himself to speak.

  51

  Hanlon walked into Room 8 of the Tate Modern in Southwark by the River Thames. Both of the Tate Galleries – indeed, now she thought about it, more or less every gallery she had ever been in – were mysterious places, like mazes, labyrinthine. And like a well-designed maze there was always something half-glimpsed in the distance that made you think you knew where you were going, until you got there and it was illusory.

  The great former power station, a testimony to the glory of brick construction, was one of her regular places to visit in London. Its shape made her think of the other industrial complex she’d seen recently, in Edmonton. But Southwark, with its enormously expensive property, is a hymn to wealth, Edmonton, a London blues song of poverty and the paucity of dreams. If you did have a dream in Edmonton, it would be to get out.

  This wasn’t her favourite gallery. She preferred Tate Britain, always so much quieter and intimate than the assertive Tate Modern, that and more user friendly. The Tate Modern was a very shouty building. It bellowed Art at the top of its voice. She also enjoyed walking through the creamy, white stucco streets of Pimlico, which always seemed a haven of tranquillity after the noisier parts of London. The streets often seemed strangely deserted there. At times it was almost dreamlike, particularly with the ziggurat shape of the MI6 building like a Mayan temple opposite, on the other side of the river.

  Here was the reverse. Opposite was the whirlwind of activity of the City clustered round the epicentre of the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. The river traffic was heavy, tourist boats and commercial barges ploughing through the dirty, thick water of the Thames. The huge river was the kind of nondescript grey, green-brown colour that you get when you’re a kid painting in class and you keep rinsing your brush out in a jam jar. The South Bank was full of tourists wandering along from the west of London, or maybe visiting the Globe Theatre next door. There were joggers and City refugees, who’d walked across from the North side to escape the commercial hubbub. There were living statues and a Mickey Mouse, and a small stage was being prepared for a band to play later that lunchtime.

  Then there was the human traffic over the Millennium Bridge, from which you could see the spires and towers of Canary Wharf in the distance.

  Hanlon made her way through the immense building that was the Tate. She wanted to see again some of the work by the man she assumed her father had liked, the artist whose signed photograph hung on her wall. The gallery was fairly quiet today and the room with the Beuys sculptures was virtually empty of other gallery visitors.

  After several false starts and turnings, she found the Beuys.

  At first glance, the sculptures themselves seemed disappointing, the usual kind of thing that gets modern art ridiculed. She felt disappointed, slightly cheated. Then she looked more carefully. There were three pieces on display. Hanlon found herself drawn to Hirschdenkmal or Monument to Stag, whose juxtaposition of metal frames and tubing on floor and table reminded her uncomfortably of the dead, still warm, body of Dame Elizabeth. Even the table that the sculpture lay on echoed Dame Elizabeth’s blood-spattered desk. What had been a hyper-intelligent, energetic über-woman in the prime of her life, a woman with so much to give, had been reduced by the actions of some moral cretin to a bag of bones and flesh.

  It wasn’t so much the cruelty of her death that upset Hanlon, as the fact it had been caused by a selfish idiot.

  Thinking about Dame Elizabeth’s death sent a powerful current of rage surging through her body.

  If she had arrived five minutes earlier, she could have prevented that. She put aside the thought. What’s done is done. No use torturing herself with regrets. />
  She looked again at the sculpture, at its title. Someone had killed the stag. Someone had killed Dame Elizabeth, Jessica McIntyre and Hannah Moore.

  Opposite the dead stag was another sculpture, this one huge, an enormous elongated triangle of pitted and corrugated black steel hanging down from a girder.

  Stag with Lightning in its Glare.

  It was like the flash of a vengeful thunderbolt. Hanlon stared at it, her face withdrawn and sinister. She rubbed the scar on her head, invisible under her thick hair.

  She thought of lightning; she thought of revenge.

  Now it was time for the hunter to become the hunted.

  I am the Lightning, she thought. I am the storm.

  She was glad now she’d visited the gallery. The Beuys sculpture was a coded message from beyond the grave.

  She thought, Dame Elizabeth wouldn’t approve, she hadn’t believed in revenge. Kant wouldn’t have approved. Tough, thought Hanlon, I do.

  She walked outside the gallery and sat on one of its wide steps, looking out at the broad Thames and the flat temple-like shapes of the buildings across the water on the far bank, with the dome of St Paul’s rising above them. There was a cool breeze and it caught her wiry, curly hair, blowing it across her face. Her phone vibrated and she checked the text message.

  It was from the anonymous caller. Whiteside Senior claims incapacity benefits, it read.

  Hanlon thought back to her meeting with the Whitesides.

  ‘John preaches down at the market.’

  ‘My husband carries them down to the market.’

  ‘He’s ever so strong.’

  All said by Mrs Whiteside.

  Hanlon thought of the heavy wooden crate, the A-board for the ‘Repent!’ signs, the bull-like chest of the father, similar to that of his son’s. Whiteside senior might be incapacitated emotionally or morally, but as far as Hanlon could see, the Good Lord had seen fit to grant him perfect health.

  Hanlon’s secondary school had been a C of E girls’ grammar school. She had come away with religion. She knew the major prayers, she could still remember the words to ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’ and ‘All things Bright and Beautiful’.