by Alex Howard
As he walked up the stairs past Marcus, Grey Hoodie suddenly wheeled towards him, left arm curving round. Marcus sensed rather than saw the blade in his hand. He was ready, he’d been expecting this. Blue Hoodie was not an immediate threat, behind his companion he was blocked by his body.
It wasn’t the first time in his life Marcus had experienced a knife being pulled on him. For a year he’d worked doors in nightclubs and pubs back in Bethnal Green and points further east to pay living expenses for his journalism degree at City University. He was a hard bastard and he knew it. After a year of minding on the Mile End Road and Plaistow he was a damn sight harder. Frankly, he was lucky to be alive. People he’d ejected from the premises or refused to allow in had tried to stab him, glass him, bottle him. Some nutcase had even fired two shots at him one night from a handgun. Luckily, they’d missed.
So, on sensing the knife, most people, understandably, would freeze in such a situation. Not him.
He almost welcomed the fight.
Marcus grabbed the arm with the knife. Grey Hoodie was seriously unbalanced, the lead foot carrying all his weight. Marcus, who was higher on the stairs, headbutted him, driving his forehead into Grey Hood’s face, smashing into his nose and simultaneously pushing with his right hand and pulling with his left.
‘You cunt!’ he shouted, frenzied with blood lust. It was a Hinds family trait. They were a violent lot, even the women. He wasn’t a rational human now, he was like a crazed animal, all intellectual thought gone. He just wanted to smash these two until they were bloody pulp.
Both his dad and his uncle had done time for GBH, he was carrying on the family tradition.
His assailant crashed into Blue Hood and Marcus lashed out with his foot, anchoring himself with his hand on the banister for balance. Then, like he was kicking a ball with all his strength, the tip of the toe of his boot smashed into Grey Hood’s face. It connected with his chin and he fell back down the stairs.
Blue Hood had had enough. He turned to run away but Marcus from behind him put his foot on his lower back and gave an almighty shove. Blue Hood was on the edge of the step and the impetus of Marcus’s leg propelled him into the void.
It wasn’t a long fall, maybe a couple of metres, but it was two metres head first onto concrete. His head slammed into the corner of the wall of the landing with a deafening crack.
Marcus breathed deeply, sucking oxygen into his lungs. He felt dazed and his heart was thundering like he’d been injected with speed.
‘Fuck!’ he said. It was the third word that had been spoken. He looked at the scene below. Grey Hoodie, his face now revealed, blood covering his mouth, was sitting on the stairs by his fallen companion.
Mark Spencer was his name. Marcus knew him as Eleuthera’s head enforcer. The guy who would lead the charge against the police horses at Stop the War or End Austerity or whatever demo they’d tagged along to.
He was the kind of person who enjoyed hurting people. One of nature’s bullies. He’d kill someone one of these days. It was the kind of thing he’d enjoy. If he could have, if he’d been the right religion, he’d have joined ISIS for the lifestyle, the chance to kill and maim. Spencer liked cider and drugs too much though to have gone down well with the jihadi brigades.
The knife, a slim flick-knife, was on the floor next to Marcus.
There was absolute silence on the stair and the stairwell. He could almost hear his heart beating. Marcus was glad of the emptiness of the block of flats. He felt he couldn’t have coped with a door opening, someone demanding what was going on, certainly he did not want anything to do with the police.
He picked the flick knife up and walked slowly down the stairs. Spencer glared at him aggressively as he edged past, their eyes locked on each other with mutual dislike and mistrust. Spencer wasn’t kind of man you would turn your back to. Marcus was very glad he was holding the knife meant for him. The weapon in his hand a very potent deterrent to any further action.
Once he was on the next flight down he ran to the front door and then he was outside in the cool autumn air. He pulled the door closed behind him and looked down the street. Parked cars on either side of the road, a skip, nothing unusual. He dropped the knife in the skip and hurried across the road.
Old Elsa, the lady tramp, was still in her doorway. She was about seventy – it was hard to judge – toothless, a Tibetan-style hat with ear flaps on and voluminous layers of clothes. She knew him, he’d given her money before now, slipping her the odd fiver when he was feeling flush.
Sometimes they’d have a chat together. He was aware of how far she had fallen: from senior common room to park bench. Mental illness is no respecter of intelligence. He needed a messenger and right now Elsa would have to do.
He could smell her as he approached. She was awake and he crouched down beside her.
She looked at him calmly.
Hardly the answer to a prayer but she was all he had. He pulled the memory stick out of his pocket, together with his wallet and a biro. He took a tenner out and an old receipt. She watched him silently. He gave her the money, the memory stick and hastily wrote a few explanatory words: DI Huss, Summertown police station.
‘Go to Summertown nick, ask for this woman, give her this. She’ll pay you, OK?’
She looked at him calmly and put the money, memory stick and credit card receipt into an inside pocket.
On an afterthought he took the external hard drive from his pocket. He knew that she never threw anything away. Even if she failed to deliver his message she’d hang on to the hard drive, of that he could be sure.
‘Hang on to this for me, will you?’
He looked into her cornflower-blue eyes as he did so. They were full of intelligence this morning. Thank the Lord, he thought, she’s with it. Some days he spoke to her and the shutters were down, she didn’t know who he was. But not today.
She took it from him, examined it curiously, she had never seen one before, and stowed it inside her stained blouse.
Marcus stood up and without a backward glance started off down the street towards the centre of Oxford and the bus station.
London, here I come, he thought grimly.
Sanctuary.
10
Laidlaw had finished putting the wraps around Hanlon’s strong, long fingers. She flexed them and then she held her bandaged hand out and he slipped on the gloves. She threw a couple of experimental punches, jab, jab, then a quick combination, jab, jab, right cross, left hook. As always, she was fast and, above all, elegant.
‘Let’s go.’
They walked down the short, silent corridor that led from his office to the cavernous, empty gym. Hanlon felt light and strong on her feet. She had that pleasurable sensation in the pit of her stomach that she always had before a fight, even though this was simply a sparring session.
Her opponent was waiting for her in the ring. He was huge, a head taller than she was. He said nothing as she climbed through the ropes, the point of no return. They faced each other momentarily, her hard grey eyes locked on to his brown ones. Any doubts he felt about fighting a woman disappeared at that moment. Joe Paulson, his manager, a sceptical look on his face, sounded the bell.
From the viewing gallery at the top of the large room that was the gym, lost in the shadows and unseen by those below, Schneider and Corrigan watched.
The two boxers in the ring were completely unaware of their audience. For them the whole universe had shrunk down to the canvas and its rope borders.
The German wondered what the hell was going on. The contest looked ludicrously one-sided.
The large figure of the black boxer advanced on her, trying to close the ring down, flicking the occasional jab to find his range. Campbell would have been much more used to fighting men of his own size and height. Hanlon, as his opponent would be in his upcoming match, was much shorter, making things awkward. He had to punch down at an angle.
He was also large and lumbering, ponderous on his legs, whereas Hanlon coul
d move with whiplash speed and balletic agility.
For now, Hanlon contented herself with avoiding his gloves as best she could. She was a slim, hard to hit target, never motionless, her head continually bobbing and weaving, her body, side on, light and flexible, and she had exquisite footwork.
Campbell frowned in frustration as his gloves aimed blows at a target that suddenly was no longer there, or she would slip low and rise under the punch, his glove finding air where he had expected her head.
Then she saw a chance, his hands were low and his face exposed, she decided to punish him, to show him what happens when you make mistakes and underestimate your opponent.
Her hand flicked out, hard, fast and accurate and she caught him on the side of his face. There was no great power behind the punch, they were just sparring, but if it had been serious it was the kind of mistake he couldn’t afford to make, particularly in his approaching fight.
His challenger there would not be landing warning shots, that was for sure.
The round continued, frustration visibly growing on Campbell’s face as she slipped under and around his punches, occasionally moving up close underneath his reach and hitting him with hooks to the body.
The bell sounded. Corrigan could see Laidlaw was delighted, Paulson quietly angry.
‘She’s amazing,’ whispered Schneider, happily.
They sat in their corners. Hanlon could hear Paulson berating Campbell for not keeping his guard up. She could see him gesturing with his left – she soon found out why.
Another round went by, this one not so good for Hanlon. Campbell was getting used to his low target and several times his gloves made contact with her padded headguard. Despite the protection and despite the lack of power in his punch, there was enough there to make her head ring. But most worrying was his left hook.
She had no real answer to it. Unlike his forward punches, his jab and right hand, it could cover all of the side of her body. If he’d put power into the shots she’d have been knocked off her feet.
Back in her corner Laidlaw hissed, ‘Get right up to him, right up close, and go even lower, do the unexpected.’
She took a drink of water and nodded. Her top was soaked in sweat now, clinging to her body, but her arms and legs felt amazing. All those hours and hours of training paying off. All that cycling, all that swimming, all that running. Hanlon was super-fit even by boxing standards.
Laidlaw watched with proprietorial pride as she took the fight to the bigger man like a terrier against a mastiff. Campbell’s skin a mahogany shade against the paleness of Hanlon. She advanced on him and he jabbed lazily at her and then she was through, under his guard, practically touching his body.
She unleashed a couple of left hooks of her own, her left foot swivelling inwards to add to their power, the force of the shot coming not from the arms but from the body. Her left elbow was perfectly angled, protecting her face.
He could see the bafflement on Campbell’s face as he tried to deal with her but she was too close, almost as if they were dancing, to be able to get any real angle on his punches.
Hanlon suddenly upped her game. It was like watching a Ferrari race a Ford Mondeo. Class, power, speed.
She suddenly stepped back and, with lightning speed, launching herself off her back foot, delivered a flawless three punch combination to Campbell’s face.
Corrigan heard Schneider say, ‘Scheisse, sie ist ausgezeichnete!’ He turned to him: ‘She really is good.’
‘Break!’ Laidlaw shouted.
Hanlon and Campbell dropped their hands and he gently tapped her gloves in a show of respect.
Hanlon walked over to Laidlaw and he undid the straps of her headguard and pulled it off. She shook her sweat-matted hair. Her top was glued to her upper body with perspiration. He could smell the leather of her gloves, her perspiration and a faint residual perfume.
‘How was that, Hanlon?’ he asked.
She took her mouthguard out and grinned wolfishly at him. ‘Better than sex, Freddie, better than sex.’
Laidlaw smiled and pointed upwards. ‘You’ve got admirers.’
She lifted her head. There, leaning over the balcony of the gallery, was a familiar figure.
‘I think you’ve demonstrated that you’re fit enough to come back to work now, Hanlon,’ Corrigan called down to her.
‘Yes, sir,’ she called back.
11
DI Huss was having a frustrating morning. She had been working on an analysis of burglaries in the Summertown area of Oxford, matching the MO with known offenders and trying to predict which streets might be next targeted. Then two of her team had been pulled to bolster a planning exercise to deal with the demonstration that was going to greet Wolf Schneider’s debate at the Oxford Union in the heart of the city.
And now, she had just been informed that responsibility for planning the police presence outside the debate was her responsibility, her problem.
‘But this is not our department,’ she’d said to Templeman, her dour Scottish boss, fuming with annoyance. ‘It’s a public order matter, it’s between uniform, the university authorities and the council.’
Templeman, despite his forbidding exterior, was a pleasant man, usually supportive, and in turn expected his officers to support his decisions, not query them.
‘I dare say you’re right, Melinda, however, the chief constable wants a woman’s touch, and you’re that woman.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, sir. Next you’ll be telling me that I’ll be working out the costings for this!’
Templeman was sitting behind his desk, reading some report or other. Now he looked up with irritation.
‘Yes! Yes, you can do that. Oxford CID is not here for your amusement, to furnish you with jobs you happen to find congenial.’ Templeman was Glaswegian and rolled his r’s when he spoke. It was something that got more pronounced the more irritable he got.
‘Now, I usually find that the quicker a job is started, the quicker it’s finished.’
Schneider, she gathered, was attracting headlines for his hard line on immigration as well as his more right-wing views, so Anonymous, End Austerity, the Socialist Workers, Liberty, just about every protest group in the city was primed to attend. Her heart sank. All the noisy, aggressive nutters.
Most of them didn’t know who he was or what he stood for, other than he was ‘a bad thing’. Stop the War were going to be there too, even though Schneider was implacably opposed, Huss gathered, to any form of intervention outside Europe.
Then again, she thought, the plus side was that it was going to be on a Tuesday night, the long-range forecast was bad – rain always helped thin the protestors’ ranks – and nobody knew who Schneider was anyway.
There was a buzz of news and talk in the office that she worked from. Reports were coming in of an incident in some street near St Clare’s college, just down the road. One man critically injured on a stairwell, presumed assault.
Nothing to do with her.
Back to her German problem.
Huss returned to the endless task of going through the requirements for Schneider’s safety. Would he need a personal protection officer and a driver with specialist skills?
How many uniforms? Maybe four divisional teams, nearly forty police. Would she need to contact Kidlington for a firearms team? Surely not.
She ground her teeth. Templeman, I could strangle you. This is not my job.
Council crush-barriers, road closures? What about a pre-visit to Schneider’s hotel to check security and, theoretically, vet the guests? Where even was his wretched hotel?
She checked the inadequate paperwork that Templeman had given her.
Picked up the phone, call this Commander Gower’s office, a London number.
Before she could key in the numbers, a voice behind her said, ‘Melinda, Pete wants you at the front desk.’
She swore quietly to herself, put the phone down and made her way through the office to the front desk. Pete Gainsborough, t
he lugubrious desk sergeant, pointed through the glass at the mound of clothing sitting on a bench in reception that was Old Elsa.
‘She wants a word with you, if that’s OK. Be as quick as you can, Melinda, she whiffs a bit.’
‘Why does she want to talk to me?’ she asked.
Gainsborough shrugged. ‘She’s not all there, but she’s a sweetheart really.’
Even from behind the glass, the penetrating scent of Elsa was making itself felt. Huss saw the tea that the old woman was holding and the sandwich container that had obviously come from the canteen.
‘Thanks, Pete,’ she said. She recalled other examples of the sergeant’s good deeds, kind turns he had done people. He was one of those people who disliked it if people knew about it. She smiled warmly at him, conspiratorially, the freemasonry of the good at heart. He noticed that she had noticed and pulled a face.
‘Don’t tell anyone or they’ll think I’m going soft. Elsa used to be a don, you know, at Somerville. Before...’ He tapped his head expressively. ‘Anyway, she’s all yours. Oh, don’t bring her back here, she’ll freak out. She’s quite paranoid. To be honest I can’t say I blame her. I nicked a couple of students who thought it funny to piss on her a while ago. Then the council would like shot of her. Poor old thing.’
He buzzed her out and she sat by the old lady on the bench opposite the reception window.
Huss looked into her face, framed by dirty locks of grey hair that had escaped from the grubby, turban-style hat that she was wearing. Dirt had so engrained Elsa’s skin it looked like she was tanned. Huss wondered what had happened to her to transform a once respected academic to this. Alchemy in reverse. But, she reflected, that’s mental illness for you. It doesn’t require a reason.
‘You’re Huss?’
‘Yes, Elsa.’ Huss’s voice was gentle.
‘Like the fish?’
‘Like the fish,’ agreed Huss.