by Alex Howard
Elsa nodded, apparently satisfied. Her vowels were cut-glass, old-style BBC RP English.
She looked around her conspiratorially. ‘He said to give you this...’ She handed Huss a memory stick and a Post-it note.
She examined it. On one side it read: Schneider. Akhdaar. Eleuthera. Rosemount. On the other side was her name, underneath, xxx Marcus Hinds.
She blinked in surprise, not a particularly welcome surprise.
Hinds – there was a name she wasn’t going to forget, although she had successfully managed to suppress the memory.
Huss was twenty-eight. Four years earlier, drunk, at a friend’s party in Oxford, she had met Hinds. The attraction had been incredible, one of those rare things that was just meant to be. They had spent what was left of the night having amazingly energetic sex on his sweat-soaked bed. He had been gorgeous and, she remembered, she had wanted more, more and more.
The grey light of morning had come and she had quietly pulled her clothes on and slipped away from his flat and out of his life. Huss wasn’t one for regrets. A relationship with an investigative journalist would have harmed her career and Huss was ambitious.
She had fond memories of the evening. His body had been great.
More memories.
His one-roomed flat had smelt of incense and faintly of weed. A student smell. He had been twenty-one, she remembered. A boy.
She closed her eyes momentarily. She could even remember his body, hard beneath her, as she straddled him. She shivered then pulled herself together.
It had been great, but not that great. She occasionally heard his name mentioned, and once their eyes had met at a press briefing. She had looked away. It wasn’t like anything was over, there had never been anything to begin with.
Now here was Schneider’s name, this time on a piece of paper, yet again pursuing her like a demon in a nightmare. God alone knows what it had to do with Hinds. Presumably Hinds had some hot information on the German politician. Maybe trying to get back into her good books.
Elsa stood up and looked at Huss. Huss opened her eyes.
‘I’ve got to go, dear,’ she said firmly, as if she had appointments to keep.
‘Oh yes, of course.’ Huss suddenly realized what was expected of her. She stood up and tapped on the window. ‘Lend me twenty quid, Pete.’ He pulled his wallet out, handed her the money and she gave it to Elsa.
‘Thank you very much,’ she said. She tucked the money inside her clothes in her grimy bra. Obviously that was a repository for valuables.
‘If you need to find me,’ Elsa informed her, ‘I’m at home every evening in the bus stop near Wilson Road, Summertown.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said Huss, solemnly.
With quiet dignity Elsa exited the police station. Huss, holding the memory stick, returned to her desk, lost in memories of the past.
She heard two of her colleagues at the next desk talking as they pulled their jackets on. She turned her attention back to her screen.
‘That assault victim’s just died.’
‘So it’s murder now?’
‘It’s murder now.’
‘Anyone in the frame?’
The DS who was in Serious Crimes buttoned his jacket. ‘Someone called Marcus Hinds.’
Fuck, thought DI Melinda Huss.
12
Hanlon walked out of Oxford’s surprisingly ugly train station, it reminded her of a giant Portakabin, to be met by Huss.
On the journey down from Paddington she reviewed her meeting with Wolf Schneider. She was due back later to escort him from his hotel in London, the art-deco wonderland of Claridge’s, to the Union Chapel in Islington where he was speaking.
Claridge’s was five hundred pounds a night for a cheapish room and Schneider had a suite. He must have some seriously wealthy backers.
As she had sat on the train, the countryside rolling by, she reflected that it was tough being a German right-wing MP. Behind you there was always another, baleful example from fairly recent history. Whatever your message, no matter what denials you issued, there it was.
Someone would forever be standing at your shoulder.
The elephant in the room.
Hanlon reflected that with the police in general, and the Met in particular, embroiled in yet another scandal, the last thing that Corrigan needed was the murder of a right-wing German politician at the hands of Islamic militants.
Disastrous too for London tourism and the economy.
She thought of the growing power of the right, of their insidious appeal.
Recent ISIS atrocities in France and other European locations only increased the power of the right. She could well imagine the charismatic Schneider doing well in such a climate. In uncertain times people turn to strong men or women and he certainly fitted the bill. He was a born leader.
Well, she didn’t share his politics. Hanlon didn’t really like politics full stop. But she owed Corrigan and she would do her utmost to ensure Schneider stayed safe and well during his time in London and Oxford.
Huss was standing waiting for her under a cold October sky, her wavy blonde hair flattened by the dispiriting moisture. Hanlon’s own coarse, springy black curls were impervious to anything the weather might throw at it.
Hanlon thought that the usually good-natured Huss looked uncharacteristically gloomy, preoccupied. That’s my job, she thought. How dare she. Stealing my look.
‘Hi,’ said Huss, opening the door of a Golf for Hanlon. ‘Nice to see you again.’
She looked at Hanlon as she climbed gracefully inside the car, admiring slightly jealously her slim, athletic body. I could never get into those skinny jeans, she thought mournfully, not in a million years. Hanlon looked stronger and fitter than ever. Mind you, thought Huss, she exercises for about two hours a day and I’ve seen her kitchen. She shuddered at the thought of Hanlon’s sparse, rigorously balanced diet, the brown rice, the tofu, the lentils and white meat. Huss liked her food, Hanlon viewed it with dispassionate lack of emotion.
Hanlon, for her part, had been unsurprised when she heard that Templeman had put Huss in charge of Schneider. Huss combined tact, organizational flair with a huge capacity for hard work. She was impressed with Huss’s abilities. Although capable of hard work, Hanlon was a poor organizer, impatient, hard to work with, occasionally slapdash. She really wasn’t the kind of person that you would want to run anything, and her abrasive personality clashed with so many people.
She guessed that Corrigan had heard from Gower that Huss was involved and that was partly why Enver had been offered the protection job.
It was only a short drive to St Wulfstan’s College where they had an appointment with the master.
Huss filled her in on what had happened so far, including the Hinds incident.
‘And what did the memory stick contain?’ asked Hanlon.
‘I don’t know,’ said Huss. ‘File names but it wouldn’t open them. Systems support have it now.’
Gower had wanted them to understand the kind of organizations they might be up against. He lived and breathed his job and one reason why he was such a success at diplomatic protection was that he insisted that his teams understood the kind of specific threat that their charges were facing. He was a man who planned meticulously and when he had heard sensible questions at the end of the phone from Huss the day before he had pulled strings and organized this briefing from one of the country’s authorities on terrorist organizations, in this case Al-Akhdaar, whose death list Schneider headed. He happened to be conveniently situated not far from where Huss worked, in central Oxford.
The seventeenth-century college’s honey-coloured Oxford stone was muted in the late autumn gloom. Term had started and students wandered to tutorials or back to their rooms along the paths bordered by intricately cut low box hedges, or via the cloisters that ran beside the college lawns.
They followed the directions that they had been given to the senior common room where the college dons met communally. The ma
ster of St Wulfstan’s, Paul Smithfield, young to be in charge of a college at forty, a noted economist and adviser to the Bank of England, was to meet them there. Smithfield was behind the invitation to Schneider to speak at the Oxford Union.
Huss knew a linguistics lecturer, Laura Thompson, who worked at the college. She had helped Huss on forensic matters a couple of times. She had called her up to find out what kind of a man the master was. Laura had said that Smithfield had a slightly sinister reputation but that he was an internationally acknowledged expert on extreme political movements and political terrorism. He often briefed COBRA and several leading think tanks.
His opponents said that there was a dark side to Smithfield. Some of his colleagues claimed he sympathized with right-wing extremism. There was another school of thought that said he was an Ayn Rand-style libertarian and allied himself spiritually with the anarchist movement, holding the opinion governments were bad, full stop. The kind of anarchism that led to the dark net, untrammelled freedom for sexual expression, bestiality, paedophilia, rape, drugs, weaponry, internet trolling.
The two women walked into the SCR. It was a beautifully proportioned, airy oak-panelled room, overlooking the central quad with its perfect lawns and the knee-high box hedges they had noticed and admired earlier, cut over the centuries into complex geometric designs.
It was also easy to imagine it as Schneider would, a shining example of the culture that was under threat from the barbarian forces yowling outside the decadent remains of a magnificent but tottering European culture like the Goths ready to plunder the Roman Empire and inaugurate the Dark Ages of ignorance and savagery.
The furniture in the room was heavy, old-fashioned, masculine. Leather sofas and armchairs, dark wood proliferated. An elderly don was the only other person in the senior common room. A pile of manuscripts, essays waiting to be marked, sat patiently on a small table next to him as he dozed like a senior, tweed-suited, moth-eaten cat in the warmth of a nearby radiator.
The master, by contrast, was in his early forties, tall, saturnine, good-looking in an arrogant kind of way. He had the lazy confidence of a man buttressed by wealth and success. Smithfield’s eyes ran appraisingly over the women in front of him. He did it in a totally obvious way, almost as if they should be flattered by his attention.
Hanlon ran her eyes over Smithfield too, in a markedly hostile fashion, as if measuring him up for where she would strike the first blow. Huss decided they had better get what they had come for quickly in case hostilities broke out.
‘Thank you for taking the time to see us,’ she began. ‘This is DCI Hanlon of the Met, currently on secondment as a protection officer for Wolf Schneider.’
Smithfield nodded graciously.
He was compelling too, thought Hanlon, but in a different way to Schneider. The German politician believed passionately in what he was saying, he was an idealist. Smithfield exuded an air of tranquil evil. She guessed he was a man who believed in nothing but himself and this was allied to extreme intelligence.
‘Basically, we’re after any information or ideas that might help with protection issues regarding Mr Schneider. I gather there have been death threats against him in his own country and in Europe too.’
The master smiled and waved them into easy chairs near a fireplace. He pressed a bell on the wall, a uniformed college servant appeared and he ordered tea.
Over the Darjeeling, he filled in Schneider’s rise to political power. From true blue-collar bricklayer origins, a real man of the people and a member of the Socialists, to increasing disillusion with the Left.
The master was a practised speaker, fluent, to the point.
‘He’s doing well in Bavaria, Hesse-Mecklenburg, Saxony and of course his own home state of Baden-Württemberg. In Heidelberg he has been taking votes from the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, the NPD...’ Huss found herself switching off mentally as the heavy, sonorous Germanic names rolled through the warm air of the senior common room. It was the names on the list that she wanted to hear about. The list that Hinds had given her. In Huss’s mind the fact that it came from a man wanted for murder added to its probable authenticity.
Hinds’s list, she ran through it mentally again: Schneider, Al-Akhdaar, Eleuthera, Rosemount.
The words of a man on the run for murder, presumably he thought that these would either explain his behaviour or clear him. Time to see what Smithfield thought.
‘That’s fascinating,’ she said, casually. ‘The name Al-Akhdaar has come up, do you know anything about that?’
‘Indeed I do,’ he lifted a surprised eyebrow, ‘and so should you.’
Hanlon glared at her. She had been enjoying Smithfield’s lecture. She was one of those people who actively liked learning new things, she was even prepared to forgive the master’s lecherous glances.
‘Um, could you elaborate?’ asked Huss.
‘Al-Ansaar al-Akhdaar, the Green Companions. Green is the colour of Islam,’ explained Smithfield, ‘and the Ansaar were the companions of Muhammad. But, as far as we’re concerned, they’re a German jihadi group. No one had ever heard of them until they sent death threats to Schneider and also a socialist MP in Heidelberg, Gunther Hart. Gunther Hart was found dead a couple of weeks ago, they’d cut his throat and uploaded the footage to YouTube.’ He carried on for a while, elaborating the sketchy history of the group, until Hanlon interrupted him.
‘So, basically, they’re the ones we should be worried about?’
‘Sure,’ said Smithfield, ‘they’re basically like IS in Germany and as German citizens they can be over here easily enough.’
‘And how about Eleuthera?’ Huss asked. Hanlon’s eyes narrowed in thought as she looked at her colleague. She hadn’t expected Huss to be remotely interested in these existential threats to Schneider. Huss’s job would be prising enough uniforms out of the system to ensure Schneider got to and from the Oxford Union and enough crush-barriers so no one got injured. That was assuming anyone actually turned up to protest.
Smithfield grimaced. ‘They’re a very unpleasant anarchist group. Hang on.’ He picked his tablet up and showed them some images, twisted, blackened metal, the remains of a car, splashes of blood in the street, an inert form huddled under a blanket.
‘Athens last year, an economist from the IMF, a friend of mine as it happens, that’s their work.’
‘“Troika scum!” Eleuthera tweeted after that,’ he added. ‘Basically they are prepared to kill, they are also extremely well-financed. But nobody really knows who they are or what they really represent.’
He drank some tea. ‘They appear online, they have a website on the dark net, using TOR, of course, to avoid detection. Sometimes they appear at rallies, masked with flags. Is it them really, or just wannabe anarchists? No one knows. Some think Russian money is involved, some say that they’re linked to organized crime, others that it’s money funnelled by the FSB, the Russian secret service, to destabilize the West. Nothing’s proven. But I’d really worry if they were involved.’
Another picture, armed cops in riot gear, clouds of tear gas, Smithfield elaborated, ‘Eleuthera-inspired demo in Toulouse outside a Front National meeting, twenty-seven delegates injured.’
Another image. A stretcher being loaded into an ambulance.
‘Hungarian,’ said Smithfield. ‘Junior justice minister in Viktor Urban’s government, assassinated, suspected Eleuthera.’ He turned off the tablet. ‘It’s Greek for freedom. Are you sure they’re involved too? I do hope not.’ He smiled coldly, he certainly didn’t look worried. ‘Like I said, some people say, do they really exist? I would say, they do an awful lot of damage for a non-existent group.’ He continued, ‘At least we can keep Al-Akhdaar at bay if we keep an eye out for Muslims, Eleuthera are a throwback to Baader Meinhof and the Brigate Rosse, they’re disaffected mainly middle-class student intellectuals. There’s bound to be a couple in my college, almost certainly doing PPE, my specialist subject. Or maybe IT.’
He
frowned thoughtfully. Hanlon wondered if he was taking it as almost a personal slight that Eleuthera should come from this background. Religious fanatics such as Al-Akhdaar would be practically insane in Smithfield’s view; rabid, foaming nutcases stuck in the fourteenth century. Eleuthera too, addicted to a political extremism that was as dated as the sideburns and flares of the seventies where it belonged. A place, a mindset, where the government were ‘the Man’ and people who worked for a living ‘breadheads’.
‘Eleuthera,’ he smiled this time, ‘so idealistic, so old-fashioned, fighting last century’s battles. Schneider’s doing very well at collecting dangerous enemies, you two are going to have your work cut out, that’s for sure.’
‘I’m sure we’ll rise to the challenge, Master,’ said Hanlon, with offhand sarcasm. It wasn’t lost on Smithfield. He frowned at her.
‘I hope so, for your sake, DCI Hanlon, and I’d lose the attitude if I were you. If you don’t, your politician, and maybe even you, are going to end up very dead.’
He smiled pleasantly at Hanlon and his voice was quiet but his gaze was cold. His eyes met Hanlon’s. Hers grey, his blue. Like a flicker of swords.
Hanlon thought suddenly, He really dislikes me. The thought didn’t bother her at all. She was supremely indifferent to the opinions of others.
‘What kind of people join Eleuthera?’ she asked, to mollify him.
‘Generally middle-class idealists with a taste for extreme violence. The kind of people who enjoy hurting and killing people but dressing it up in ideological clothes. Just like the killers who join IS, it’s an excuse to do harm. If you were religious, you might call them evil.’
Hanlon nodded. She wasn’t religious, but she believed in the power of evil.
‘Any other questions?’ asked Smithfield.
‘Rosemount?’ asked Huss.
Smithfield’s head jerked up in almost a pantomime of surprise. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Rosemount,’ repeated Huss.
‘That’s the hotel near here that Schneider is staying in for a week. Only his people and I know about it, it’s supposed to be a closely guarded secret.’ He looked at Huss with a perplexed expression. ‘And just how on earth did you hear about it, DI Huss?’