by Alex Howard
Still holding his hair so his head was forced to look down at the pavement, she reached inside his jacket, thick quilted army style, with her free hand. Then her fingers found what they were looking for in his inside pocket.
She drew the man’s head close to her mouth. ‘Tell your anarchist friends that the fascist whore wants to leave a message, you got that?’
He muttered something and she tightened her fingers in his hair and twisted.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,’ she hissed, her voice taut with anger.
‘Yes,’ he moaned with pain. Any more strain on his hair, she thought, and it’d probably come out in a bloody clump.
‘Here’s the message,’ she said.
Hanlon slammed her left fist into the side of his head, just above the ear, and he fell down to his knees. The pain from his eardrum made him retch into the gutter and he nearly blacked out.
Still carrying the iron bar like a relay runner, she broke into a jog and the two would-be assailants, one on all fours, the other still with knees drawn up to chest on the pavement, watched her back disappear down the street.
Hanlon was back inside her car five minutes later. She smiled to herself. For the first time in a long while she felt truly happy. She even hummed the opening of the ‘Internationale’ as she glanced at the Samsung she’d taken from its owner. She pressed it and the keypad appeared for the code. She smiled again and took her own phone out, scrolled down, found the name she was looking for.
‘It’s me. I’ll be round at your gaff in about forty minutes. Don’t go to bed. I need you to open a phone.’
She smiled at the squawking protest, spoke again.
‘Stop moaning, you old fruit. Dear God, Albert, you’ve got three-quarters of an hour, even a man of your age ought to be able to finish having a fuck in that time.’ She started the engine, still talking to the enraged Albert. ‘Well, tell him to get a move on. If he is a porn star he should be used to coming on command! It’s a Samsung, by the way. That’s right, the new model, just like the man in your life.’
She swung the Audi TT around and pointed it in the direction of London. She looked triumphantly at the phone beside her. A major link in the chain that would take her to Schneider’s would-be assassins. For the first time in a week she felt she was making progress.
It was a huge step forward.
She wondered if Huss had found out who had tipped Eleuthera off about old Elsa.
You can run, she thought, but you can’t hide.
26
Back at the station, Huss wrote up her actions that she had performed at the crime scene of Elsa’s death prior to McKenzie’s arrival. While the phrases flowed into her report
As Acting Crime Scene Manager I created a common approach path... (see appended)... Inner and outer cordons were established... DI McKenzie to supply further details of personnel and actions undertaken together with Forensic Team...
memories of Elsa’s fate riffled through her mind. The loud, thrumming noise of the generator brought in to power the lights, the charred bulk of her body. The blackness and fragmentary state of her clothing had made her remains look like a gigantic dead crow. The child’s rhyme ‘four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’ had run through her head. The terrible smell of burning lingering in her nostrils.
Overlaid on these memories, how had Eleuthera found out about her proposed visit to Elsa?
Other memories resurfaced.
Bending over her in the street outside Hinds’s flat, the sight of Georgie Adams at the window. Her beautiful face, pale through the glass above.
Who else had known about the visit?
Hanlon.
Hanlon had known she was going to visit Elsa, but Huss, although she didn’t like her, would trust her with her life. And Hanlon was famously close-mouthed.
Darker thoughts.
Evan Collins. He had known. Evan Collins, their overqualified stoner slacker. The one that people said, ‘What is he doing here?’
The one that people said, ‘Oh, he’s so cute.’
Well, Evan Collins wasn’t the only computer expert in the building. He also wasn’t the only man who fancied her either.
Ed Worth was in the other office. He looked up when Huss entered and smiled. He found Melinda Huss incredibly attractive. Tonight she was wearing thick tights, an above-the-knee skirt and a low-cut sweater. Her stocky, buxom form managed somehow to combine chunky sexiness with assertive practicality.
I bet she goes like a train, he thought.
Huss came straight to the point. ‘Can I get access to Evan Collins’s personnel records?’
‘No,’ said Worth. He didn’t ask why she wanted to know, quite frankly he couldn’t care less. His mind whirred, seeking for a way to ingratiate himself with Huss. ‘But I can get his CV for you and that includes his social media data. That lies in a part of personnel that I happen to have the passcode for, rather than the main data.’ He reflected that, although they had changed the system now, it used to be that job applicants’ details were held in a kind of pending file and they never really got moved.
‘That’s brilliant, Ed.’ She smiled at him. I love your chin, he thought, dreamily, his long, strong fingers resting on the keyboard in front of him, feeling the raised indentation on the F key in front of him. Her fingernails were painted blood red.
He shook his head free of his Huss-inspired fantasies and applied himself to the keyboard.
‘Shall I send them to you?’ he asked.
Huss shook her head.
‘I’d rather have a hard copy – I don’t want anything showing up on the system.’
Worth nodded. He could see the outline of her bra under the wool of her sweater. If only... he thought... If only. He applied himself to the keyboard in front of him and a minute or so later the printer in the corner whirred into action.
Huss went over and retrieved the half-dozen pieces of paper, said her goodbyes to Worth and went back to her desk.
Worth closed his eyes. If he concentrated he could just make out a faint memory of her scent lingering on the air of the office. I love you, Melinda Huss, he thought.
*
A while later she had her answer.
A selection of social media images and posts that someone had idly downloaded when his application to join Thames Valley had been made. Pictures that had then seemed innocuous but now had a very different connotation.
A photo of Collins with James Kettering, the dead man on the stairs.
Another image: Evan Collins and Georgie Adams toasting the camera with cans of cider in Whitehall, Lutyen’s Cenotaph visible in the background.
Say NO to War, Fight Fascism, said their placards.
Evan Collins, another placard, this one ironic given his current job. A cartoon pig, red in the face, huffing in outrage as a superimposed cut-out photo of Karl Marx in a crude collage-style stood in close proximity to its backside: FUCK THE PIGS!
Collins was a member of Eleuthera.
27
Enver Demirel, dressed casually in chinos and a pea jacket, parked his old Volvo in the car park of the Rosemount Hotel. The estate car was sandwiched between a top-of-the-range Mercedes – Enver was hazy on car makes – and a Maserati.
So far, his involvement in protecting Schneider had been minimal. He had attended a couple of diplomatic protection briefings on protocol and on the law, been given a sheaf of literature to read and signed up for a firearms course at the police training school outside Reading that would take place long after the German politician had left the country. Then an order to visit Gower at New Scotland Yard in the replacement headquarters at Curtis Green House on the Embankment.
Gower’s desk was untidy, piled high with briefing documents and buff envelopes. He didn’t warrant a river view, it seemed.
‘There’s been a significant development in the Schneider affair,’ he told Enver. He filled him in on the death of Elsa, which was being regarded as possibly linked to Eleuthera. Enver had
heard about this from Huss but feigned ignorance.
‘As you can imagine, DI Demirel, this has considerably ramped up the danger level that Eleuthera posed. This is obviously not the work of Islamic extremists. The death of that anarchist on those stairs in Oxford that we attributed to Hinds in a random act of violence has to be reconsidered too. Some of us, myself included, tended to regard them, the anarchist movement, as a bit, how shall I put it, insignificant. Well, that’s changed.’
He paused, shuffled some papers.
‘DI Huss, from Thames Valley, who I gather you know, has discovered that Marcus Hinds’s girlfriend, a Georgie Adams, has possible links with Eleuthera, and there is also credible evidence that some form of attack on Schneider may be launched while he’s staying at the Rosemount Hotel.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Enver.
‘The manager of the hotel, some Polish guy,’ he checked his notes, ‘Czerwinski, has been very helpful and given me the staff employment records. In my experience, Enver, in an attack on a big, rambling building like a hotel, there’s usually someone on the inside. Hotels employ so many low-grade temporary staff – cleaners, gardeners, chambermaids, kitchen porters – and they usually have a high turnover, so in general it’s easy to get someone in there.
‘Anyway, I digress.’ He tapped his notes, settled his glasses on his nose. ‘A couple of things are blindingly obvious from looking at them.’
He leant back in his chair and straightened his tie. Gower’s suit was very rumpled, like he’d slept in it.
‘There are some seventy people working at that hotel, probably a third are household, cleaners, chambermaids, et cetera. They’re virtually all women and predominantly all European, with a couple of Thais and Chinese. They don’t fit the Al-Akhdaar demographic and they don’t fit that of Eleuthera. Anarchists tend to be university educated. They don’t seem overly keen on soiling their hands with manual labour.’ He paused, drank some water. ‘Then we have the front of house and management, a more fertile ground, and I’ve got two officers stationed in the hotel, just in case. Now, there are twenty-seven staff in the kitchen,’ he consulted his notes again, ‘of these fourteen are Muslim, including four East Europeans, a Chechen, one from Dagestan and a Turkish chef de partie, whatever that may be, do you know?’
‘Head of a section, sir. Like pastry or sauces,’ explained Enver.
‘Impressive knowledge, DI Demirel.’ Gower paused, as if Enver had passed some sort of test. ‘Now guess what I want you to do?’
Work in the kitchen, thought Enver. Damn, I walked into that one.
‘I don’t know, sir.’ I’m certainly not going to suggest it, he thought.
Gower beamed at him. ‘Assistant Commissioner Corrigan tells me that you have had kitchen experience in your time. Czerwinski has had a request for a temporary chef de partie slash junior sous chef from the kitchen for a while – you’re that new chef. What better place to monitor the kitchen than the kitchen itself!’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Enver through gritted teeth. His colleagues would get to check out Schneider’s well-being from a luxury junior suite with bar facilities, use of the pool and gym, and he’d get to work eighteen-hour, ball-breaking days and nights with the pots and pans in the kitchen.
*
Well, now here he was. He stepped out of his car and looked around him. It seemed very peaceful. His feet scrunched on the thick gravel of the car park.
Perhaps, he thought, perhaps a Michelin-starred kitchen might be a quieter and less manic place to work than other kitchens he had been in.
Just then an out of breath teenager in dirty chef’s whites and Crocs ran up to him. ‘Hi, are you the agency guy?’ he panted. To Enver’s eyes he seemed about twelve. He was thin, gaunt, white, dark bruises under his eyes, he looked exhausted.
‘Yes, I’m Enver.’
‘Oh, I’m Pete, Peter Marshall.’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Enver. They politely shook hands. Peter Marshall looked even more twitchy.
‘Great, Chef says could you get your whites on and your arse in gear and get into the kitchen like ten minutes ago, it’s all going tits up.’
Enver sighed and took his sports bag with his whites and canvas knife-roll from out of the boot.
Or perhaps not.
28
Hanlon lay on her stomach at the top of the escarpment, looking down on the scene in the valley below.
She was about a mile and a half away from the Rosemount Hotel, the other side of the woods that abutted on to the lodge where Schneider was due to stay. A main road ran nearby the entrance to the valley and there was a little single-track road that wound its way up the opposite hill to a hamlet. Near this was a farm track that threaded its way along the bottom of the valley and in this was the encampment that she had been watching for the past half-hour.
The slopes of the valley were fields, now brown and grey and stubbly. The tops of the valleys on both sides were covered in trees, dark and mournful in the cold, autumn breeze.
There were three caravans and their attendant vehicles in the small anarchist encampment. They were two old Land Rovers and an ancient Audi A6. There were also two vans, one a former ambulance, that had been converted into mobile homes. They were parked in a circle like a wagon train in a Western.
Hanlon’s friend, Albert Slater, had hacked into the Samsung, a task that had taken maybe three minutes, and blocked the phone’s tracker app. Hanlon had then been free to browse the anarchist’s life as revealed on his phone.
His name was Deke Pirie. From his phone she also learnt that he was a keen game player, he was very sexually active but that he had a partner, Lizzie, (the girl with the pierced nose that Hanlon had met in the kitchen at the anarchist meeting); he was a gun enthusiast and he had a dog, a Dobermann called Jet.
She also learnt from his messages that he’d sent a text to Georgie Adams on the day that Kettering had died in the stairwell.
Mark’s on his way with JK.
Time and date. Well, it corroborated one part of Hinds’s story. Adams had called in the heavies.
Like Hanlon, he was a keen cyclist, there were photos of his bike, and, like Hanlon, he had an app that recorded his routes, superimposed on an Ordnance Survey map, dates and times. It was this that had led her here. The app gave detailed maps of the area showing where he began and finished his cycle rides (together with their timings, effort levels and other dashboard information), virtually all centred around the valley below. Finding it had been child’s play. Was this the sort of mistake in security that Georgie Adams would make? Hanlon doubted it.
And I wonder why you chose this area to settle in? thought Hanlon. Could it possibly be its prettiness or is it due to the proximity of the Rosemount Hotel?
The slope of the field down to the caravans was covered in a light brown stubble of some harvested cereal crop, probably barley, thought Hanlon. Behind her was a strip, a thin line really, of maize, and behind that there were several blue barrels between the maize and the wood that lay between the valley and the hotel grounds, about a mile and a half distant. The feed barrels were raised above ground level on a tripod arrangement.
Huss would have known immediately what this meant. The local landowner or farmer was raising pheasant for a shoot, that’s what the feed was for, to keep the pheasants in the immediate vicinity, and the strip of maize was where they would shelter.
Hanlon knew none of this.
She was lying just in front of the green strip of maize when, through her binoculars, she saw Mark Spencer appear from one of the caravans together with Lizzie, Deke’s girlfriend. He was obviously part of the anarchist encampment here.
He was wearing a black T-shirt with the arms cut off, showing off his powerful biceps, and the white anarchist logo, a ragged spray-gunned capital letter A in a circle, emblazoned on the front.
He lit a joint and a cloud of smoke briefly haloed his brutally shaved head. His left eye was practically swollen shut and Hanlon could see t
he vivid blue and purple bruise from where she had hit him the night before. Lizzie was wearing a ragged short skirt and jumper. She had excellent legs. He passed her the joint and then Jet, the Dobermann, joined them from inside the caravan.
Hanlon moved her foot behind her and by sheer ill-luck a pheasant, disturbed by the motion, flew directly upwards, making its distinctive and very loud call of alarm. The metallic clacking noise rose over the valley and the dog barked. Hanlon looked round in irritation and discovered another of the birds practically sitting on her right calf.
The couple below her looked up sharply. Spencer reached an arm into the caravan and through her binoculars Hanlon watched as his arm reappeared holding a .22 rifle. He raised it to his shoulder and she could see the movement of his fingers as he clicked off the safety and pulled the bolt back.
The end of the muzzle moved up and down then settled in her direction. There was a telescopic sight on the gun. Hanlon guessed that if she could see him, he could see her. Her head could well be filling that sight, her face in its cross-hairs.
She froze momentarily. Then started cursing herself. Once Deke had dusted himself down after their fight the night before and discovered his phone missing, he would have informed Spencer. Spencer was no fool. Of course he could have guessed that she’d be down here. That’s why there was no one around but him and the girl – they were expecting some kind of raid. Spencer had obviously moved the other anarchists out. That’s why the only signs of life that she had seen had been them. The decks had been cleared for action.
Also that explained why he had a rifle handy, just in case she was stupid enough to come on her own.