by Alex Howard
‘Well, don’t start giving them ideas, Enver Demirel,’ said Huss severely.
The grey, Gothic pile of the hotel was visible through the trees. Huss thought of the kitchen staff back in their accommodation in their two-hour kitchen break, fucking like rabbits, taking drugs, having a couple of snatched beers, sleeping in exhausted heaps in odd places, under tables, in linen cupboards, until the evening service began and they could all work like crazy until midnight.
She hoped that Enver might come across something to cast doubt on Hinds’s guilt. If only he hadn’t run away. And what the hell was he doing on that video? None of her colleagues believed that Hinds was anything other than guilty of two murders now. Any theories that Eleuthera were behind Kettering’s death or that of Elsa were void. Even Huss was beginning to doubt herself.
As for Evan:
‘We all do daft things at university,’ Templeman had said. ‘Quite frankly it would have been weirder if he’d been a member of the Young Conservatives. What sort of political organization would you expect to find a Comp Sci student in other than the anarchists? It’s absolutely meaningless. Get a grip, Melinda.’
No one was interested in the anarchists now. Including Enver.
‘I can’t see any likely candidates for killing Schneider,’ said Enver. ‘Nobody can spell “anarchist” in that kitchen, much less want to be one.’
‘Apart from you.’ Huss threw another piece of bread to the fish. Enver’s face wore its typical doleful expression. He was still wearing his chef’s jacket under his heavy coat. It was partially unbuttoned and Huss could see the swell of his pectoral muscles. His hands lay on the granite balustrade, he had exceptionally powerful fingers. There was a painful-looking crescent-shaped burn on one thick wrist and his left forefinger had a blue plaster wrapped around it. Huss found this damage oddly compelling. The cold breeze ruffled his thick black hair and his drooping moustache bristled.
‘Apart from me,’ agreed Enver. ‘And my fellow Muslims aren’t going to be joining the Wahhabis anytime soon. One of the Chechens, Arzu, is even on suspension for “inappropriate behaviour” with lady guests.’
‘Is “inappropriate behaviour” jihadi extremism?’ asked Huss teasingly.
Enver failed to see the joke. ‘No, it’s shagging the guests. Arzu’s sex on a stick, seemingly. Mind you, some women just like fucking chefs.’
Huss moved closer to Enver and slid her arms around his body. She was shorter than he was and she rested her forehead on his chin. Her thick blonde hair tickled his nose, he could smell the shampoo she used.
Huss’s hands slipped under his coat and chef’s jacket. She pulled him closer to her, her palms stroking the rock-hard muscles of his lats and lower back. Her own back gave a warning yelp of pain. She ignored it. I’ll go to the doctor next week, she thought. She lifted her head up and looked into his sad, brown eyes.
‘I want to fuck a chef, Enver,’ she breathed.
‘I don’t know if I’ve got time, Melinda,’ said Enver despairingly. ‘I’ve got to make seventy-two bridge rolls and debone thirty chicken thighs...’
Huss’s hand slid lower down the front of his body, found what she was looking for.
‘...for a ballotine...’
‘I’m sure you’ll make time,’ whispered Huss. ‘Now let’s go back to your room.’
‘But I’ve got to poach the chicken mousse...’
‘Sod the mousse, Enver... Service, Enver, that’s what you say, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely.
‘Service, Enver, now, please.’
He nodded. The ballotine could wait.
It would have to.
Arm in arm they headed back to the Rosemount.
34
Enver woke with a start about one in the morning. The staff accommodation was an ugly-looking block like a prison wing or student accommodation built out of sight behind the hotel.
The room Enver was in, which contained a washbasin, a bed and little else, had a window that overlooked the back of the kitchen and the bins. He was glad it wasn’t the summer. He guessed that the noxious smell from the ten gigantic wheely bins underneath the windows would rise straight upwards into the staff’s bedrooms. It would stink.
He got out of his narrow single bed, wondering what had woken him up, went to the window and looked out. The yard just at the back of the kitchens was in partial darkness, mitigated by the moon overhead and the light that the hotel itself created from the odd window here and there. Nothing was moving in the yard. He could see the bins and the upturned plastic beer crates where the chefs and waiters sat when they had a cigarette break.
He turned his attention to the kitchen door. He could see a blue glow from inside. He guessed that was from where the gigantic stockpot, the size of a dustbin, would be sitting on top of the stove, the gas turned to its lowest setting, whilst twenty kilos of roasted beef bones and dozens of litres of water would slowly reduce and gather flavour overnight to produce a highly flavoured jus.
He noticed that the kitchen door was ajar and he frowned in irritation – that shouldn’t be the case. He’d been the last out, he’d made sure that it was locked.
Although there was no alcohol or money to steal in the kitchen, there were other desirable things worth having. There was ultra-high quality meat in those fridges, beef fillets, venison fillets and fish, tranches of turbot, and then the smoked fish and the oysters that were worth a small fortune. He wasn’t so much worried about the truffles, five hundred pounds sterling for a hundred grams in weight. Harry Jones kept those under lock and key in a safe in his office. They were weighed out for usage on little scales like drug dealers use.
He couldn’t go back to bed knowing that the kitchen was open. If I found out which moron did this, they’ll be wearing their nads for earrings, he thought. He rolled his eyes. So it had come to this, he was back to thinking like a chef. Nads for earrings indeed. A few more days at the Rosemount and he would find himself transformed into one of those teeth-baring culinary psychos he’d become used to working alongside in his youth.
Sod it, he thought, pulling a dressing gown on. I’d better go and see what’s going on. He walked into the darkness of the corridor, headed for the stairs and, as he turned the corner, nearly fell over two bodies on the landing.
Peter Marshall, one of the junior chefs de partie, was lying on his back while the ample, naked form of Kelly Reeves, a pastry chef, her huge breasts swinging back and forth, a half-litre can of lager in her left hand, bucked energetically up and down on top of him.
She froze momentarily, her head tilted back. Can to lips. He could see, strangely, that, despite where she was, what she was doing and what she was drinking, she had her little finger crooked genteelly over the can in her hand as if she were having afternoon tea.
‘Who’s that?’ she demanded. Her voice was quite aggressive, she was a terrifying girl in many ways.
‘It’s Enver, the junior sous.’ He felt incredibly embarrassed by the unexpected encounter. Not so Kelly.
‘Evening, Chef,’ she called out cheerily, obviously reassured, resuming her motions. ‘Oh, I finished those venison pithiviers by the way,’
‘Oh, God,’ moaned Marchant from beneath her, his eyes firmly closed, blotting out Enver from his vision. ‘Oh, Christ yes...’
‘They’re in the walk-in, third shelf down.’
‘Good,’ said Enver weakly as he squeezed past them. Kelly bent over the kid pinioned beneath her and upped the pace.
‘Oh, Christ, yes, Kell, yes.’
‘I remembered to date and label them this time, Chef,’ she called out over her shoulder. Her mighty breasts shook, her hair obscured her face and she crushed the now empty lager can in her hand and tossed it over her shoulder. Enver had given her a hard time over lax labelling earlier, heavy on the sarcasm. He’d been worried in case he’d overdone it, but all in all she seemed to have forgiven him.
He shook his head. The place was a madhouse, he thoug
ht.
He crept down the stairs, worried in case he fell over any more of his kitchen brigade. The staff block reeked of grass, cigarette smoke, sex and booze. Lights flickered from under doors as his fellow chefs got high, masturbated, listened to music, fucked, watched porn, or films, played Xbox. Some of them just cried.
It was quite a hard life really, thought Enver. The fifteen-hour days and six-day weeks, the lack of daylight, the lack of normality, really screwed the staff up, both mentally and physically. Nobody ate properly, nobody had enough sleep, nobody exercised, people shouted at them or hit them or gave them sadistic punishments, everyone drank to excess and seemed addled on drugs. Their only topic of conversation was sex and food, occasionally football. Any idea of normality had long since left the building. Many of them didn’t really know where the hotel was, would be unable to find it on a map. Hardly anyone knew the name of the prime minister. Certainly nobody knew who Schneider was. Nobody would be able to find Germany on a map.
The kitchen brigade in the cold light of day looked dreadful, more dead than alive.
On balance, he preferred the police force. It was slightly saner.
He opened the door to the yard and went outside, shivering as the temperature plummeted. His breath steamed.
He rounded the bins and saw a figure standing just inside the kitchen doorway, silhouetted against the ghostly blue light in the kitchen from the gas ring and the electric fly and insect killers on the walls.
‘Hello?’ he called, no answer. The silent figure swayed in a slightly disturbing way, almost as if it were weightless.
Enver felt a shiver of supernatural dread and took another step forward.
The links of the steel fly chains glinted like silver in the moonlight. Standing in the chains was the figure of a woman, head bent over, long dark hair hanging over her face. Her toes in her stockinged feet were a couple of centimetres above the ground. Two of the chains had been wrapped and tied tightly around her neck, supporting her dead weight.
He sighed and looked more closely, careful not to touch or disturb anything. Her sightless eyes bulged, her mouth was open, she was evidently beyond any form of assistance.
It was Christiane Hübler.
35
Hanlon met up with Huss the following day at eleven in the morning at the police station in Summertown in Oxford.
‘The chief suspect is a young chef called Arzu Mansur,’ said Huss. ‘There’s a text on Hübler’s phone from him agreeing to meet up in the kitchen at twelve thirty. It’s fairly sexually explicit.’
‘So they were having an affair? That was speedy work on her part.’ Despite what she knew about the dead woman, it seemed very quick off the mark.
Huss nodded. ‘She had met him before, seemingly. She’d been down twice before now to check the lodge out and Czerwinski, the manager, said that Mansur had given her a little tour of the lodge’s catering facilities. Mansur had a reputation as a ladies’ man.’ She paused and looked hard at Hanlon. ‘You knew Hübler – did she seem the sort to put it about?’
Hanlon said, ‘Absolutely. She struck me as a very direct woman.’
‘What about Schneider?’ asked Huss.
‘I have to say,’ Hanlon picked her words carefully, she wasn’t sure of the answer, ‘I’m not even sure what her relationship with Schneider really was, come to think of it. I thought they were having an affair, more than that, that they were an item, then I wasn’t so sure and then last night, there was this weird atmosphere.’
She filled Huss in on her evening with Hübler, the strained atmosphere, the stress on the word, the concept, of ‘loyalty’.
‘There was definitely something going on,’ she concluded.
‘Is it likely she would have an affair with a non-European?’ said Huss. ‘Given her race views?’
‘If anything, she seemed to prefer it,’ said Hanlon. ‘She didn’t want Muslims in Europe, but that didn’t mean she didn’t necessarily want them in her bed; or it could have been transgressive sex, forbidden fruit? Who knows, sex is sex, it doesn’t have rules.’ She told Huss about her conversation with Hübler in Claridge’s.
‘Why would they meet up in a kitchen to have sex?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Hübler and Arzu, I mean. Why not in Arzu’s room?’
‘Arzu shared his room with another kid, it’s quite common for sexual activity to take place in other places because of this. Enver nearly fell over two other chefs at it like rabbits when he was on his way down to the kitchen,’ Huss explained.
Hanlon hid a grin – she could imagine how mortified the prudish Enver would have been.
Huss added, ‘And from what you say about Schneider being worried that she’d embarrass him politically with her non-white lovers, she could hardly invite him to her room at the lodge. She’d want to keep it secret. No, the kitchen makes perfect sense. It’s a hotbed of vice. Enver found one of the sauce chefs with his hand up the skirt of one of the waitresses in the walk-in fridge. The chefs seem to like screwing in the kitchen or by the bins, I really don’t know why, but they do.’
She shrugged and looked at Hanlon and continued, ‘So this “loyalty” thing that Schneider was obsessing about, could it be that he knew she was having an affair with Arzu? There was no sign of sex, by the way, on the body, nothing at all. She was strangled with that chain, pure and simple.’
‘Schneider didn’t do it?’ asked Hanlon, half joking. ‘You did check his alibi? Hübler did imply that she had some pretty impressive dirt on Schneider that would ruin his political career.’
‘I did check his alibi, he couldn’t have killed her.’ Huss shook her head. ‘He was doing a conference call with Germany on Skype and he alibied Frank Muller too, for what it’s worth. The murder had to have taken place between eleven forty-five and one a.m. I find it impossible to imagine he arranged a hitman to kill Hübler in such a public place and in such a short space of time and in a foreign country.’
‘And Arzu’s missing,’ said Hanlon.
‘He’s missing,’ confirmed Huss, ‘and it was he who opened that door at eleven forty-five, his thumbprint is logged on the system. It’s a touch-sensitive keypad that controls that door.’
She took her laptop and swivelled it round so Hanlon could see the screen. She pointed at the thumbprint image and time. ‘That’s his, can’t be anyone else.’
Hanlon nodded.
‘And now there’s this.’
Two figures, dressed in military fatigues, their features covered with ski masks and Arab headscarves, sat cross-legged beneath a banner with Arab writing.
‘Al-Akhdaar,’ said Huss. ‘Uploaded to YouTube early this morning.’ One of the two men had a laptop and it displayed the image of Christiane Hübler’s face, a death mask, so to speak, hanging in the chains. He pressed a button, and Arabic letters appeared, overwriting her dead face.
‘Al-Mawt lil sharmouta maseehiyya,’ said Huss, reading from her notebook. ‘“Death to the Christian whore” is what it means.’
‘Is there no audio?’ asked Hanlon. Huss shook her head.
‘Just the images.’
Hanlon nodded. ‘Oh well, so it looks like Schneider wasn’t the target.’
‘Maybe he was,’ said Huss. ‘Maybe they didn’t fancy their chances with that dog of his. Or Muller, come to that. It amounts to the same thing: an attack on democracy and Western values. There’s no way either we could trace the source of that clip, it was sent via TOR.’
‘Have you been up to the scene of crime?’ asked Hanlon.
‘This morning. The Rosemount is a real mess at the moment. Czerwinski is going crazy. News crews everywhere, guests majorly pissed off, functions cancelled, the kitchen’s a crime scene, it could hardly be worse.’
‘How long is the kitchen going to be shut?’ asked Hanlon.
‘Not long,’ said Huss. ‘DI Robbins, who’s the SIO, reckons his team should be finished by about ten tonight, call it midnight. It’s a fairly dream location, really, not like that sodding bus stop.
The kitchen was cleaned down before the murder so any evidence will be easy to gather, couldn’t be better for fingerprints or indeed anything, and we know who the suspect is. Ports, airports, Eurotunnel all alerted.’
‘So is Schneider out of your hair now?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Presumably he’s going back to Germany.’
‘Is he buggery!’ Huss’s voice was angry. ‘He’s still doing that stupid debate at the Oxford Union: “I will not let this act of barbarism silence free speech, it is my tribute to Christiane.” It’s his great moment. Now even people in Britain have heard of him. He’s on the front cover of Bild, der Spiegel are doing a feature. It could hardly be better for the man. You don’t get this sort of publicity often.’
‘So not Eleuthera.’ Hanlon looked questioningly at Huss.
‘Seemingly not,’ said Huss regretfully. ‘It looks like I was barking up the wrong tree.’
‘Well, off the record...’ Hanlon told Huss about her encounter with the anarchists. She could hardly have revealed how she had discovered their presence. Huss shook her head at Hanlon’s actions.
‘They’re gone now,’ said Hanlon. ‘I checked on my way here, all the vehicles have moved out.’
‘Well,’ Huss bit her tongue, ‘it hardly matters. It doesn’t look like they were involved. There’s another two protection officers coming, that makes four plus Enver, plus the hotel guys and that humongous hound.’
‘Mastiff,’ said Hanlon.
‘Whatever. Schneider’s very well protected.’
‘I thought that they didn’t want to provide too much protection in case it looked like we were condoning Schneider’s views?’ asked Hanlon.
‘The chief constable does not want him dead in Oxford, that’s the bottom line. We’d rather be accused of condoning the right,’ said Huss. ‘Face it, we’ve got, what, a couple of hundred protection officers in the Thames Valley, what with Chequers and Dorneywood. I’m sure it hasn’t hurt to divert a couple of them to babysit Schneider.’