by Alex Howard
‘But where does this leave you with Hinds?’ Huss looked at her questioningly. Hanlon had spoken in a kind of offhand way but Huss could feel a kind of tension behind the innocuous query.
‘He’s facing two charges of murder.’ Her voice was formal, almost stiff.
‘Which you don’t think he did.’
Huss said, her voice softer, ‘No, I don’t. Hinds is not the kind of man to do something like that. I just wish I could talk to him, hear what he’s got to say.’
‘Do you really mean that?’ asked Hanlon, with an infuriating half-smile.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Huss. She looked suspiciously at Hanlon. She was obviously up to something.
‘Well, then,’ Hanlon stood up and stretched, ‘I’ll arrange it.’
She took her phone out, Huss watched her fingers swiftly text, then read a reply. She clicked the phone off and looked at Huss.
‘This evening.’
‘Where?’
Hanlon smiled. ‘The home of British Boxing, Melinda. The York Hall, Bethnal Green.’
36
The York Hall, although richly evocative for the boxing community in the same way as La Scala is for the opera lover or Wembley for the football fan, was, for DI Huss, a bit of a disappointment. It’s an unlovely building and inside, the boxing ring standing proud of serried ranks of plastic chairs on a scuffed wood-block floor, it is not unlike being in a school gym.
Hanlon had been before, but not Huss. Before they went Hanlon had said to her, ‘You can drop any ideas you might have about nicking him, that’s for sure. There’s going to be about two thousand people in there tonight, a good proportion of them have been on the wrong side of the law, and a lot of them know how to fight.’
Huss nodded, she could imagine. She didn’t know who the superintendent of Bethnal Green police was, but she could well believe that a request to effect an arrest there would go down very badly.
Hanlon went on, ‘Anderson said Hinds will talk to you there, he wants to give you his side of the story. He says he can give you information that will prove that he’s innocent.’
‘That sounds fair enough.’
‘And let me remind you once again, Melinda, don’t try and arrest him. We’re going to be in Bethnal Green, that’s not a good place to use any heavy-handed police tactics, it’s not Oxford. You’d have some sort of almighty riot kicking off.’
Huss looked around her. It was late afternoon, half five, and the fights went on until the last one finished about ten-thirty. The bouts were anything from three to ten rounds. This was real boxing, gritty, no-frills, low-key. The fighters weren’t slick, it was where it all begins. It is a world away from the glitz of the MGM Grand Las Vegas, the O2 arena or Madison Square Garden. It’s where everything slowly starts for the fighters as they make their painful way up in the fight game. The crossover point from the amateur to the professional world.
She and Hanlon leaned by the back wall, waiting.
There were quite a few other women present, mainly young, dressed up in tight revealing dresses and vertiginous heels. Lots of cleavage, make-up and perfume. All of them with either families or boyfriends. The men were muscular, short-haired or shaven-headed, probably eighty per cent white, twenty per cent black, a sprinkling of Asians. The dress code was tough.
Fleetingly Hanlon wondered what they’d make of someone like Albert Slater who, the last time she’d seen him, had been wearing pink brothel creepers, torn skinny jeans, a leopard-print silk shirt and a beret. Seventy years old and still rocking.
Hanlon was wearing a long, tailored knee-length blue wool coat, very tight dark blue jeans and high-heeled brown suede boots that reached her lower calves. She had a white V-necked cashmere sweater on underneath. She looked incredible, thought Huss, feeling awkward and burly next to her in a two-piece trouser suit. Hanlon was turning a lot of heads.
There was a fenced-off VIP section in front of the ring. Same functional plastic chairs as everyone else, maybe a tiny bit more legroom.
A gallery upstairs ran around three sides of the interior. Banners, home-made, brought by friends and relations of the boxers, hung down, cheering on fighters due later in the evening.
The hall was maybe only half-full at this time. It was early days. Then, with little warning, the MC took to the ring with his microphone. The acoustics were appalling, Huss could make out only the odd word, ‘...blue corner... red trunks... from Hornsea, London...’
Then the fighters came in, one after another, to their chosen music. They took their corners and two girls, shoehorned into basques that displayed a huge amount of pushed-up cleavage and which disappeared up between their buttocks, wearing fishnets and very high heels, paraded around the ring with cards saying ‘Round One’ on one side and ‘Spearmint Rhino’ on the other.
Hanlon smiled to herself. Quite by chance, at a similar place in Luton, years ago, she had seen a nineteen-year-old Enver Demirel, fleeing the tyranny of the family restaurant business, emerge to fight some black guy. A much slimmer Enver. Enver ‘Iron Hand’ Demirel. His surname meant, quite literally, Iron Hand, in Turkish.
Enver’s entry music to the ring had been Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, chosen by his Brummie manager. He had found it embarrassing but, typically, Enver hadn’t liked to say anything.
Enver ‘Let’s not make a fuss’ Demirel.
The girls finished walking around the ring and slipped out between the ropes. The bell rang, the fight started.
It was two lightweights. Huss paid no attention, then she felt Hanlon stiffen and followed her gaze.
Walking into the VIP area was a small group of men. One tall and distinguished-looking in a dark suit and a red tie. Next to him a shorter man dressed in a blue tracksuit and trainers. He had snakelike unruly locks of dark hair, not wholly dissimilar from Hanlon’s, that fell around his face. The other two men wore Crombies and had shaved heads, like a kind of uniform, which, in a sense, it was.
Huss noticed people staring, but in a kind of surreptitious way, and the crowd of people gathered in the walkways between the chairs and the walls magically parted as if for royalty.
Dave Anderson had arrived. His eyes unerringly found Hanlon’s over the sea of faces and their glances met. He inclined his head curtly and sat down. The evening was beginning.
*
Hanlon and Huss watched more punters file into the York Hall – no sign of Hinds yet. There was a cough to one side of Hanlon. It was another of Anderson’s shaven-headed associates and a man in his fifties, paunchy, with a flat, almost Aztec face, composed of planes and angles. He was somehow compellingly good-looking and wore a jaunty trilby hat and a loud jacket. Ringlets of dark hair fell down from under the hat.
‘You must be Cliff,’ said Hanlon. Despite having met him once years ago, she would never have recognized him now.
‘You must be psychic,’ he said. Despite his comparative age, he was still attractive. Almost literally: there was a cocky, confident swagger about him that exuded an almost tangible pull.
‘No, I can read, that’s all,’ she replied, looking at his knuckles.
His gaze followed her eyes and he suddenly grinned and looked at Huss. ‘DI Huss?’ She nodded. Marcus Hinds’s uncle said, ‘Please follow me.’
Clifford Hinds led them with his rolling, swaggering walk, his large, handsome face thrust aggressively forward. They passed through a pair of frosted double doors into the back corridors of the York Hall.
The two women, followed by the silent skull-headed form of Anderson’s underling, like the Angel of Death in a Crombie, walked behind Cliff up flights of stairs and down corridors until they came to an office door at the end of a silent, linoed hall. They could hear the muted roar of the boxing downstairs.
A familiar figure stood outside the door, tall and thin, tonight coolly elegant in a three-piece light grey Prince of Wales check suit.
‘In here, DI Huss,’ said Morris Jones. His eyes were their usual hooded, slightly glazed slits.
Huss nodded and the door closed behind her.
Jones turned his attention to Cliff and the muscle.
‘You two can go,’ he said dismissively. They nodded and did so. Morris Jones and Hanlon watched them disappear down the corridor.
‘Fucking bell-ends,’ said Jones dismissively.
He looked down at Hanlon; he was about a head taller. Her cold grey eyes met his. I’m glad I won’t have to fight him, she thought. Morris Jones was like Death’s emissary.
‘So, you never took that money we gave you.’ He gave the words a feeling of regret, as if Hanlon had missed some kind of rare opportunity to finally make an intelligent decision.
‘You didn’t give me any money, Morris,’ Hanlon’s tone was clipped, annoyed, ‘that was for Mark Whiteside’s medical expenses. And no, I didn’t. It’s all in that escrow account. You’ll be able to have it back soon.’
‘He’s still in that coma.’
Hanlon nodded. ‘He’s being operated on in a couple of weeks. It’s on the NHS, I don’t need your money now, Anderson can have it back.’
‘He thought you’d say that.’ Just how did they know about Whiteside’s op? thought Hanlon, irritated. Anderson had so much information at his disposal. But who would refuse a request from Anderson? Not if you wanted to live.
‘I’ll pass the message on,’ said Jones.
They fell silent. It wasn’t an awkward silence, neither of them liked making small talk, both of them were content saying nothing.
‘You did earn it, Hanlon,’ he pointed out.
She looked at him in surprise. ‘Not really.’
‘The vor, that Myasnikov, dead. That firm of his, dead and buried. I know, I had to organize the cleaning up.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘Dust to dust.’
‘I didn’t kill anyone, Morris.’
‘Of course you didn’t, Hanlon.’ Spoken in the tone of one humouring a child. Hanlon glared at Morris Jones, her glance taking in his immaculately polished shoes, the razor-sharp creases in his suit. It suddenly occurred to her that when Jones dressed he was probably dressing for death – either his own or someone else’s.
Jones’s own mortality was a constant companion. Any day, any evening, any night, some rival of Anderson’s might decide to remove him from the equation, or a job might go terribly wrong, or simply one day his body might pack it in from the heroin he used. An overdose, a heart attack. Jones was perpetually skating on thin ice.
He didn’t care, he lived for the moment. She reflected with a rare stab of humour that that made Jones quite trendy, what with all the current vogue for mindfulness. Perhaps he could set up as a lifestyle coach.
‘I don’t kill people for money like you, Morris.’ Their eyes locked. Mutual dislike but mutual respect.
He looked down at her with genial contempt. ‘No, the difference between us is that for me it’s an occasional part of my job, but you’ – he emphasized the word ‘you’, it was like being jabbed in the chest by an accusing finger – ‘you choose to do it. You just pretend it’s self-defence or that you had no choice, which is a load of old bollocks. You’re a fucking hypocrite.’
She glared at him, but part of her thought, You can’t deny it, it’s true. You like hurting people. You’ve got a problem.
‘Anyway,’ he said, stretching, ‘that’s enough small talk, you want to stay and babysit your mate or do you want to come and watch the fights? You’re quite handy with your fists, I hear.’
It sounded quite like a challenge. She decided to take it as such. Hanlon felt something snap inside her. It had been the mention of Whiteside, a man that she adored, that had done it. She took a step toward Jones and looked up into his eyes, expressionless as a crocodile’s.
‘You name the time and place, Jones. I’ll be there,’ she hissed. Her turn now. She jabbed him hard in the chest with her forefinger. ‘Anytime.’
He smiled down at her.
‘Well, Hanlon, I’m sure the day will come and when it does,’ he adjusted the cufflinks in his shirt and straightened his tie, ‘all your troubles will be over.’ He turned on his heel and took a pace down the corridor, stopped and turned to look back at her.
‘Because you’ll be dead.’
37
Earlier that day, while Huss busied herself with her duties regarding Schneider, Enver concentrated on his: cooking.
RNF (Rhein-Neckar Fernsehen) TV were currently interviewing Schneider in the drawing room of the lodge. Enver found himself making yet another batch of sandwiches and coffee and tea for the media company and for Bayerisches Fernsehen, the big Bavarian TV company, who were patiently waiting their turn.
He sliced and buttered bread, added fillings and garnishes, took tray-bakes that he’d made from the oven. He was doing simple food, a lot of it, but of an exemplary high quality. Ironically he found himself slightly sneering at the low level of expertise needed to do all this in comparison to his pressurized kitchen duties the other day. He caught himself doing that and smiled bitterly at himself – once more, he was falling back into chef’s thinking.
Enver spoke serviceable German and as he bustled in and out of the living room he caught snatches of Schneider’s interview:
‘...I’m not saying all Muslims are bad, not at all, but their values are incompatible with Western democracy. They execute gays, they force women to stay at home and cover their heads, if they’re liberal, and their faces and hands if they’re conservative...’
Enver, silently seething, put the sandwiches down on a table and went to get the drinks. He came in again:
‘...Christiane died protecting not just me but all of you. Can any of you name a single Muslim country that has a free press? Oh, you’re happy to criticize me and my policies. But I’m trying to save Germany!’
Schneider paused dramatically, the cameras lingered on his powerful, good-looking face, his expensive haircut. He looked into the lens, his blue eyes moist, and a single tear rolled down his cheek:
‘Christiane Hübler died for you all. I will never forget her. Neu Schicksal will never forget her. We must never forget her.’
‘Danke schön, Herr Schneider, vielen danke,’ said the visibly moved Bavarian TV interviewer.
‘Murdered by Muslim immigrants who want to enslave us and destroy our way of life. Wir mussen niemals vergessen!’
*
Hübler’s death, thought Enver, had been a wonderful thing for Schneider. He was energized, the press were clamouring for interviews. He had hundreds of new followers on Twitter. Dr Florian Kellner, his political media adviser, was beside himself with excitement.
And while they work themselves into a lather about killer Muslims, thought Enver, here I am making them cakes and bloody sandwiches.
Enver’s day wore on and on. Several times he had to jog up to the hotel to fetch more food. He then cooked a vast amount of chicken and apricot tagine and couscous for the assembled press for their dinner. He was tired, he had a headache and he felt increasingly irritated. Nobody said thank you. Nobody tipped him.
Nearly three million Muslims in the UK and how many of them were involved in terrorism? Just a tiny, tiny percentage and many of them not really British, like Jihadi John, now no more, who had been more Kuwaiti than anything.
Who’s trying to keep you alive? he thought, angrily cooking up more couscous for the German film crews and Radio Oxford who had now arrived.
Who’s cooking your bloody dinner, ingrates?
Bastards.
Muller had tethered the demon dog up somewhere. It was quite tempting to go and find it, unchain it and watch it go at the media. Really give them something to film.
Five o’clock came up on the kitchen clock in the lodge. Enver went in search of Schneider and found him with the blubbery-lipped, fat-faced Dr Florian Kellner, his number two deputy, who had flown out from Germany to be with him.
Enver momentarily wondered about the wisdom of having leader and deputy leader under the same roof. Eggs in one basket, h
e thought. Then he yawned; he’d been up since five a.m. and he wouldn’t finish until midnight. Typical hours for a Michelin hotel chef. He was almost too tired to care.
‘I’m going to take a break now,’ he said, ‘for an hour. Is there a room you’re not using?’
He knew there were four bedrooms upstairs, on the ground floor was the kitchen, dining room, living room and study.
Schneider said, ‘You can go back to the hotel if you like.’
Enver shook his head. ‘I’d prefer to be here for now,’ he said, ‘just in case.’ With Hübler dead at the hands of Arzu he could hardly afford to be careless. ‘Besides, it’s hardly worth going back for an hour.’
Kellner said approvingly, ‘I applaud your attitude.’
Schneider smiled. ‘Go downstairs. In the treatment room down there, there’s a bed.’ He turned to Florian. ‘Go and show him.’
‘I’ll be back at half six.’ Enver turned and wearily walked out of the lounge into the hall and down the stairs to the treatment room.
There was a variety of interesting things to be seen down there. Florian Kellner, who in Enver’s eyes looked like a huge baby in a suit with glasses and his pouty, fleshy mouth, pointed them out.
‘All this stuff exists up at the hotel but this lodge is for the very rich and they don’t like having to share,’ he explained. ‘Or, I suppose, if they’re famous they don’t want to be seen with a tube up their ass having a colonic irrigation.’
There was a sauna, a little steam room, a couple of massage couches with Velcro straps for arms and legs.
‘Why the restraints?’
Kellner smiled. ‘It’s those hot stones and cupping and stuff like that where you’re supposed to be immobile. I think it’s Quatsch myself, but rich people like mumbo-jumbo. I suppose if you’re strapped down you have to endure it without being able to get up and go.’ He looked around him and his eyes alighted on a suitable example of holistic ‘medical’ nonsense.
‘I mean, look at some of this Scheiss! Like that.’
He pointed to a large barrel-shaped object, the height of a tall man, like an immersion tank in an airing cupboard.