by Alex Howard
It didn’t mean that it had to be Stuttgart, of course, but the car was almost posed there as if it had been Photoshopped to indicate the location of the premises. That was, of course, the point of the photos. The premises.
The third. The car was gone now, the door ajar. Open for business.
The picture had a message. Come inside... all earthly delights await you in here... all your erotic dreams can come true, no matter how strange... Nothing, but nothing, is forbidden...
The pictures were tantalizingly close to forming a narrative.
Come inside...
The Something Club, in Stuttgart.
The passage behind the door was womb-red, an almost universal signifier of sexuality. Standing in the half-open doorway was a dwarf girl in a miniskirt and fishnets. She was like a parody of the girls Hanlon had seen the night before in the boxing ring.
She wasn’t simply a midget, or short, she had the classically configured dwarf physique. It was this that made Hanlon believe she would be eminently traceable. There couldn’t be that many dwarf prostitutes in one town.
‘Do you know where this is?’ she asked.
Meyer looked at it and shook her head.
‘It’s obviously the something or other Club and that’s a Stuttgart plate on the Merc. I guess it’s a brothel. Hang on. Lucas!’ she called.
Her colleague wandered over from where he’d been chatting to an attractive policewoman. Meyer spoke to him in German. He looked at the photos and spoke to Meyer who translated, ‘He says it’s the old Oskar’s Klub, in the Bohnenviertel. It closed down years ago. That area has all been sanitized for tourism now.’ She looked at Lucas. ‘Was habt du sagt? Langsamer, bitte... Ja... genau... ganz schon... The girl is Lottie, a dwarf prostitute. Oskar’s was a club where you could have sex with freaks, like overly pierced whores or really hard-core S&M, golden showers, that kind of thing, and it catered to fetishists too.’
‘Is Lottie still around?’
Lucas said something to Meyer who nodded. He got his phone out, spoke to someone. She caught the word Bahnhof.
‘She’s got a place near the station,’ said Meyer. ‘Do you want to go and see her?’
‘Very much,’ said Hanlon. ‘Lottie’s the key to all of this.’
She looked at the photo one more time before she put her phone away. The small dwarf girl. The half-open door of the brothel.
A world of secrets. A world of lies.
Come inside...
*
Hanlon sat in the back of the police BMW as Lucas drove skilfully through the streets of Stuttgart.
‘Tell me more about Oskar’s?’
Meyer directed the question at Lucas in an awkward three-way conversation. Hanlon gathered it was a members’ club for the experimental or deviant, certainly not for the faint-hearted. It was also exclusive, they had sky-high membership fees, a six-month waiting list, and a reputation for utter discretion.
Those few paparazzi brave or foolish enough to try and get photos of clients had a habit of having their equipment and fingers smashed. The message soon got around.
‘Who owned it?’ asked Hanlon.
Meyer asked Lucas, who grunted a reply.
‘Out-of-towners,’ said Meyer.
‘Russich Mafia,’ elaborated Lucas. There’s a surprise, thought Hanlon.
‘Is it the kind of place Gunther Hart might have belonged to?’
Meyer said, ‘It’s exactly the sort of place that Hart would have belonged to. He’d have found it funny, he liked to shock.’
Up until now they had been making reasonable progress through the streets of Stuttgart but as they drew near the station, they came to a grinding halt. The station, as Hanlon had realized when she had arrived, was undergoing a major rebuilding programme. Lucas swore irritably as several roads he took or tried to take were closed, sometimes just ending in enormous man-made canyons. The chaos, which one would have expected in London, seemed slightly un-Germanic to Hanlon.
Eventually they hit upon a road that seemed acceptable to Lucas and about five minutes later they parked up outside an anonymous apartment building.
Lucas said something and Meyer translated for Hanlon’s benefit.
‘He says he’ll wait with the car.’
The three of them got out and Lucas leaned against the bonnet and lit a cigarette. Meyer rang the bell marked C. Schwartz and a voice answered. She said something and the door buzzed open.
Hanlon and Meyer walked up the concrete stairs, their footsteps echoing in the well of the building.
On the first floor there was a door open and a sardonic dwarf woman stood regarding them with an unfriendly expression. It was a pose that almost matched the one on the phone, except this was no luridly, explicitly sleazy nightclub. She too smoked, a cigarette was burning between her fingers.
They walked into her apartment. Meyer started making introductions in German and Lottie cut her off. ‘I speak English well enough,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’
She was wearing a housecoat, slippers and an unfriendly expression. Hanlon looked around her apartment, which was studiously anonymous. Everything, floor, walls, furniture, was magnolia, fawn or tan. She suddenly realized that it was almost certainly Lottie’s workplace and that she would want to screen her private life from her clients. There had to be another place that Lottie lived, even if it was only a room, rather than this sterile, beige environment.
One patch of brilliant colour did exist in the apartment. On the glass coffee table in front of the sofa was a pack of tarot cards laid out as if for a reading. They were old-fashioned and well-used, the evocative pictures archetypal forms familiar to everyone. Lottie looked at Hanlon almost knowingly.
She pointed at two cards that were turned up. One was a card of a stern-faced woman sitting between two pillars. There was a large brass-bound book open on her lap, in her hand a quill.
‘The Book of the Law,’ said Lottie touching the card, indicating the open volume. Then she pointed at the twin pillars. ‘Jachin and Boaz; Security and Strength.’
‘Who is the woman?’ asked Hanlon. There was something about the cards that made you want to ask questions. That was partly their function, she supposed.
Lottie looked at Hanlon.
‘The High Priestess, I guess that’s you.’ She paused. ‘She represents Love and Hatred.’ She closed her eyes and, as if quoting from memory said, ‘Furtherance of the ends of destiny.’
‘Did the cards tell you why I was here as well?’ asked Hanlon with polite scepticism.
‘I don’t need the tarot for that,’ said Lottie, pointing at a MacBook. ‘I’ve got the real news on a variety of feeds.’
The flat was small, just the lounge, bedroom, galley kitchen and bathroom. The bedroom, through the open door, had been fitted up as a kind of sex dungeon.
‘Still turning tricks, Lottie?’ asked Meyer, as if expressing polite interest.
‘I’m moving into tarot readings now,’ she said, ‘but, yes, I’m still hooking. I’m still very much wanted. Do you find it odd that men want to fuck me, Kriminalinspektor, a misshapen hag like me?’
‘Takes all sorts, Lottie.’ Meyer shrugged.
‘I’ve always been in demand from men, the richer and more successful the better,’ said Lottie, proudly. ‘Stuttgart’s very good for me. I must have fucked the boards of Germany’s largest industrial Konzerne.’ She cupped her generous breasts in her hands. ‘God alone knows how much coke they’ve snorted off my tits and ass. I’m surprised they haven’t dropped off.’
Hanlon took the tablet out, the photos.
‘Remember these?’
She leaned over for a better look. ‘Oh, yes, DCI Hanlon, natürlich.’ She looked at Meyer. ‘My readings are private, you can wait outside.’
Meyer nodded. ‘I’ll be in the car with Lucas,’ she said to Hanlon. She stood up and left the room. They heard the main door close, the echoes dying away in the hallway.
Lottie leaned forward and t
urned over the rest of the cards.
The Devil. The Lovers. Death, a grinning skeleton mounted upon a horse. The Tower Struck Down and lastly, the vain, gaudily dressed figure walking with carefree steps towards the waiting chasm, the Fool.
‘So, would you like to hear about Al-Akhdaar and Wolf Schneider and Gunther Hart?’ Lottie’s voice was sarcastic and unfriendly, she was about to hurt someone and she had been relishing the prospect of doing so. Whores don’t have hearts of gold, or at least not for their clients.
‘Oh, yes, Lottie,’ said Hanlon. ‘Natürlich.’
Half an hour she left the apartment.
An elaborate web of deceit uncovered by Lottie.
She had just one more thing to do in Stuttgart and then she could go home.
Now she knew for sure that more or less everything that Marcus Hinds had said had been a lie.
40
DI Huss parked her Golf in the staff car park of the Rosemount and went in search of Czerwinski, the hotel manager. The investigative team had finished and the kitchens had now reopened. The hotel had bridged the catering hurdle by transferring all the cooking to a small satellite kitchen in another part of the building that was used to provide food for functions, weddings, business conferences and parties. For the harassed kitchen staff it had been yet another unwanted challenge to get over.
She found Czerwinski in his office looking tired and careworn. He smiled at her.
‘I only ever seem to see you when something bad happens.’
She knew he was referring back to the time that they had last met, in Oxford. Another death.
‘Well, Irek, I am the police. We’re not normally harbingers of joy.’
He nodded. ‘The problem is the clientele, they seem to think it’s very unfair a dead person should be inconveniencing them.’
She made a ‘me too’ gesture. ‘That’s the public for you. Moan, moan, moan.’
He smiled, picked up a letter. ‘Old-fashioned. Not an email. “Dear sir, my husband and I have had our stay ruined by the activities of the police...”’
He put the letter down and looked at her over the desk. ‘If Hübler had been famous they wouldn’t moan. They’d be taking selfies. “This is me by the murder scene...” He added, ‘This has been the worst couple of days of my life. How’s the hunt going for Arzu?’
‘Nothing as yet,’ said Huss, ‘but we’ll get there.’
Unless he’s already fled the country, she thought. The borders of Europe were at the moment in turmoil with hundreds of thousands of refugees. If he had done a runner, they wouldn’t see him again. British border police wouldn’t have troubled themselves about one person slipping out of the UK.
He could be in Chechnya by now, if he so desired, or equally he could be on his way to joining IS in Syria or Libya or Iraq or Boko Haram in Nigeria. She very much doubted that they would ever see him again.
Czerwinski said, ‘Well, at least all of this is coming to an end. Schneider’s leaving tomorrow...’
‘Really?’ said Huss. ‘Nobody told me.’
She wasn’t unduly concerned. Schneider and his party, Muller and Kellner and that dreadful dog, had nothing to contribute to the Hübler investigation.
‘Yeah,’ said Czerwinski. ‘There’s a helicopter coming tomorrow to pick them up from here and fly them to Heathrow.’
‘What, and the dog?’
Czerwinski laughed. ‘Can you imagine that in a helicopter? No, that’s being driven in Muller’s van. Thank God they’ll be out of everyone’s hair.’
Huss nodded. She very much agreed. And the helicopter ride from one of Schneider’s rich sponsors would mean that they needn’t find him a car and driver. After the Hübler killing they could hardly entrust him to a limo service or taxi firm.
‘Well, Irek,’ she said, ‘you’ve got your hotel back. No controversial guests lined up, I trust?’
He stretched in his old leather chair and looked around the crowded cubbyhole that was his office.
‘At this level, DI Huss, they’re all controversial in one way or another. Rich people, actors, rock stars, you don’t usually get money by being nice and this is, after all, a very expensive hotel.’
Huss nodded.
‘I suppose so. Anyway, I just came to say goodbye. Enver will leave tomorrow too.’
‘Pity,’ said Czerwinski. ‘Harry Jones was going to make him a job offer. He came to see me earlier, for authorization. I said he was welcome to ask. He genuinely has no idea that he’s not a proper chef.’
Huss laughed. Enver would be thoroughly alarmed to hear that. All his adult life had been spent in the quest to avoid working in the family restaurants, and circumstances kept nudging him in that direction.
‘I’ll tell him,’ she said.
‘Are you going over to the lodge to say bye to Schneider?’ Czerwinski asked.
Huss shook her head. ‘No, I’ve seen plenty of him. I think that I’ll just head off home.’
She stood up to go and winced in pain. Supported her weight momentarily on the top of the chair. The painkillers were starting to wear off now and her back was hurting like hell.
Czerwinski noticed.
‘You OK?’ His voice was concerned.
‘Bad back.’ Huss thought, To put it mildly. It was excruciating.
‘You should use the cryosauna down at the lodge,’ he said. ‘You can come over tomorrow if you want.’ There was a hopeful tone in his voice and a slight look of optimistic determination and pleading in his gaze. ‘Seriously, I’ve tried it. It works.’
Huss shook her head. ‘Enver told me about that, it sounds a bit scary, like a walk-in freezer.’ I’d hate to get trapped inside, she thought.
‘I suppose that is more or less what it is,’ said Irek. ‘Do come tomorrow, I’ll give you lunch.’
Huss smiled. Irek was making a pass at her, she thought.
‘I’d take a lot of convincing, Irek.’
‘Well,’ Czerwinski said, ‘obviously you wouldn’t want to get locked in, but I get a bad back too, I’m on my feet for hours a day, and it works.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s just psychological but I think that’s what pain is, isn’t it? Anyway, the combination’s 2222, all the twos.’
‘Thanks, but no thanks. Anyway, I’ll be off now.’
She left his office, which was on the first floor overlooking the majestic sweep of the drive and the magnificent fountain, everything lit up in brilliant, hallucinatory-clear detail by halogen spotlights. She walked down the magnificent carpeted staircase and across the baronial splendour of the reception area, admiring the fake Gobelin tapestries on the walls, the statues in their recessed niches and the gigantic oil paintings with their pre-Raphaelite allegories of the virtue of industry.
She said goodnight to the attractive girls at the front desk and walked into the cold, November night air.
There was a brilliant moon overhead and an owl hooted nearby.
She toyed with the idea of going down to the lodge to say goodbye to Schneider, despite what she had said to Irek, but another knifelike jab of pain in her lower back made her head round the corner to the dimly lit staff car park.
As she approached her car, a dark figure purposefully made its way towards her. Huss felt a stab of alarm. Arzu was still at large, after all. She wondered what she would do if it was him. She certainly was in no fit state for a struggle.
‘Who’s that?’
‘It’s me, DI Huss.’
The figure stepped forward. It was Marcus Hinds.
41
Hanlon left Lottie’s apartment and walked down the stairs, turning over in her mind what she had just been told.
She went up to the unmarked police car and leant in the window. Meyer’s sharp, intelligent face turned to Hanlon.
‘I’m going to walk back to the Bahnhof to get the train back to the airport. Thanks for all your help,’ said Hanlon. She wanted time to digest what she had just learned and space, literally, in which to think. Hanlon hated thinking
sitting motionless, she wanted to feel the delight of movement, the lithe strength of her body moving.
‘Did you get what you came for?’ asked Meyer.
‘Oh, yes, I most certainly did, ‘said Hanlon.
The three of them shook hands and said their goodbyes. The sky was dark and a fine, cold rain started to fall. Hanlon walked slowly along the clean, broad streets of Stuttgart. There were quite a few people about, busy and purposeful. Lights were burning in houses and shops. The cafés were beginning to close. Hanlon thought with surprise, I like this place. Normally she didn’t notice places that much, but Stuttgart, with its air of bustle and work ethic, suited Hanlon’s slightly dour character. It was a place for the industrious and the hard-working.
On impulse, she walked into one of the cafés, sat down and ordered herself a large espresso and, uncharacteristically, some Schwarzwald torte. She hardly ever ate sweet things but it seemed to go with the country she was in.
The café was impeccable, small glass-topped tables, a prosperous clientele of wealthy-looking Stuttgart ladies, the various cakes under glass; Hanlon counted seven different varieties, from the chocolate cake that she was eating to Apfel Torte, Baumkuchen and Linzer Torte. She thought fondly of Enver, how he would agonize about his weight before deciding that actually he probably could get by with a few slices. In fact, the more she thought about it, Enver would be perfectly capable of almost eating his own weight in the various cakes on offer.
And then moving along to the bread stacked neatly above.
Perhaps she ought to lay in a stock of cake to distract the Presa if need be. She smiled grimly to herself. Hanlon had taken steps to neutralize the dog if she had to. Her boyfriend... the term was hardly accurate... The man that she was having a relationship with... again, that was unsatisfactory... Hanlon was involved with a man, a senior officer in another country’s security forces, and she had asked him to provide her with a solution to the Presa.
She thought momentarily of Serg and her bleak grey eyes softened. His hard gymnast’s build, his eyes, born to command, his almost ethereal good looks with his formidable military skills and easy, sarcastic charm.