Cold Revenge (2015) (16 page)

Fuller was preying on her mind.

She couldn’t work out if he was a killer or if, as he claimed, someone else was doing the crimes and framing him. DI Huss, however, had irritatingly put the problem very well. If Fuller was the killer, he was still at large and if anyone else died they were going to look increasingly negligent. The press would certainly have a field day. She could almost see the headlines now.

Why was this man free to kill again?

Incompetent cops bungle investigation.

The real Dr Evil.

She was mildly surprised that there had been nothing yet in the papers, almost certainly because the second murder had happened down in Oxford and no connection had yet been made.

In one of his last classes she’d been to, Fuller had touched on Utilitarianism, the theory that you can measure if something’s good by its impact on society. On that basis, they should put Fuller behind bars immediately for the public good. If he was guilty, the murders would stop, because he could no longer commit them. If someone were trying to frame him, the murders would have to stop too.

When she found the brothel in Oxford that she was sure Fuller had attended, she could maybe get confirmation one way or another. They’d never be able to use it in court, but it’d help clarify her mind. She knew that this was a very arrogant way of looking at things, but she was getting increasingly disillusioned with the police force. She decided that if her superiors discovered what she was up to and tried to discipline her, then she would resign. She would resign very publicly too.

Hanlon had never sold information or stories to the press; she despised them. But she did know several journalists she had a grudging respect for and she was sure they would leap at the opportunity to publish any Hanlon-led revelation. And she did know a lot of dirt.

She looked around her one-room apartment for inspiration as to what to do with her day. Hanlon was terrible at killing time. In truth, work was her drug. Her boss, Corrigan, had once wondered to himself what motivated Hanlon. The answer was simple. It was work. It gave her something interesting to do. It filled time. She didn’t have the kind of distractions that most people have. She didn’t have any friends to see, any real hobbies other than triathlon, if that could be called a hobby, and today was supposed to be a rest day. The triathlon was more a way of mortifying the flesh than a desire for sporting achievement. Six days a week she worked her body till it screamed in pain, Sundays she deliberately did nothing, to let it recover. It was the hardest part of her training.

She had no TV. Television annoyed her, as did film and music. In fact, most things annoyed Hanlon. She could have gone out for lunch, but eating was not done for fun. In truth restaurants slightly sickened her. She particularly disliked the elevation of food to a quasi-religious experience with its own hagiography, its own priesthood and its own liturgy. It had got seriously out of hand, in her opinion. Even the process of eating, moving food around in her mouth, she found faintly disgusting.

She had a book to finish on the Spanish Civil War but didn’t feel like it at the moment. It was hard to work out who was what, through the thick forests of acronyms – the POUM, the CNT-FAI, the UGT, the PSUC, it was bewildering. The book was, however, one of the few things in her flat to read; the picture on the wall, a signed black-and-white photo of the German artist Joseph Beuys, the only thing to look at.

The only link to a father she never knew.

Art was one of the few things she did enjoy and she was surprisingly knowledgeable about it. When she was young, a man had come to the house where she lived with her adoptive parents and left the photo, signed and framed, of the artist sitting in a corner of his studio wearing work boots, jeans and his trademark fisherman’s vest. Under the brim of his hat, Beuys looked sad and slightly worried. His eyes had a haunted look. Her adoptive parents had told her that the photo had belonged to her father and that she should have it. It was the only thing of his that she owned.

She unrolled her futon mattress and lay on it, staring at the ceiling. She ought to be visiting Whiteside’s parents to try to talk them out of their decision, but she feared her temper. There were times when she envied Anderson’s freedom of action. He would have made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. But Hanlon knew she could never physically assault a couple in their sixties. That being the case, there was no point threatening them. Like Anderson, Hanlon didn’t make threats. Their method was to point out to the other person the consequences of non-obedience.

It was then up to that person to choose their fate.

For lack of anything better to do, she took her phone out and texted Dame Elizabeth to see if they were still OK for their meeting.

Dame Elizabeth responded almost immediately in the affirmative, seven p.m., then she added casually:
I think I might be able to tell you something about your father, if you’re interested.

Hanlon stared in disbelief at the screen. She read the message again to make sure there was no confusion on her part, that she hadn’t somehow misunderstood.

...if you’re interested.

Well, that would be a classic understatement.

All her conscious life, since she could remember, she’d wanted to know more about the man whose surname she bore and, paradoxically, almost just as strong was the desire not to know. Everyone else knew where they came from it seemed, but she did not. She had no parents, no siblings, no family. Nothing. Sometimes this was a thing of pride, sometimes a source of unhappiness.

Then again, she was honest enough to realize that she almost certainly could have found out if she’d so chosen. There would be public records to consult, established procedures for this kind of thing, existing protocols. She could even have used police resources, blind eyes would have been turned, and lastly she could have utilized the network of people who owed her favours, or simply did her bidding.

She’d done none of those things. She wondered if at the back of this lay cowardice. The worry that she might discover some highly unpalatable truth about her parentage. What if her father had turned out to be a rapist, a worthless junkie, insane? She already knew she had a mother crazed enough to commit suicide, that much her adoptive parents had told her.

Even worse maybe, depressingly normal. An accounts clerk with hairy ears and a cardigan.

She’d turned her back on her past, but now the past had risen to claim her. As Dame Elizabeth had found out, you can ignore the truth but it won’t go away.

‘Fine,’ replied Hanlon, tapping the word in. She lay back down on the mattress. Her grey eyes for once lacked their usual angry certainty. Tonight would be the first time in her life that anybody had told her anything about her father.

If I’m interested, of course, she thought.

DCI Hanlon was not the only person with family on their mind. Fuller too lay on his bed, a bottle of vodka on the table beside it, thinking about the past. He’d got to Oxford like Laura, but by a very different route.

He was sixteen when he did his A levels, nearly two years younger than everyone else in his class. Big’s career at the BBC had crashed and burned. Uncle Phil, steadily climbing the corporate ladder, had ditched her for younger meat.

Big was axed from TV. She’d been judged by the Corporation as too old and unattractive to be in the public eye. The flat in central London was now gone and Monica Fuller spent most of her days and nights drowning her sorrows at The Queen’s Head pub round the corner from their new flat in Acton, in a far from glamorous part of West London. She told the regulars that she was involved in community dance projects. They didn’t care. Nobody who drank there cared about anything any more. To be a regular at the Queen’s was to be a card-carrying failure. It was a truly terrible pub.

Gideon Fuller’s academic career was beginning to unfurl like a triumphant banner.

When they left central London, he had left the private school where he’d been a scholarship student and had wound up at the local comprehensive. Learning moved at a more sedate pace there. Fuller, through a mix of streaming, and a headmaster worried that the new kid whose public-school accent marked him out so dramatically might come to an unpleasant end, was fast-tracked.

Fuller, lost in unhappy memories of the past, poured himself another vodka. He picked away at the recollections of the past like a scab. His eyes narrowed. He was remembering his last day at home. His ability to recall events was amazingly good. He must have relived this event thousands of times. His free hand held Vulture gently. Vulture had been there too.

It must have been in August, twenty years ago. The results had come in the post, which would have been nine thirty a.m. There were two letters, one for him, one for Big, as he had come to think of her.

He remembered holding the envelope that contained the key to his future. He knew he had done well, but how well remained to be seen. He had opened the buff envelope with his name on, four grade As. If he passed the Oxford University entrance exam which he was signed up for in the autumn (and he knew he would – fish swim, birds fly, I pass exams, thought Gideon), he’d be in and away from all this mess. That was the expression he used to himself, mess. Gideon never swore. He didn’t want to be like Big, with her foul mouth, and he would never drink for the same reason.

He showed Vulture his results. Vulture was delighted for him. He waggled his neck and his beak jumped up and down with excitement. Gideon felt a surge of happiness. It was an unusual feeling and one he had learned to associate with achievement, with things, not people.

Things make you happy; people just hurt you. It was an axiom.

In the present day, his phone started ringing. Fuller ignored it. He was reliving his past in every excruciating detail. His memories were startlingly vivid and detailed.

As if on cue, Monica Fuller’s bedroom door had opened.

‘Morning, Mum,’ he said. His mother gave him a look of angry disgust.

‘What’s that you’ve got there?’ she demanded. Big was still drunk from the night before, but only too aware of how bedraggled she was looking. She’d slept in the clothes she’d been wearing and a residual smell of The Queen’s Head, the ghost of Christmas Past, lingered on the fabric. She noticed Gideon wrinkle his nose slightly and a wave of anger against her prissy, goody-goody son surged through her. Who did he think he was to judge her, the little bastard. She badly wanted to hurt him. Let him share her pain. Do you think it’s fun being me, she thought, does it look like I’m having a laugh? She took a cigarette from the packet on the table and lit one. She knew he hated smoking.

She snatched the letter from him, holding it at arm’s length so she could focus, one eye half closed against the smoke rising from the cigarette in her mouth, and read through it. Well, no joy there. Her lips curled. Academic results, big deal, what use are they in the real world?

She opened the other letter. It was from his drama and dance teacher at the stage academy Big sent him to. It was disastrous, an unambiguous demolition of Big’s hopes to see Gideon in the West End. It might as well have said, Two Left Feet and can’t act. She knew, deep down, that he was not cut out for life as an actor but she was unwilling to let go of her dreams. There was no place in life for her as an academic’s mother. There was, however, a role for her as a stage mother; indeed she might build a second career on its back. She could be an agent or maybe get a choreographic role. She knew he could act, she knew he could dance, it was in his genes. He’d just chosen not to. She was furious, and still very drunk.

‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘And after all the sacrifices I made for you. You ungrateful little bastard.’

Gideon stared at the floor in misery.

‘You didn’t even try, did you?’

‘I promise I’ll learn to dance, Mummy. I’ll make you proud of me.’ He wasn’t sixteen any more. He was ten. His mother snorted in derision. Vulture was still sitting on the kitchen table. Big’s eyes alighted on it.

‘God, you’ve still got that horrible thing,’ she said, picking Vulture up.

‘Give him to me,’ said Gideon. Big laughed, gratified by his obvious distress. Got your attention now, haven’t I? she thought. It felt good.

‘Playing with toys at your age, you little poof,’ she said.

Then it happened. She took her cigarette out of her mouth and stubbed it out in Vulture’s left eye. There was a hiss, a plume of thin smoke and a smell of burning rubber.

‘Give him to me,’ repeated Gideon.

If Big hadn’t still been half-cut from her three a.m. session she would have noticed the change in his voice. Big sneered. She had noticed there was a deep cut in the rubber where the wing of the bird joined the body. With one brutal, downward motion, she tore the wing off the bird and threw Vulture out through the open kitchen window of the second-floor flat. The wing followed.

She turned to look at her son in triumph and was sent flying, as Gideon’s open palm slammed into her cheek. Her glasses flew off and Gideon stamped on them as if he was crushing a venomous insect. He looked at her cowering from him. His hand hurt; God knows what her cheek must have felt like. He felt the triumph spreading through his body as he saw her pain.

Big was no coward, nor was she a stranger to being knocked around by men, but this unexpected attack seemed to paralyse her. She steadied herself on the table and Gideon slapped her again. It felt even better. Big whimpered. He liked that. In fact, it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

Then he grabbed hold of her throat with his right hand and squeezed. Now he could see the pain and terror in her eyes. How do you like it? he thought. Sixteen years I’ve had of this, you drunk old bitch. Now it’s payback time.

He increased the pressure on her throat and her bloodshot, slightly yellow eyes bulged. If I keep going, thought Gideon, she’ll die. It was a tempting thought. He pushed her away roughly and his mother staggered across the kitchen.

‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Get out. When you come back I’ll be gone and don’t even think of looking for me.’