Cold Revenge (2015) (34 page)

Hanlon suddenly felt very sorry for Fuller. S&M hadn’t killed him in the end; good old-fashioned romance had. Passion for Hanlon had. It was the thought of seeing her that had brought him here, and that alone. He’d fallen in love with her and was now going to pay a terrible price.

At least he had an excuse, which was more than she did.

How could she have been so stupid? She felt a surge of contempt for herself. And now you’re going to die in your new party dress, she thought.

She suddenly thought of Corrigan, crossly looking at his watch and cursing her non-attendance. Typical Hanlon, he’d be thinking. Bloody woman. And here she was, a victim of a self-pitying murderer, bemoaning the hand that fate had dealt him.

‘You’d have thought being a university lecturer, he’d have shown a bit more intelligence, but oh no, thick as pigshit,’ he said. ‘You know, I always wanted to go into teaching. Three lecture jobs at catering colleges I’ve been rejected for now, whereas privileged perverts like him can get anything they want.’

There was no mistaking the bitterness in Michaels’ voice now. There was no mention in the list of complaints against Fuller of Abigail Vickery. Hanlon suddenly thought, your daughter’s death was just an excuse to hang all of this on, wasn’t it? Your resentment in life has sparked all this off but you’ve cast yourself not as the embittered loser, but as the revengeful vigilante. Just to make yourself feel better.

You make me sick, she thought.

‘I could do his job myself,’ he continued in the same aggrieved tone. ‘I’d like to see him try and do mine. He wouldn’t last five minutes. Or that bitch Dame Elizabeth. Do you know what she was being paid? Nearly two hundred K, six times more than me and I do a sixty-hour week. She only worked, if you call it working, six months a year.’

He moved to stand directly in front of the trussed-up Fuller. His face was furious with resentment. ‘And there was all the extra money she earned, on committees, lecture tours. She was minted. Yet ask her for a raise and it was a different story. Can you imagine that, the hypocritical bitch.’ He looked Fuller up and down and balled his fists.

‘I’ve worked at the Dorchester.’ He hit the bound man brutally hard in the stomach with his right hand. His latexed fist thudded into Fuller’s gut. The lecturer bound to the pillar took the full force of the vicious blow. ‘The Georges Cinq in Paris.’ Another savage punch with his left. Hanlon wondered if Michaels was going to beat him to death while working through a list of famous restaurants he’d worked in, like a homicidal San Pellegrino Top One Hundred restaurant award. ‘And Claridges, and no one gives—’ a last vicious right – ‘a fuck. They just don’t care, Hanlon. They couldn’t fucking care less. Well, now it’s payback time.’

Fuller couldn’t move. He was a human punchbag. His head sagged. Michaels surveyed his handiwork with an air of satisfaction.

‘And that upper-class whore McIntyre. I fucked her, you know.’ He sounded aggrieved about his role as a sex toy. ‘And you know what she called me? Her bit of rough. And that, Hanlon, that was supposed to be some sort of compliment. The perfidy of women, Hanlon, the perfidy of women.’

He took a filleting knife off a magnetized holding strip on the wall, walked behind the pillar and started cutting Fuller free.

The lecturer’s body was leaning forward and a couple of seconds later, as the support of the plastic holding him up gave way, he toppled forward, trailing cling film. He was on his hands and knees, as Michaels put the knife down and started gathering up the torn plastic around him and stuffing it into a black bin bag.

Despite herself, Hanlon found something beautiful about Michaels’ movements. All those years in top-class kitchens had left him with an impressive ability to work fast, gracefully, efficiently and, above all, tidily. And the importance of meticulous planning had been beaten into him from an early age in his sixteen-hours-a-day, six-days-a-week apprenticeships in Britain’s top restaurant kitchens. Hanlon had little doubt that when it was eventually discovered, the crime scene would look exactly how Michaels wanted it to look.

He approached her now with the knife and, despite herself, she swallowed. He squatted down next to her and lifted her chin up with his thumb and forefinger. His calm, brown eyes looked deep into her furious grey ones. Her throat was completely exposed.

He put the point of the knife into the material of her dress, about a centimetre below the collar, and ripped upwards, gashing the fabric. The razor-sharp blade left her skin unmarked. Michaels’ expertise with a knife was unrivalled. Then he put the knife down and, using both hands, tore a rip in the dress so her collarbone and the top of her chest were visible.

He stood up again and put the knife down on a work surface, then he turned to look at Hanlon.

‘The only person I feel sorry for, really, is that stupid girl Hannah Moore. I thought killing her would be enough, what with putting Fuller’s hair on her and everything. But oh no, I had to keep going. Well, that’s why you’re here, Hanlon. To lend credibility to Fuller’s demise. If anyone’s likely to kill a suspect in the Met, it’s you. Nobody will be surprised. You’ve established a bit of a reputation. You should Google yourself. Full of alarming comments about you.’

He stood next to Fuller, still face down, and grabbed him by the hair with one hand and the waistband of his underpants with another. Fuller hung as motionless as a log in Michael’s arms and Hanlon found herself staring at the crown of his head, where he was starting to go bald. Michaels braced himself and suddenly swung Fuller forwards like a human battering ram into Hanlon’s face.

She could do very little about it, but she pushed her head against the pillar for the impact and tucked her chin in, so Fuller’s face would smash against hard bone.

There was an audible thud as Fuller’s face met her forehead. The pain was excruciating, but she was largely unscathed. Fuller’s face, nose, mouth and the thin skin around his eye socket, however, already damaged by Hanlon’s head from the university encounter a week or so before, exploded in blood.

Hanlon’s face was covered in it. Michaels dragged Fuller’s crimson face over her dress, holding his lolling head by a fistful of hair, smearing more of his blood down her. Then he took Fuller’s right hand and scraped it down her exposed flesh, leaving claw-like scratches from her shoulder, to halfway down her breast.

He stood back and surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction.

Then he pulled Fuller up by his hair like a giant rag doll, marched him over to the walk-in freezer, opened the door and pushed him in.

He slammed the hugely thick door shut. The freezer door, like the fridge, had a hasp for a padlock and Michaels pushed a knife steel through it so the door couldn’t be opened. Just like he’d done with Hanlon in the walk-in fridge. There was an LED display on the outside of the door, minus eighteen degrees Celsius, it read. Hanlon wondered how long Fuller would survive.

As if reading her mind, Michaels said, ‘I think he’ll last about half an hour. They’ll find him tomorrow, with bits of your skin under his fingernails, where he tried to rape you. You fought him off and locked him in there, while you went to get help.’

He walked over to where she was secured and stood over her.

‘I am sorry about this,’ he said. You don’t look it, thought Hanlon. ‘But you know, Hanlon, when you cook meat, say beef, if it’s fifty-seven degrees it’s medium rare, all lovely and tender and pink. Well, that’s how my heart used to be, but when you heat beef up to about seventy, it’s all tough and dry. I’m afraid that’s me these days.’ He shook his head regretfully. ‘That’s what life has done to me, I’m afraid.’

I don’t give a rat’s arse about cookery or beef, thought Hanlon. Or your pathetic self-justification. I want to kill you.

He looked towards the internal kitchen doors at the far end of the room. The drain was still blocked and the resultant puddle was now wide and shallow, but in its centre, where the drain grill was, the water was probably a couple of centimetres deep.

He jerked his head in its direction.

‘And that’s where they’ll find you tomorrow, Hanlon. Collapsed with your injuries, drowned in there. A tragic accident. You bravely fought off your attacker, only to die so needlessly, in a puddle of water. God knows I’ve submitted enough memos about that fucking drain. Did anyone listen?’ He shook his head angrily. ‘I’ve told them, time and time again, that it’s a health hazard and a potential death trap, but would anyone do anything about it?’ He mimicked a kind of mimsy voice. ‘Oh no, we’ll have to dig the whole floor up to fix it. It’ll cost a fortune. We haven’t got the budget. It’s not covered by insurance. It’s grade-one listed.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, I’ll have been proved right, won’t I! You won’t have died wholly in vain.’

Momentarily she wondered if Michaels was entirely sane. He sounded genuinely aggrieved by the blocked drain. A decent man, pushed by idiots into unreasonable behaviour.

He looked down at her, grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled upwards. Back braced against the pillar, she straightened her legs until she was standing.

Hanlon looked bleakly towards the drain, her final resting place. Then she saw something that gave her the kernel of an idea, and hope blazed inside. At least she felt she had a chance and that might be all she needed.

A yes, a no, a straight line, a goal.

Michaels slipped the choke chain around her neck and held the other end behind the pillar.

‘I’m going to unlock the cuffs. I want you to put your hands behind your back.’ She heard a click, then felt one arm being taken out of the open metal bracelet. Docilely she moved her arms behind her back, as Michaels had demanded. She gasped as the chain bit into her neck. Michaels was taking no chances.

She felt the cuffs tighten on her wrist as he relocked them, and now both her hands were secure behind her back. The choke chain was removed and Hanlon stepped forward. As discreetly as possible, she flexed the long powerful muscles in her legs.

Her legs felt good. They felt strong.

‘Now,’ said Michaels, ‘over to the freezer door. Good, turn round, face me, touch the handle. Good girl, now the top of the steel, excellent.’ Satisfied there were enough of her prints on the door, he looked her in the eye.

‘Come on, Hanlon,’ said Michaels gently, looking at the puddle. ‘Time for your bath.’

‘Put your arm round me and keep walking,’ said Huss quietly to Enver. He did as he was told.

He wondered what on earth she was doing, but Huss was the kind of woman who inspired confidence. It was a long time since he’d been so close to a woman. Her springy hair smelled of some light floral shampoo as she pulled his head close to her, her powerful fingers twined in his thick dark hair. She could feel his breath on her cheek and the roughness of his thick, drooping moustache.

Huss had arrested Sam Curtis twice in her career and interviewed, or sat in on interviews with him, on three other occasions. All of these had involved crimes of violence, or intimidation of one form or another. She knew him as a thoroughly nasty little thug. To find him here was a genuinely unpleasant surprise. Curtis also knew her face well, or he should have done. He’d spat in it once when she’d nicked him.

That had been the time when Curtis had been employed by the Russians to trash Paul Molloy’s pub. It was a commission Curtis had carried out with exemplary zeal. Nobody had testified against him, and he’d walked.

She had no doubt he would have recognized her immediately.

They rounded the corner, out of Curtis’s sight, and Huss let go of Enver, who almost sprang away from her. She was very disappointed by the alacrity with which Enver had let her go. Ed Worth would have clung on for dear life, his hands desperately trying to cover as much ground as possible. Of that she was quietly confident.

Quickly she told Enver who had been sitting in the car and why she had averted her face. There could only be one reason Curtis was there and that was Hanlon. Why else would he be in central Bow?

Occam’s razor again, thought Enver. Why would an Oxford villain be in a car at the end of Hanlon’s road? To wait for her, presumably.

There was one street for Hanlon’s address: one road, two entrances to the road. Curtis at one end.

‘Come on,’ said Enver, turning into the street parallel to the one with Hanlon’s address. ‘Let’s see if Mr Curtis has got a colleague.’

Huss smiled up at him. She did quite a bit of shooting in her spare time and she enjoyed stalking. Enver might have slipped out of her sights; time to find a different prey.

‘After you,’ said Michaels politely to Hanlon, indicating the other end of the kitchen, near the door of the walk-in fridge where Hanlon had been trapped several days before. She still had one shoe off and one shoe on. The slight imbalance made her bob up and down as they walked.

The further down into the kitchen they went, the louder was the noise of the extractor fans. They roared overhead. There was a peculiarly harsh, strong smell of chemicals and she noticed that the oven doors were open.

There were four of them, two banks of two, Hobart again, the same German make as the ones she’d seen when she had been with Michaels in the upstairs kitchen. These were much bigger, though.

She guessed that the ovens must be having some sort of deep clean and that the insides had been sprayed with a degreaser. That would explain the smell and the fans.

She stood, head bowed, by the work surface facing Michaels, outwardly awaiting her fate. In the centre of the kitchen the puddle spread out across the floor. In a minute she guessed he would stun her, either with his fists, or against some surface. She was already so badly bruised on her head, stomach and shoulders, from the choke chain and the handcuffs, that the pathologist would find it impossible to work out what had happened. Once she was half conscious, her slow death would begin.

She had a sudden vision of herself, lying pale and inert, naked on the morgue table, while her body awaited the Y-incision, so they could determine cause of death. Of the two bodies the police would have to deal with, she’d be autopsied first. Fuller would have to wait until he’d fully thawed out, like a piece of frozen beef.