‘So, DCI Hanlon, what was the Rosemount like?’ He paused and smiled his thanks as the attentive waiter poured Schneider a generous glass of white wine from the bottle.
‘Luxurious.’ She looked around the Michelin-starred restaurant they were sitting in. ‘You’ll like it.’
Vacherin, the restaurant, with its predominately French menu, would have sat quite comfortably in the Rosemount as far as food went, but not décor. You have to work awfully hard to be young and relevant but classic is classic. The mod-ish room they were sitting in now, essentially minimalist in its styling, just off Bond Street, would have clashed horribly with the Rosemount’s pseudo-Gothic style. It was modern, with composite moulded plastic tables, expensively done, the kind of faux-marble effect that one might get in an expensive fitted kitchen. There was quite a lot of Miró-style art on the walls, interspersed with pieces of interesting abstract sculpture. Everything was beautifully, expensively lit.
The lights didn’t just light, they enhanced. Even Hanlon was impressed.
‘You live very well, for a man of the people,’ she said. Schneider looked at her, amused. ‘I came from a really shit background, Hanlon, a classic slum. I can keep it real, but I’m never going back.’ He shook his head. ‘Niemals. I’d rather die.’
She believed him.
She looked at the menu and her eyebrows rose fractionally. No wonder they could afford the lights.
That which was artfully illuminated included Schneider, who tonight looked like a Hollywood actor playing a minor Germanic god, relaxed, powerful, strongly handsome. Hanlon noticed that Hübler, sitting next to him on the banquette that ran the length of the wall, was almost pressing her body against him and she also noticed that Schneider was looking slightly embarrassed by this. She wondered if maybe they’d had some kind of one-night stand at some time and he had found himself embarrassingly stuck with her. She plainly adored him, and he was now regretting it.
Hanlon mentally filed this information and thought back to her visit to the Rosemount earlier that day.
Like Claridge’s, the Rosemount Hotel was classical luxury rather than the contemporary chic that Vacherin embodied. It had been built as a home for a Victorian industrialist, a large imposing baroque pile, swirly stone decorations everywhere, a huge clock tower, a massive Italianate fountain with nymphs, dolphins and gods frolicking around, manicured grounds, gates like those of a London park. It was a stone-built hymn to money. There was a red carpet, secured with brass runners, going down the steps and, once inside, the luxury baronial theme continued. A minstrels’ gallery, suits of armour, enormous gloomy paintings. Everything was on a massive scale. Walls were wood-panelled, ceilings incredibly high and rococo-plastered. There was a dining room that hadn’t just been copied from a Loire chateau, it had been ripped from a Loire chateau and transported, piece by piece, back to Oxfordshire and reassembled.
It was two fingers up to the boutique hotel, with its transitory fads and its egalitarian atmosphere. This was a place where everybody knew their place and the main concessions to modernity lay in plumbing, bathrooms and Wi-Fi. There was a helipad for guests and prices were to match.
Strangely, thought Hanlon, from what Huss had told her, Georgie Adams would have been very much at home here. She was the interloper at the Rosemount, not the upper-class anarchist.
The hotel was built on an escarpment, giving its dining room a majestic view of the flat, dull Oxfordshire countryside. The duty manager, Irek Czerwinski, pointed to a building visible from the terrace at the rear of the hotel.
‘That down there is the Presidential aka the Garden Lodge. It’s where Herr Schneider and his party will be staying, come and see.’
He looked at the woman by his side as they walked down the balustrade stone steps and along the path to the lodge. The wind blew her dark corkscrew curls and he noticed the way her cold, grey eyes evaluated her surroundings. He had met her before, at a different hotel, and he doubted she would remember him, but she had caused a great deal of trouble then and indirectly nearly got him fired. Like all good hotel managers, he had an almost psychic ability to read people’s characters.
Hanlon was trouble.
He had no doubt whatsoever of her ability to create trouble again at the slightest provocation. He knew he would be heartily glad to see the back of her. He carried on with his tour.
‘The lodge was built to accommodate the prince regent and his party in 1889 when they stayed here over Christmas for the shooting.’ Czerwinski had automatically fallen into his hotel spiel. ‘Discretion was the order of the day, and so a hawthorn hedge was planted around the lodge to screen the prince’s shenanigans. Nothing ever changes, there’s only the one entrance.’
Hanlon evaluated the three-metre-high hedge, beautifully trimmed but with vicious thorns, that surrounded the property. It was impenetrable.
All the better to protect the prince from prying eyes as he got on with his womanizing. A function it was still serving well over a century later. She looked back at the hotel above, dominating the landscape, its grey stone staircases and manicured lawns.
‘We won’t go in.’ There were barred gates the height of the hedge controlled by a keypad.
‘So what is it now?’ asked Hanlon.
‘A four-bedroomed self-contained cottage, gym and spa room in the basement. Staff will come down from the hotel as arranged.’ The manager indicted the hedge. ‘Nobody could get through that hawthorn, or cut through it, and your friend Mr Schneider can let his dog run free, it won’t be able to get out and bite anyone.’
He looked at the hedge. ‘Have you seen his dog?’
‘No,’ said Hanlon.
‘It’s fucking horrible,’ Czerwinski shuddered, ‘and I like dogs!’
They had finished walking around the hedge. It was close to the perimeter of the grounds and a wood ran up to where the hawthorn started to grow. Czerwinski pointed at it.
‘There are jogging trails in the woods that guests can use, and an outdoor gym. There is also one thing that I should show you. It’s not something I would usually mention, but you are responsible for Mr Schneider’s security, so, come and look at this.’
He led her to where the trees met the hedge and walked with her into the wood. He pointed to a section of the hedge. ‘Look down there.’
Hanlon did so. There were concrete steps leading down to a rusty steel door. Brambles overgrew it. If it hadn’t been pointed out to her she’d never have seen it. She looked at Czerwinski questioningly.
‘During the war, the main house,’ he pointed back up at the hotel, ‘was used by military intelligence; it was linked up with Bletchley. The officers had the cellars of the house as bomb shelters but the plebs, the junior staff and the ATCs, et cetera, who were billeted in the grounds had this.’ He pointed at the steps. ‘It’s a kind of Anderson shelter, cut-and-cover; the other end comes out in the lodge grounds, behind a shed.’
Hanlon walked down the steps to the heavy steel door and tested it. The hinges were rusted but you could open it. She looked up at the manager.
‘What about the other end?’
‘It’s like this, but there’s a window, well, a kind of hole really. The whole thing runs under the hedge. I think they built it like that in case the gate got blocked – it would serve not just as a bomb shelter but also an emergency exit. You can understand they’d be worried about incendiaries turning the inside into a sea of fire and everyone trapped.’
Hanlon looked at it closely. ‘Well, I can’t see it being a problem. Schneider’s got that dog of whatever sort it is.’
Czerwinski led her back towards the hotel, noting absent-mindedly her athletic fluidity as she walked along, her eyes perpetually busy.
Hanlon asked him, ‘Is the lodge popular? I mean, do you book it a lot?’
They had reached the grassy terrace now and they were looking down on the roof of the lodge. He nodded.
‘Pretty much fully booked. People are happy to pay a high premium for security. Sometimes I guess it’s justified, we have Hollywood stars who’ve had problems with stalkers or the paparazzi, or Russian businessmen anxious to avoid “business” rivals, and then you get legitimate business people who I think would probably be perfectly safe anywhere but they like to feel that they’re so important they need this level of security, an ego thing. They sometimes hire bulletproof limos – they like that touch. Nobody gets gunned down in Oxfordshire, for heaven’s sake. It’s not Moscow or Mexico.’
He paused and looked at her inscrutable face as she surveyed the bleak Oxfordshire countryside. A red kite wheeled high overhead.
Hanlon watched it, her eyes as grey as the skies above, as the great bird wheeled effortlessly overhead, borne on its giant wings.
‘So Herr Schneider will have his dog,’ she said again. He nodded. ‘And an alarm that goes directly through to Kidlington police station. There’d be an armed response team here in minutes, or so they say.’ He shrugged, theatrically sceptical. ‘And I’ve got two of the Specialist Protection boys in the hotel, they must think Christmas has come early. They’re armed. And there’s our security, they’re ex-marines so, to be honest, I’d back them over your lot in a fight. I can’t imagine there’ll be any problems at all.’
Hanlon nodded dubiously. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.
A magpie flew down on to the grass in search of food. One for sorrow, thought Hanlon.
Back in the dining room at Vacherin, she looked at Schneider and Hübler. They looked like a successful married couple, like the world, the future, belonged to them. She wondered where the minder, Muller, was. Eating raw meat somewhere with the mastiff. A meeting of minds.
Christiane Hübler’s eyes rested on Schneider with proprietorial love. Once again Hanlon wondered at their relationship. Someone is always in charge but such was the mixed messages that the two of them were sending out, it was difficult to say who had the whip-hand, or was Schneider one of those powerful men who like to be dominated?
‘You’ll like it,’ said Hanlon. ‘So will the dog. It’s very you.’