Hanlon met up with Huss the following day at eleven in the morning at the police station in Summertown in Oxford.
‘The chief suspect is a young chef called Arzu Mansur,’ said Huss. ‘There’s a text on Hübler’s phone from him agreeing to meet up in the kitchen at twelve thirty. It’s fairly sexually explicit.’
‘So they were having an affair? That was speedy work on her part.’ Despite what she knew about the dead woman, it seemed very quick off the mark.
Huss nodded. ‘She had met him before, seemingly. She’d been down twice before now to check the lodge out and Czerwinski, the manager, said that Mansur had given her a little tour of the lodge’s catering facilities. Mansur had a reputation as a ladies’ man.’ She paused and looked hard at Hanlon. ‘You knew Hübler – did she seem the sort to put it about?’
Hanlon said, ‘Absolutely. She struck me as a very direct woman.’
‘What about Schneider?’ asked Huss.
‘I have to say,’ Hanlon picked her words carefully, she wasn’t sure of the answer, ‘I’m not even sure what her relationship with Schneider really was, come to think of it. I thought they were having an affair, more than that, that they were an item, then I wasn’t so sure and then last night, there was this weird atmosphere.’
She filled Huss in on her evening with Hübler, the strained atmosphere, the stress on the word, the concept, of ‘loyalty’. ‘There was definitely something going on,’ she concluded. ‘Is it likely she would have an affair with a non-European?’ said Huss. ‘Given her race views?’
‘If anything, she seemed to prefer it,’ said Hanlon. ‘She didn’t want Muslims in Europe, but that didn’t mean she didn’t necessarily want them in her bed; or it could have been transgressive sex, forbidden fruit? Who knows, sex is sex, it doesn’t have rules.’ She told Huss about her conversation with Hübler in Claridge’s.
‘Why would they meet up in a kitchen to have sex?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Hübler and Arzu, I mean. Why not in Arzu’s room?’
‘Arzu shared his room with another kid, it’s quite common for sexual activity to take place in other places because of this. Enver nearly fell over two other chefs at it like rabbits when he was on his way down to the kitchen,’ Huss explained.
Hanlon hid a grin – she could imagine how mortified the prudish Enver would have been.
Huss added, ‘And from what you say about Schneider being worried that she’d embarrass him politically with her non-white lovers, she could hardly invite him to her room at the lodge. She’d want to keep it secret. No, the kitchen makes perfect sense. It’s a hotbed of vice. Enver found one of the sauce chefs with his hand up the skirt of one of the waitresses in the walk-in fridge. The chefs seem to like screwing in the kitchen or by the bins, I really don’t know why, but they do.’
She shrugged and looked at Hanlon and continued, ‘So this “loyalty” thing that Schneider was obsessing about, could it be that he knew she was having an affair with Arzu? There was no sign of sex, by the way, on the body, nothing at all. She was strangled with that chain, pure and simple.’
‘Schneider didn’t do it?’ asked Hanlon, half joking. ‘You did check his alibi? Hübler did imply that she had some pretty impressive dirt on Schneider that would ruin his political career.’
‘I did check his alibi, he couldn’t have killed her.’ Huss shook her head. ‘He was doing a conference call with Germany on Skype and he alibied Frank Muller too, for what it’s worth. The murder had to have taken place between 11.45 p.m. and 1 a.m. I find it impossible to imagine he arranged a hitman to kill Hübler in such a public place and in such a short space of time and in a foreign country.’
‘And Arzu’s missing,’ said Hanlon.
‘He’s missing,’ confirmed Huss, ‘and it was he who opened that door at eleven forty-five, his thumbprint is logged on the system. It’s a touch-sensitive keypad that controls that door.’
She took her laptop and swivelled it round so Hanlon could see the screen. She pointed at the thumbprint image and time. ‘That’s his, can’t be anyone else.’
Hanlon nodded.
‘And now there’s this.’
Two figures, dressed in military fatigues, their features covered with ski masks and Arab headscarves, sat cross-legged beneath a banner with Arab writing.
‘Al-Akhdaar,’ said Huss. ‘Uploaded to YouTube early this morning.’ One of the two men had a laptop and it displayed the image of Christiane Hübler’s face, a death mask, so to speak, hanging in the chains. He pressed a button, and Arabic letters appeared, overwriting her dead face.
‘Al-Mawt lil sharmouta maseehiyya,’ said Huss, reading from her notebook. ‘“Death to the Christian whore” is what it means.’
‘Is there no audio?’ asked Hanlon. Huss shook her head. ‘Just the images.’
Hanlon nodded. ‘Oh well, so it looks like Schneider wasn’t the target.’
‘Maybe he was,’ said Huss. ‘Maybe they didn’t fancy their chances with that dog of his. Or Muller, come to that. It amounts to the same thing: an attack on democracy and Western values. There’s no way either we could trace the source of that clip, it was sent via TOR.’
‘Have you been up to the scene of crime?’ asked Hanlon. ‘This morning. The Rosemount is a real mess at the moment. Czerwinski is going crazy. News crews everywhere, guests majorly pissed off, functions cancelled, the kitchen’s a crime scene, it could hardly be worse.’
‘How long is the kitchen going to be shut?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Not long,’ said Huss. ‘DI Robbins, who’s the SIO, reckons his team should be finished by about ten tonight, call it midnight. It’s a fairly dream location, really, not like that sodding bus stop. The kitchen was cleaned down before the murder so any evidence will be easy to gather, couldn’t be better for fingerprints or indeed anything, and we know who the suspect is. Ports, airports, Eurotunnel all alerted.’
‘So is Schneider out of your hair now?’ asked Hanlon. ‘Presumably he’s going back to Germany.’
‘Is he buggery!’ Huss’s voice was angry. ‘He’s still doing that stupid debate at the Oxford Union: “I will not let this act of barbarism silence free speech, it is my tribute to Christiane.” It’s his great moment. Now even people in Britain have heard of him. He’s on the front cover of Bild, der Spiegel are doing a feature. It could hardly be better for the man. You don’t get this sort of publicity often.’
‘So not Eleuthera.’ Hanlon looked questioningly at Huss. ‘Seemingly not,’ said Huss regretfully. ‘It looks like I was barking up the wrong tree.’
‘Well, off the record…’ Hanlon told Huss about her encounter with the anarchists. She could hardly have revealed how she had discovered their presence. Huss shook her head at Hanlon’s actions.
‘They’re gone now,’ said Hanlon. ‘I checked on my way here, all the vehicles have moved out.’
‘Well,’ Huss bit her tongue, ‘it hardly matters. It doesn’t look like they were involved. There’s another two protection officers coming, that makes four plus Enver, plus the hotel guys and that humongous hound.’
‘Mastiff,’ said Hanlon.
‘Whatever. Schneider’s very well protected.’
‘I thought that they didn’t want to provide too much protection in case it looked like we were condoning Schneider’s views?’ asked Hanlon.
‘The chief constable does not want him dead in Oxford, that’s the bottom line. We’d rather be accused of condoning the right,’ said Huss. ‘Face it, we’ve got, what, a couple of hundred protection officers in the Thames Valley, what with Chequers and Dorneywood. I’m sure it hasn’t hurt to divert a couple of them to babysit Schneider.’
‘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.’