Dr Gideon Fuller shrugged up the collar of his raincoat and stepped quickly along Gower Street; it ran arrow straight from the Euston Road in the centre of London down to the British Museum. This was university land. More or less every building of the featureless, ugly street was connected with academia.
It was the land of Bloomsbury, spiritual and physical home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the artist, of Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, the art critic. Fuller always felt uplifted by their rarefied ghosts. Like them, he felt morally, intellectually and spiritually superior to the mere mortals who surrounded him.
It was also the street where Hannah Moore had lived, dreamed, loved and died. That was something Fuller managed to successfully ignore. Compassion was not part of his vocabulary.
Fuller didn’t believe in love.
He didn’t notice the slim figure of Hanlon following him, with her customary expertise. She had a natural ability to blend in with the background when it suited her. They had now reached the top end of Gower Street and she could see the British Museum, its great dome floodlit against the inhospitable dark of the wet night. Cars and black taxis swished by on the rain-drenched road. Fuller crossed the road into Store Street, heading for the major thoroughfare of the Tottenham Court Road, Hanlon a dark, insubstantial wraith behind him. Now she could see the lights of Centre Point, the landmark sixties’ office block, glistening through the rain.
She had nearly caught up with him and she was forced to conceal herself in the shadows of Heal’s Furniture Store. Then, once Fuller had crossed the road, she ran after him as he disappeared down one of the side streets into Fitzrovia.
If Bloomsbury was famous as a kind of dessicated, intellectual powerhouse, then Fitzrovia, a warren of narrow streets and restaurants and pubs, had been well known for hellraising, famous for drunken writers, drunken artists and generally dissolute behaviour. Like everywhere in London now, money was having a sterilizing effect and it was becoming sanitized, characterless.
On one level, Hanlon disapproved, but London was a city of permanent change, so it made little sense to complain. Nevertheless the steady erosion of the past saddened her. She didn’t have any relatives and she often wondered if her love of London history was an attempt to forge some kind of identity. I’ve created a family of historical ghosts, she thought, following Fuller at a ten-metre distance from the opposite pavement.
Fuller didn’t linger. He was moving south towards Oxford Street and Hanlon noticed that his stride had lengthened, his back straightened and he’d started playing with his hair again, like he did in class. He radiated excitement. She guessed that the end of their journey was near in the gathering darkness.
What Hanlon didn’t know was that while her thoughts were full of Fuller, by some strange parallel symmetry, his thoughts were full of Hanlon.
As he walked the slick, wet streets of central London, Fuller was involved in a sexual fantasy, in which he brutally ordered Hanlon to undergo various painful and humiliating acts. Fuller had a very vivid imagination. He was still smarting from his run-in with Hanlon over her name.
Bloody lesbian civil servant, he thought angrily, I’ll show you retribution. Women are all the same, they need disciplining. You need a good Teacher. That’s how he liked to think of himself. As a Teacher. The word ‘lecturer’ was arid, sterile. It gave an image of someone standing behind a lectern, reading from notes. He didn’t lecture; he taught. He taught people things in class and he liked to think he taught the women in his life to respect him. And if they didn’t, they needed correction. He liked the word ‘correction’. He corrected essays, he corrected mistakes, he corrected women when they needed it.
His thoughts moved away from the pornographic fantasies, to the practicality of how to get a good few photos of her on his phone. Once he’d done that, he’d be able to transfer them to his PC and Photoshop her head on to suitable-looking images from his S&M pornography collection. How best to take the photos, though? He waited in the rain for a break in the traffic and for inspiration.
She was no idiot, that was for sure. He’d have to blindfold her, or make her wear a hood. He couldn’t take those hard, grey eyes looking at him; it would unman him.
Hanlon watched Fuller’s back as he crossed Oxford Street from Rathbone Place into the seedy underworld of Soho. This was London at its most bohemian and raffish. She followed Fuller across the small, green expanse of Soho Square and into Dean Street. Hanlon knew the area in incredible detail. She could almost have found her way around Soho blindfold. Despite the bad weather, Soho’s narrow streets were full, its pavements crowded and noisy with chatter, its myriad restaurants busy. The pubs they passed, the Pillars of Hercules, the Carlisle Arms, the Crown and Two Chairmen, the Dog and Duck, were busy and gaggles of hipsters with beards and tight trousers and women from the production and media companies of Soho, drawn here for an evening out, were hanging outside the bars smoking, and not just cigarettes. Several times she wrinkled her nose against the strong smell of skunk drifting through the wet night air; she passed laughing and chattering groups of businessmen and women staggering along the streets. Older media types – balding, fat, offsetting the advancing years with expensive glasses, too-tight red trousers emphasizing their paunches, and pointy shoes – drank too heavily and laughed too loud and too desperately.
Down the road was Old Compton Street, with its gay bars and discos, where she occasionally used to go with Mark. Bouncers were standing outside the gay clubs, the same shape and build, and with the same haircuts as a lot of their muscle- Mary clients. There was a transgender bar in Brewer Street where she used to drink occasionally and Madame JoJo’s, the famous drag bar.
Open doorways with handwritten signs promised massages upstairs with young models.
Strip clubs designed for the expense-accounted businessman, like Stringfellows or the Windmill.
Clip joints for the unwary Soho tourist.
Soho whispered sex the way the City whispered money. And it spoke in many languages and many accents, and right now it was speaking to Fuller.
Loud and clear.
Fuller disappeared into an alleyway just off Dean Street. It was journey’s end, Fuller’s destination. Hanlon knew the alley went nowhere. Once, years ago, as a rookie PC, she’d hidden in the alley waiting to nick street drug dealers. A tramp had pissed over her shoe. Very little had changed. Now she noted the three cameras pointing their electronic eyes to cover its entrance and immediately decided to return the following day. She did not want Fuller catching sight of her on a monitor inside the building.
She lingered just long enough to see which of the three doors facing on to the alley Fuller used, and then she disappeared into the neon-rich Soho night, with its explicit promise of sleaze, sex, drugs, alcohol and oblivion.