Dame Elizabeth sat in her office, thinking about Hanlon and thinking about Kant. She didn’t know it, but she had come to the same conclusion as Hanlon. Most of her life, she had been advocating, and believing in, ruthless honesty, and now she suspected that it had all been easy because she had never needed to make a difficult decision.
Now that time had come, she’d flunked it.
Nearly forty years ago – God, so long ago, she thought – she’d been a young postgraduate student doing research for her Ph.D. at Berlin’s Humboldt University. One of the lecturers, not that much older than herself, had been a man called Jonathan Hanlon. His field was the philosophy of art and aesthetics and he epitomized the title of his discipline. He was devastatingly attractive.
That wasn’t hyperbole on her part. People stared at him surreptitiously in public. He had done modelling work, highly unusual in the seventies, but his beauty marked him out. There was something of his looks in Hanlon’s face – the cheekbones, the set of the jaw, the full mouth, above all the grey eyes. But where hers were cold and unforgiving, his had been warm, life-affirming.
Most of all, Jann Hanlon had charm.
He also had a beautiful wife who he said looked very much like Ophelia in Rossetti’s painting. That’s where Hanlon would have got her corkscrew curly hair from.
Dame Elizabeth had flung herself at him. She hadn’t cared that he was married. She hadn’t cared about anything; she was like a woman possessed. She was burning with lust. Not that she’d needed to do much flinging; it would have been like charging at an open door. Jonathan, Jann as everyone called him, was an intense womanizer and Dame Elizabeth had been very attractive. And for six wonderful months, he was hers.
It was the best time of her life. It was exhilarating. They went to wild parties with the Fluxus crowd (Jann was a friend of the famous artist Joseph Beuys), they held court at the Adlon Hotel, they went to openings at Berlin’s galleries, they did soft drugs with avant-garde Berlin musicians, they went to decadent thirties-style nightclubs where Jann was a big hit with the drag queens.
This was the seventies before Berlin had become the fashionable place to be in Europe, and the shadow of post-1945 destruction still hung heavily. Jann introduced her to Grunkohl with smoked sausage, Eisbein and Konigsberger Klopse, beef dumplings with capers in cheap restaurants. They drank huge quantities of beer and wine.
They hung out with Andy Warhol, when Jann had helped organize an exhibition of his work at the Kunsthalle, and they had endless sex in her cheap apartment, that smelled of hash, patchouli oil and incense, in Alexanderplatz, overlooking the Berlin Wall.
The pace that he lived his life was feverish; there was never any time to reflect or consider. Any money he earned he would squander. Jann never saved or worried about the future. She remembered him saying, Zeit ist Geld und Geld ist gut. Time is money and money is good. An unfashionable view at the time.
She remembered lying naked in bed with Jann in January while outside a bitterly cold wind blew in from the east and snow gently and silently fell, her bedroom warmed by an old thirties stove and his heat. He had a marvellous body; she guessed that was something else Hanlon had inherited from her father.
She remembered a particularly groundbreaking Anselm Kiefer exhibition. Afterwards they’d walked hand in hand down the Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor. She had been so much in love with Jann at that moment in time it was almost ecstatically painful.
She remembered shopping in the flea market at Rathaus Schöneburg, where Kennedy had made his Ich bin ein Berliner speech. And Jann had bought her the bracelet that now Hanlon was wearing.
Then came the inevitable split. A huge row, Jann had a terrible temper. Unforgivable things were said on both sides, the typical, lacerating wounds of love gone wrong. Jann went back to Ophelia (Catherine, that was her name, Dame Elizabeth remembered now); angrily and dismissively, she returned the jewellery he’d given her and came back to England, back to Oxford. Jann was a distant memory, a footnote on one of the many pages in the book of her life.
Then two years later, in the late seventies, 1979 it would have been, came a shocked phone call from Germany one night. Jann was dead, a stupid, perfectly avoidable, car crash. Not murdered by a jealous husband, or dead of a romantic disease. A car crash. A stupid, stupid car crash. Jann had always driven too fast, too aggressively. He drove like he lived, without evaluating risk properly, heedless of consequences. In some ways it was typically Jann, infuriating and thoughtless.
It was such a waste, a dumb, pointless way to die.
She wondered if DCI Hanlon had the same tendency to charge in without thinking.
Dame Elizabeth was a good judge of character. She rather suspected she had.
Until two days ago she had hardly thought of him in years. Earlier that day, she’d phoned the man who’d given her the news of the fatal car crash, another academic, now at Belfast University. He’d told her of Catherine’s unravelling after Jann’s death, the depression that settled over her like a thick, impenetrable fog. There had been one botched suicide attempt then, one evening, she strode out in front of an Inter City 125 train. No mistakes there. No cry for help. The real thing. The daughter, given up for adoption, had now resurfaced
before her very eyes, in her university.
Dame Elizabeth was technically unsure where she stood on the subject of fate, but what she did know was that she had a duty to tell Hanlon what she knew of her parents. Well, about her father anyway. What Hanlon chose to do with that information would be up to her, but Dame Elizabeth would have acted properly.
With a sinking heart, she took Hanlon’s card from her purse and texted to ask her to meet her in the lecture hall where they had first met, at seven p.m on Sunday. The terse reply came almost immediately, a graceless yes.