Sunday morning and the City, London’s financial square mile, was practically empty. It always felt strange to her, the eerie silence that enveloped the district at weekends, like being in a zombie film or some post-apocalyptic disaster movie.
Hanlon rode through the deserted streets on her Fuji triathlon bike, enjoying the freedom and the absence of traffic. Tomorrow, Monday, three hundred thousand workers would be decanted into the area. Today, on a Sunday, there’d be fewer than seven thousand and most of those would be invisible. Weekends were a great time to cycle around the City, particularly a Sunday, when she had no training to be done. Sunday was a rest day and she limited herself to light exercise, like cycling around just for fun. Sometimes she just liked to enjoy her body for a change.
She ate breakfast at a café, chewing her way without enthusiasm through an omelette, and returned home. She felt restless and irritable. The following day she’d decided to go and see Campion at the brothel.
Fuller was preying on her mind.
She couldn’t work out if he was a killer or if, as he claimed, someone else was doing the crimes and framing him. DI Huss, however, had irritatingly put the problem very well. If Fuller was the killer, he was still at large and if anyone else died they were going to look increasingly negligent. The press would certainly have a field day. She could almost see the headlines now.
Why was this man free to kill again? Incompetent cops bungle investigation. The real Dr Evil.
She was mildly surprised that there had been nothing yet in the papers, almost certainly because the second murder had happened down in Oxford and no connection had yet been made.
In one of his last classes she’d been to, Fuller had touched on Utilitarianism, the theory that you can measure if something’s good by its impact on society. On that basis, they should put Fuller behind bars immediately for the public good. If he was guilty, the murders would stop, because he could no longer commit them. If someone were trying to frame him, the murders would have to stop too.
When she found the brothel in Oxford that she was sure Fuller had attended, she could maybe get confirmation one way or another. They’d never be able to use it in court, but it’d help clarify her mind. She knew that this was a very arrogant way of looking at things, but she was getting increasingly disillusioned with the police force. She decided that if her superiors discovered what she was up to and tried to discipline her, then she would resign. She would resign very publicly too.
Hanlon had never sold information or stories to the press; she despised them. But she did know several journalists she had a grudging respect for and she was sure they would leap at the opportunity to publish any Hanlon-led revelation. And she did know a lot of dirt.
She looked around her one-room apartment for inspiration as to what to do with her day. Hanlon was terrible at killing time. In truth, work was her drug. Her boss, Corrigan, had once wondered to himself what motivated Hanlon. The answer was simple. It was work. It gave her something interesting to do. It filled time. She didn’t have the kind of distractions that most people have. She didn’t have any friends to see, any real hobbies other than triathlon, if that could be called a hobby, and today was supposed to be a rest day. The triathlon was more a way of mortifying the flesh than a desire for sporting achievement. Six days a week she worked her body till it screamed in pain, Sundays she deliberately did nothing, to let it recover. It was the hardest part of her training.
She had no TV. Television annoyed her, as did film and music. In fact, most things annoyed Hanlon. She could have gone out for lunch, but eating was not done for fun. In truth restaurants slightly sickened her. She particularly disliked the elevation of food to a quasi-religious experience with its own hagiography, its own priesthood and its own liturgy. It had got seriously out of hand, in her opinion. Even the process of eating, moving food around in her mouth, she found faintly disgusting.
She had a book to finish on the Spanish Civil War but didn’t feel like it at the moment. It was hard to work out who was what, through the thick forests of acronyms – the POUM, the CNT-FAI, the UGT, the PSUC, it was bewildering. The book was, however, one of the few things in her flat to read; the picture on the wall, a signed black-and-white photo of the German artist Joseph Beuys, the only thing to look at.
The only link to a father she never knew.
Art was one of the few things she did enjoy and she was surprisingly knowledgeable about it. When she was young, a man had come to the house where she lived with her adoptive parents and left the photo, signed and framed, of the artist sitting in a corner of his studio wearing work boots, jeans and his trademark fisherman’s vest. Under the brim of his hat, Beuys looked sad and slightly worried. His eyes had a haunted look. Her adoptive parents had told her that the photo had belonged to her father and that she should have it. It was the only thing of his that she owned.
She unrolled her futon mattress and lay on it, staring at the ceiling. She ought to be visiting Whiteside’s parents to try to talk them out of their decision, but she feared her temper. There were times when she envied Anderson’s freedom of action. He would have made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. But Hanlon knew she could never physically assault a couple in their sixties. That being the case, there was no point threatening them. Like Anderson, Hanlon didn’t make threats. Their method was to point out to the other person the consequences of non- obedience.
It was then up to that person to choose their fate.
For lack of anything better to do, she took her phone out and texted Dame Elizabeth to see if they were still OK for their meeting.
Dame Elizabeth responded almost immediately in the affirmative, seven p.m., then she added casually:
I think I might be able to tell you something about your father, if you’re interested.
Hanlon stared in disbelief at the screen. She read the message again to make sure there was no confusion on her part, that she hadn’t somehow misunderstood.
. . . if you’re interested.
Well, that would be a classic understatement.
All her conscious life, since she could remember, she’d wanted to know more about the man whose surname she bore and, paradoxically, almost just as strong was the desire not to know. Everyone else knew where they came from it seemed, but she did not. She had no parents, no siblings, no family. Nothing.
Sometimes this was a thing of pride, sometimes a source of unhappiness.
Then again, she was honest enough to realize that she almost certainly could have found out if she’d so chosen. There would be public records to consult, established procedures for this kind of thing, existing protocols. She could even have used police resources, blind eyes would have been turned, and lastly she could have utilized the network of people who owed her favours, or simply did her bidding.
She’d done none of those things. She wondered if at the back of this lay cowardice. The worry that she might discover some highly unpalatable truth about her parentage. What if her father had turned out to be a rapist, a worthless junkie, insane? She already knew she had a mother crazed enough to commit suicide, that much her adoptive parents had told her.
Even worse maybe, depressingly normal. An accounts clerk with hairy ears and a cardigan.
She’d turned her back on her past, but now the past had risen to claim her. As Dame Elizabeth had found out, you can ignore the truth but it won’t go away.
‘Fine,’ replied Hanlon, tapping the word in. She lay back down on the mattress. Her grey eyes for once lacked their usual angry certainty. Tonight would be the first time in her life that anybody had told her anything about her father.
If I’m interested, of course, she thought.