‘Four hours, I was in that fridge before they found me,’ fumed Hanlon to Enver. It was midnight and they were sitting in the Euston police station where Enver was based. He looked at her thoughtfully. It obviously wasn’t the fridge that was bothering her, he thought. If anyone could sit locked in a fridge with a fractured, bleeding wrist for hours without worrying about it, that person was Hanlon. And he thought her attitude was uncalled for. The response, once the body of Dame Elizabeth had been found by the security man doing his rounds, had been extremely efficient.
The police really could not have done a better job. The university building was vast, labyrinthine, and once the dog team had arrived, they’d led them straight to Hanlon, while their colleagues, who’d started at the top of the building, were still working their slow way down, floor by painstaking floor.
More or less every square metre had to be checked out.
She’d had her arm X-rayed and strapped up at nearby University College Hospital. She’d given a statement and Enver had filled her in on what they had so far on the progress of the murder investigation. It was getting nowhere fast. Nothing on what few internal cameras there were. No trace evidence left by the killer.
Hanlon was more shaken than she cared to admit by Dame Elizabeth’s death. She’d always been profoundly affected not so much by the waste of a life inherent in murder, but by the incredible selfishness of the murderer. Dame Elizabeth had been a woman whose life had been a beacon to others. She had touched maybe thousands of people for the good. Hanlon didn’t doubt she had flaws, but her life had been extinguished by some creep with less worth in her mind than a cockroach. Three women, possibly four, if the theory of Abigail Vickery’s death as a sex killing proved correct, were dead. To add insult to injury, she’d seen the killer playing with the body of Dame Elizabeth as if it were some sort of toy. And it was an insult. It was deliberately degrading to the corpse.
Then of course there was the personal aspect. Hanlon had expected the evening to end with a sense of finally knowing who she was and where she came from, and now this had been snatched away from her by the murderer. He’d killed Dame Elizabeth and he’d killed her dreams.
Hanlon wanted revenge.
She had been unable to identify anything about the man in the mask. No forensic trace had been found. Gloved, masked, careful as ever, it could have been anyone.
Fuller was another dead end. Murray had gone round to Fuller’s flat in person. Fuller had answered the door. He’d been drinking. Murray told Hanlon he’d looked considerably the worse for wear, unshaven and bellicose. He refused to allow them in; they had no warrant. He’d said, ‘Yeah, I’m really going to let you in so you can fit me up like you did in Oxford.’ Or words to that effect. Arrest me or go away was the gist of his message.
Familiarity with the police was obviously breeding contempt in Fuller’s mind.
As a defence it worked well. Murray had no grounds to arrest Fuller. Even if he had, he would have been unable to question Fuller until the man was legally sober enough, and by then his solicitor would have got him out. There was really very little he could do.
Murray was far from assertive as a policeman and he decided to let Fuller come to the station in the morning to give a statement, although he did put a plain-clothes in the street just in case Fuller emerged from his flat.
When this officer was relieved the following day, Murray gave instructions that Fuller be escorted round the back entrance of the station. There’d be quite a media scrum out there on Monday, he guessed.
Meanwhile the phone calls and emails to the station about Dame Elizabeth were accumulating rapidly. Her murder was very much in the public domain now, and was tweeted and retweeted as well as being hot news on other social network sites. She had touched thousands of lives and her students and legions of ex-students were media savvy. TV was now getting involved.
Murray was the ideal choice to handle this kind of thing. Unassertive he may have been, but he was unflappable and possessed of a certainty that everything would be all right in the end. He gave a mini press conference, confirming no details other than that the police were investigating a suspicious death. The press knew Murray; they knew he could stonewall indefinitely.
Well, Hanlon thought, my involvement is practically at an end. Fuller’s philosophy course would be suspended indefinitely, so her undercover role was over. She had Murray’s blessing to tie up the loose ends regarding Fuller’s potential whereabouts in Oxford on the day of the murder, and that was more or less it. By Friday, it would all be history.