Hanlon looked thoughtfully at her phone. Fuller’s was an invitation she couldn’t turn down. It was possible that he might make a clean breast of the killings; it was equally possible that he might attack her. Hanlon felt more than equal to the challenge.
She dismissed Fuller from her mind and looked around the police station office. After the Whitesides and Campion, she had felt the need to see someone she trusted, someone normal, and was now sitting at Enver’s desk, waiting for him to come out of a meeting with Murray.
She took in the details of the crowded office with jealousy. Everyone, naturally, knew each other. There was the typically low-key noise of such a place, quiet conversation, phones ringing, the chatter of printers, laughter. It must have been at least a year since she’d been part of station life and although she’d never been exactly popular, she’d been accepted. It had enabled her to have her cake and eat it. She’d managed to be both solitary and part of the herd.
She shook her head angrily, annoyed with herself for feeling self-pity.
The staff around the office were virtually all staring surreptitiously at Hanlon, whose status was approaching legendary. The newly bandaged arm added to the mystique.
She had seen the murderer.
She had pursued the murderer.
She had been attacked by the murderer and locked in a fridge. There was a general feeling of jealousy towards Enver from his male colleagues, for being so close to the most talked about woman in the Metropolitan Police.
Now Enver crossed the room and joined Hanlon at his desk. He thought she looked haggard, more tired than usual. Perhaps she over-exercises, he thought, all that running around can’t be good for you. His chair creaked ominously beneath him as he sat down.
‘How did it go with Fuller?’ she asked.
Enver rolled his eyes. ‘It was a disaster,’ he said. ‘His solicitor’s very good, for a start, but we had absolutely nothing on him.’
‘Alibi?’ asked Hanlon. Enver shook his head.
‘Between you and me, I have a feeling that Dr Fuller is a bit of a recluse,’ he said. ‘I spoke to a couple of colleagues of his and Fuller doesn’t attend functions or parties, not unless practically ordered to. He’s quite antisocial. He doesn’t even have Facebook. That’s pretty odd these days for a university lecturer.’ He looked directly at Hanlon. ‘What about last night, do you think it was him?’
‘I wish I knew,’ she said. ‘I keep changing my mind about him. He’s very contradictory.’ She paused, then continued. ‘When I first saw him, when Corrigan showed me his photo, I thought he was a kind of weak-looking individual, that he wouldn’t have the balls for this kind of thing. But I’m beginning to wonder. I think he’s very bright and he learns quickly. I’ve listened to the recording of that first interview, he was shitting himself. Now he’s self-possessed. I think I was wrong about him. He does have balls.’
Enver nodded. ‘Well, that pattern, I mean the ability to adapt to a learning curve, would fit the killings too. An initial fail-safe strangulation, the victim willingly subdued, and then the McIntyre woman, a ratcheting up of violence, and after that the Dame Elizabeth murder. It’s a clear progression in confidence and technique.’
‘I still find it hard’, said Hanlon, ‘to work out the forensic evidence that was found in the first murder, the hairs, and the underwear in the second, given the level of sophistication of the planning.’
Enver shrugged. ‘Maybe he wants to be caught. One thing we do know with certainty about Fuller is he likes Sado-Masochism. What could be more sadistic than murder? And what could be more masochistic than making sure you got punished for it? I read your report on what he was doing to that professor, that’s pretty crazy stuff. Perhaps that’s the explanation for his carelessness, he’s just crazy.’
We need to talk. Hanlon thought about her email from Fuller. We need to talk. Maybe he does want to be caught, or maybe he’s crazy, or, possibly, he’s innocent.
She wondered whether or not to tell Enver about her meeting with Fuller and immediately decided against it. Enver would be horrified and would insist on coming with her.
She looked at Enver over the desk. He was like an old mother hen. She smiled, remembering his inept attempt to trail her once in a Corrigan-inspired desire to watch her back, to stop her doing anything stupid. He’d do the same again if he had any idea of what she was about to do.
If he told Murray, it would be officially cancelled. Either that, or turned into some form of police circus with surveillance, recording equipment and some form of SWAT team lurking in a broom cupboard.
‘Speaking of Dame Elizabeth,’ she said casually, ‘she knew my father and was going to give me something of his.’ Like details of his life, she thought grimly. ‘I don’t suppose crime scene found anything?’
Enver had, of course, no idea what she was talking about.
His own family story was textbook immigrant. Father arrives in the early seventies, gets job in a restaurant in Turkish North London, where language skills aren’t an issue, works his way up to head chef and opens a successful kebab house, marries local Tottenham girl; the business is transformed by Enver’s two brothers, Aunt Demet and some cousins into three upmarket Turkish restaurants. It was a life short on family drama, long on back-breaking work. Everyone was too busy for introspection. If anything, Enver felt he knew rather more about the family history of the Demirel family than he wanted to, from his great-grandfather’s role at Gallipoli to his grandfather’s achievements in secondary education in Rize province, to his father’s early struggles in the restaurant trade. ‘No. Just those dates about your father,’ he said.
When he’d seen the short text, the name Hanlon, the words born and died, he had shivered inside. It didn’t make him think or wonder about her family history. It made him horribly aware of the fact that he might well be writing something similar for the woman in front of him. Her obituary. He’d have to order her tombstone too, if she wanted a church burial. DCI Hanlon born . . . died . . . He looked at the slim figure of Hanlon opposite, so tough and yet so fragile.
I worry about you, he wanted to say. Hanlon would go crazy with rage if he said that. She was always pushing her luck and Enver didn’t believe in good luck lasting forever. Things revert to an average mean, he thought. Every bit of good luck has a corresponding amount of bad.
‘And what about her computer?’ said Hanlon. ‘Any leads there?’ Again, what she really wanted to know was if they’d found a folder marked with her name, rather than the unlikely existence of a folder marked Killer: Definitive Proof. Dame Elizabeth was a woman with forty years’ experience of note- taking and the written word. Writing was as natural to her as breathing. Hanlon found it unthinkable that she would have called her over to what was essentially a meeting without some sort of agenda. There would have been at least a list of what she’d got to say.
The eye-catching announcement of her father’s death on the interactive whiteboard had been a demonstration of how the professor had planned to treat their meeting, as much a lecture as a confidential talk.
Her mind went back to the moment when she stood at the top of the stairs looking down at Dame Elizabeth, her face a ruined sheet of blood, the masked figure standing executioner- style behind her. She forced herself to think, to remember. He had scooped up a small red bag, and something else, something beige – an envelope?
It wasn’t the kind of thing she could swear to in a court of law. She couldn’t deny the possibility that her mind was imagining it, but it’s what she believed she had seen, and it fitted her theory perfectly. A letter, to her. Perhaps even now, Fuller was reading it, if it had been him there the night before.
Was that why he wanted to meet with her now? She had to know.
Again, Enver shook his head. ‘Sergeant Gustafson has made a start on her PC, but it’s full of philosophy notes, ideas for lectures, old emails and memos. Quite frankly, I think the case will be closed one way or another by the time he gets through it. I guess it will all end up with her executors.’
‘Oh well,’ said Hanlon. So it’s down to you, Fuller, she thought. Down to you to tell me about Dame Elizabeth. Down to you to hand me over what was in that envelope. Down to you to give me back my past.