‘So,’ said Enver, ‘your ex is a champion dancer? What, like Strictly?’
‘Oh no,’ said Alison. ‘That’s not his kind of thing at all. He was a good northern soul dancer. That and disco dancing. It’s how we met, in a disco. He’s a bloody good dancer. I’m not bad but he’s practically professional level. Personally, I much prefer northern soul to all that Hi-NRG stuff. He won loads of trophies from the weekenders at Camber Sands. He’d practise for hours, it was all really tightly choreographed.’
She folded her arms in front of her and looked up at the ceiling. ‘But of course, disco, particularly Donna Summer, Sylvester, all the gay stuff – odd when he was so heterosexual – was really his thing. Stephen Michaels, the disco king.’
‘Your ex-husband is called Stephen Michaels?’ said Enver stupidly.
‘Yes. Vickery’s my maiden name. Abigail preferred it to Michaels so that’s what she was called.’
Perhaps it’s all just simply coincidence, thought Enver, feeling stunned. But of course, he knew it couldn’t be.
‘What does he do?’ he asked casually.
‘Oh,’ she said, stifling a yawn, ‘he’s a chef, a very good one. Very sought after. Went down south when he was a kid. Did his apprenticeship at the Dorchester, three years there, worked up here in a couple of Michelin-starred and rossetted places, but he’s down south again now, I think. The last I heard of him, he was somewhere in Oxford, some flagship hotel, the Blenheim, is it? That and doing agency for the colleges. He told me he’d worked in all the big ones.’
Enver thought of the other things she’d said about him. He had a truly bad temper.
He was always getting into fights. It’s a miracle he never killed anyone.
But it looked as if he had. It really did. As he sat opposite Alison, things slotted comfortably into place.
Enver knew a great deal about working in kitchens. His family background involved catering. He’d become a boxer, and when that career finished thanks to injury, a policeman, to avoid it.
He knew the terrible, endless, grinding hours, the sixty-hour weeks, the shouting, the stress, the continual air of hysterical violence, hanging as heavy as the heat, in the kitchen. He’d grown up with it. He knew the implacable attention to detail, the concentration needed.
He thought of what Hanlon had told him of Michaels’ sense of injustice, which he could see now flourishing in this febrile background. The chef brooding at the seduction and killing of his daughter by some poncey intellectual that the law refused to punish. The feeling that they were all in it together, Fuller, McIntyre, Dame Elizabeth. One law for them; one law for the likes of him.
He thought of the care with which Hannah Moore had been killed. He thought of her affair with the married man. That would technically fit Michaels, who was separated but not divorced.
Then the Donna Summer as he killed her. The Disco King.
The choreography, again the attention to detail.
The knowledge of the layout of St Wulfstan’s. He’d worked in all the big colleges.
That would almost certainly have included St Wulfstan’s. A chef like Michaels, a senior agency chef, would have wanted to know where a dumb waiter in his kitchen led to. And after the murder, in his chef’s whites, mingling with the other chefs, he’d have been part and parcel of the kitchen furniture. Who’s the bloke with the beard? Oh, some guy from the agency. In the rabbit warren of the college kitchen, he’d have been unnoticed, unchallenged.
He’d worked in the Blenheim too. The kitchen staff in a hotel always did their level best to sleep with as many waitresses and cleaners as possible. They were usually eager to reciprocate. Michaels, good-looking, charismatic, important, a god in the kitchen, could easily have persuaded some employee to help him, or even better, would have known where keys were kept and how to get them.
As a former senior chef, and a respected one, all the staff would have treated him like an honoured guest. He could bet that when Michaels popped into the Blenheim all his drinks were free, meals wildly undercharged, rooms upgraded or mysteriously never showing up on the bill. To have slipped into Fuller’s room would have been simplicity itself.
Enver thought, maybe he’s insane. Some imbalance that had surfaced in a different form in his daughter. Hanlon had mentioned in her report about the murder of Dame Elizabeth the way he was interacting with her corpse, almost dancing with it, the choreography again. The disco music as he had killed Hannah. Well, mental health wasn’t his field. That would be for others to decide.
Maybe he just liked killing people.
Then the choice of the kitchen to hide in when being pursued by Hanlon, an instinctive choice for Michaels, safe, familiar ground.
And finally, of course, a motive. Michaels bent on revenge on the man who he saw as having killed his daughter. Death would have been too good for him. He could have killed Fuller but instead presumably wanted him broken – everything he had worked for, the career, the reputation, the livelihood, all taken away.
Fuller would find prison hellish and he would be very much at the bottom of the food chain.
Well, that would certainly be enough to bring Michaels in for questioning. Mentally, he congratulated Hanlon.
It hadn’t been Fuller. She’d been proven right again.