The next morning there was still no reply from Julia. Hanlon frowned. She was getting slightly concerned. She would go round to check on her later; she texted her to that effect.
She took Wemyss for a run around Holyrood Park, a quick 5 km, then breakfast, more stolen sausage to appease her conscience at leaving him alone in the room until lunchtime. She stroked his head and looked into his mournful eyes.
‘This should all be over fairly soon,’ she reassured him. Then she set off at a brisk pace to Marchmont, a couple of miles away. She wanted to have words with Paul Wyre, student abuser.
At quarter to nine she was outside the door of the basement flat where she had seen him embracing Jenny Evans. She remembered how indignant he had been that he had been kicked out by his girlfriend. This must be the shared flat he had complained about being studenty. Now I’m renting a room in a shared flat in a scrotty basement in Marchmont, like a student.
She hammered on the door; a bleary-looking Wyre wearing a dressing gown opened it.
‘Hello, oh, it’s you…’ he said.
He was unshaven and smelt quite strongly of whisky fumes. There was a faint odour of stale weed and a sweet smell of rotting food coming from the flat. If Wyre was slumming it as he claimed, following the split from his fiancée, he had certainly embraced the student lifestyle wholeheartedly.
‘Can I come in?’ asked Hanlon, not waiting for an answer, pushing her way past him.
The flat – a living room, kitchen through an arch, and, she guessed, a couple of bedrooms and a bathroom through another door, which was closed – was a mess. It looked as bad as it smelled. There were books and magazines lying around, a laptop and an iPad on the sofa. On a coffee table a bag of weed and some cigarette papers. The ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts and roaches from smoked joints. A couple of unwashed coffee cups and a nearly empty bottle of Bell’s.
‘Haven’t you heard of Marie Kondo?’ asked Hanlon, casting a withering eye over the mess.
‘Why don’t you fuck off out of my flat?’ asked Wyre, pleasantly enough.
Quite why she did it she couldn’t really say; one moment she was perfectly composed, the next she had driven her fist into his stomach. An uppercut, not a punch she used very often, hard to do well. A short, brutal blow, her fist driven by the power of her hips and shoulder into Wyre’s flabby gut. Twisting in and upwards to put her bodyweight behind the punch. He doubled over in pain and shock and collapsed back on the sofa, his dressing gown opening, revealing an unexpected big roll of flab and a pair of torn grey boxer shorts.
It looked as though Wakefield would be needing a new hard man, she thought contemptuously, as Wyre groaned and swore.
Almost immediately she heard Dr Morgan’s voice in her head, the voice of her conscience. ‘That’s why they made you leave the police force, Hanlon. Brutality. And you can’t even claim that this was justified. He’s an open door, all you need to do is push, not kick it in.’
‘What the fuck…?’ gasped Wyre, hunching forward, fighting for breath.
‘Now I’ve got your attention,’ Hanlon said menacingly, ‘what were you thinking when you told Jenny Evans to call me and lie about Griffiths having an affair with Aurora?’
‘I don’t know what you mean… Jesus…’ He straightened up painfully.
Hanlon took a step towards him and he put up his hands in protest. ‘OK, OK, I did tell her to call you and say that.’
‘Why?’ Her voice was hard, but nowhere near as hard as her expression.
‘To get you off my back,’ confessed Wyre. ‘I didn’t want you snooping around and causing trouble for me.’
‘Well, you should maybe stop abusing your position of power,’ Hanlon said.
The voice in her head. Who is abusing power right now? This is the way Millar acts, terrorising people. You shouldn’t be doing it. You know that.
‘We all do,’ said Wyre, testily. ‘Besides, it was consensual. She’s a grown woman.’ Well, that was arguable, thought Hanlon, but I’m not here for a debate.
‘I’m not interested in that,’ Hanlon said. ‘Is Griffiths at work today?’
‘Yes, I happen to know he is.’ Wyre was eager to change the subject away from himself.
‘And do you know his address?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, I’ve been to his house often enough. Why do you want to know?’ he wondered.
‘Because I want to go round and snoop and cause trouble for him, that’s why,’ she said, deliberately parodying the words he’d just used to her.
‘Well, I’ve got a key, if you want it,’ Wyre offered. Anything to get this nightmare woman out of his flat. Now that he could see it was Griffiths she was interested in, he was almost falling over himself to be helpful. In a moment he’d be offering to drive her there.
‘Yes, I do – how come you’ve got keys?’ she asked suspiciously.
Wyre said, ‘Because I feed his cat when he goes away, which is quite often.’
‘Right, I’ll take the key, then.’
Wyre stood up and returned with two keys and a circular disc on a key ring.
‘Just touch this to the alarm when you’re inside – it disables it.’
‘Thank you,’ Hanlon said.
‘Post the keys through my letterbox when you’ve finished, please,’ Wyre said. ‘I don’t want to see you again.’
‘The feeling’s mutual,’ Hanlon said.
And it was that simple.
The Dalkeith Road where Griffiths lived was long and wide. She walked past a hall of residence for Edinburgh University and the Commonwealth Pool. The English literature lecturer had a respectable-looking house about five minutes’ walk down from where they were situated. He looked to be doing well for himself; Millar would be paying him handsomely, Hanlon guessed.
She rang the bell to check that nobody was in, then unlocked the door and let herself in. A swipe of the fob on the spare set of keys silenced the burglar alarm that was making its bleeping sound, just as Wyre had said. She was in.
She sighed with relief and looked around.
It was always an odd sensation, breaking into someone’s house. The utter silence. The total strangeness of the surroundings. The adrenaline rush of knowing that you could be caught. The heightened awareness that came with that, and the feeling of power, almost exultation, that you could take anything, break anything, destroy anything you wanted. She liked it; she liked it more than she cared to admit.
What she wanted to find more than anything else was cocaine or weed, and lots of it, not just a bit for personal use – not that anyone had suggested that Griffiths might have ever used drugs. The drugs had to be cached somewhere, why not here?
Griffiths house was exactly as one might expect from a lecturer in English literature at a university. It was modestly furnished, comfortable. There were potted plants, ferns, a lot of greenery, quite a few bookshelves, arranged by subject and in alphabetical order. Everything was neat and tidy. There were framed prints, some of them posters for movies. Arthouse films, Querelle, Death in Venice, a Pasolini movie. Others quality reproductions of paintings by artists Hanlon didn’t know. There was a large, expensive-looking hi-fi with a record deck and a selection of vinyl, predominantly jazz. Quite a few CDs, jazz and classical.
She moved to the kitchen. It had been knocked through to the dining room. A large stove, more plants, a cat flap in the door and a food and water bowl. She opened cupboards: crockery, herbs and spices, cups. More or less everything was where you might expect it to be; there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary.
She opened some of the drawers; one had flour and sugar in it, stuff for baking. It was probably where she would have put the coke; it wasn’t there.
She tried another room at the front. Griffiths’ study: a computer, printer, reference books, some framed awards from foreign universities, some framed schedules featuring his name as guest lecturer from foreign universities, framed photos, Griffiths with people she didn’t know, presumably academics or writers. None of Griffiths with Pablo Escobar and a mound of coke. None of Griffiths with Millar.
This was all a waste of time.
Then she froze as she heard a sudden noise, magnified by the adrenaline that was suddenly coursing through her veins. It was the sound of a key being inserted into a lock, then a click as the Yale sprang open, footsteps, a cough, a man’s cough and a thud as a bag was dropped on the tiles of the hall, and then the sound of the door closing.
She was trapped in Griffiths’ house.