An Incidental Death Read online

18

  Elsa was having lunch with Old Harry; today it was butternut squash soup. Rowenna would go down the weekly market in Summertown and badger the veg stall holders into giving her the unsaleable stuff for free. Today she’d come away with a dozen squash, a sack of potatoes, carrots and celery.

  Elsa was unsure about it. ‘It’s very orange, Harry.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be that way, Elsa. How’ve you been keeping anyway? I haven’t seen you for a couple of days.’

  She ate some of her soup thoughtfully. It was lovely and warm.

  ‘I’ve been out of town, Harry,’ she said grandly. He nodded. He knew that she had a place in the woods on the outskirts near the ring road where she slept. It was quieter out there and she had a tarpaulin and a couple of sleeping bags that she kept hidden under a spreading holly bush, so she could wrap up warmly and not get hassled by passers-by.

  ‘I’m looking after something, it’s from a computer, I think, that the nice young man who lives in Pretoria Road in Summertown gave me.’

  Harry frowned. ‘That street was on the news, someone got killed there.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Elsa. ‘In fact in, oh, my Lord, what’s his name...’ Harry watched with amusement as she banged her head angrily with her fist, he often had the same problem. Names refusing, obstinately, to come.

  ‘Marcus, that’s it, Marcus Hinds.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you speak to the police about it?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Maybe I will, or maybe I won’t,’ said Elsa mysteriously.

  ‘Have you finished, Elsa?’ asked Rowenna. She was going round the tables clearing the bowls and plates away. She had learnt that it was best to get them back as quickly as possible in case of breakage or spillage.

  ‘Yes, thank you, dear, anyway.’ She turned her back on Rowenna who was stacking the bowls and plates on a trolley and looked at Harry. ‘Marcus Hinds said he’d be back for it at some stage, so I’ll speak to him then. He’ll probably want it back. Those computer drive things are probably important.’

  ‘Are you finished too, Harry?’

  He nodded and Rowenna moved their bowls on to her trolley.

  She pushed it back to the kitchen. So, she thought, Elsa knows Marcus. What a small world.

  19

  Huss picked up Georgie Adams outside St Anne’s College. It wasn’t far away from Summertown, near the part of Oxford known as Jericho.

  Huss had found her image on Marcus Hinds’s Facebook page but the small photo had done little justice to how attractive she was.

  Both she and Huss were the same height, but there things diverged. Huss had thick, springy, wavy blonde hair and a sturdy, no-nonsense frame. She was powerfully built, the kind of woman who could swing a half hundredweight bag of feed effortlessly over her shoulders. Georgie was much slimmer but Huss could see that she was toned. She also had a watchful air about her and a hardness to her face that was quite daunting. She was exceptionally good-looking but there was a disturbing air about her. Her dark hair with its green highlights should have looked playful, quirky, but seemed oddly sinister. Her slim body was expensively accentuated by the leather jacket, the kind of leather that is soft as butter.

  Ironic, thought Huss, trying to control an irrational and visceral dislike of Georgie. She supports class war and she’s from the background of the ‘oppressors’, unaware that she’s part of what the workers hate: unthinking privilege.

  ‘Hello, you must be DI Huss.’ She smiled coldly. Her smile was as expensive as her clothes. Templeman had told her that her father was a prominent Edinburgh lawyer. Huss felt a further stab of irritation. She was a farm girl, had left school at sixteen and, she felt, knew the value of peasant-style labour. Georgie, expensive private schooling, still being elitist-educated at one of the country’s top universities, determined to try to smash a system that had showered her with every gift known to man.

  She championed the proletariat but, thought Huss, had probably never done a day’s manual labour in her life.

  Or was it simply revolution as a fashion accessory? Something to go with that handbag, which Huss guessed to cost about five hundred pounds.

  She felt patronized by Georgie. Not just patronized but treated with contempt. ‘Fascist bitch’. ‘Pig whore’. Words like that would be hurled by Georgie at her if Huss chose to attend the police line at the Schneider talk, plus volleys of gob. Now, she seemed happy to see Huss to protect her from her nut-job boyfriend.

  And, annoyingly, she was better-looking than her.

  But Huss was a fair-minded person and determined not to let her own prejudices stand in the way. Even though she would have cheerfully consigned her companion to compulsory ‘re-education’ Mao-style in the countryside.

  I’ve had to literally shovel enough shit in my lifetime, she thought. Let’s see how you’d like it. Put those expensively manicured hands to some use.

  She put the car in gear and they drove round to Hinds’s flat.

  All traces of the police investigation were gone. Huss had read the notes, and as they walked up the concrete stairs, their footsteps echoing in the stairwell, the faint smell of disinfectant in her nostrils, she could imagine the scenario, the curled-up body in the corner, the blood pooling underneath him. His friend’s attempts to staunch the flow of blood as it seeped inexorably out. The medical officer had said it would only have taken a couple of minutes for him to have bled to death.

  A stab wound to the leg.

  The knife had been found next to the body.

  Why did you do it, Marcus? she wondered.

  As if reading her mind, Adams said, ‘I don’t suppose for one instant Marcus thought he was going to kill him. I think he just wanted to incapacitate him.’

  ‘Had you ever seen him with that knife before?’

  She was watching Georgie Adams’s face closely and there was a moment of flickering indecision.

  ‘Yes, yes I had.’ I don’t believe you, thought Huss. Liar. ‘But I still like to think Marcus just stuck it in his leg thinking in his mixed-up way that would stop him following him.’

  They reached the top of the stairs and Georgie opened the door to the flat.

  ‘I’ll go in first,’ said Huss, ‘just in case.’

  Marcus’s flat was an attic conversion and it didn’t take long to look around. There was one main room with kitchen facilities and a bathroom. There was an odd, almost chemical smell that Huss recognized as that of old skunk smoke. The bed was screened off from the room by a storage unit. Light came in from large, velux windows. He was not a houseproud man; the flat was dusty, clothes lay strewn about the floor.

  ‘OK,’ said Huss. Georgie came in. She barely glanced around and went straight to the bathroom, emerging seconds later with a washbag.

  ‘My stuff,’ she explained.

  ‘Is that everything?’ asked Huss.

  ‘I wouldn’t leave clothes in here, can you not smell that weed?’ Georgie shook her head. ‘I blame that for what he’s become.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Huss was looking at the table under the window. It was obviously the place that Marcus sat down to work. There was an anglepoise lamp, a coaster, an ashtray.

  ‘A nutcase.’ She sat down on the old sofa and looked up at Huss. ‘I’ve got some friends in Occupy the City, the libertarian group, and I’m a member of the SWP. It’s not exactly like I’m some sort of terrorist, but at times he became convinced that we were committed to heavy duty armed struggle. He thought I was mixed up with crazy anarchists.’

  She gave a harsh bark of laughter at the idea.

  ‘What, like the Red Brigades?’ Huss asked.

  ‘Exactly,’ Georgie nodded, ‘he was really paranoid sometimes. I don’t mean that in a joking way, I really do think he has a serious medical problem. And now James is dead because of it. Weed isn’t like it used to be, it’s a seriously fucked-up drug these days, and then if you add a bottle of vodka on to that...’ She shook her head sadly.

  Huss had to admit
that she sounded authentically worried. It was a plausible enough story.

  ‘Or Eleuthera?’ Huss tossed the name out lightly but Georgie blinked, startled.

  ‘Who?’ It was such a transparent lie.

  ‘Oh, just some anarchist mob.’ Huss’s voice was dismissive. Her eyes were on the table, in the centre of which was a rectangle that was free of dust. Given that the rest of the flat had a fine film of it everywhere, it was conspicuous. A rectangle about the size of a laptop.

  ‘Did Marcus have a laptop?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Georgie nodded, looking relieved that the conversation had shifted from anarchist groups. ‘He must have taken it with him.’

  Huss looked out of the window at the street below and the terraced houses opposite. It was lined on both sides by cars. Directly opposite, one of the houses was boarded up and on the steps leading up to the door was old Elsa, the bag lady.

  ‘I see you’ve got a resident tramp.’

  Georgie nodded. ‘Her, yes. She stinks to high heaven. I spoke to her once, offered her help to get into a hostel. She more or less told me to eff off. I wish she would.’

  Georgie’s tone made it clear that there would be no place for people like Elsa in her bright new dawn.

  ‘Is she here often?’

  Georgie shrugged. ‘Often enough. She told me she had another residence. That’s how she put it: “residence”.’

  There was no attempt to lecture Huss on Oxford council’s railroading of rough sleepers out of sight of the tourists, out of the city, or an attack on government policy to the homeless. Huss guessed they weren’t glamorous enough for Georgie.

  The bus stop, thought Huss. The other residence. Suddenly Huss wanted very much to speak to Elsa, alone. She wished she didn’t have Georgie with her.

  Marcus must have run out of the front door of the flats and given Elsa the memory stick. He must also have taken time – how long, a minute? – to jot down the words for Huss to read. It didn’t seem like the actions of a man fleeing a stabbing, but fleeing he obviously had been.

  Eleuthera?

  ‘Shall we go?’ she said.

  Georgie shook her head. ‘No, not just yet. I know this sounds silly but I want to be alone here to think.’

  ‘Oh well, if you’re sure.’ Thank you God, she thought.

  ‘I’m sure. I can’t imagine Marcus turning up here, can you? Not now, not after all of this.’

  Huss let herself out of the flat and walked back down the echoing stairs. The heavy door of the house banged to behind her and she walked round the side of the skip that took up two precious bays for the residents-only street parking and crossed the road.

  Elsa huddled in her layers of clothing, topped off by a once fawn-coloured man’s Burberry raincoat, now rain-soaked and torn, but still quite stylish. Huss thought, if you gave her a makeover she would look quite presentable. There was a faded beauty still discernible in Elsa’s features.

  Huss took her purse out of her bag and extracted a five pound note.

  Elsa’s shrewd blue eyes regarded her inscrutably.

  ‘Hello, it’s me, remember me?’ Huss asked.

  ‘Of course I remember you, dear.’

  ‘Did you see anything that happened? With the man who gave you the note to give to me?’

  ‘Yes.’ Just that, just the one word. Elsa took the note.

  ‘Can you tell me any more?’

  Elsa raised her head and looked across the road, up at roof level.

  ‘I will. I saw lots. Meet me at my other address. I’m not talking here.’ She looked upwards. ‘Walls have ears.’

  ‘Wilson Road.’ Huss remembered the name from earlier.

  Elsa nodded.

  ‘Ten p.m.,’ she said. ‘I’ll have finished all my chores by then.’ She smiled at Huss. ‘He gave me something to look after.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Please God let it be the laptop, prayed Huss.

  ‘It’s called a “superdrive”, dear. Ten p.m.! Don’t be late.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Huss with feeling. So, not the laptop but an external hard drive. Just as good.

  Elsa rose to her feet and gathered up her bags. Huss watched her slowly hobble off down the street in the direction of the main road.

  She turned to go herself in the direction where she had left her car. As she did she noticed movement at the window high above the street. A curtain twitched.

  Georgie Adams had been watching.

  20

  Hanlon met Huss in the cafeteria of the Natural History Museum of Oxford. She’d spent twenty minutes in the attached Pitt Rivers ethnography museum looking at the shrunken heads. Severed heads had always fascinated people and now, she reflected, it was the Islamic terrorists’ turn to benefit from the hold they had on popular imagination.

  Gunther Hart’s head hadn’t been severed but his throat had been spectacularly slit. The act itself hadn’t been filmed but the attackers had been filmed, balaclavaed, posing with his corpse. The usual depressing performance.

  She’d been researching Al-Akhdaar – it was slim pickings. They had only really come to prominence in terms of their threats to Schneider and the murder of Hart. The concierge of Hart’s townhouse had disappeared, was rumoured to be in Syria. So the group, although possibly minuscule, couldn’t be discounted. They had followed through on one major promise. She couldn’t blame Schneider for wanting to sleep with an attack dog, human or canine, at the foot of his bed.

  Huss had just finished telling her of the meeting with Georgie.

  ‘So what do you think?’ asked Hanlon.

  ‘I think that Marcus Hinds was running for his life. The dead man, James Kettering, has one conviction for affray from a Stop the City march, and has been linked to anarchist groups like The Wombles and Class War. These are fairly tame organizations,’ said Huss, ‘and much as they might like to, they haven’t beheaded any capitalists yet. Eleuthera are anything but tame. They’ve got a rock solid history of violence, bombs, beatings, murder. That’s on the continent, of course. And they’re well-funded. I’m assuming that they have linked up with Al-Akhdaar to commit a high-profile assassination of Schneider, like they did with Hart.’

  ‘And Hinds knows about it?’

  ‘I would think so.’ Huss drank some of her coffee. ‘He is a journalist. I spoke to a couple of his mates. He’d been bragging about it to anyone who would listen. He was going to do a big exposé of Eleuthera – names, photos, everything – and was going to sell it to one of the Sundays. He had a deal lined up. Big money, it would have been front page. Normally he does in-depth crime, either profiles of well-known criminals or exposés of types of crime. Face it, he’s got the connections.’

  ‘I was there once when his uncle was nicked,’ Hanlon suddenly recalled. ‘It must have been twenty years ago, under Detective Superintendent Tremayne.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Quite a laugh, larger than life, an old-school villain, had an eye for the ladies. He was very good-looking, actually. Cliff, that was his name.’

  She drank some coffee then asked Huss, ‘So, you think that Hinds has been framed to make him disappear or to discredit any claims he may make regarding Eleuthera?’

  ‘Well, it’s working,’ Huss pointed out. ‘Hinds is on the run and his girlfriend’s claims that he’s mentally impaired through drugs and booze are quite cleverly laid out. Sow doubt as to his credibility, make it look like Hinds’s report is the ramblings of a drunk, paranoid stoner.’

  I’ll reserve judgement on that, thought Hanlon.

  ‘What does she look like?’ she asked Huss.

  ‘Slim, dark hair, beautiful.’ Huss thought. ‘Hang on, here’s her Facebook photo.’ She took her tablet out of her bag and showed Hanlon.

  ‘We’ve met,’ Hanlon said sourly. Huss looked at her in amazement and Hanlon told her about the incident of the previous night. Huss shook her head.

  ‘You assaulted a protestor!’ Her voice was scandalized but really she t
hought, Good.

  ‘Yes, well, it was self-defence.’ Hanlon was unapologetic. ‘I seem to have got away with it, no one’s made a complaint. Anyway, she was there. Probably sizing Schneider up for his coffin.’

  ‘I’m amazed you haven’t been sacked, DCI Hanlon,’ said Huss.

  ‘So am I, but I’m a bit past caring, to be honest.’

  Huss stayed diplomatically silent. Hanlon was forever pushing at the boundaries, but she had a very powerful protector in the sizeable form of Corrigan and she had brought in some spectacular results. Corrigan had a tendency to block or shut down anti-Hanlon investigations. Sometimes he had to have ‘a word’ and officers’ memories tended to become confused. He could play the system like a virtuoso could a violin. Crime reporters might be gently bribed, ‘distracted’ with a juicier story. He headed internal investigations. People knew better than to cross Corrigan, a capricious friend but a monomaniac as an enemy.

  The assistant commissioner, raised a hellfire Catholic, now staunch atheist, had as much forgiveness in him as the Old Testament Jehovah.

  One of these days, thought Huss, Hanlon would really overstep the mark, but she knew that Hanlon probably wouldn’t care.

  ‘So what are your plans regarding Schneider?’ asked Huss.

  ‘I thought I’d go and have a look at the Rosemount, introduce myself to the management and have a look at where they’re planning to put Schneider. Evaluate it from a security point of view. We’ve only got to keep him alive for a few days, after that it’s not our problem. I can do that much for Corrigan. I do owe him several favours.’

  Huss shook her head. ‘Until the next time. Eleuthera won’t go away.’

  ‘So what?’ Hanlon was unimpressed. ‘They’re tiny, they’re insignificant.’ She put her head on one side and looked at Huss. ‘It’s hard to underestimate how insignificant they are.’

  ‘They’re violent,’ said Huss, protesting. ‘They might decide, oh I don’t know...’ she cast around in her mind for an example, ‘to bomb the Dragon School here in Oxford because it’s fee-paying and kill a load of seven-year-olds because they’re capitalist scum. Or some college because they’re a bastion of the elite. Or chop your head off,’ she pointed at Hanlon, ‘because you’re a violent tool of tyranny. I think they killed James Kettering on that stairway to frame Hinds and they’ll probably kill again.’