An Incidental Death Read online

  ‘Fine,’ Hanlon raised her hands placatingly, ‘just so long as you’re sure that they exist outside of Hinds’s imagination. It’s all well and good, they might do this, they might do that, let’s wait until they actually do something. You realize Hinds might just be crazy like Adams says he is? She’s not necessarily lying. I told you I met his uncle Cliff, and he was handsome and a charmer. He was also a nutter. It’s coming back to me now. He used to debt-collect for the Andersons. Dave Anderson’s dad. He bashed someone’s head in with a claw hammer, they were late with their payments, that’s what we nicked him for. His brief got it reduced to self-defence, eight years or something, I seem to remember he got.’

  ‘You really think that?’ Huss was incredulous.

  ‘Why not? Neither of us knows Hinds, he’s a not very successful writer with a heavy drug and alcohol problem and a criminal family background. The only “evidence” you appear to be working on is a scribbled note and a memory stick that’s full of gibberish.’

  Huss eyed Hanlon with irritation. ‘Well, I’ve got a witness who says she knows what happened and tomorrow I’ll call you and hopefully I will be able to give you some evidence.’

  Hanlon stood. ‘Well, good for you.’ She zipped her jacket up. ‘Happy times! In the meantime I’ll go and check out that hotel. Make sure that Schneider’s safe from the Phantom Menace.’

  Huss watched Hanlon’s lithe figure with her arrogant, confident strut walk away through the café to the street outside.

  Bitch, she thought. Well, come ten o’clock I’ll have Marcus’s hard drive and then we’ll see.

  21

  ‘Hello, Rowenna,’ said Mark Spencer. Rowenna turned around in the small kitchen of the church hall as he quietly closed the door behind him.

  Rowenna looked at Mark uneasily. She had been attracted to the anarchists because of a libertarian streak in her and a visceral hatred of politicians. She had started the soup kitchen by herself because she had wanted to do something for the rough sleepers of Oxford whom she saw as being shamefully betrayed by the local authorities. But her romantic view of the anarchists was challenged by people like Mark Spencer, who she thought was a dangerous thug, and also Georgie Adams, who she thought was uncommitted to their ideology. In fact, she had a feeling that Adams was using them for her own ends.

  ‘Hello, Mark,’ she replied.

  ‘Busy?’ He went over and peered into the enormous stockpot the size of a dustbin on the stove. It had a metal handle on each side, riveted on. He went to hold one of the handles.

  ‘Be careful,’ warned Rowenna, ‘the handles get very hot.’

  He gingerly touched one and winced.

  ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. He turned and looked at her. ‘You know old Elsa, don’t you?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You know that she sometimes sleeps in Pretoria Road, near Marcus Hinds’s gaff?’

  ‘I didn’t know that, no.’

  He took a step towards her. There was something menacing about the gesture and she instinctively backed away so that she was trapped between him and the stove. His shaved head gleamed under the kitchen lights, contrasting with his stubbled chin. He looked very intimidating. Disturbing memories of rumours she’d heard of his behaviour troubled her mind. She had put these down to right-wing propaganda, wanting to discredit their cause. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Has she been saying anything about Marcus?’ he asked.

  ‘No...’ She shook her head and then gasped as he grabbed her forearm. She struggled but he was much stronger than she was and he pushed her wrist against the very hot metal handle of the stockpot.

  She gasped at the pain. Her legs turned to jelly and she felt a sickening knot in the base of her stomach. He pushed his face close to hers and his eyes were hard.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.

  ‘OK, I’ll tell you.’ It was excruciating. He let go of her arm and she could see the ugly red weal on the pale, delicate skin where she had been burned.

  ‘He gave her something, something computer related, maybe a hard drive or a memory stick, I really don’t know.’

  He nodded, digesting the information.

  ‘And where can I find Elsa? She’s not in any of her usual places.’

  ‘I honestly don’t know.’

  This time he grabbed her by the hair and forced her face over the pan. They both looked at the lentils bubbling away, a couple of large onions and some carrots bobbing around in the boiling liquid.

  Spencer pulled his jacket sleeve over his fingers and gave the stockpot a sharp tug. The soup sloshed around alarmingly, nearly spilling over the sides.

  ‘It’d be terrible if this pan fell off the stove and over you,’ said Spencer. ‘You’d be so badly burned, now, please help me?’

  Rowenna thought of the effect of pouring boiling water over tomatoes, the way their skin blistered and slid off. She imagined it happening to her.

  ‘Please...’ she begged. He kicked her ankles away from beneath her and she thudded down on to the tiled floor of the kitchen. He pulled the enormous pan so a third of it hung over the edge of the stove directly above her. Its dented, blackened bottom loomed huge and menacing.

  She stared up at it in horrified fascination.

  ‘Old Harry knows where she lives,’ Rowenna said, hurriedly, hating herself for what she was doing.

  ‘And what’s his address?’ asked Mark Spencer.

  Five minutes later he left the kitchen, nodding to himself with self-satisfaction.

  Inside, Rowenna carefully turned the heat off under the soup.

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ she whispered.

  22

  ‘So, DCI Hanlon, what was the Rosemount like?’ He paused and smiled his thanks as the attentive waiter poured Schneider a generous glass of white wine from the bottle.

  ‘Luxurious.’ She looked around the Michelin-starred restaurant they were sitting in. ‘You’ll like it.’

  Vacherin, the restaurant, with its predominately French menu, would have sat quite comfortably in the Rosemount as far as food went, but not décor. You have to work awfully hard to be young and relevant but classic is classic. The modish room they were sitting in now, essentially minimalist in its styling, just off Bond Street, would have clashed horribly with the Rosemount’s pseudo-Gothic style. It was modern, with composite moulded plastic tables, expensively done, the kind of faux-marble effect that one might get in an expensive fitted kitchen. There was quite a lot of Miró-style art on the walls, interspersed with pieces of interesting abstract sculpture. Everything was beautifully, expensively lit.

  The lights didn’t just light, they enhanced. Even Hanlon was impressed.

  ‘You live very well, for a man of the people,’ she said.

  Schneider looked at her, amused. ‘I came from a really shit background, Hanlon, a classic slum. I can keep it real, but I’m never going back.’ He shook his head. ‘Niemals. I’d rather die.’

  She believed him.

  She looked at the menu and her eyebrows rose fractionally. No wonder they could afford the lights.

  That which was artfully illuminated included Schneider, who tonight looked like a Hollywood actor playing a minor Germanic god, relaxed, powerful, strongly handsome. Hanlon noticed that Hübler, sitting next to him on the banquette that ran the length of the wall, was almost pressing her body against him and she also noticed that Schneider was looking slightly embarrassed by this. She wondered if maybe they’d had some kind of one-night stand at some time and he had found himself embarrassingly stuck with her. She plainly adored him, and he was now regretting it.

  Hanlon mentally filed this information and thought back to her visit to the Rosemount earlier that day.

  Like Claridge’s, the Rosemount Hotel was classical luxury rather than the contemporary chic that Vacherin embodied. It had been built as a home for a Victorian industrialist, a large imposing baroque pile, swirly stone decorations everywhere, a huge clock tower, a massiv
e Italianate fountain with nymphs, dolphins and gods frolicking around, manicured grounds, gates like those of a London park. It was a stone-built hymn to money. There was a red carpet, secured with brass runners, going down the steps and, once inside, the luxury baronial theme continued. A minstrels’ gallery, suits of armour, enormous gloomy paintings. Everything was on a massive scale. Walls were wood-panelled, ceilings incredibly high and rococo-plastered. There was a dining room that hadn’t just been copied from a Loire chateau, it had been ripped from a Loire chateau and transported, piece by piece, back to Oxfordshire and reassembled.

  It was two fingers up to the boutique hotel, with its transitory fads and its egalitarian atmosphere. This was a place where everybody knew their place and the main concessions to modernity lay in plumbing, bathrooms and Wi-Fi.

  There was a helipad for guests and prices were to match. Strangely, thought Hanlon, from what Huss had told her, Georgie Adams would have been very much at home here. She was the interloper at the Rosemount, not the upper-class anarchist.

  The hotel was built on an escarpment, giving its dining room a majestic view of the flat, dull Oxfordshire countryside. The duty manager, Irek Czerwinski, pointed to a building visible from the terrace at the rear of the hotel.

  ‘That down there is the Presidential aka the Garden Lodge. It’s where Herr Schneider and his party will be staying, come and see.’

  He looked at the woman by his side as they walked down the balustrade stone steps and along the path to the lodge. The wind blew her dark corkscrew curls and he noticed the way her cold, grey eyes evaluated her surroundings. He had met her before, at a different hotel, and he doubted she would remember him, but she had caused a great deal of trouble then and indirectly nearly got him fired. Like all good hotel managers, he had an almost psychic ability to read people’s characters.

  Hanlon was trouble.

  He had no doubt whatsoever of her ability to create trouble again at the slightest provocation. He knew he would be heartily glad to see the back of her. He carried on with his tour.

  ‘The lodge was built to accommodate the prince regent and his party in 1889 when they stayed here over Christmas for the shooting.’ Czerwinski had automatically fallen into his hotel spiel. ‘Discretion was the order of the day, and so a hawthorn hedge was planted around the lodge to screen the prince’s shenanigans. Nothing ever changes, there’s only the one entrance.’

  Hanlon evaluated the three-metre-high hedge, beautifully trimmed but with vicious thorns, that surrounded the property. It was impenetrable.

  All the better to protect the prince from prying eyes as he got on with his womanizing. A function it was still serving well over a century later. She looked back at the hotel above, dominating the landscape, its grey stone staircases and manicured lawns.

  ‘We won’t go in.’ There were barred gates the height of the hedge controlled by a keypad.

  ‘So what is it now?’ asked Hanlon.

  ‘A four-bedroomed self-contained cottage, gym and spa room in the basement. Staff will come down from the hotel as arranged.’ The manager indicted the hedge. ‘Nobody could get through that hawthorn, or cut through it, and your friend Mr Schneider can let his dog run free, it won’t be able to get out and bite anyone.’

  He looked at the hedge. ‘Have you seen his dog?’

  ‘No,’ said Hanlon.

  ‘It’s fucking horrible,’ Czerwinski shuddered, ‘and I like dogs!’

  They had finished walking around the hedge. It was close to the perimeter of the grounds and a wood ran up to where the hawthorn started to grow. Czerwinski pointed at it.

  ‘There are jogging trails in the woods that guests can use, and an outdoor gym. There is also one thing that I should show you. It’s not something I would usually mention, but you are responsible for Mr Schneider’s security, so, come and look at this.’

  He led her to where the trees met the hedge and walked with her into the wood. He pointed to a section of the hedge. ‘Look down there.’

  Hanlon did so. There were concrete steps leading down to a rusty steel door. Brambles overgrew it. If it hadn’t been pointed out to her she’d never have seen it. She looked at Czerwinski questioningly.

  ‘During the war, the main house,’ he pointed back up at the hotel, ‘was used by military intelligence; it was linked up with Bletchley. The officers had the cellars of the house as bomb shelters but the plebs, the junior staff and the ATCs, et cetera, who were billeted in the grounds had this.’ He pointed at the steps. ‘It’s a kind of Anderson shelter, cut-and-cover; the other end comes out in the lodge grounds, behind a shed.’

  Hanlon walked down the steps to the heavy steel door and tested it. The hinges were rusted but you could open it. She looked up at the manager.

  ‘What about the other end?’

  ‘It’s like this, but there’s a window, well, a kind of hole really. The whole thing runs under the hedge. I think they built it like that in case the gate got blocked – it would serve not just as a bomb shelter but also an emergency exit. You can understand they’d be worried about incendiaries turning the inside into a sea of fire and everyone trapped.’

  Hanlon looked at it closely. ‘Well, I can’t see it being a problem. Schneider’s got that dog of whatever sort it is.’

  Czerwinski led her back towards the hotel, noting absent-mindedly her athletic fluidity as she walked along, her eyes perpetually busy.

  Hanlon asked him, ‘Is the lodge popular? I mean, do you book it a lot?’

  They had reached the grassy terrace now and they were looking down on the roof of the lodge. He nodded.

  ‘Pretty much fully booked. People are happy to pay a high premium for security. Sometimes I guess it’s justified, we have Hollywood stars who’ve had problems with stalkers or the paparazzi, or Russian businessmen anxious to avoid “business” rivals, and then you get legitimate business people who I think would probably be perfectly safe anywhere but they like to feel that they’re so important they need this level of security, an ego thing. They sometimes hire bulletproof limos – they like that touch. Nobody gets gunned down in Oxfordshire, for heaven’s sake. It’s not Moscow or Mexico.’

  He paused and looked at her inscrutable face as she surveyed the bleak Oxfordshire countryside. A red kite wheeled high overhead.

  Hanlon watched it, her eyes as grey as the skies above, as the great bird wheeled effortlessly overhead, borne on its giant wings.

  ‘So Herr Schneider will have his dog,’ she said again.

  He nodded. ‘And an alarm that goes directly through to Kidlington police station. There’d be an armed response team here in minutes, or so they say.’ He shrugged, theatrically sceptical. ‘And I’ve got two of the Specialist Protection boys in the hotel, they must think Christmas has come early. They’re armed. And there’s our security, they’re ex-marines so, to be honest, I’d back them over your lot in a fight. I can’t imagine there’ll be any problems at all.’

  Hanlon nodded dubiously. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.

  A magpie flew down on to the grass in search of food.

  One for sorrow, thought Hanlon.

  *

  Back in the dining room at Vacherin, she looked at Schneider and Hübler. They looked like a successful married couple, like the world, the future, belonged to them. She wondered where the minder, Muller, was. Eating raw meat somewhere with the mastiff. A meeting of minds.

  Christiane Hübler’s eyes rested on Schneider with proprietorial love. Once again Hanlon wondered at their relationship. Someone is always in charge but such was the mixed messages that the two of them were sending out, it was difficult to say who had the whip-hand, or was Schneider one of those powerful men who like to be dominated?

  ‘You’ll like it,’ said Hanlon. ‘So will the dog. It’s very you.’

  23

  Huss returned to the station at Summertown feeling slightly irritated. She rubbed the small of her back. She’d pulled a muscle there helping her father on the farm
and it was really starting to bother her. The first sign of ageing, she thought gloomily. She ran through her emails, checking allocations of the team that worked for her, following up on the arrangements for the Oxford Union debate.

  No we do not require street closures, she angrily wrote to Oxford Council, underlining as she went. This was emphatically not CID work and she felt a surge of resentment towards Templeman for having landed her with it. The problem was, nobody was really all that sure as to what to do with Schneider. They were trying to forestall a crime rather than clear one up.

  Yet again, she went over the Hinds’s conundrum in her mind. Had he murdered a man, as seemed the case, or was it something connected to the anarchist group Eleuthera and/or Al-Akhdaar, as Hinds’s scribbled note to her suggested? Was Georgie Adams connected with Eleuthera or was she just an innocent political protestor? Eleuthera were not a banned organization in the UK, so did it matter anyway?

  Presumably Hinds’s hard drive would contain proof of a criminal Eleuthera connection to a plot to kill Schneider.

  There was a slight cough and she looked up.

  ‘Hi, I was thinking about that memory stick. Could I have another look at it?’ Evan was wearing a tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirt today and an apologetic expression.

  ‘Sure, Evan,’ said Huss, cheering up at the sight of him. ‘Do you think you might be in with a chance?’

  It was typical of life, she thought, that now she would very soon have access to gigabytes of Marcus’s data, in the form of his hard drive, it seemed likely that Evan might be able to restore the content of the memory stick to a readable format.

  ‘Yeah, well, I was kind of rushed off my feet yesterday and there are a couple of things I could try. No promises, mind you.’ He looked suitably apologetic.