Cold Revenge (2015) (7 page)

‘Police, you big Eastern European baby,’ Hanlon said to him. ‘I want to speak to the manager.’

She shook her head in mild disbelief at what she’d just said. The manager. She sounded like she was in John Lewis. She looked around her.

She wasn’t in John Lewis.

She was standing in a small entrance hall with a front desk and a couple of armchairs against the wall opposite. There were three monitors on the wall showing the alleyway, the images clicking jerkily this way and that as the cameras changed angle, on the other side of the door.

Beyond the desk were a couple of ormolu chairs and a rug on the floor; in front of them a richly carpeted staircase twisted upwards. The colours of the furniture and wallpaper were dark, black, gold, crimson. Hanlon guessed that at night the place would look mysterious, darkly erotic. At this time of day, however, the cracks showed.

You could see where the paint was peeling, where the Persian rug was frayed, the odd cobweb in the cornice. The place reeked of stale smoke, alcohol, cheap perfume and sex. It smelled of what it was.

The man stood there still, rubbing his sore foot against his other leg in an aggrieved way.

‘Vot are you vanting?’ The accent was Eastern European, the tone unhelpful.

‘I want to speak to whoever’s in charge and I want to do it now, or I’ll nick you,’ said Hanlon, annoyed.

‘On vot charge!’ protested the man.

‘Obstructing a Police Officer in the Execution of His Duty,’ said Hanlon. She leaned over the desk. Amongst the paperwork, there was an ashtray with several cigarette ends and a half-smoked joint. ‘And knowingly permitting the consumption of drugs on licensed premises contrary to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.’ She straightened up. ‘That good enough for you?’

There was a heavy silence for a minute or so while the Slav pondered what to do about Hanlon. She started drumming her fingers on the top of the desk impatiently.

A door by the side of the stairs concealed by a mirror opened. ‘I’m in charge,’ said a woman quietly, standing framed in the now revealed doorway. Hanlon looked at her. She was an imposing sight. Tall and bulky, she was dressed in a pink, silk dressing gown. She was wearing fluffy slippers to match. Hanlon introduced herself and the big woman scrutinized her proffered ID carefully.

‘Do come through and join me, Officer,’ she said. Her accent was London, through and through, and her tone imperious.

She ushered Hanlon into the room behind her. Hanlon felt like Alice in Wonderland following this apparition into the concealed back room. Her host gestured in a make-yourself-comfortable kind of way and Hanlon sat down in a small, lace-draped armchair in an overly chintzy small room, looking at the ‘Manager and Proprietress, dearie,’ of the Krafft Club, Soho.

It was a strange room, more like the drawing room of an old lady than of a manageress in the vice trade.

Copies of Victorian sentimental pictures, like
Bubbles
and some depressed-looking Highland cattle
On Rannoch Moor
hung on the walls, and there were shelves of porcelain figures, shepherdesses, twenties-style flappers, that kind of kitsch. Once again, it struck Hanlon that it was the sort of room that should have belonged to an elderly spinster. Knowing it was on the premises of a sex business made it seem sinister. It was as if the rosebud and cupid statuary were masking some unpleasant secret.

At first glance, Hanlon had mistaken the madam for a drag queen. It was an easy mistake to make. The woman in front of her was not conventionally feminine. Iris Campion – ‘Like the flower, but not as pretty’ – was at least six foot tall and burly with it. She had massive, flabby arms, revealed by the short-sleeved dressing gown, like a shot-putter gone to seed. Hanlon, though, a good judge of physique, guessed there was still a great deal of strength under there. Her hair was close-cropped and dyed a henna-red; her face, mannish, good-naturedly brutal. Two deep scars, one on each cheek, were clearly visible. Hanlon guessed they’d been put there as a punishment, at some stage in her life.

Campion must have divined what Hanlon was thinking because she laughed. It was a self-mocking laugh, designed to deflect any sympathy, but Hanlon could feel the sadness underlying it.

‘Looking at my beauty marks are you, DCI? I was sixteen when that was done. Bit of a career handicap for a young tart, eh? Damaged goods, you might say.’

Her voice was hard, and so were her brown eyes, but just momentarily, a flicker of pain ran across the woman’s face and Hanlon felt she had a sudden glimpse of a terrified sixteen-year-old, a child, being held down by at least one man, while another carefully sliced through the flesh on her cheeks. The scars were ruler-straight, sharp-edged. It showed practice.

He’d have used something like a Stanley knife or even an old-fashioned cut-throat razor, thought Hanlon. ‘Striping’, it was called. She remembered, years ago, being in a north London pub with an old-fashioned DCI – DCI Norman Tremayne, that was his name – who’d been her boss at the time. One of the regulars had been striped for trying to stop some kids vandalizing his car. Which one was it? Hanlon had asked in all innocence. The DCI had rolled his eyes and pointed at a bunch of guys standing by the bar, one of them with both cheeks covered with wadded surgical dressings taped into place.

‘Take a wild guess, Hanlon,’ he’d said wearily.

Then the madam’s professional face, a face as concealing as any mask, was clamped on again. Hanlon suddenly knew, with a flash of clarity, that she’d be furious if she thought Hanlon might pity her.

‘So you moved into bondage then,’ said Hanlon briskly. It made a great deal of sense, sex where your face could be covered, or where facial scarring itself would be arousing for some.

There’s a market for everything.

Iris nodded. ‘You’re not thick are you, dear,’ she said. She reached behind her to a small table and undid a bottle of Macallan whisky, adding a quadruple to the coffee in its china cup. Breakfast of champions, thought Hanlon.

‘There’s a market for everything,’ Iris said, as if reading her thoughts. It was the Scotch that had done for Tremayne, she thought. Towards the end, you could smell him coming from fifty metres away. She wondered if they’d ever known each other, they were of a similar generation.

‘Now, tell mother what brings you here.’ She smiled sardonically at Hanlon. ‘Please tell me you’d like a job, you’d be a fantastic domme. I saw the way you handled Yuri.’

‘Dr Gideon Fuller,’ said Hanlon, not wasting any time.

‘I’m not sure I feel like discussing our clients, if indeed we have anyone by that name on our books. We’re not a knocking shop, dearie. We’re a private members’ club, Detective Chief Inspector. Surely you know I’m not going to discuss my membership lists.’

Hanlon nodded. What else was Campion going to say.

‘It’s up to you,’ Hanlon said with a shrug. ‘But if you want a full Health and Safety audit, including fire regs, if you want me to get the council to check that you’re complying fully, without deviation, with whatever licence you’re operating under, if you want a couple of uniforms posted in the street outside to “reassure” your clients and, of course, I’d be dropping by regularly, then you go right ahead and not discuss him. It’s a free country. The choice is yours.’

Campion looked at Hanlon. She was a good judge of character and she could see from the other woman’s face she would not back down. A fight with Hanlon would mean trouble. Campion knew what trouble looked like when she saw it looming.

She made her mind up. It wasn’t a fight worth having. She nodded. ‘OK. Fair enough. What do you want to know?’

‘General background,’ said Hanlon. ‘That’ll do for now.’

Campion sipped her whisky-freighted coffee. ‘Well, our good doctor is a classic dom. That means, as you can guess, he likes to be totally in charge. That’s in general.’

‘So the women do what they’re told,’ said Hanlon. Campion nodded.

‘They do what they’re told, or he punishes them. And of course it goes without saying that the girls make sure he gets to punish them. He also has his own special preferences. He’s really into AgePlay, which for him means teacher/student relationships and also breath control.’

‘Do you mean strangulation?’ asked Hanlon. It was obvious she wasn’t talking about yoga.
Pranayama
, that was the term, she thought.

The madam nodded. ‘Exactly. Just make-believe, obviously. But he does like to be dominant, which is not always the case. Particularly with teachers. They usually get enough of that at work. We get all sorts here, obviously,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘But you’d be surprised how many bottoms or subs we get.’ Hanlon looked puzzled.

‘Submissives,’ Campion explained. ‘We get a lot of them. Dr Fuller, though, well, let’s just say I’ve had to have a word with him on occasion. He’s certainly not submissive. Some of the girls complained; he can get a little too rough. Is that what this is about?’

‘In a sense,’ said Hanlon guardedly. ‘You mentioned AgePlay, student/teacher role-play. Might that include peculiar sexual favours for higher marks, that kind of thing? In a role-play sense.’

She was thinking of Abigail Vickery, Fuller’s possible first victim. Had he blackmailed her into sex? Could that have happened with Hannah Moore?

‘But of course,’ said Campion, matter-of-factly. ‘Art reflects life, so does sex. You should know that, DCI Hanlon. If it happens in real life, it will absolutely happen here, and if it happens here it’ll probably happen in reality.’ She sipped her Scotch. ‘It’s the circle of life.’

Hanlon nodded thoughtfully. ‘How plausible would it be to suggest someone like Dr Fuller would strangle someone accidentally?’

‘Very unlikely,’ said the madam firmly. ‘S&M fans are big on contracts and consensus. We use safe-words a lot. There’s no mystique to it, just common sense.’

‘But accidents happen?’

‘Very few in S&M, Detective Chief Inspector Hanlon.’

There was a knock on the door and Campion said, ‘Come.’

A tall man, naked but for a leather thong and a black face mask, shuffled into the room. His feet were shackled together with a section of chain. The mouth of the mask was closed with a zip.

Campion was watching Hanlon. The policewoman’s face remained expressionless.

‘Have you cleaned my bedroom?’ asked Campion menacingly. The cowled figure nodded. ‘The bathroom?’ A shake of the head, then a gesture towards its mouth. It, Hanlon thought, not he. Reification it was called, she seemed to remember, treating people as things.

She wondered if Fuller thought of his women in the same way. Things not people. Was that why Hannah Moore had been hooded, so he hadn’t found it necessary to look at her face as he killed her? Would he have been unable to meet her gaze as his fingers crushed her windpipe? Did the simulated violence mask a desire for real violence? Like taking off a mask to reveal another mask.

She guessed that the appearance of this man was a lesson from Campion, a window into her world.

It was a stage-managed world, the realm of S&M. It was a world devoid of chance, a scripted world like an intricate, violent sexual dance with its own steps and its own music, the music of pain, the rhythm of control.

‘Oh, of course,’ Campion said and the figure leaned forward, while she unzipped its mouth. It bowed in gratitude and disappeared. The door closed gently behind it.

Hanlon looked at the madam.

‘He’ll need his tongue to clean properly,’ Campion said, looking challengingly at Hanlon. ‘Does that shock you, Detective Chief Inspector?’

She leaned forward in her chair, so their faces were almost touching. Hanlon could smell the whisky on her breath, her stale perfume and a faint sheen of perspiration. Campion reached out a finger and gently touched Hanlon’s swollen eye.

‘And how did you get that beauty?’ she asked softly, almost tenderly.

Hanlon didn’t move. She returned the other woman’s stare dispassionately, her grey eyes looking into the slightly bloodshot brown ones of her host. It was like some kind of test, a peculiar kind of intimacy, the iron wills of the two women almost audibly clashing. Then suddenly, as quickly as it started, it was over. Campion nodded. The test was over. Hanlon stood up; it was time to go.

‘I’d be very careful with Dr Fuller if I were you,’ she said to the madam.

‘If I were you,’ repeated the other woman scornfully. ‘If I were you.’ There was no mistaking the bitterness in the intonation now.

She suddenly stood up with a speed and a lightness of which Hanlon would never have imagined her capable. ‘You,’ she said contemptuously, pointing a forefinger at Hanlon, ‘you have no fucking idea what it’s like to be me, no fucking idea at all, and pray to God you never will.’ Her voice was very quiet, very threatening. She looked down at Hanlon; she was a good few inches taller.

‘Before you leave, DCI Hanlon, do me a favour.’ Hanlon looked at her. ‘Just lift your shirt up for me a few inches.’

Hanlon unzipped the light jacket she was wearing, reached down and pulled up her blouse, exposing the skin from the waistband of her trousers to the base of her ribs. It was a riot of blue and purple bruising. Sparring or no sparring, Jay had certainly left his mark. She pulled her shirt back down.

The other woman nodded to herself, as if having had a suspicion confirmed and asked, ‘What happened to the person who did that?’ Hanlon shrugged, her silence eloquent. As she turned and left the room, she heard the sound of the whisky bottle being opened and Campion’s voice.

‘It’s not just Fuller that likes hurting people is it, DCI Hanlon? Who are you to judge us? Eh? Who the fuck are you to decide?’

Hanlon walked out of the Dean Street brothel into a bright Soho morning that did not reflect her thoughts.

Who am I? she thought. I wish I knew.

Hanlon decided to eat in the university canteen on Tuesday lunchtime. She’d put in a couple of hours at the gym, followed by a five-mile run, and wanted something different to eat to vary her monotonous diet of lightly grilled chicken, pasta and salads. She also had an ulterior motive. She was hoping she might come across Michaels.