Cold Revenge (2015) (8 page)

Hanlon had developed a keen interest in the chef. She liked the way he seemed to view the world, with a wry yet tough amusement. She felt he would make an admirable witness, reliable and trustworthy. She was also conscious of the fact that they were getting nowhere with the Hannah Moore killing. Michaels was someone who had known Hannah. He knew the philosophy class and he knew Fuller. Indeed, technically, both employed by the university, they were colleagues. She felt that his input could prove very useful. He knew Fuller’s work reputation and since so much time is spent in the workplace, he would be aware not only of his own dealings with the man but those of other staff members. She fully intended to benefit from this.

The university canteen was better than she’d envisaged. It was large, airy and open-plan, with a kitchen that gleamed in a space-age way, where you could see the chefs working. The food was far better than anything available at a police canteen, where everything seemed stodgy or fried, despite endless initiatives designed to help those in the Met lose weight.

There must have been a couple of hundred students in the hall and it made her feel old and dowdy. She’d never particularly cared about clothes and she suddenly realized that the students probably thought she was somebody’s mother. She found the idea disquieting. Hanlon was used to being the centre of attention. At work, her reputation preceded her and as a woman she was in a minority. Not here, at Queen’s College. Here she was a nobody. She felt slightly deflated and began to wish she hadn’t come.

It wasn’t just the age difference, although most of the students looked absurdly young with unlined faces and gravity-defying bodies. Hanlon thought, the main difference between me and them is really one of optimism. They’re looking forward to everything, but what have I got? Job satisfaction at best. I arrest people, she thought gloomily, and I spend my time with lowlifes and criminals. The rest of the time I spend with the police. It was sometimes hard to tell which was more dispiriting.

She had chosen a table nearest the open-plan kitchen, so that if Michaels did show up, he could see her. Although the canteen was crowded, her table was empty. She had attributed this to the fact that she was older than the students, looking like someone’s mother. Most of them, however, found the sight of Hanlon – haughty, grim, with a black eye where Jay’s gloves had caught her during their sparring session, and sitting ramrod straight – intimidating at best, or at worst, genuinely frightening.

Nobody wanted to sit next to her, because nobody dared.

Michaels appeared from the back of the kitchen, saw her and waved from across the pass, the steel dividing counter between kitchen and dining area. He was not the kind of man to be intimidated by people or situations.

He was wearing chef’s whites with the sleeves rolled up and the whiteness of the jacket accentuated his Mediterranean colouring. He had a striped butcher’s apron on and a kitchen skullcap, which gave him a priestly air. He was wearing highly polished, black, steel-toed Caterpillar boots on his feet and appeared, to Hanlon’s eyes, ready to rise to any challenge. He looked intensely competent.

She watched him moving swiftly round the kitchen, tasting, testing food, bobbing up and down as he checked fridges. The other chefs quickened their pace, looked more alert, adjusted their posture. It was like a general reviewing the troops.

She got up and went over to him.

‘Gallagher, nice to see you. Everything OK with your food, I hope?’ he asked, leaning over the barrier between canteen and kitchen.

‘Yes, fine,’ she said. She couldn’t actually remember what she was eating, simply because she didn’t care what she ate.

‘Good. Good.’ He hesitated, glanced round the busy kitchen. ‘Look, I’m a bit up to my eyes in it right now.’

‘That’s a shame,’ said Hanlon, lying with practised ease. ‘I was hoping to get some input on Dr Fuller’s attitudes to women. I know that Dame Elizabeth is keen to have my feedback, given what I do for a living.’

For a second he looked puzzled, then nodded and said, ‘Oh, I see, that EU thing.’

‘Exactly,’ said Hanlon.

‘Gender equality?’

‘Gender equality,’ confirmed Hanlon. ‘Particularly in adult education, it’s a fertile ground.’

She thought that the bait, the lure, of being given the opportunity to criticize Fuller, a man whom she suspected Michaels couldn’t stand, would prove irresistible. She was right. He nodded his head again in agreement. He glanced up at the clock on the wall.

‘I have to go and cook in the executive dining-room kitchen right now. Come and keep me company and I’ll let you know what I think of our esteemed tutor.’

The last three words were heavily seasoned with sarcasm.

‘That’d be great,’ said Hanlon. She was particularly keen to learn more about Hannah and her love life. Hannah had given herself up to her killer, that much was obvious. There was no struggle, no fight. Hanlon wanted to know if Hannah’s lovers were restricted to the philosophy circle, or had she spread her favours wider as Jessica had implied.

Michaels could help with this. Now his attention was on the canteen kitchen.

‘Just give me a couple of minutes,’ he said, glancing around. ‘I need to make sure this lot are OK.’

He turned his attention to the team of chefs and called out, ‘Molly! Here a minute.’ A hugely overweight girl came running over.

Molly was enormous. Her blonde, wispy hair was tucked under a headscarf and she had slightly bulging psychotic eyes. She looked very pale beside Michaels. Her forearms were like slabs of veal. She had a huge chest under her chef’s jacket and apron.

‘She’s bloody good,’ said Michaels to Hanlon. He spoke quietly so Molly wouldn’t hear.

Molly arrived in front of them. She stared at Hanlon, a non-chef, with obvious disapproval.

‘Yes, chef!’ She looked at Michaels with slavish devotion, like a human Labrador.

‘Righto, Molly,’ said Michaels briskly, ‘you’re in charge down here. I’ll be upstairs with Kieran.’

Molly nodded. Michaels’ eyes suddenly narrowed with genuine anger as he looked at the young chef. Hanlon wondered what could have caused it.

‘I’m sorry, I must have missed that,’ said Michaels. Hanlon noticed that he spoke lightly but there was a genuine hint of steel in his voice, harsh and threatening.

Molly blinked. ‘Yes,
chef
.’ She stressed the word.

‘That’s better,’ said Michaels. ‘We don’t want to forget who’s in charge, do we?’

‘No, chef.’

Michaels nodded, satisfied his authority had been properly acknowledged. He turned to Hanlon and motioned with his head to her.

Hanlon felt faintly shocked at Michaels’ peremptory rudeness. She had no problem with the chef’s desire to stamp his authority on his workforce, but she wouldn’t have done that in front of a stranger. She decided there was a cruel streak somewhere inside the man before her.

‘We’d better go. It’ll be hellish up there,’ he said quietly and laughed. He didn’t look remotely concerned.

Hanlon followed Michaels out of the canteen and up and down corridors, many of which were marked
Staff Only
, until she was thoroughly lost. Eventually they emerged in a kitchen space in a part of the university she’d never been in.

It was at moments like this that Hanlon appreciated just how vast a building Queen’s was. It was labyrinthine, almost nightmarish. Like many public buildings there was a kind of parallel world built for the staff and functionaries. It was an unseen world of shabby and secretive service corridors and windowless rooms, an underworld known only to the initiated.

The kitchen was quite small and compact. Michaels pointed to an area at the end of the pass where the waiting staff would collect the dishes.

‘If you stand there, Gallagher, we can talk and you won’t be in anyone’s way. I’ll introduce you to Kieran.’

He called out and a young chef with a fluffy, ill-developed beard appeared. He smiled politely at Hanlon.

‘All set?’

‘Yes, chef.’

Service began.

As the orders rolled in from the waitresses in the dining room, sent wirelessly to the small, black plastic cheque machine, she watched while Kieran did the simple stuff. He put the pre-cooked vegetables in boat-shaped, eared dishes and microwaved them, or arranged and dressed the pre-prepared salad ingredients on a plate according to photos pinned up on a wall.

‘Spec sheets,’ Kieran said over his shoulder, practised fingers moving speedily, expertly. ‘Just follow the photos, simple as.’

He deep-fried Parmentier potatoes, similar to chips in cube form, or pommes soufflé, which were like puffed-up crisps. He also had the two large Hobart ovens. They were dual function, and could be set with the turn of a knob, to steam as well as to bake. One of them was set on the steam function and when he opened it to put something in, vast clouds of superheated vapour surrounded him.

And so it went. Fast, pressurized, relentless.

One hour later, Hanlon had a great deal more respect for the catering trade than she had ever thought likely. The speed at which they worked was breathtaking.

While they discussed the course and their fellow students, Michaels was a blur of movement.

In the time that Kieran took to make one salad – for example, pear, goat’s cheese, curly endive and hazelnut with a hazelnut vinaigrette – he had started chargrilling duck, pan-seared blackened chicken breasts, laid out Parma ham-wrapped cod loin and set a steak on the go, while doing other starters, more complicated vegetables than Kieran was allowed to, and arranging and saucing.

His concentration was absolute, his movements deft, exact and amazingly quick. She had never seen anyone work so fast or so neatly. His coordination was precise and balletic. Occasionally she saw his lips moving as he repeated an order to himself, making sure that all the parts of the dishes were ready.

Michaels could obviously separate the cooking from the conversational part of his mind. He managed to carry on a conversation in spite of the stress he was under. She learned that he regarded Hannah as someone to be protected. He found her startlingly naive and above all over-anxious to please.

‘I felt sorry for her,’ he yelled over the noise of the kitchen. ‘She seemed so, well, pathetic.’

It was incredibly hot in the small kitchen; everything seemed to generate heat. The six-burner stove, the ovens, the flat-top stove, the grill (or salamander as she learned to call it), the metal pass with its scaldingly hot lights and its capacious metal storage cabinet for plates and bowls, all were roasting.

Hanlon’s hair was heavy and sodden, sweat trickled down her face in the forty- to fifty-degree-Celsius heat. She could feel her clothes sticking to her. Michaels seemed cool and unaffected.

‘I think that’s why she ended up with a reputation as the class bike. She couldn’t say no to people,’ he said, slicing and arranging two pink duck breasts on beds of dark Puy lentils.

‘And Fuller?’

‘Exploited it,’ said Michaels. ‘I think, no, I know, he’s the kind of man who preys on women.’

The noise of the kitchen was intense and Michaels had to practically shout. The roar of the extractor fans was like being on an airport runway. All the pans were of course metal, so they clanged as they got bashed around on the stove, and there was a continuous percussive beat to the rhythm of the kitchen as oven and fridge doors were opened and slammed shut.

‘You really think that’s true?’ shouted Hanlon.

‘Absolutely, hang on.’ He barked instructions to an attentive waitress standing next to her. ‘Table Five away, Ellie. Now, where were we. Anyway, Hannah told me about a girl called Abigail Vickery. She died because of him. Either he killed her or he encouraged the S&M stuff that did her in.’

The printer on the pass, connected to the waitresses’ electronic order pads, made a high-pitched, tearing noise while it operated, and this would translate into a food order which Kieran would detach from the machine, keep one copy for himself and put the other on the cheque grabber above the pass for Michaels to read.

‘Dessert cheque, Kieran,’ he said, then turned his attention back to her. ‘He really doesn’t like women, did you know that? He’s always running them down, at least that’s what I’ve been told. Oh, and he’s got a huge porn collection by all accounts. I heard him boast about it once. He was smashed at some do and let it slip.’

‘Really?’ said Hanlon.

Michaels nodded. ‘Doesn’t like women, he’s a pervert, drink problem, past history and now another dead girl. Whichever way you look at it, he’s guilty.’

‘Why are you in his class then, if you dislike him so much?’

As she asked the question, the machine printed off several cheques, one after another, each a separate food order. Michaels rolled his eyes.

‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said. He busied himself at the stove.

Eventually, like a water main gradually being turned off, the gaps between orders grew longer and longer, the pile of completed cheques grew higher on the metal spike and Hanlon heard Michaels say, ‘Right. That’s the last order out. Come on, Gallagher, let’s get some air.’

Thank God, she thought, that’s all over. She’d had quite enough of the kitchen. She wondered how they could bear it in there for fifty to sixty hours a week. She looked up at the clock on the wall: two thirty p.m. Kieran and Michaels had done about forty meals in a couple of hours.

She did a quick calculation. Twenty mains per hour plus thirty starters, seventy plated meals, thirty-five an hour, one meal every two minutes, all done by two people. And it was all done to order, all expertly cooked, all perfectly arranged. It was staggering really. Michaels was extremely good.

She followed him out through a side door, past a room marked
Dry Store
and down a corridor lined with several bags of potatoes, then through a beaded, chain curtain, a fly screen to a small roof terrace outside.

By the fly screen Michaels pointed to a staircase. ‘That’ll take you out down to the main corridor below.’

They stood side by side, looking out at the rooftops of central London. She could see the sparkplug-like shape of the Telecom Tower from here. It was amazingly tranquil.