Cold Revenge (2015) by Alex Howard Read Free Book Online

towards the main road. He was obviously well known.
    She followed Fuller as he turned into Gower Street and walked northwards, head bowed as if tired and depressed, towards King’s Cross.
    Despite its refurbishment, King’s Cross, to Hanlon’s jaded police eyes, meant cheap prostitutes, very much down on whatever little luck they had, dodgy drug deals and alcohol-fuelled violence in the grotty pubs that surrounded the station. The kind of pubs that had low-level blue lighting in the toilets, so junkies would find it harder to jack up in the cubicles. Great strides had been made to clean the place up and the restored St Pancras Hotel and British Library lent a welcome touch of class to the area, but it was still King’s Cross. You might situate Google’s new headquarters here, but it was still King’s Cross. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
    It’s an ancient part of London. It had been inhabited from time immemorial; there had even been an ancient river crossing of the Fleet River here. The river is now bricked over and culverted, but its filthy waters still flow below the shiny new buildings and Hanlon, who knew her subterranean London, thought it wouldn’t surprise her at all if the whole area wasn’t slightly cursed.
    As below, so above.
    Hanlon hoped that cheap sex was the reason for him being there, but Fuller had ignored the whores and the few sex stores that managed to linger despite the steep rental rises in the area, and then disappeared into the Uunderground, followed by Hanlon.
    He caught the Piccadilly Line, to where he lived in Finsbury Park. She’d cycled through it just a few days before.
    A blameless academic returning home at the end of a worthy day.
    She followed him from the station, back to his nondescript flat, and watched from across the road as he let himself in. The journey had taken about thirty minutes, door to door. It would take about the same time from Hannah’s bedsit, easily done. An hour out of his day would be all the time that Fuller would need to kill and get safely back home.
    After the lesson the following Tuesday, Hanlon went for a drink with several of her classmates to a nearby pub. They’d by now become characters as well as known faces to her. The legal woman she sat next to was there, as was alpha woman, Jessica. They were all women apart from one man. He rarely spoke in class and she couldn’t remember his name, apart from the fact it was unremarkable. Someone asked her what she did and Hanlon replied, ‘I’m a consultant on EU Proposed Directive on Gender Equality Rights (491).’ She was wearing her Home Office security pass on its lanyard as if it were a talisman to ward off awkward questions. It worked. As Corrigan had predicted, everyone’s eyes glazed over.
    The hot topic was still the murder of Hannah Moore, which was being picked over with the kind of relish only reserved for the death of someone whom nobody had really liked. The general consensus was that the police were baffled, Fuller was innocent, if foolish, and that Hannah probably had herself to blame. Her blog was at last being read and discussed, but not in a way she would have wanted.
    Hanlon noticed that the only person not to join in the general character assassination was also the only man in the group. He was tall, slim, dark and balding, with a closely trimmed beard. She guessed he might have Spanish blood in him because his eyes were a Mediterranean brown, as was his skin. He was ascetic-looking, with slightly saturnine features. He was dressed for the office in a suit and tie, but Hanlon’s eyes, sharp as ever, were drawn to his hands. They were slim and strong-looking, the wrists below the cuffs of his striped shirt, powerful. His fingernails were trimmed very short, and on his hands there were several deep, ugly cuts; on the inside of his left wrist, a painful-looking red weal where the new skin had regrown.
    She also noticed his body, which had a swimmer’s build –