Cold Revenge (2015) by Alex Howard

investigation things should be risk-free.

8
    Dr Gideon Fuller shrugged up the collar of his raincoat and stepped quickly along Gower Street; it ran arrow straight from the Euston Road in the centre of London down to the British Museum. This was university land. More or less every building of the featureless, ugly street was connected with academia.
    It was the land of Bloomsbury, spiritual and physical home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, the artist, of Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, the art critic. Fuller always felt uplifted by their rarefied ghosts. Like them, he felt morally, intellectually and spiritually superior to the mere mortals who surrounded him.
    It was also the street where Hannah Moore had lived, dreamed, loved and died. That was something Fuller managed to successfully ignore. Compassion was not part of his vocabulary.
    Fuller didn’t believe in love.
    He didn’t notice the slim figure of Hanlon following him, with her customary expertise. She had a natural ability to blend in with the background when it suited her. They had now reached the top end of Gower Street and she could see the British Museum, its great dome floodlit against the inhospitable dark of the wet night. Cars and black taxis swished by on the rain-drenched road. Fuller crossed the road into Store Street, heading for the major thoroughfare of the Tottenham Court Road, Hanlon a dark, insubstantial wraith behind him. Now she could see the lights of Centre Point, the landmark sixties’ office block, glistening through the rain.
    She had nearly caught up with him and she was forced to conceal herself in the shadows of Heal’s Furniture Store. Then, once Fuller had crossed the road, she ran after him as he disappeared down one of the side streets into Fitzrovia.
    If Bloomsbury was famous as a kind of dessicated, intellectual powerhouse, then Fitzrovia, a warren of narrow streets and restaurants and pubs, had been well known for hellraising, famous for drunken writers, drunken artists and generally dissolute behaviour. Like everywhere in London now, money was having a sterilizing effect and it was becoming sanitized, characterless.
    On one level, Hanlon disapproved, but London was a city of permanent change, so it made little sense to complain. Nevertheless the steady erosion of the past saddened her. She didn’t have any relatives and she often wondered if her love of London history was an attempt to forge some kind of identity. I’ve created a family of historical ghosts, she thought, following Fuller at a ten-metre distance from the opposite pavement.
    Fuller didn’t linger. He was moving south towards Oxford Street and Hanlon noticed that his stride had lengthened, his back straightened and he’d started playing with his hair again, like he did in class. He radiated excitement. She guessed that the end of their journey was near in the gathering darkness.
    What Hanlon didn’t know was that while her thoughts were full of Fuller, by some strange parallel symmetry, his thoughts were full of Hanlon.
    As he walked the slick, wet streets of central London, Fuller was involved in a sexual fantasy, in which he brutally ordered Hanlon to undergo various painful and humiliating acts. Fuller had a very vivid imagination. He was still smarting from his run-in with Hanlon over her name.
    Bloody lesbian civil servant, he thought angrily, I’ll show you retribution. Women are all the same, they need disciplining. You need a good Teacher. That’s how he liked to think of himself. As a Teacher. The word ‘lecturer’ was arid, sterile. It gave an image of someone standing behind a lectern, reading from notes.
    He didn’t lecture; he taught. He taught people things in class and he liked to think he taught the women in his life to respect him. And if they didn’t, they needed correction. He liked the word ‘correction’. He corrected essays, he corrected mistakes, he corrected women when they needed it.
    His thoughts