Free Cold Revenge (2015) by Alex Howard

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