Tuesday 1 July 2014

4.20 p.m.

Finlay had dozed off at the wheel of the car in the outside lane of the motorway. This had not been as disastrous as it might have been, as they had been sitting in stationary traffic for over forty minutes. The rain was hammering down hard enough to drown out his snores, sounding more like rocks against the thin metal than water. The windscreen wipers had long since stopped having any effect, which was likely to be the reason for the delay up ahead.

In an attempt at anonymity, they had requisitioned a pool car, which they had successfully driven right past the press as they retreated for cover from the sudden rainstorm. Even if they had had sirens, they were trapped in the outside lane of four, and the gridlocked traffic had diffused into every feasible space. They would never have reached the hard shoulder, which stood frustratingly out of reach, less than ten metres away.

Wolf had spoken to Chief Inspector Walker at Southall Police Station. He had immediately struck Wolf as being both competent and intelligent. He had searched Rana on arrival and confined him to a custody cell with one of his men posted at the door. He assured Wolf that only four people, including himself, were aware of Rana’s presence in the building. He had sworn his men to secrecy, even from their colleagues out on the road. Walker had closed the station to the public at Wolf’s request, claiming a fictional gas leak, and instructed his officers to take their breaks at other stations. Despite the delay, Wolf was satisfied that Rana was in safe hands for the time being.

The five-vehicle pile-up was eventually moved aside to provide entertainment for the dawdling stream of traffic filtering past in the nearside lane. They reached Southall a little over an hour later and the first rumbles of thunder rolled across the dark sky as Wolf and Finlay climbed out of the car. The street lighting was already on, reflecting off the tops of the scurrying umbrellas and the torrent of water flooding the gutters, racing the congested traffic along the high street.

They were both soaked through after their ten-second dash from the car park up to the station’s rear entrance. The chief inspector let them inside and then swiftly relocked the door behind them. He was around Finlay’s age and proudly sported the familiar uniform. His severely receding hairline suited him so well that it gave the impression he was going bald on purpose. He greeted them warmly and led them through to the break room, where he offered them each a hot drink.

‘So gentlemen, is there a plan for Mr Rana?’ asked Walker. He directed the question at Finlay, presumably as a courtesy to the older man because he was well aware that Wolf had been making the arrangements.

‘It’s pretty short notice for Protected Persons to arrange something,’ said Finlay, wiping rainwater off his face with a saturated sleeve. ‘They won’t move until they can guarantee he’ll be safe.’

‘I shall leave that in your more than capable hands then,’ said Walker. ‘Please make yourselves at home.’

‘I’d like to speak to him,’ said Wolf as Walker turned to leave the room.

He took a moment to reply, perhaps searching for the least offensive wording for his response.

‘DS Fawkes, you are quite the celebrity at the moment,’ he started.

Wolf was unsure where he was going with this.

‘Although, and I mean no disrespect by this, you were before all this came about anyway, weren’t you?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that, when Mr Rana came stumbling into reception this afternoon, he was quite distressed. He wanted to distance himself from his wife and children, which is quite understandable under the circumstances. He then broke down and proceeded to weep for his dead brother.’

‘I see,’ said Wolf, now understanding Walker’s reservations: he knew. Wolf was a little irritated; although, he appreciated that the chief inspector was only doing his job. ‘I have never met or even heard of Vijay Rana before all this. My only interest in him is in keeping him alive, and I’d say if anybody needs protecting during our meeting, it’ll be me.’

‘Then you shan’t object if I am present at all times during your interview with the prisoner,’ said Walker.

‘It would certainly make me feel safer,’ said Wolf flippantly.

Walker showed them into the custody suite at the back of the building, where the three other officers aware of the situation were waiting tensely. The chief inspector introduced Wolf and Finlay to each of them and then asked the officer standing guard to open the door to Rana’s cell.

‘We put him at the far end, as far away as we could manage from our other guests,’ Walker told them.

The door swung heavily to reveal an open mildewed toilet and the blue mattress and pillow, laid across a wooden bench, that made up the custody cell. Rana was sitting with his head in his hands, still wearing a water-stained anorak. The lock clicked loudly behind them as Walker slowly approached his prisoner.

‘Mr Rana, these two officers are in charge of—’

Rana looked up and as his bloodshot eyes settled on Wolf he leapt up from the bench and charged forward. Walker seized one of his arms as he passed and Finlay took hold of the other. They dragged him back over to the bench while he screamed:

‘You bastard! You bastard!’

The two experienced officers easily overpowered Rana, who was both short and heavily overweight. A few days’ worth of coarse stubble had grown unevenly across his overly large face. He seemed to deflate as he yielded and then started to weep into his pillow. Walker and Finlay cautiously released their grip as the man settled back down. Gradually, the atmosphere calmed.

‘My condolences about your brother,’ said Wolf with a smirk. Rana’s furious eyes fixed back on him. ‘He really was a piece of shit.’

‘You bastard!’ Rana screamed again as Walker and Finlay struggled to wrestle him back onto the bench.

‘Dammit, Will,’ complained Finlay after a stray knee connected with his groin.

‘Do that again, Fawkes,’ snapped Walker angrily, ‘and I won’t even try to stop him.’

Wolf raised an apologetic hand and took a few steps back to lean against the wall. Once Rana had calmed back down, Finlay explained the situation to him: how they had managed to keep news of his surrender contained to a select few, how they were awaiting instructions from Protected Persons, how he would be safe and had made the right decision by giving himself up. As per his training, once he had given Rana enough information to gain some trust, Finlay conversationally switched to his questioning. He asked whether Rana had known any of the other people on the list, names of anyone who may have wished him harm, any recent phone calls or incidents out of the ordinary.

‘May I ask you a couple of questions about your brother?’ asked Finlay, as politely as Wolf had ever heard him. He was tiptoeing around what they had clearly established to be Rana’s pressure point.

Wolf made sure to keep his eyes fixed firmly on the floor, so as not to provoke the situation.

‘Why?’ asked Rana.

‘Because there must be a link between those names on the list and the victims he has already … claimed,’ explained Finlay softly.

Wolf rolled his eyes.

‘OK,’ said Rana.

‘When did you last have contact with your brother?’

‘2004 … 2005?’ Rana answered uncertainly.

‘So that would mean you weren’t there for the trial?’

‘No. I was not.’

‘Why?’ asked Wolf, speaking for the first time in over five minutes.

Walker went to grab hold of Rana; however, the man made no attempt to move, nor to answer the question.

‘What sort of man doesn’t show up for a single day of his own brother’s trial?’ continued Wolf, ignoring glares from both Walker and Finlay. ‘I’ll tell you what sort: a man who already knows the truth, who already knows that his brother is guilty.’

Rana did not respond.

‘That’s why you changed your name all those years ago. You knew what he was going to do, and you wanted to distance yourself from it.’

‘I never knew he was going to—’

‘You knew,’ shouted Wolf, ‘and you did nothing. How old is your little girl?’

‘Fawkes!’ yelled Walker.

‘How old?’ Wolf screamed back.

‘Thirteen,’ mumbled Rana.

‘I genuinely wonder whether your brother would have burned your little girl alive by now if I hadn’t stopped him. She knew him, probably trusted him. How long do you think he’d have been able to resist such an easy target?’

‘Stop it!’ cried Rana, holding his hands over his ears like a child. ‘Please, stop it!’

‘You, Vijay Khalid, owe me!’ spat Wolf.

He hammered against the cell door, leaving Finlay and Walker to deal with their whimpering prisoner.

At 7.05 p.m. Wolf received a phone call advising that someone would be with them by 10.30 p.m. at the latest. Protected Persons were still in the process of arranging appropriately trained officers and a suitable safe house considering the immediacy of the threat against Rana’s life. Wolf relayed the news to Walker and his officers, who made no effort to disguise that he had already long outstayed his welcome.

Sick of their scathing looks, he decided to fetch some food for Finlay, himself and the prisoner (as a precaution, he had instructed Walker not to feed Rana anything on site). He generously offered to buy chips for everyone, not because he felt he owed them anything but because he could not be sure that they would let him back inside empty-handed.

Wolf pulled on his damp coat and one of the officers held the reinforced door open for him. Apparently the thick metal had dulled the sound of the storm outside. Wolf ran out onto the deserted high street, attempting to time his progress against the mini-tsunamis that flooded the pavement every time a car went through a deep puddle. He found the fish and chip shop and stepped inside onto the slippery, mud-stained floor. As he closed the door on the deafening rain, he realised that his phone was ringing.

‘Wolf,’ he answered.

‘Hello, Will. It’s Elizabeth Tate,’ said a croaky voice.

‘Liz, what can I do for you?’

Elizabeth Tate was a hard-nosed defence lawyer, who also acted as the duty solicitor for a number of central London police stations. She had been in the job for nearly thirty years, a first-line defence for the unprepared imprisoned (from drunks to murderers), a lone voice of support for the isolated and distraught. Although they had had their fair share of disagreements in their time, Wolf liked Elizabeth.

Where other lawyers would lie through their teeth, not for the sake of their undoubtedly guilty client but in defence of their own ego, Elizabeth would defend them as far as the law insisted but no further. On the few occasions that they had fallen out, it had been because she had sincerely believed in her client’s innocence, and under those circumstances she was able to fight as ruthlessly and passionately as the best of them.

‘I believe that you are, at this moment, guarding a Mr Vijay Rana,’ she said.

‘Battered sausage and chips twice please, love,’ someone ordered in the background.

Wolf covered the speaker as he decided upon a response.

‘I don’t know what you’re—’

‘Drop the act. His wife called me,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I represented him last year.’

‘For tax dodging?’

‘No comment.’

‘For tax dodging.’

‘I have already spoken to Simmons, who has agreed to let me meet with my client this evening.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Are you going to make me start quoting the Police and Criminal Evidence Act down the phone at you? I just spent twenty minutes doing just that to your boss. Mr Rana is not only under your protection but under arrest for a crime. We both know that anything he says, to you or anybody else, over the next two days, could further incriminate him to the detriment of his case in court.’

‘No.’

‘I have agreed to be subjected to a full search of my person and belongings and will, of course, adhere to any other procedures that you have put in place.’

‘No.’

Elizabeth sighed.

‘Speak to Simmons then phone me back,’ she said before hanging up on him.

‘What time can you be here?’ Wolf mumbled down the phone to Elizabeth as he picked at the last of his soggy chips back at the station.

He and Simmons had argued for ten solid minutes, although it was unrealistic to think that their lawsuit-phobic commissioner would ever back down on such an issue – to deny a prisoner his right to legal advice for a crime that they still fully intended to prosecute him for. Simmons, expecting Wolf to undermine his orders, reminded him of their conversation on Saturday evening. He reiterated that he could have Wolf taken off the case at any given moment. He also made the point that to refuse Rana his lawyer could be grounds to dismiss the case against him; he would have saved a criminal’s life only to let him walk free.

Grudgingly, Wolf had called Elizabeth back.

‘I need to finish up here at Brentford, then stop off briefly at Ealing on the way over. I should be with you by ten.’

‘That’s cutting it pretty fine. He’s being moved at half past.’

‘I’ll be there.’

There was a sharp crack of thunder and then all of the lights in the custody suite went out. After a few moments, the eerie glow of the emergency lighting dimmed the darkness a little. A prisoner in one of the nearest holding cells started kicking rhythmically at his door. The dull thudding filled the claustrophobic hallway like a war drum while the muted storm raged beyond the walls. Wolf got to his feet and hung up on Elizabeth.

He realised that his hand was trembling and tried to ignore the reason why: that this was his nightmare, those countless sleepless nights spent on the secure ward, listening to the endless screams flooding the maze of corridors, the futile impacts of desperate bodies breaking against immovable doors. He took a moment to compose himself and then shoved his hand into his pocket.

‘I want to check on Rana,’ he called to the others beside the processing station.

He and Walker strode down the dark corridor as the steady beat grew towards a crescendo. The officer guarding Rana’s room hurriedly unlocked the door. Inside, the cell was pitch black. The weak glow from the corridor barely penetrated the darkness.

‘Mr Rana?’ asked Walker. ‘Mr Rana?’

Finlay appeared behind them wielding a torch. He swung the beam wildly around the room and then steadied it upon the motionless figure lying on the bench.

‘Shit,’ said Wolf, who rushed into the dark room and rolled Rana onto his back. Pressing two fingers against the man’s neck; he searched for a pulse.

Rana’s eyes flickered open, and he let out a terrified shriek, having been fast asleep. Wolf sighed in relief as Finlay chuckled out in the corridor. Walker just looked as though 10.30 p.m. could not come quickly enough.

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