Tuesday 8 July 2014

6.54 a.m.

‘Let me go!’ screamed Ford as Wolf, Finlay and the diplomatic protection officer struggled to drag the frenetic man back into the room. ‘You’re killing me! You’re killing me!’

The gaunt and jaundiced man had been surprisingly strong, and the three of them had barely managed to heave him back over the threshold during the three-minute panic. He still had a firm grip on the thick door frame, and his legs were kicking out at them violently. In the background, Andrea addressed the world through the television, the Death Clock hovering above her head counting down Ford’s final hours. She cut back to a reporter out in the field, and Wolf was horrified when he and his colleagues suddenly appeared on screen battling with Ford.

He almost lost his grip on the crazed man when he turned to locate the camera, wielded by a lunatic hanging precariously out of a window in the building opposite. Thankfully, the DPG officer had called for backup, and at that moment two more armed men came rushing to their aid.

‘Get the blinds!’ Wolf shouted desperately.

Both officers glanced at the television and understood the situation immediately. One of them ran to the windows while the other took hold of Ford’s thrashing legs. Hopelessly outnumbered, Ford went limp and started to weep.

‘You’re killing me,’ he sobbed repeatedly.

‘We need to get those reporters out of that building,’ Wolf told the newcomers, who nodded and hurried back out of the room.

‘You’re killing me!’

‘Shut up!’ snapped Wolf.

He needed to speak to Simmons. He had no idea where they stood legally in detaining Ford against his will, and thanks to one, admittedly, resourceful cameraman they could all technically be charged with assault. He was aware that he should approach Vanita with issues such as this, but knew that her answer would be biased by the PR team and in ensuring that she was covering her own arse. Simmons, on the other hand, knew how the real world worked.

Half an hour later, Wolf had discussed the situation with Simmons, who had fortunately arrived admirably early for work. They were agreed that, unlike Garland’s threat to decline their input, Ford could not confidently be classed as ‘of sound mind’. It was, therefore, in his best interests for the police to temporarily revoke his right to freedom.

It was a grey area at the best of times and they were, frankly, grasping at straws. Protocol would dictate that a qualified medical practitioner thoroughly assess the patient and sign off on it; however, after the Elizabeth Tate incident, there was no way on earth that Wolf was permitting anybody access to Ford.

The ambassador had returned to the embassy after seeing the news report. Wolf felt a little guilty about how insolently he had acted towards the influential man, who had bent over backwards to accommodate them. Wolf had accused his staff of selling information to the press and demanded (not that he had any right) that he conduct a full inquiry into the source of the leak. He would have to apologise later.

He was overly tired and irritable after a difficult night with Ford and had vented his anger at the wrong person. Yet again his frustrations should have been directed at Andrea, who had heedlessly jeopardised another life in her selfish pursuit of ratings. This time he was not going to let her simply shrug off the impact of her continued interference. He would ensure that she was held accountable should anything happen to this man.

Simmons had suggested that they find somewhere else for Ford to go, but Wolf disagreed. Half of the city’s press had gathered on the street below. He could hear the frenzied buzz of activity seeping through the draughty windows even as they spoke on the phone. They would never have been able to move Ford without exposing him to the ever-growing crowds or being followed. They were in a secure building and would be able to protect him best from there.

When Wolf returned to the room, Ford was speaking calmly to Finlay. He seemed resigned and surprisingly dignified considering the scene thirty minutes earlier.

‘You were doing your job,’ said Finlay. ‘What possible reason would you have had to let someone, who had just been declared innocent, be beaten to death in front of you?’

‘You can’t seriously be trying to tell me you think I did the right thing?’ laughed Ford bitterly.

‘No. I’m telling you that you did the only thing you could do.’

Wolf closed the door quietly, so as not to disturb the intriguing conversation.

‘If you hadn’t stepped in and Khalid had died, there’s a very good chance he’d never have been exposed as the Cremation Killer and Will here,’ Finlay gestured towards him standing in the doorway, ‘would’ve spent the next twenty-five years of his life in prison.’

‘A little girl died,’ said Ford with tears in his eyes.

‘Aye. And a good man was spared,’ said Finlay. ‘I’m not saying it was a good thing that Khalid survived. I’m just saying … things happen.’

Finlay took out the ancient pack of cards that he always carried around with him and dealt out three piles. His talk with Ford seemed to have calmed the unpredictable man down, but it had also affected Wolf as he took a seat on the sofa. He had always dwelled on the negative repercussions of that traumatic day; he had never even considered the positive.

He picked up his disappointing hand and watched Finlay closely. After years of playing with him, he knew that he was a dirty cheat. Ford burst into tears after looking through his cards, which was not much of a poker face.

‘Got any threes?’ asked Finlay.

‘Go fish.’

Blake had a weak bladder and an appreciation for Earl Grey tea. Edmunds had deduced this after watching his comings and goings for the past day. Edmunds waited for him to pass his and Simmons’ desk before getting to his feet and rushing over to see Baxter at the back of the room. He had two minutes.

‘Edmunds! What the hell are you doing?’ asked Baxter as he crouched down to avoid attracting attention.

‘Someone told the press and therefore the killer about the embassy,’ he whispered.

‘I’m not allowed to talk about the case with you.’

‘You are the only person I trust.’

Baxter warmed a little. Everyone had been treating her like a leper since the Garland fiasco. It was reassuring to know that one person, at least, still valued her opinion.

‘You can trust all of them. Anyone could have blabbed about the embassy: you’ve got DPG, the staff, whoever’s in that building opposite. You really need to drop this. Now get out of here before you get me in trouble.’

Edmunds hurried back to his desk. A few moments later, Blake walked by with a mug in his hand.

By early afternoon Simmons had eliminated forty-seven of the eighty-eight names on the list while Edmunds continued looking for connections between the victims. When the standard checks and protocols had turned up nothing, he had reverted to his fraud training and borrowed a colleague’s passwords to access his old department’s specialist software.

Within fifteen minutes he had found something and scared Simmons half to death by leaping out of his seat. They moved into the meeting room to talk in private.

‘Ashley Lochlan,’ said Edmunds triumphantly.

‘The next victim?’ said Simmons. ‘What about her?’

‘Back in 2010, she was married and going by the name of Ashley Hudson.’

‘We must have known that?’

‘We did, but the computers weren’t looking for a second bank account in a different name that was only open for ten months. On the fifth of April 2010, she paid two and a half thousand pounds cash into her Hudson account,’ said Edmunds, handing Simmons a printout.

‘That was around the start of Khalid’s trial.’

‘I looked into it. She was working in a pub for minimum wage at the time. She then paid in a second two thousand five hundred a fortnight later.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Suspicious,’ Edmunds corrected him. ‘So I looked through our other victim’s accounts for that period and found two matching withdrawals made by one Mr Vijay Rana.’

‘Why would Khalid’s brother be transferring five grand to a barmaid?’

‘That’s what I’m about to ask her.’

‘Do it. Excellent work Edmunds.’

At 4 p.m., Wolf heard the muffled sounds of the officers changing over through the door. They had switched the television off after that morning’s incident, although it was only a token gesture, seeing as they could quite clearly hear that the sea of spectators, police cars and reporters flooding the road beneath them were yet to get bored and move on.

With the exception of a couple of fleeting episodes, Ford had maintained his new-found calm and given Wolf and Finlay a rare insight into the man that he had once been. If anything, he seemed defiant, determined, spurred on by the bloodthirsty mob waiting expectantly outside.

‘I’ve already let one serial killer ruin my life. I’m not about to let another decide when to end it.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said Finlay encouragingly.

‘I’m taking back control,’ said Ford. ‘And today seems as good a time as any.’

As a security precaution, they had closed all of the windows and dropped the blinds. Despite borrowing a fan from down the hall, the room was stifling. Wolf unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, exposing the healing burn that covered his left arm.

‘I never asked,’ said Ford, gesturing to Wolf’s injury. ‘What happened?’

‘It’s nothing,’ replied Wolf.

‘He was injured when Mayor Turnble …’ Finlay trailed off.

‘So, both of you are taking a huge risk just by being near me, aren’t you? For all you know, he could just fire a rocket launcher up here.’

The thought had clearly not crossed Finlay’s mind and he looked to Wolf in concern.

‘I’ve not got long anyway,’ said Wolf cheerfully as he peered through a gap in the blind.

‘I don’t want anyone getting hurt for me,’ said Ford.

Wolf had been watching a group of three people out on the street for over five minutes. They had caught his attention because they had settled away from the rest of their fellow spectators and looked to be waiting for something. Two of them had carried a large canvas bag to the spot and set it down in the middle of the closed road. Wolf watched as each of them pulled a different animal mask over their face. Soon, they were joined by six others.

‘Finlay!’ Wolf called from the window. ‘Can you get hold of the officers down on the street?’

‘Aye. What is it?’

‘Trouble.’

Two of the masked group, a cartoon monkey and an eagle, crouched down and pulled the bag open. They removed what they needed, barged their way through the crowd and ducked beneath the police tape.

‘Child killer!’ one of the slightly muffled voices called up to them.

‘The saviour of the Cremation Killer!’ yelled his female counterpart.

The police officers on crowd control were swift to remove the two people who had crossed the cordon, but the remaining seven, who had lingered behind, had now caught the attention of the media as they produced banners, boards and a megaphone from the large bag. A woman wearing a shark mask began ranting over the already raucous street.

‘Andrew Ford deserves what is coming to him!’ she thundered. ‘If he had not saved the Cremation Killer’s life, Annabelle Adams would still be alive today!’

Wolf looked back into the room to gauge Ford’s reaction, expecting it to set him off again. Surprisingly he had not moved. He just sat listening to the distorted assault upon him. Unsure what to say, Finlay switched the television back on, found a children’s programme and turned the volume right up in an attempt to drown out the commotion outside. Wolf thought that the gloomy, grand room resembled Ford’s impoverished bedsit all of a sudden.

‘Spare the Devil and God will strike thee down!’

The protesters had started chanting the same faux-religious slogan repeatedly. One of them was talking animatedly to a reporter while the ringleader suggested that Ford had been involved with Khalid since the beginning.

‘Has this ever happened before?’ Wolf asked Ford, without taking his eyes off the threat below.

‘Not like this,’ replied Ford distractedly. In an almost inaudible whisper, he joined the chant: ‘Spare the Devil and God will strike me down.’

Some of the police at street level had gathered around the protesters; although, while they remained peaceful, they had no grounds to disperse them. Wolf gestured for Finlay to join him at the window.

‘You think this is his doing?’ mumbled Finlay, reading his mind.

‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t feel right.’

‘Want me to go down there and ask some questions?’ Finlay offered.

‘No. You’re better with him than I am. I’ll go.’

Wolf took one last look at the group of masked people before heading for the door.

‘Wolf,’ said Ford, as he was leaving. ‘Take back control.’

Wolf smiled politely at the bizarre comment, shrugged at Finlay and left the room. As he reached the ground floor, he received a phone call from Edmunds, who told him about his discovery involving Ashley Lochlan.

‘She’s refusing to talk to anybody but you,’ said Edmunds.

‘I’m busy,’ said Wolf.

He had barely taken a step out of the embassy before a wave of reporters swelled forward towards him. He wondered if perhaps he should have sent Finlay. Ignoring the shouts of his own name, he ducked beneath the tape and pushed through the crush, following the sound of the chanting.

‘It’s important,’ said Edmunds. ‘She might be able to finally tell us what the connection is between you all. From there, we’ll stand a real shot of working out who is doing this to you.’

‘Fine. Text me the number. I’ll call her when I can.’

Wolf hung up. A large space had formed around the seven disruptive protesters. Up close, the cartoonish masks felt far more sinister: venomous voices spat from unmoving smiles and furious eyes burned through the dark holes in the plastic. The most intimidating of them, both in stature and behaviour, was wearing a slack-jawed wolf mask. He carried two mounted boards high above his head as he stamped around the others, chanting aggressively. Wolf noticed that he was limping slightly, presumably an old injury from where the last rubber bullet had bounced off his rear end.

Making sure to avoid the bellicose man, Wolf approached the woman in the shark mask who still had the megaphone held up to her mouth. He snatched it off her mid-sentence and threw it against the wall of the building behind, where it split apart with an electrical squeal. The incriminating television cameras were following his every move greedily.

‘Hey! You can’t … Wait, aren’t you that detective?’ asked the woman, now adopting a far more feminine and middle-class tone.

‘What are you doing here?’ Wolf demanded.

‘Protesting,’ she shrugged.

Wolf could sense her smug smile obscured from his view and looked unamused.

‘Jesus Christ. Lighten up.’ She lifted up her mask. ‘The truth is, I don’t know. None of us do. There’s this website where people advertise for, like, flash mobs or girls to stand around outside hotels to make boy bands look more popular. Today it was for people to stage a protest.’

‘What site?’

She handed him a leaflet with the details printed on it.

‘They were handing them out at my college.’

‘Do you get paid for it?’ asked Wolf.

‘Of course. Why else would we do it?’

‘You sounded pretty passionate about it before.’

‘It’s called acting. I was reading from a card.’

Wolf was very conscious of the number of people listening in. In an ideal world, he would not have been questioning her on live television.

‘How are you getting paid?’

‘Cash, inside the bag. Fifty quid a piece.’ She sounded bored by his questions. ‘And, before you ask, we all met at a grave in Brompton Cemetery. The bag was already there waiting for us.’

‘Whose?’

‘Bag?’

‘Whose grave?’

‘That name I read out before – Annabelle Adams?’

Wolf tried to conceal his surprise at the answer.

‘That bag and everything in it is evidence in a murder investigation,’ he said, kicking the empty holdall back in front of the group.

They whined and swore but obeyed the physical instruction and threw the boards, banners and cue cards into an untidy pile.

‘And the masks,’ Wolf barked impatiently.

One by one they reluctantly surrendered six of the colourful masks. Two of the protesters immediately pulled their hoods up over their heads to conceal their identities, even though, technically, they had done nothing wrong.

Wolf turned round to address the final protester in the wolf mask, who had so far ignored the instructions. The imposing man was still chanting breathlessly while he trampled the perimeter he had carved out of the crowd, as if marking his area. Wolf stepped out in front of the man. The ironically friendly-looking wolf had been depicted licking its lips and salivating. He barged heavily into Wolf and then continued on another lap.

‘I’ll be needing those,’ shouted Wolf, gesturing to the two boards that he was carrying over his head, inscribed with the now familiar chant.

Wolf stepped back out into the man’s path and braced himself for the worst. He was precisely the sort of person that Wolf would have expected to respond to such an advert, hiding behind a mask, empowered by his anonymity, opportunistically seeking out large crowds and overwhelmed security as occasions to commit blatant acts of violence, vandalism and theft.

Wolf had no qualms about arresting the thug, who came to a stop mere inches from his face. He was unaccustomed to having to stand up straight to match someone’s height and recoiled slightly at the underlying smell, medicinal, rotting, that seemed to emanate from behind the plastic. Eerily, the wild, light blue eyes staring out at him looked as though they could have actually belonged to the creature.

‘Boards. Now,’ said Wolf, in a tone that would have cowed anyone aware of his controversial past.

Wolf refused to break eye contact. The man turned his head to the side, much like a real animal: inquisitive, measuring up a new challenger. Wolf could sense the cameras at his back, drinking in the tense stand-off and praying that it might escalate. Suddenly, the man threw both of the boards he had been holding across the concrete.

‘And the mask,’ said Wolf.

The man showed no intention of complying.

‘The mask,’ he repeated.

This time, it was Wolf who leaned in aggressively. He could feel the tip of the plastic nose brushing against his own, the smell nauseating, as they shared one another’s hot breath. They stood like this for ten excruciating seconds until, to Wolf’s surprise, the man’s pale eyes darted up towards the upper windows of the embassy behind him. All around him, people started gasping and shouting as they too spotted what the wolf had seen.

Wolf turned to see Ford balancing precariously on the pitched roof as Finlay hung out from a small window, calling him back. The crowd took a sharp intake of breath as Ford stepped out of reach of Finlay’s grasping hands and staggered across the open rooftop to a chimney, like a tightrope walker losing balance.

‘No, no, no!’ hissed Wolf.

He shoved the confrontational protester aside and started pushing his way through the crowd. Diplomatic protection officers appeared at sporadic windows alongside Ford and on the floor below.

‘Don’t do this, Andrew!’ shouted Finlay, who was now out on the window ledge with half of his body lying across the unstable roof.

Part of a tile broke away and seemed to fall forever before cracking the windscreen of a police car below.

‘Don’t move, Finlay!’ Wolf screamed up at him as he emerged from the sea of people. ‘Don’t you move!’

‘Wolf!’ shouted Ford.

Wolf skidded to a stop and stared up at the man whose scruffy hair was blowing about in a breeze that he could not even feel at street level. He could hear a fire engine blasting its bullhorn as it rushed across the city towards them.

‘You’ve gotta take back control!’ Ford said again, but this time Wolf understood his meaning.

‘If you do this … If you die, he wins!’ yelled Finlay. Crouched on the sloping roof, he clung desperately to the windowsill as more debris showered down over the street.

‘No. If I do this, I win.’

Ford released his grip on the chimneystack and tentatively raised his trembling arms to balance himself. The traffic on the main road had come to a standstill as people abandoned their vehicles to watch this worldwide news unfold first-hand. The crowd below was quiet, except for the whispered bulletins from distracted reporters. The fire engine could only have been a few streets away.

Finlay had shuffled halfway between the safety of the window and the chimney stack. There were shouts of horror from the spectators when Ford almost lost his balance. He closed his eyes with his arms outstretched and swayed unsteadily above the edge.

‘Things happen,’ he said, so quietly that only Finlay could hear.

Then he let himself fall forward.

Finlay scrambled across the space between them, but Ford had already dropped out of reach. Wolf could only watch helplessly, with the other two hundred people out on the road, as he plummeted silently past the windows and then dropped out of sight into the basement service area with a dull thud.

For a moment, all was still – and then the army of reporters surged forward, overpowering the handful of police officers in their desperation to broadcast the first gruesome images of the aftermath. Wolf ran to the black metal fire escape and jumped the last six steps in his haste to reach Ford. As he approached the body, which had twisted unnaturally on impact, he realised he was standing in the copious amounts of blood that had leaked freely from the back of the man’s skull.

Before he had even checked for a pulse, the sun had been chased off the fresh corpse by the shadows of the people above. Too traumatised to care that he was undoubtedly posing for yet another iconic photograph, Wolf sat back against the wall, surrounded by the growing puddle of blood, and waited for help.

Three minutes later the service area was heaving with police officers and paramedics. Wolf got to his feet to climb back above ground, where he would be able to watch the fire service rescue Finlay from the rooftop, who was now clinging to the chimney stack for dear life. A trail of red footprints followed Wolf over to the metal stairs where he had to wait for an obese coroner to finish his protracted descent.

Wolf put his hands in his pockets and frowned in confusion. He removed an unfamiliar piece of paper and cautiously unfolded it to reveal a single bloody fingerprint soiling the centre of the crumpled page. A hint of dark lettering was showing through from the other side. He turned it over to find a short message scrawled in the killer’s distinctive handwriting:

Welcome back.

He stared at it in utter bewilderment, wondering how long he had been carrying it around with him and how the killer had ever managed to—

The wolf mask!

‘Get out the way!’ yelled Wolf as he shoved past the hefty man on the stairs.

He surfaced out onto the chaotic road, searching frantically through the crowds for any of the protesters. Weaving between the people packing up equipment or leaving the scene now that the show was over, he reached the spot where the confiscated boards and banners had been thrown into a pile.

‘Move!’ he shouted at the dawdling pedestrians as he climbed on top of a bench for a better viewpoint.

He spotted something on the floor in the centre of the road and pushed his way through to find the plastic wolf mask cracked and dirty from where it had been trampled into the concrete.

Wolf stooped down to pick it up, knowing that the killer would still be there, watching him, laughing at him, revelling in the undeniable power that he had held over Ford, that he continued to hold over the media and, as much as Wolf hated to admit it, that he held over him …

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