Saturday 28 June 2014

12.10 p.m.

An atmosphere of exasperation and resentment was manifesting quietly within the hushed office as the wasted hours ticked languorously by. The blatant inequality being exhibited by granting preferential treatment to the ‘notable’ Mayor Turnble, at the expense of every other second-class victim in the city, had been the heated topic at the core of several whispered conversations. Baxter suspected that this new-found egalitarianism, amongst some of the most chauvinistic and narrow-minded men she had ever known, was rooted more in their own self-importance than in their desire for a fairer world; although, she had to admit, they had a point.

Unconvinced eyes flicked back to the interview room door time and time again, almost hoping for something to happen, if only to justify the inconvenience. There was only so much of the tedious paperwork, which constituted an unglamorous 90 per cent of a detective’s job, that people could endure in one sitting. A handful of officers, coming off the back of a thirteen-hour shift, had dragged a whiteboard in front of the grotesque creations that Wolf had plastered across the wall. Unable to go home, they had turned the meeting room lights off in an attempt to get some rest before their next shift began.

Simmons had seriously lost his temper with the seventh person to request special treatment to breach the lockdown and no one had dared ask since. All had had perfectly valid reasons, and he was more than aware that his drastic actions would impact negatively, perhaps irredeemably, upon other equally important cases, but what could he do? He wished that he and Mayor Turnble had not been friends, a detail he was sure would come back to haunt him, because his decisions would have been the same. The world was watching this test of the Metropolitan Police. If they should be proven weak, vulnerable, incapable of preventing a murder that they had prior warning of, the repercussions could be devastating.

Embarrassingly, the commander had made herself at home in his office, so he had temporarily relocated himself to DI Chambers’ vacant desk. Simmons wondered if news of the murders had reached him in the Caribbean yet, and whether the experienced detective might have been able to shed any light on the bizarre case had he been there.

Baxter spent the morning tracking down the owner of the flat in which the body had been found. He had believed that a newly-wed couple were occupying the old apartment with their newborn baby. Baxter expected that parts of the couple had contributed to the body and did not want to contemplate for too long the fate of the defenceless little baby; however, she discovered with relief that she could find no record of the couple’s marriage and that the limited details provided to the trusting landlord had all been fake.

When she called him back an hour later, he admitted that he had been approached privately and accepted cash in hand, posted through his letter box. He told her that he had binned all of the envelopes, never met the tenant in person and then pleaded with her not to report him for undeclared income. Confident that the taxman would catch up eventually, and in no mood to create more work for herself, she moved on, having wasted hours on a dead end.

Edmunds, on the other hand, was feeling elated as he perched on the corner of Baxter’s desk. This was, in part, due to the position of his non-desk, situated directly beneath a vent in the ceiling, through which a steady stream of cold air was plunging over his head; more importantly though, he had made significant headway with the pedestrian task that Baxter had assigned him.

Told to find out from whom the prison sourced its food he had quickly learned that the vast majority was prepared on site, but following a food strike in 2006, a company named Complete Foods had been brought in to supply specialist catering for many of its Muslim inmates. A brief call to the prison confirmed that Khalid had been the only inmate to regularly receive the special gluten-free version of the meals. When Complete Foods then admitted that they were investigating a contamination issue after receiving two complaints of people being hospitalised following the consumption of similar meals, Edmunds had to hide his excitement. He wanted to impress Baxter – who was clearly getting nowhere – with his progress.

The floor supervisor at Complete Foods explained that the meals were prepared through the night, ready to be shipped out to prisons, hospitals and schools in the early hours of the morning. Edmunds asked him to compile a list of employees who had been on duty that night and to prepare the surveillance video for their visit the following day. He had just picked up the phone to contact the two companies that had submitted the complaints, confident that he already knew the unfortunate recipient’s diagnosis and regrettable outcome, when somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Sorry mate, boss’s asked you to take over for Hodge on the door. I need him for something,’ said the sweating man, who closed his eyes in bliss as he stepped into the blast of cool air.

Edmunds suspected from the man’s vague excuse that he was actually just rescuing a friend from the mind-numbing task of standing outside a door for hours on end. He looked to Baxter for help, who just waved him away dismissively. He put the phone back down and unenthusiastically went to relieve the man stood outside the interview room.

Edmunds shifted his weight and slouched back against the door that he had been guarding for almost fifty minutes. The lack of sleep had caught up with him now that he was no longer keeping his mind occupied, and the gentle ambience of muted conversation, clicking keyboards and the whirr of the photocopier acted like a lullaby to his exhaustion. His eyelids flickered. He had never longed for anything as much as he wanted to close his eyes at that moment. He rested his heavy head against the door and felt himself drifting off, when a quiet voice spoke unexpectedly from inside the room.

‘It’s a funny game, politics.’

Wolf jumped at the mayor’s sudden, but obviously considered, outburst. The two men had been sitting in silence for five straight hours. Wolf placed the file that he had been reading down on the table and waited for him to elaborate. The mayor sat staring at his own feet. As the pause blossomed into an uncomfortable silence, Wolf wondered whether the mayor even realised that he had spoken out loud. He hesitantly reached for the file again when the mayor finally continued with his thought:

‘You want to do good, but you can’t unless you’re in power. You can’t stay in power without votes, and you only get votes by appeasing the public. But then, sometimes appeasing the public requires you to sacrifice the very good that you had set out to achieve. It’s a funny game, politics.’

Wolf had absolutely no idea what the appropriate response to this peculiar pearl of wisdom should be, so he waited self-consciously for the mayor to either continue or shut up.

‘Let’s not pretend that you like me, Fawkes.’

‘OK,’ replied Wolf, a little too quickly.

‘Which makes what you are doing for me today all the more humbling.’

‘I’m doing my job.’

‘As was I. I want you to know that. Public opinion was not in your favour, therefore, I was not in your favour.’

Wolf felt that the phrase ‘not in your favour’ fell a little short when referencing the relentless tirade of condemnation, the unabashed rallying to whet the appetite of the corruption-fatigued public and the unremitting portrayal of Wolf as a symbol of immorality: a target at which the virtuous could, at last, vent their anger.

Riding a wave of inexhaustible public support against the city’s floundering police force, the mayor had unveiled his ground-breaking reports, Policing and Crime Policy. He had repeatedly encouraged that Wolf be punished to the full extent of the law during a rousing speech to a roomful of his peers, in which he coined the already well-known slogan ‘policing the police’.

Wolf recalled the almost comical turnabout after Naguib Khalid was arrested for the second time. He remembered how this man, still using Wolf as his poster boy, had flaunted his Health Inequalities Strategy while damning the inadequate services available to ‘our best and bravest’ and to the city of London as a whole.

Conducted by a charismatic and unusually popular public figure, the mayor’s supporters applauded and rallied obediently in time to his manipulations. The same dedicated voices that had called for Wolf’s blood were now campaigning to patch him back up, and one passionate interviewee had even gone on television to demand both.

There was no doubt that without the mayor’s influence and his well-publicised crusade to reinstate one of the people’s ‘broken heroes’, Wolf would still be behind bars; however, both men knew that Wolf owed him nothing.

Wolf remained deathly silent, fearful of what he might say should he open his mouth.

‘You did the right thing, by the way,’ the mayor continued pompously, oblivious to Wolf’s drastic change in mood. ‘There is a difference between corruption and desperation. I see that now. Personally, I wish you had killed the sick bastard in that courtroom. That last little girl he set alight was my daughter’s age.’

The mayor’s breathing had calmed during the hours of tense quiet, but this extended period of talking had undone all of his progress. He shook his blue inhaler and the uninspiring metallic sound, as the dregs of the medicine shuffled against the canister wall, came as no surprise; he had overdosed on over a week’s worth of Salbutamol since entering the interview room. Unperturbed, he took another dose and held the precious breath in for as long as he could.

‘I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time,’ said the mayor. ‘That it was never personal. I was just doing—’

‘Your job, yeah,’ Wolf finished bitterly. ‘I understand. You were all just doing your jobs: the press, the lawyers, the hero that shattered my wrist and pulled me off Khalid. I get it.’

The mayor nodded. He had not intended to aggravate Wolf, but he felt better for speaking his mind. Despite his current unenviable situation, he felt a small weight lift off his shoulders, something that he had been carrying for far too long. He opened up his briefcase and took out the packet of cigarettes.

‘Do you mind?’

Wolf stared at the wheezing man in disbelief: ‘You must be joking.’

‘We all have our vices,’ said the mayor unapologetically. His pomposity had been buoyed by his almost-apology, his authority given free rein now that he no longer felt in any way indebted to Wolf. ‘If you expect me to stay locked up in this room for another eleven hours, I expect you not to argue. One now, one at dinner time, that’s all.’

Wolf was about to protest when the mayor defiantly placed the cigarette between his lips, sparked his lighter and, with a cupped hand shielding the flame from the air-conditioned breeze, drew the fire towards his face …

For a fleeting moment, the two men stared at one another, neither able to comprehend what was happening. Wolf watched as the flame caught where the cigarette wedged the mayor’s mouth open and spread instantaneously to consume the entire lower half of his face. The mayor gasped deeply to scream out, but the inferno followed his breath, filling his nose and mouth as it poured into his lungs.

‘Help!’ yelled Wolf as he reached the man who was silently burning alive. ‘I need help in here!’

He grabbed the mayor’s flailing arms, uncertain what to do. Edmunds burst through the door and stood open-mouthed as the mayor let out a sickening, guttural cough that showered Wolf’s left arm in frothy blood and liquid fire. Wolf momentarily loosened his grip on a thrashing arm and was struck painfully across the face as his own shirtsleeve started to burn. He realised that if he could only get close enough to hold the mayor’s nose and mouth closed, the oxygen-starved fire would die out instantly.

Edmunds had rushed back out into the corridor as the fire alarm tripped. The entire office were on their feet, watching as he ripped a fire blanket off the wall. He saw Simmons running between desks towards the room. Edmunds re-entered the interview room. The sprinkler system now raining down over the two men was doing more harm than good; with every mouthful of water that the panicking man sprayed across the room, he spread the flames further, as though he were literally breathing fire. Wolf was still attempting to wrestle him to the ground when Edmunds raised the blanket and charged into them both, dropping all three of them onto the flooded floor.

Simmons splashed into the room and froze in repulsion as Edmunds pulled the blanket off the devastated body that had once been his handsome friend. When it dawned on him that the air he was breathing stank of scorched flesh, he began to gag. Two more officers rushed inside as Simmons backed out. One of them threw another blanket over Wolf’s, still burning, arm while Edmunds searched the mayor’s neck for a carotid pulse and listened for breathing at the destroyed mouth.

‘No pulse!’ he yelled, unsure who was even in the room.

The Savile Row shirt disintegrated in his hands as he pulled it open and started counting in time to the chest compressions; however, every time he pushed down on the mayor’s sternum, blood and charred tissue flooded the ruined throat. The very first thing that his three-day First Aid at Work course had taught him was the ABCs: without an airway, all the chest compressions in the world could not save him. Edmunds gradually slowed to a stop and slumped onto the soaking floor. He looked up at Simmons, who was standing just outside the door.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Water streamed out of Edmunds’ saturated hair and was running down his face. He closed his eyes as he tried to make sense of the surreal events of the previous two and a half minutes. Somewhere in the distance, he could hear sirens approaching.

Simmons stepped back into the room. His expression was unreadable as he looked down at the charred body of his friend. Forced to look away from the ghastly image that he knew would haunt him for the rest of his life, he turned his attention to Wolf, who was on his knees, holding his blistering arm in pain. Simmons grabbed a handful of his shirt and pulled him to his feet before throwing him back against the wall, shocking everyone in the room.

‘You were supposed to protect him!’ Simmons screamed with tearful eyes, slamming Wolf into the wall repeatedly. ‘You were meant to watch him!’

Edmunds jumped back to his feet before anyone else had reacted and restrained his boss’ arms. Following his lead, the two other officers and Baxter, who had just appeared in the doorway, wrestled Simmons away from Wolf and dragged him out of the room. They closed the door on their way out to preserve the crime scene, leaving Wolf alone with the grotesque corpse.

Wolf slid down the wall and sat curled up in the corner. Dazed, he felt the back of his head and stared at the blood on his fingers in confusion. He was surrounded by dozens of tiny oily flames, still burning ferociously across the surface of the rising flood, like Japanese water lanterns guiding lost spirits into the world of the dead. Resting his head against the wall, he watched the flames flicker under the relentless downpour, letting the cold water wash his bloody hands clean.

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