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.’