He felt well rested and invigorated for the week ahead, but then, with a single glance up at the busy office, he realised that everything had changed.
The commander looked to have taken up residence in Simmons’ office again. Simmons, meanwhile, appeared to have relocated onto Chambers’ old desk and inherited Edmunds in the process, who was sitting alongside him and sporting two very black eyes. Baxter was deep in conversation with a detective named Blake, who everyone knew she could not abide and who had no attachment whatsoever to the Ragdoll case.
On the flipchart in the meeting room, two additional names had been added to the list of dead victims, and Wolf found a note from Finlay waiting on his desk asking him to meet him at the Irish embassy in Belgravia once he had ‘finished at the shrink’s’. They were to take charge of Andrew Ford’s protection there, which was mildly vexing because Wolf distinctly remembered leaving Ford in South Wales and driving away.
Bewildered, he made his way over to Simmons and Edmunds, whose nose was clearly broken up close.
‘Morning,’ he said casually. ‘So, what did I miss?’
Madeline Ayers had worked for Collins and Hunter for a four-year period and had acted as Naguib Khalid’s defence lawyer for the duration of the high-profile trial. Simmons had recognised the name on the Missing Persons report immediately. Ayers had spearheaded the pejorative, and often propagandising, assault on Wolf and the Metropolitan Police Service as a whole. She had become a household name with her flippant remarks and controversial quotes from inside the courtroom, including famously suggesting that Wolf take her client’s seat in the dock.
Seeing Ayers’ name had been confirmation that Edmunds had been right in his convictions all along: this was, and always had been, about Khalid. The process of dispatching officers to her home in Chelsea had merely been a formality in order to officially confirm that the pale, fragile torso holding the mismatched Ragdoll together was hers. Despite this tragic, but promising, step forward in the investigation, the team were no closer to understanding Michael Gable-Collins’ connection to the case.
Barely three hours later, Baxter and Edmunds had returned to the office with confirmation that Khalid’s probation officer, Michelle Gailey, was their fifth unidentified victim, courtesy of a ten-thousand-dollar nail varnish and an extravagantly duplicitous Swede. Somewhat overshadowed by more pressing matters at the time, it turned out that Khalid had been found guilty of driving while disqualified and had been under Michelle Gailey’s supervision when he claimed his final victim.
Out of the six body parts that made up the Ragdoll, only one remained unidentified. Although none of the other people involved in the trial had been reported missing, Simmons was now positive that their final victim’s name was staring up at him from the page. He began working back from the top of the list and would only cross off a name once he had made direct contact or was satisfied that they had been sighted since the Ragdoll’s discovery.
By dawn on Sunday morning, Rachel Cox had been nearing the end of her night shift in a quaint cottage close to the picturesque Welsh village of Tintern. She had only been working for Protected Persons for a little over a year, but this had been by far the most pleasant location that they had sent her to in that time. Unfortunately, it had also been the most trying.
Andrew Ford spent the majority of his time either screaming obscenities at Rachel and her colleague or throwing things around the delicate little house. On Friday night he had almost burned the thatched cottage down after an unsuccessful attempt to build a fire, and on Saturday afternoon it had taken both of them to physically stop him from leaving the grounds.
Finlay had given her a piece of advice back at the reservoir, which she had dismissed at the time, but she was now seriously considering going into town after a couple of hours of sleep and smuggling a few bottles of alcohol into the house. She would have to keep it from her supervisor, but she had no doubt that it would make the remaining nights with their Irish house guest more bearable.
Thankfully, Ford had finally run out of steam at around 3 a.m. and fallen asleep. Rachel sat at the gnarled wooden table in the warm kitchen under the cosy glow spilling in from the hallway light. She was listening to the snores and holding her breath every time there was a pause in the guttural sounds, praying that he had not woken up. When she could feel herself getting drowsy again, she followed her supervisor’s advice and got up to patrol the grounds.
She tiptoed across the creaky floorboards, unlocked the heavy back door as quietly as she could and stepped out into the chilly morning. Slipping her boots on, she walked along the wet grass in the predawn light and could feel herself waking up. The cold air stung her eyes and she wished that she had thought to bring her jacket out with her.
As she rounded the wall to the front garden, she was startled by a ghostly figure standing fifty metres away by the front gate.
Rachel was directly beneath the bedroom where her armed colleague was sleeping. She would be down there in under twenty seconds if Rachel called out, but she did not want to wake her unnecessarily, nor draw attention to the fact that she had left her radio on the kitchen table, so decided to investigate herself.
She cautiously took out her pepper spray and approached the featureless figure, silhouetted against the glowing hills behind. The temperature seemed to be dropping with every step she took away from the safety of the house and her forced, slow breaths were now adding an eerie mist to the already intimidating scene.
A few minutes later and the sun would have climbed above the undulating horizon. As it was, Rachel had silently moved to within ten metres of the figure and was still unable to make out a single discernible feature, only that it was tall and fixing something to the front gate. They showed no sign of being aware of her presence until she was forced to step out onto the gravel path. The cold stones crunched loudly beneath her boots and the dark figure abruptly stopped what it was doing to stare in her direction.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Rachel as confidently as she could. She had been trained to only reveal herself as a police officer as a last resort. She took another step closer. ‘I said, can I help you?’
Rachel was furious with herself for leaving the radio behind. She was now almost fifty metres from the cottage and would have to shout loudly to have any hope of waking her colleague. She wished she had done it sooner. The figure stood motionless. It did not respond, but she was close enough to hear its raspy breathing and see the rhythmic clouds of mist filling the space between them, like smoke warning of the fire to come.
Rachel’s nerve finally gave out. She took a huge cold breath to cry for help, and the figure bolted.