Wolf looked out at the palace in the distance for a tranquil moment before going to face the pugnacious man again. He smiled at the armed officer on the door, who did not return the gesture, and entered the opulent room to find Finlay calmly watching television while Ford writhed about on the floor like a badly behaved toddler.
The room clearly functioned as an office under normal circumstances. The computers, desks and filing cabinets had either been removed entirely or stacked against the far wall to accommodate their ungracious guest. Someone had even gone to the trouble of equipping the room with a camp bed, kettle, sofas and the television at very short notice.
A creature of habit, Ford had evidently slept in front of the TV on the pristine leather sofa, because the same smelly, stained duvet from his bedsit now lay draped across it. It was a peculiar sight, this dirty train wreck of a man living in such decadent surroundings, and Wolf could not believe that, of all his possessions, he had chosen this rancid piece of bedding to drag across the country and back again.
‘Wolf!’ shouted Ford, as though they were old friends. He howled excitedly.
Finlay waved cheerfully from the other, duvet-free, sofa.
‘What noise does he make when he sees you?’ Wolf asked Finlay.
‘Afraid I cannae repeat it. Wasn’t very friendly though.’
Ford got up off the floor and Wolf saw that his hands were trembling constantly. The Irishman then rushed over to the window to peer out over the street below.
‘He’s coming Wolf. He’s coming to kill me!’ said Ford.
‘The killer? Well … yeah,’ said Wolf in confusion. ‘But he’s not going to.’
‘He is. He is. He is. He knows things, doesn’t he? He knew where I was before. He’ll know where I am now.’
‘He will if you don’t move away from that window. Sit down.’
Finlay watched in resentment as the childlike man, who had made the last seventeen hours of his life a living hell, obeyed without argument. Wolf took a seat next to his friend.
‘Good night?’ he asked cheerily.
‘I’m gonna kill him myself if he carries on like he has been,’ Finlay muttered.
‘When was his last drink?’
‘Early hours,’ said Finlay.
Wolf knew from experience the toll that the withdrawal symptoms could take on a long-term alcoholic. Ford’s heightened anxiety and the onset of delirium tremens was not a promising sign.
‘He needs a drink,’ said Wolf.
‘Believe me, I asked. The ambassador said no.’
‘Why don’t you take a break?’ Wolf told Finlay. ‘You must be dying for a cigarette.’
‘I’m the one who’s going to die here!’ yelled Ford in the background.
They both ignored him.
‘And while you’re out, pick us up a couple of bottles of … lemonade,’ suggested Wolf with a significant look.
Simmons walked past Vanita’s door carrying a coffee.
‘Chaachaa chod,’ she murmured, using her favourite Hindi insult.
Because of him, she had spent the entire morning wading through the backlog of paperwork and post that he had left unactioned. She opened up the next email: another update, sent out to everyone involved in the Ragdoll investigation. She noticed Chambers’ name included in the list of recipients and sighed. Simmons had cancelled his pass card to the building immediately after learning of his death, as per the protocols, but the endless task of removing the veteran officer from their databases and collecting in his equipment sat somewhere near the bottom of her to-do list.
Supposing that it was bad form to circulate a dead colleague’s name on each and every one of the incessant updates, she quickly typed out a request to have him deleted and moved on to the next job on her list.
Simmons and Edmunds had been working silently for over an hour, despite sitting only eighteen inches apart. Edmunds felt surprisingly relaxed around his irritable senior officer. Perhaps three months of Baxter had toughened him up, but the quietness felt comfortable, just two professionals absorbed in their work, efficient, intellectual souls, sharing a mutual respe—
Simmons turned to Edmunds, interrupting his train of thought.
‘Remind me to order you a desk later, will you?’
‘Of course, sir.’
The silence felt considerably less comfortable after that.
Simmons was still working on the labour-intensive task of contacting each and every one of the remaining eighty-seven names on the list. On his first pass, he had only managed to cross off twenty-four. He had turned the page back over and started again from the top, positive that once they had identified this final victim, the entire puzzle would make sense.
Edmunds, whose idea it had been to compile the list in the first place, was not sure how or when Simmons had claimed ownership over his part of the investigation but was not about to question it. He had his hands full anyway, searching for all possible links between the Ragdoll victims and Naguib Khalid.
Although he had not found a connection between Chambers or Jarred Garland, he figured that police officers and journalists both tended to accrue long lists of enemies over the years. He had, instead, decided to focus his attention on Michael Gable-Collins, Mayor Turnble and the waitress, Ashley Lochlan.
He felt frustrated. Something connected this assorted group of people but even knowing that Khalid was the key, they were somehow failing to see the entire picture.
Baxter was at the scene of a serious sexual assault in an alleyway just two streets down from Wolf’s apartment. It really was a shitty area. She had annoyed Blake by refusing to climb into a skip to help him search for evidence and was supposed to be asking for witnesses instead but had distracted herself by thinking about Wolf and Finlay in the Irish embassy, with just a day and a half to go until the attempt on Andrew Ford’s life. She missed Edmunds too. She had got so used to him following her around like a puppy that she had actually barked an order into thin air earlier that morning.
She was bored. It was a terrible thing to admit while in the midst of investigating the most horrific ordeal of a young woman’s life, but she was. She thought back to the feeling of hopelessness she had experienced as Garland thrashed around just metres away from her. She remembered holding his hand, willing him to survive and the nurse coming in to break the news of his death.
She missed the adrenaline. It had been one of the worst days of her entire life and yet, given the opportunity to do it all over again, she would. Was there something wrong with her? Were haunting memories better than none at all? Feeling fear and peril preferable to feeling nothing? And were these the sort of questions that the killer asked himself to justify his own atrocities?
Scaring herself, she decided to go and do some work.
Wolf and Finlay were watching a rerun of Top Gear at almost inaudible volume while Ford snored loudly from beneath the duvet on the other sofa. He had passed out after approximately one and a half bottles of ‘lemonade’ and given the two detectives a blissful hour of quiet.
‘Thomas Page,’ rasped Finlay as quietly as he could.
‘What?’ asked Wolf.
‘Thomas Page.’
‘Bastard. He knocked out t—’
‘Two of your teeth at a crime scene when you were in training. I know.’
‘He always had a temper.’