‘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.