Edmunds could not stop poking at the lump on his head where the nurse had glued the skin back together. He had spent the hours in the waiting room replaying the conversation with Wolf in his head and had transcribed it almost word for word in his notebook. He could not understand how Wolf had misinterpreted his meaning so entirely.
He was tired. Perhaps he had unintentionally come across as disrespectful or accusing. Accusing him of what, though? Edmunds wondered whether Wolf had lied about recognising the case and knew full well that he had forgotten to include the updated forensics report. His overreaction might have been in self-defence.
The one positive thing to have come out of his trip to A & E was that Tia had been forced to reply to his texts. She had even offered to come out of work to sit with him, but he assured her that he was fine. They had agreed that she would stay with her mother for the rest of the week as he would barely be at home and he promised that he would start making up for everything after that.
Conscience-free, he trained it back across town to Watford and then caught a taxi out to the archives. Robotically, he went through the usual routine to gain access to the warehouse but paused outside the little office at the bottom of the stairs. He normally strode right past the door labelled ‘Administrator’, but on this occasion, he knocked politely against the glass and stepped inside.
The small middle-aged woman behind the obsolete computer looked exactly as he had predicted: deathly white skin, oversized glasses and unkempt. She greeted him enthusiastically, like a conversation-starved elderly relative, and he wondered whether he was her first visitor in quite some time. He agreed to sit but declined the offer of a drink, suspecting that it would cost him at least an hour of his precious time.
After she had told him all about her deceased husband, Jim, and the friendly ghost that she swore haunted the subterranean mausoleum, Edmunds gently guided the conversation back on track.
‘So everything has to go through this office?’ he asked.
‘Everything. We scan the barcodes in and out. If you take one step through that door without a validated code, every alarm in the place goes off!’
‘Which means that you can tell me who has been looking at what,’ said Edmunds.
‘Of course.’
‘Then I’m going to need to see any box that DS William Fawkes has ever booked out.’
‘All of them?’ she asked in surprise. ‘Are you sure? Will used to come here a lot.’
‘Every single one.’
ST ANN’S HOSPITAL
Sunday 17 October 2010
9.49 p.m.
Wolf shuffled languidly back towards his room in preparation for the night staff’s rounds at 10 p.m. The tired corridor was filled with artificial light and the smell from the hot chocolate trolley, a misleading name, as the tepid drink reduced in temperature every time a patient threw a cup of it in a member of staff’s face.
He rolled a small ball of plasticine around in his fingers, stolen off the Pink Ladies a week earlier, which he fashioned each night into makeshift earplugs. Although nothing could silence the perpetual screaming, these at least made it only a distant horror.
He passed several open doors leading to vacant rooms as their occupiers squeezed every last second of television out of the evening before their enforced curfew came into effect. As he turned the corner into another deserted corridor, he heard whispering from one of the darkened rooms. He gave the doorway a wide berth as he passed, overhearing the muted prayers recited at speed under the speaker’s breath.
‘Detective,’ called the whispered voice before continuing with the remaining lines.
Wolf paused, wondering whether he had imagined it, the medication playing tricks on him again. He peered into the blackness. The door was slightly ajar. The shard of light penetrating the darkness revealed only the hard floor and part of a black torso bent over a bare leg in prayer. Wolf went to move away when the whispering stopped once more.
‘Detective,’ it repeated before beginning a new verse.
Wolf cautiously approached the heavy door and pushed. It swung stiffly on its old hinges with a weary creak. From the relative safety of the doorway, he reached blindly for the light switch that he knew was situated somewhere to the right of the door. The recessed fluorescent strip buzzed to life but had been smeared with either food or dried blood, its brightness reduced to an imitation candlelight that threw dark shadows across the walls. The small space reeked of infection and whatever it was that had burnt onto the plastic casing.
Joel faltered in his prayer to shield his eyes from the polluted light. He was only wearing frayed underwear, leaving the substantial scarring to the rest of his body exposed; however, these were not souvenirs from a past accident or violent attack but self-inflicted mutilations. Crosses of various sizes littered the dark canvas, many scars aged white with time, others still red-raw and inflamed.
The rest of the small room matched its guest: a Bible lay haemorrhaging pages on the yellow-stained bed, individual verses torn crudely from their gospels and glued with saliva to every available surface, overlapping where God’s message overwhelmed the room’s insufficient size.
As if emerging from a trance, Joel slowly looked up at Wolf and smiled.
‘Detective,’ he said softly before gesturing around the room. ‘I wanted to show you this.’
‘I wish you hadn’t,’ replied Wolf, his own voice barely louder than a whisper, as he tried to cover his nose in the politest way possible.
‘I been thinking a lot about you … about your situation. I can help you,’ said Joel. He ran his hand across his disfigured chest. ‘And this – this is what’s gonna save you.’
‘Self-harm?’
‘God.’
Wolf suspected that the self-harm route might have produced more tangible results.
‘Save me from what, Joel?’ he asked wearily.
Joel burst out laughing. Wolf had had enough and turned to leave.
‘Three years back, my little sister was killed – murdered. Drugs debt,’ said Joel. ‘Owed some pretty bad people a hundred and fifty quid – so they cut her face off.’
Wolf turned back to look at Joel.
‘I-I mean, I ain’t gotta tell you. You know. You know what I wanted to do to them. Woulda made it real slow. Woulda made them feel it.’ Joel stared into space as he pictured enacting his revenge with a cruel smirk. ‘I tooled up. Went looking. But these ain’t the kinda people you get close to. I felt helpless. Know what I’m saying?’
Wolf nodded.
‘Desperate times, right? So, I took the only option I had left, the only way to make things right. I made a trade.’
‘A trade?’ asked Wolf, transfixed by the story.
‘My soul for theirs.’
‘Your soul?’
Wolf glanced around at the Bible that surrounded them and sighed. He felt foolish for indulging his fanatical host for as long as he had. He could hear a member of staff struggling to escort someone back to their room out in the corridor.
‘Goodnight Joel,’ he said.
‘Week later, I find a bin bag waitin’ on my doorstep, just a regular black bin bag. There was so much blood. I mean, it was on my hands, my clothes …’