‘I’m not leaving you.’
‘You’re not,’ Baxter assured him desperately, feeling fainter again already. ‘Help’s here.’
Wolf opened his mouth to argue.
The noise was intensifying, the distorted crackles of radios and the clink of metal on metal growing clearer.
‘There’s no time! Just go!’ pleaded Baxter, shoving him away from her with what little strength she had left.
Wolf looked disorientated but snatched the coat off the floor and ran to the small door behind the witness stand. He paused and looked back at her for a fleeting moment, no trace of the monster that she had witnessed ripping Masse apart in his deep blue eyes.
And then he was gone.
She glanced over at Masse, doubting that he would survive, and then remembered that she needed to hide the gun. She reached to her right, but her fingers only found the hard floor. With great effort, she turned her head to discover that it was gone.
‘Bastard!’ she smiled to herself.
She raised her hands in the air, holding her identification high above her head as the pack of black-clad officers stormed the room.
Wolf followed the familiar corridors away from the sound of the ongoing search. He buttoned up Masse’s coat to conceal his bloodstained shirt and put his glasses back on before bursting through the first emergency exit he came to. Alarms went off all around him, but he knew that it would be impossible for anyone out on the street to hear them over the chaos in front of the building.
The rain was hammering down, lending the array of brightly coloured emergency vehicles an additional sheen, so that they appeared to glow against the dreary city and the dark clouds overhead. The press and the ever-growing crowd of curious passers-by had gathered on the other side of the road, jostling for position as they struggled to catch a glimpse of whatever everybody else was looking at.
Wolf calmly crossed the no man’s land between the building and the police cordon as two paramedics rushed by. He waved his ID in the general direction of a young officer, who was far too preoccupied holding the reporters at bay to care. As he ducked beneath the police tape, he caught sight of the statue of Lady Justice watching from the rooftop, teetering ever closer to the edge, and then started weaving through the crush of people ceilinged by dark umbrellas.
As the rain intensified, he pulled the hood of the long black coat over his head and made his way towards the edge of the crowd, feeling people pushing past him, stepping over those ignorantly blocking his path and ignoring their scathing looks when he did so, not one of them aware of the monster walking among them.
A wolf in sheep’s clothing.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’m bound to forget someone and offend them, but here goes …
RAGDOLL wouldn’t exist without a long list of very nice and talented people working incredibly hard to get it out into the world.
From Orion, I’d like to thank Ben Willis, Alex Young, Katie Espiner, David Shelley, Jo Carpenter, Rachael Hum, Ruth Sharvell, Sidonie Beresford-Browne, Kati Nicholl, Jenny Page and Clare Sivell. (I haven’t forgotten you, Sam – you get a special mention at the end.)
From Conville & Walsh, I’d like to thank my friends Emma, Alexandra, Alexander and Jake as well as Dorcas and Tracy, who go above and beyond to look after me.
My family – Ma, Ossie, Melo, Bob, B, and KP for all of their help and support.
A very special thank you to the ‘curiously omnipresent’ force of nature that is my incredible editor Sam Eades, for her relentless enthusiasm and for having such belief in something I wrote.
And an equally special thank you to my friend and confidante Sue Armstrong (she’s also my agent), who picked RAGDOLL up off the slush pile, and without whom this book would probably still be collecting dust under my bed with everything else I’d ever written until I was fortunate enough to meet her. A very special lady.
Finally, thanks to everyone else who has worked on the book in the UK and publishing teams all over the world, and everyone who has taken the time to read it when there are so many incredible books out there you could have been reading instead.
OK, I’m done.
Daniel Cole
2017
Author Q & A with Daniel Cole
1. RAGDOLL is a masterfully written crime thriller – have you always been a fan of the genre?
I’m more influenced by TV than anything else. As much as I love some of the UK crime shows, there’s this common theme of them looking a bit drained of colour, being true-to-life gritty and unrelentingly sombre. But then the US shows often descend into cringe-worthy cheesiness and gimmicks (There’s an episode of Castle where they wake up as 1920’s detectives – I never watched it again).
So, when I started writing screenplays (of which, Ragdoll was one), I was aiming for that perfect balance between the two – grounded escapism; cherry-picking all of my favourite aspects and trying to make them work together.
Book-wise, I have quite commercial taste – I love the Robert Galbraiths, the Stieg Larssons…I’m definitely a fan of the genre.
2. The main characters are all such distinct personalities – were they based on anyone you know? Do you have a favourite character?
I don’t have a favourite character.
Wolf was a combination of all my favourite heroes/anti-heroes – he’s one part Captain Mal Reynolds from Firefly, one part Sawyer from Lost. There’s definitely some Rick Grimes from Walking Dead in there, set off against a dash of Lethal Weapon’s Martin Riggs among others.
None of the other characters were based on anybody specific apart from Baxter, who is loosely based on my amazing sister and biggest fan, Melody.
3. Your plot is very tightly woven, with multiple twists and turns. Did you chart it out in fine detail at the beginning of the process?
I always start writing with just an intriguing beginning and a shocking ending and let the story develop from there. I don’t know how other people write, but I find that so much changes as I start putting words on the page that it would be a complete waste of time planning anything in advance.
Having said that, RAGDOLL is so complicated and intertwined, I have no idea how I managed to bring it all together. I think I have six years of rejection letters to thank for that – I had a lot of time to think about it.
4. A real strength of RAGDOLL is the humour. Was that important to you when writing the book?
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I can’t take anything very seriously. It’s probably very annoying. Basically, I get bored if something doesn’t make me smile every few pages. There’s an uninteresting but relevant story (from long before my wonderful editor came on board) where it was suggested to me that I remove all humour from the book if I wanted to stand any chance of getting it published. I decided then that I’d rather persevere and fail as a writer than put something out there that didn’t make me laugh a little.