Ragdoll

by Daniel Cole

  ‘I called it off when my daughter was born back in 2010.’

  ‘That’s mighty fine of you.’

  ‘I haven’t seen her since. It’s funny …’

  ‘What is?’ asked Baxter.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about her a lot in the last week, probably because of all these things in the news.’

  Baxter and Edmunds shared a glance.

  ‘Which things?’ they asked in unison.

  ‘The Cremation Killer turning up dead. Naguib Khalid, is that his name? It’s just that Michelle and I spoke a great deal about him the last time I saw her. It was a big step for her.’

  ‘What was?’ they both chimed together again.

  ‘Her being assigned to him,’ said Markusson thoughtfully. ‘She was his probation officer.’

  CHAPTER 21

  Monday 7 July 2014

  9.03 a.m.

  Wolf ignored the call from Dr Preston-Hall’s assistant as he entered the Homicide and Serious Crime department. He had, unofficially, discharged himself from her care. Seeing as she had already effectively declared him unfit for work, he could see no reason to waste another moment of his precious time in the old battleaxe’s company.

  Simmons only had grounds to overrule the psychiatrist’s advice because of the premature and very public death of Jarred Garland. With so little time, and the odds already stacked against them, he could not risk provoking the killer further, and the communiqué sent to Baxter following the murder had made it quite clear that Wolf’s involvement was to continue.

  By Simmons’ reckoning, the risk of having one unstable detective out on the streets was far outweighed by the insinuated threats of a serial killer: additional victims? Disregarding the stipulated dates again? Leaking more sensitive information to the press?

  They weren’t coping as it was.

  Oddly, Wolf could not help but feel a little appreciative towards the ruthless monster, who planned to murder him in a week’s time, for keeping him in a job. He had no intention of buying him a card, but every cloud …

  On the spur of the moment, Wolf had decided to head down to Bath for the weekend. Although he had barely entertained the notion of his own demise, something inside him had yearned for the furnace-like front room of the house he’d grown up in, his mother’s overcooked beef Wellington, and a pint at the local with his oldest friend, who was apparently destined to live, work and die within a two-mile radius of their senior school.

  He had taken the time to listen to the same stories that his dad had been telling for his entire life and had, after all this time, understood why they were worth revisiting so regularly. Only once, during a lull in the conversation, had his parents briefly touched upon the subject of the murders and their son’s impending doom; his father had never been the touchy-feely type. They had apparently discussed it at ‘great length’ while Wolf had been in the shower (a subtle dig at him for using too much hot water) and arrived at their usual solution to most of life’s problems: he could move back into his old room upstairs.

  ‘Doubt this fella will want to trek all the way down here,’ his father told him confidently.

  In the past, Wolf might have found their naivety and trivialisation infuriating, but on this occasion he found it endearingly humorous. His dad then got cross with him for laughing at his opinion.

  ‘I might not be one of your big city know-it-alls but that doesn’t mean I’m thick either,’ he snapped. For some reason, he had always had an issue with the capital and had treated his son differently ever since he abandoned their ‘dull little town’ for better things. ‘Bloody M4’s a menace. Roadworks and average speed checks the entire way!’

  Unfortunately this only set Wolf off again, irritating his father further.

  ‘William-Oliver!’ his mother had chided him when William Senior stormed out to ‘make a cuppa’.

  He hated the way that she always double-barrelled his first names. As if their pretentious surname wasn’t bad enough. She appeared to consider hyphens camouflage for their modest means, just as the immaculate garden and financed car parked in front of the house in no way matched the tired rooms inside.

  Wolf did a few jobs around the house; however, this did not extend to Ethel next door’s bloody fence, and he almost crippled himself diving behind the garden wall when she had suddenly emerged from her porchway to accost him.

  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.<
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  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.

  ‘Coombes!’ she yelled as she burst through the gate and pursued the shadow downhill along the muddy track that ran alongside the woods.

  Rachel was twenty-five years old and had been the star runner at her university. She was rapidly closing the gap between them as they stumbled down the steepening slope, which was growing increasingly uneven underfoot. It was surreally silent; the only sound in the tranquil hills was that of their laboured breathing and heavy footsteps as the chase continued.

  ‘Police! Stop!’ she panted.

  The sun was rising with every passing moment, and the tips of the dark trees were now painted in golden sunlight. Rachel could now make out that she was chasing an imposing man with a closely shaven head and a deep scar running diagonally across his scalp. He was wearing heavy boots and a black or dark blue coat that billowed out behind him as he ran.

  Suddenly he veered off the track and leapt awkwardly over the barbed wire fence surrounding the woods.

  Rachel heard him cry out in pain before scrambling back to his feet and disappearing through the treeline. She reached the spot where he had hurdled the fence and abandoned her pursuit. Sometimes it was difficult to remember the training once the adrenaline had kicked in, but she was only armed with pepper spray. She had already ascertained the man’s imposing size and therefore, suspected that the dense woodland would be of greater advantage to him than to her. Besides, she had what she needed.

  She knelt down to look at the dark blood pooling around a coil in the metal spike. Without anything to cut the wire with, and unable to leave the evidence unattended, she took a clean tissue from her pocket and soaked up what she could. With one eye on the treeline, she began the long, steep, ascent back up the hill.

  Baxter had been the first member of the team to arrive at the office on Sunday morning and had picked up the urgent message to contact Protected Persons. She had to go through an arduous twenty-minute process of identity checks and security numbers before finally being connected to Rachel, who informed Baxter of the incident and the brown envelope that she had found tied to the gate of the cottage on her return. It had contained a single photograph, taken the previous afternoon, of Rachel and her colleague struggling with Ford in the front garden.

  Rachel and her supervisor had been reassuringly competent and thorough. They had local police combing the woods, had cordoned off the muddy footpath to preserve footprints, and had bagged the bloodstained tissue that Rachel had collected and the section of fence that the trespasser had injured himself on, both of which were already in transit to the Met’s forensic lab.

  If it had been their killer’s first mistake, they fully intended to capitalise on it.

  It was clear that Andrew Ford was no longer secure at the safe house. With Simmons unable to get hold of Wolf, he had sent Baxter and Edmunds to collect Ford while he worked on alternative arrangements. After a few personal calls to contacts that he had met through Mayor Turnble, he was connected to the ambassador of the Embassy of Ireland.

  The embassy had seemed a logical choice as it was already overseen by the armed diplomatic protection officers and had security measures engineered into the building as standard. Simmons had been as open with the ambassador as he could, and was upfront about Ford’s drinking problem and volatile behaviour.

  ‘No need to check his passport then,’ the ambassador had joked.

  He had invited Ford and the Metropolitan Police to utilise the top floor of the embassy until the situation had been resolved, and Finlay had drawn the short straw of spending Sunday night there.

  Edmunds had returned home on Sunday evening, exhausted from his day of travelling. They had left Ford in Finlay’s care and then Baxter had kindly dropped him home.

  ‘Don’t let the cat out!’ Tia screamed at him as soon as he stepped over the threshold.

  ‘The what?’

  He almost tripped over the tiny tabby kitten as it sped past him and collided with the front door.

  ‘T? What is this?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s called Bernard, and he’s going to keep me company while you’re out at work,’ said Tia challengingly.

  ‘A bit like the baby will?’

  ‘The baby’s not here yet though, is it?’

  Edmunds stumbled through to the kitchen as the affectionate kitten rubbed up against his legs. Tia was clearly delighted, though, and had not even complained that he was home late, so he decided not to object or remind her that he was severely allergic to cats.

  On Monday morning, Vanita had assumed Simmons’ role and taken charge of the case. Simmons, back at Chambers’ desk, was rather looking forward to being a more intimate part of the unit – less so to the disciplinary action awaiting him when things calmed down. Baxter, meanwhile, had been reassigned to normal duties.

  Her first case had been a woman who stabbed her cheating husband to death. Boringly, she had admitted to it. Baxter, therefore, faced several hours of tedious form-filling to complement her fi
ve seconds of investigative work. She also had to work alongside Blake, one of the obnoxious Saunders’ crowd, who had always had a thing for her. It was fortunate she was such a gifted actress that nobody had picked up on the fact that she could not abide the man.

  Simmons had scribbled the weekend’s updates onto the scruffy board in the meeting room:

  (HEAD) Naguib Khalid ‘The Cremation Killer’

  (TORSO) – ? – Madeline Ayers – (Khalid’s defence lawyer)

  (LEFT ARM) platinum ring, law firm? – Michael Gable-Collins – why?

  (RIGHT ARM) nail varnish? – Michelle Gailey – (Khalid’s probation officer)

  (LEFT LEG) – ?

  (RIGHT LEG) Detective Benjamin Chambers – why?

  A – Raymond Turnble (Mayor)

  B – Vijay Rana/Khalid (Brother/accountant) not at trial

  C – Jarred Garland (Journalist)

  D – Andrew Ford (Security guard/alcoholic/pain in arse) – Dock security officer

  E – Ashley Lochlan (Waitress) or (nine-year-old girl)

  F – Wolf

  Edmunds had all but forgotten about the newest addition to their family as he got ready for work that morning but received a stark reminder when he accidentally trod on the sleeping fluff-ball in the hallway and stumbled face first into his front door.

  Tia had, of course, sided with Bernard, and told Edmunds to stop scaring him by bleeding so profusely.

  CHAPTER 22

  Monday 7 July 2014

  11.29 a.m.

  The moment the ‘On Air’ light went out, Andrea pulled off her microphone, hurried out of the studio, and back into the newsroom. Elijah had scheduled their meeting for 11.35 a.m., and as she climbed the stairs up to his office, she still had no idea what she would say should he offer her what she had always wanted.

  When she had agreed to help Baxter she had had every intention of leaving the cut-throat profession behind; however, her misguided attempt at redemption had backfired horribly, while catapulting her fame and journalistic influence to dizzying new heights. Somehow, in her fight to free herself from the dirt, she had only succeeded in digging herself further in.