Ragdoll

by Daniel Cole

  ‘If you say so. Dinner at the Greenhouse then?’

  ‘You can cope without me tonight, can’t you?’

  Geoffrey huffed: ‘Office, then?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  Wolf unlocked the door to his tatty flat and switched on the television to drown out the sound of the nightly shouting match between the clearly incompatible couple upstairs. The presenter of a property programme was showing some newly-weds around a three-bedroom detached home on the outskirts of an idyllic park in a far more pleasant part of the country. It was simultaneously comical and soul-destroying to listen to them deliberate over the minuscule asking price, which would not have even afforded them the hovel that he was currently occupying in the capital.

  Wolf walked to the kitchen window and stared into the blackness of the crime scene opposite. He paused, almost expecting to see the Ragdoll still hanging there, waiting for him. The property show came to an end (the couple decided that they could get more for their money) and a weatherman energetically predicted that the heatwave would come to a spectacular end the following night, with thunderstorms and extremely heavy rain anticipated.

  He switched off the television, pulled the blinds and climbed onto the mattress on the bedroom floor with the book that he had been reading for over four months. He made it through another page and a half before drifting off into a disrupted sleep.

  Wolf was woken by his mobile phone buzzing on top of his folded clothes from the day before. He was instantly struck by the pain in his left arm and glanced down to find that the wound had wept through his bandages during the night. The room looked strange in the weak morning light, grey rather than the familiar orange that he had grown accustomed to over the previous two weeks. He rolled over and reached for the vibrating phone.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘What have you done now?’ Simmons snapped angrily.

  ‘I don’t know. What have I done now?’

  ‘Your wife—’

  ‘Ex-wife.’

  ‘… has plastered Vijay Rana’s face all over the morning news and announced to the world that we are ill-equipped to find him. Are you trying to get me fired?’

  ‘Not on purpose, no.’

  ‘Handle it.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Wolf stumbled unsteadily out into the main room. He took two painkillers for his arm and then switched the television back on. Andrea materialised on screen, looking as flawless as ever, but still wearing the same clothes that he recognised from the evening before. With her usual flair for the dramatic, she was reading an undoubtedly fictitious quote from a ‘police spokesperson’, who implored friends and family of Rana to come forward for his own well-being.

  In the top right-hand corner of the screen, a timer counted down the hours and minutes to Wednesday morning. Disconcertingly, with no idea where to even begin the search for Rana, they had only another 19 hours and 23 minutes to wait before the killer could claim his next victim.

  CHAPTER 10

  Tuesday 1 July 2014

  8.28 a.m.

  London had returned to its usual monochrome self, the overcast sky propped up by dirty grey buildings that threw dark shadows across an endless expanse of concrete below.

  Wolf dialled Andrea’s number as he walked the short distance between the Tube station and New Scotland Yard. To his surprise, she picked up almost immediately. She seemed genuinely perplexed by his reaction and insisted doggedly that her sole intention had been to assist the police to atone for the damage that she might have caused. She reasoned that having every pair of eyes in the country looking for Rana could only be a good thing, and Wolf could not really argue with that piece of self-serving logic. He did, however, make her swear to run any further contentious details past him before broadcasting them to the rest of the nation.

  Wolf entered the office, where Finlay was already hard at work. He was on the phone to someone at the Royal Courts of Justice, re-emphasising the life and death importance of the simple task that they still had not completed. Wolf took a seat at the desk opposite and flicked through the piles of paperwork left by the night-shift detectives, who had little to show for their efforts. With no better ideas on how to locate Rana, he continued from where his colleagues had left off: the arduous box-ticking exercise of systematically sorting through bank statements, credit card bills and itemised phone records.

  At 9.23 a.m. Finlay’s phone rang, and he answered it with a yawn: ‘Shaw.’

  ‘Good morning, this is Owen Whitacre from The National Archives. I apologise for the length of time it took to—’

  Finlay waved at Wolf to catch his attention.

  ‘Have you got a name for us?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I do. I am faxing over a copy of the certificate to you as we speak, but I thought I should probably contact you directly considering … well, considering what we found.’

  ‘What you found?’

  ‘Yes. Vijay Rana was born Vijay Khalid.’

  ‘Khalid?’

  ‘So we checked, and he has one sibling listed, a younger brother: Naguib Khalid.’

  ‘Shiatsu.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Nothing. Thanks,’ said Finlay before hanging up.

  Within minutes, Simmons had assigned three additional officers to assist Wolf and Finlay delve into Rana’s hidden past. They isolated themselves in the meeting room, away from the noise and distractions of the main office, and set to work. They still had fourteen and a half hours to find him.

  They still had time.

  Edmunds’ neck was killing him after a night spent on his inconceivably uncomfortable sofa. He had returned home, to his ex-local authority maisonette, at 8.10 p.m. the evening before to find Tia’s mother washing up in the kitchen. He had completely forgotten about the arrangement. She greeted him with her usual warmth and wrapped two bubble-covered hands around him, standing on tiptoes just to reach his chest. Tia, on the other hand, had been far less forgiving. Sensing the tense atmosphere, her mother made her excuses and left as quickly as was polite to do so.

  ‘This has been arranged for more than a fortnight,’ said Tia.

  ‘I got held up at work. I’m sorry I missed dinner.’

  ‘You were supposed to pick up dessert, remember? I had to cobble together one of my trifles.’

  He was suddenly a little less sorry that he had missed it.

  ‘Oh no,’ he said, sounding convincingly disappointed. ‘You should have saved me some.’

  ‘I did.’

  Damn.

  ‘Is this what life’s going to be like from now on? You skipping dinners, turning up at all times with your nails all painted up?’

  Edmunds picked self-consciously at the flaking purple varnish.

  ‘It’s half eight, T. Not exactly “all times”.’

  ‘So it’ll be worse then, will it?’

  ‘Perhaps it will. This is my job now,’ Edmunds snapped.

  ‘Which is why I never wanted you to move from Fraud,’ said Tia, her voice rising.

  ‘But I did!’

  ‘You can’t be this selfish when you’re a father!’

  ‘Selfish?’ shouted Edmunds in disbelief. ‘I’m out there earning the money for us to survive! What else are we going to live off? Your hairdressing wage?’

  He regretted the spiteful retort immediately, but the damage had already been done. Tia stormed up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door behind her. He had hoped to apologise in the morning but left for work before she had even woken up, making a mental note to buy some flowers on the way home.

  He met with Baxter first thing, hoping that she would not notice that he was wearing the same shirt from the day before (the others were hanging, freshly ironed, behind the locked bedroom door) or that he could not turn his head to the right. While she was busy contacting orthopaedic surgeons and physiotherapists regarding the reconstructed leg, he had been instructed to find out as much as possible about the plain silver ring.

  He se
arched on his phone for the nearest reputable jewellers and set off, on foot, towards Victoria. When he arrived, the camp salesman was delighted to be of assistance, obviously revelling in the drama of it all. He led Edmunds through to a back room where the relaxed and elegant illusion projected by the front of house was dropped in favour of imposing safes, grubby tools, polishing equipment and feeds from over a dozen hidden cameras, surveying each and every one of the reinforced glass cabinets.

  A pasty, scruffy man, hidden out of sight like a leper from the easily intimidated upper-class clientele, took the ring over to his workstation and examined the inner band through a magnifying glass.

  ‘Highest-quality platinum, hallmarked by the Edinburgh Assay Office, made in 2003 by someone going by the initials TSI. You can check with them to find out who that mark belongs to.’

  ‘Wow. Thank you. That’s all incredibly helpful,’ said Edmunds, making notes, astounded that the man had gained so much from the seemingly meaningless symbols. ‘Any idea what a ring like this would sell for?’

  The man placed the chunky ring on a set of scales and then produced a dog-eared catalogue from the bottom of one of his drawers.

  ‘It’s not a designer brand, which would keep the cost down a little, but we’ve got similar rings marked up at around the three grand mark.’

  ‘Three thousand pounds?’ Edmunds confirmed. He was momentarily reminded of his argument with Tia the evening before. ‘That gives us an indication of our victim’s social class, at least.’

  ‘It tells you a lot more than that,’ said the man confidently. ‘This has to be one of the most boring rings that I have ever seen. It has virtually no artistic merit whatsoever. It is the jewellery equivalent of walking about with a fistful of fifty-pound notes: pretentious materialism. All show, no substance.’

  ‘You should come and work for us,’ said Edmunds in jest.

  ‘Nah,’ replied the man, ‘doesn’t pay enough.’

  By lunchtime Baxter had phoned over forty hospitals. She had excitedly emailed copies of the X-ray and a photograph of the resultant scar when one surgeon confidently claimed responsibility for the limb-saving operation; disappointingly, just five minutes later, he had called back to say he would never have left such horrendous scarring and could be of no further assistance. Without a date or serial number her information was simply too vague.

  She watched Wolf in the meeting room. He was also on the phone, working frantically with his team to locate Rana. She still had not even acknowledged the fact that his name had featured on the killer’s list, perhaps because she was not sure how he expected her to react. Now, more than ever, she had absolutely no idea what they were to each other.

  She was amazed by the way in which he had thrown himself into his work. Weaker men would have gone to pieces, hid, sought sympathy and reassurance from those around them. Not Wolf. If anything, he had grown stronger, more determined, more like the man she had known during the Cremation Killings: the same efficient, ruthless, self-destructive, time bomb. No one else had noticed the subtle shift in him yet, but they would in time.

  Edmunds had made impressive progress with the ring. He had already contacted the Edinburgh Assay Office, who had informed him that the hallmark belonged to an independent jewellers in the Old Town. He had sent them a photograph of the ring, crudely annotated with dimensions, and was busying himself comparing nail polishes while he waited for them to return his call. After stopping off at Superdrug and Boots on the way back to the office, he was now the proud owner of another six glittery bottles, none of which matched either of the shades that they were looking for.

  ‘You look like crap,’ Baxter informed him after putting the phone down on her forty-third hospital.

  ‘I didn’t sleep brilliantly,’ replied Edmunds.

  ‘You were wearing that shirt yesterday.’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘In three months you’ve never worn the same shirt two days in a row.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were keeping tabs.’

  ‘You had a fight,’ she said knowingly, enjoying Edmunds’ reluctance to talk about it a little too much. ‘A night on the sofa, huh? We’ve all been there.’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, could we talk about something else please?’

  ‘So, what was it? She doesn’t like you being partnered up with a girl?’ Baxter swivelled round in her chair and fluttered her eyelashes elaborately at him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘She asked you about your day and you realised you had nothing to say to her that didn’t involve dismembered body parts or burning mayors?’

  ‘There’s always nail polish,’ he smiled, waving his chipped purple nails from the day before at her. He was trying to make a joke to prove that she was not getting to him.

  ‘In which case, you missed something. Birthday? Anniversary?’

  When Edmunds did not answer, she knew she was on the right track. She stared at him, waiting patiently for a response.

  ‘Dinner with her mum,’ he mumbled.

  Baxter burst out laughing.

  ‘Dinner with her mum? Christ, tell her to get a grip. We’re trying to catch a serial killer, for God’s sake.’ She leaned in conspiratorially. ‘One bloke I was seeing, I missed his mum’s funeral coz I was chasing a boat down the Thames!’

  She laughed out loud and so did Edmunds. He felt guilty for not sticking up for Tia, for not explaining that she was still adjusting to the demands of his new role, but he was enjoying sharing some common ground with his partner.

  ‘I didn’t hear from him again after that,’ she continued.

  As her laughter slowly ebbed away, Edmunds thought he could detect genuine sadness beneath the show of insouciance, just a faint flicker as she wondered about all of the things that could have been had she chosen differently.

  ‘You just wait till your sprog pops out on a day we’re tied up at a crime scene and you’re not there.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ said Edmunds defensively.

  Baxter shrugged and spun back in her chair. Picking up the phone, she dialled the next number on the list.

  ‘Marriage. Detective. Divorce. Ask anyone in this room. Marriage. Detective. Divorce … Oh hello, this is Detective Sergeant Baxter with the …’

  Simmons came out of his office and paused to look over the piles of autopsy photographs that Baxter had littered over Chambers’ empty desk.

  ‘When’s Chambers back?’ he asked her.

  ‘No idea,’ she replied, on hold to yet another physiotherapy department.

  ‘I’m sure it was today.’

  Baxter shrugged in a way that suggested she neither cared nor wanted to hear any more about it.

  ‘He screwed me for a week when that volcano went off a few years back. He’d better not be “stuck” in the Caribbean. Give him a call for me, will you?’

  ‘Call him yourself,’ she snapped, agitated further by the Will Young song blaring down the phone at her.

  ‘I’ve got a call with the commander. Do it!’

  While still waiting to be connected, Baxter took out her mobile and dialled Chambers’ home number, which she knew off by heart. It went straight to the answering machine:

  ‘Chambers! It’s Baxter. Where are you, you lazy bastard? Shit, I hope the kids don’t pick this up. If Arley or Lori are listening, please ignore the word “bastard” and … “shit”.’

  Someone at the hospital finally picked up the other phone, catching Baxter off guard.

  ‘Piss,’ she blurted down the mobile before abruptly hanging up.

  Wolf felt utterly helpless as the hours ticked by. At 2.30 p.m. he received a call from the officer he had sent to Rana’s cousin’s house. This, like all of their other possible leads, had turned up nothing. Wolf was positive that friends or relatives were sheltering Rana and his family. They had vanished without a trace over five months before and had two school-age children in tow, who would have been conspicuous during the week. He rubbed his tired
eyes and saw Simmons pacing round his tiny office, dealing with the endless phone calls from his superiors while flicking through the news channels to assess the latest damage.

  Another half-hour passed uneventfully before Finlay suddenly shouted out.

  ‘I’ve got something!’

  Wolf and the others dropped what they were working on to listen.

  ‘When Rana’s mother died in 1997, she left the house to her two sons, but it was never sold on. A few years later, they signed it over to Rana’s newborn daughter. Another tax dodge no doubt.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Wolf.

  ‘Lady Margaret Road, Southall.’

  ‘That’s got to be it,’ said Wolf.

  Wolf lost the rock-paper-scissors and sheepishly interrupted Simmons’ phone conference. The chief inspector joined them in the meeting room and Finlay explained what he had discovered. The decision was made that Wolf and Finlay would apprehend Rana alone. Discretion would be key to his survival, and it served their purpose to allow the press to tear them apart, flaunting the fact that they had failed to track Rana down, only to reveal him safe and sound on Thursday morning.

  Simmons came up with the idea of using his contacts at the UK Protected Persons Service, who were far better equipped to deal with covert transportation and safeguarding, to take joint responsibility for Rana until deemed safe. He had just picked up the phone when there was a gentle knock at the meeting room door.

  ‘Not now!’ he bellowed as a junior officer timidly entered the room and closed the door behind her. ‘I said not now!’

  ‘I’m very sorry to interrupt, sir, but there’s a phone call I really think you need to take.’

  ‘And why do you think that?’ Simmons asked patronisingly.

  ‘Because Vijay Rana has just walked into Southall Police Station and given himself up.’

  ‘Oh.’

  CHAPTER 11

  Tuesday 1 July 2014

  4.20 p.m.

  Finlay had dozed off at the wheel of the car in the outside lane of the motorway. This had not been as disastrous as it might have been, as they had been sitting in stationary traffic for over forty minutes. The rain was hammering down hard enough to drown out his snores, sounding more like rocks against the thin metal than water. The windscreen wipers had long since stopped having any effect, which was likely to be the reason for the delay up ahead.