Hangman Page 21

  She put her earphones in and turned to face the window, still breathing heavily after her outburst. All she could see was her own reflection in the dark glass as her furious expression gradually relaxed into something resembling guilt.

  Too stubborn to apologize, she closed her eyes until she eventually drifted back off to sleep.

  Once back at Heathrow Airport, Rouche had been as amiable and pleasant as always, which only made Baxter feel worse. She had ignored all of his attempts to engage with her and had pushed past to disembark before him. Her suitcase had been one of the first to come off the plane. She snatched it off the baggage carousel and wheeled it outside to wait for Thomas.

  Ten minutes later, she heard a case rolling up behind her, so focused intently on the pickup point until she heard it roll away again. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Rouche heading toward the taxi rank. Looking down at her bags, she was surprised to find her garish hat and gloves now sat on top of it. She shook her head:

  “I am a horrible, horrible person,” she whispered.

  Chapter 23

  Thursday, 17 December 2015

  9:34 A.M.

  “Morning, boss!”

  “Morning.”

  “Welcome back, Chief.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Bollocks. She’s back.”

  Five minutes after arriving at New Scotland Yard, Baxter had to fight her way through an onslaught of mostly friendly greetings in order to reach the sanctuary of her office.

  Thomas had driven her back to his house that morning, where she had treated herself to a quick shower and a change of clothes. They had enjoyed a breakfast together while Echo sulked in the corner, incredulous that Baxter would leave him in a strange place for almost an entire week. But for the first time ever, arriving at Thomas’s house had felt like coming home . . . Thomas had felt like home.

  Not entirely clear what time or even what day it was anymore, Baxter had headed into work.

  Quickly closing the door to her office, she shut her eyes and exhaled deeply, leaning against the flimsy wood in case anybody else attempted to wish her a good morning.

  “Good morning.”

  She slowly opened her eyes to find Rouche sitting behind her desk. He looked irritatingly wide-awake and full of life.

  There was a knock at the door.

  “Yes!” called Baxter. “Oh, hi, Jim.”

  An older, mustached man entered and took an inquiring look in Rouche’s direction:

  “Morning. I was just here for our interview,” he said carefully.

  “It’s fine,” she assured him, turning to Rouche:

  “Jim’s the man in charge of the ‘search’ for Detective Fawkes,” she explained.

  “So,” said Jim, not even bothering to take a seat, “seen Wolf?”

  “Nope.”

  “Great. See you next week, then,” he told her, closing the door behind him.

  Baxter braced herself for the next visitor, but none came.

  “I’m in your seat,” said Rouche, getting up to relocate onto one of the cheap plastic chairs. “I’ve scheduled a meeting with the T-Branch section chief at Thames House. Half ten. I hope that’s all right? Then we’re back here with SO15 at twelve.”

  “Fine.”

  “I thought we’d go together,” he added carefully.

  “Did you?” sighed Baxter. “Fine, but I’m driving.”

  “Keep breathing. Keep breathing. Keep breathing . . .”

  The breathalyzer beeped twice before the youthful officer removed it from Baxter’s mouth. His colleague was lying face-down on the pavement, fishing what was left of the road bike out from beneath the Audi. The Lycra-clad cyclist was being checked over by a paramedic, despite only suffering a few minor grazes. Rouche, meanwhile, was sat quietly on the curb looking visibly shaken.

  “So are we done here?” Baxter called to everybody involved.

  After a noncommittal response, she removed a business card from her pocket and handed it to the seething cyclist as she passed. Rouche got up unenthusiastically and they climbed back into the car. A few additional bits of carbon fiber clattered across the concrete as they reversed off the pavement and continued on their short journey to Millbank.

  “Stick those in the glovebox, will you?” said Baxter, handing him a stack of the Metropolitan Police business cards that she had given to the cyclist.

  Rouche took them off her but then paused:

  “You realize these have Vanita’s name on them, don’t you?” he asked.

  Baxter frowned at him as though he were being thick.

  Rouche was still staring at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “I seriously can’t have any more insurance claims against me,” she told him. “I was on my final warning from Transport about eleven accidents ago. I’ll get some Finlay Shaw cards made up when I get a chance . . . ‘Finlay’ could be a girl’s name, right?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Rouche.

  “Well, I think it could. And it’s fine!” Baxter assured him. “He’s retired. He won’t mind.”

  Rouche still looked uncertain.

  After a few minutes of quiet, in which they moved approximately five feet through the gridlocked traffic, Rouche attempted to spark a conversation:

  “Boyfriend must be glad to have you back,” he said casually.

  “I guess.” Baxter yielded to social etiquette by reciprocating the comment, which she reeled off with the emotion of a robot: “It must be nice for your family to have you around a bit more.”

  Rouche sighed: “They’d already left for work and school by the time my taxi driver had finished showing me the sights of London.”

  “Shame. We’ll try to finish at a decent time tonight so you can get back to see them.”

  “I’d like that.” He smiled. “I was thinking about what you said about Curtis and—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” Baxter shouted over him, all the raw emotion from the previous day returning in an instant.

  The silence swelled.

  “Well, don’t not talk either!” said Baxter angrily. “Can we just talk about something else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like anything. I don’t know. Tell me about your daughter or something.”

  “You like kids?” Rouche asked.

  “No.”

  “Of course not. Well, she’s got bright red hair like her mum. She likes singing, although God help you if you find yourself within earshot when she does.”

  Baxter smiled. Wolf had often said the same about her. After arresting a drug dealer who had pulled a knife on him, he had asked her to serenade their prisoner while he went to find them some lunch.

  She pulled the car up to block a busy junction.

  “She loves swimming and dancing and watching The X Factor on Saturday nights,” Rouche continued. “And all she wants for her birthday is Barbie, Barbie . . . and more Barbie.”

  “At sixteen?”

  “Sixteen?”

  “Yeah. Your friend, that FBI agent, said she was the same age as his daughter: sixteen.”

  Rouche looked lost for a moment and then laughed:

  “Wow. Nothing gets past you, does it? McFarlen is not my friend. I thought it would be easier to go along with it rather than tell him he’d got it all completely wrong. She’s six . . . Close, though.” He smiled.

  Finally, Baxter rolled them off the junction and onto a pedestrian crossing.

  “What’s her name?”

  Rouche hesitated for a moment before answering: “Ellie . . . Well, Elliot. Her name’s Elliot.”

  Chief of Section Wyld leaned back in his chair and shared a look with his colleague. Baxter had been talking for ten minutes straight, while Rouche nodded along silently.

  Wyld appeared surprisingly young to hold such a prominent position in the security services and radiated an indissoluble confidence.

  “Chief Inspector,” he interrupted when she showed no sign of slowing d
own. “We appreciate your concerns . . .”

  “But . . .”

  “. . . and you coming to us with this, but we are already well aware of your investigation and have a team working through the intel sent over by the FBI in relation to this.”

  “But I—”

  “What you have to understand,” he said forcefully over her, “is that the US and New York City, in particular, were already at a ‘Critical’ threat level, meaning that an attack was imminent.”

  “I know what it means,” said Baxter childishly.

  “Good. Then you’ll understand when I say that the UK has been maintaining a somewhat discomforting but reassuringly consistent status of ‘Severe’ for the past fifteen months.”

  “So put it up!”

  “It’s not quite as easy as just pushing a button, I’m afraid.” Wyld laughed patronizingly. “Do you have any idea what it costs the country every time we ascend a terror alert? Billions: the visible armed presence on the streets, mobilizing the military, people not going to work, a halt in investment from overseas, stock prices plummeting. The list goes on and on . . .

  “To declare ourselves ‘Critical’ is to admit to the rest of the world that we’re about to take a big hit and there’s not a damned thing we can do to stop it.”

  “So it’s about money?” said Baxter.

  “In part,” Wyld admitted. “But it’s more about us being absolutely one hundred percent positive that an attack is coming, and we’re not. Since settling at ‘Severe,’ we have prevented seven serious terror attacks that the public know about and many, many more that they don’t. My point, Chief Inspector, is that if there was going to be an incident related to the Azazel murders . . .”

  “They’re not called that.”

  “. . . we would have heard something about it by now.”

  Baxter shook her head and laughed bitterly.

  Rouche recognized the look and quickly stepped in before she could say something irreparable to the MI5 officers:

  “You can’t be suggesting that Times Square being leveled less than ten minutes after the massacre at the church was just a coincidence?”

  “Of course I’m not,” snapped Wyld. “But have you considered that the attack may have been opportunistic in nature? That this imminent terror attack was brought forward to take advantage of the NYPD’s major incident?”

  Both Baxter and Rouche remained quiet.

  “The FBI have already ascertained that the crude materials used at the church bore no resemblance whatsoever to the devices detonated down the road. And this whole ‘UK mirroring the US’ theory: we’ve only had two murders here, both as widely reported across the Atlantic as they were domestically. Even you have to admit the very real possibility that the Times Square church massacre was their endgame all along.”

  Baxter got up to leave. Rouche followed accordingly.

  “Have you had a message yet?” she asked on her way out of the door. “Has anybody claimed responsibility for all that devastation and death?”

  Wyld looked to his colleague in exasperation: “No. No, they haven’t.”

  “Know why?” she asked, now out in the corridor. “Because it’s not over yet.”

  “Dickheads!” hissed Baxter the moment they stepped out onto Millbank, the grand arched entranceway to Thames House looming above as a cold wind blew across the river.

  Rouche wasn’t listening. He was busy reading through the emails on his phone.

  “They’ve found one of the killers from the church still alive!”

  “Really? How?”

  “Buried beneath a load of debris in one of the backstage corridors apparently, away from the worst of the blast. He’s comatose, but Lennox is insisting they wake him up against the doctor’s orders.”

  “Good for her,” said Baxter. She didn’t like the special agent in charge but knew that Vanita would never make such a brave decision. It was the detectives’ job to make these difficult choices and hers to sacrifice them when they did.

  “They say he’ll more than likely suffer lasting brain damage as a result of being brought round early.”

  “Even better.”

  “If he does, it won’t end well for Lennox. They’ll want their pound of flesh.”

  “Yeah.” Baxter shrugged. “A common side effect of doing the right thing, unfortunately.”

  At 8:38 P.M., Edmunds stumbled through his front door and was confronted by the smells of talcum powder, fresh poo, and toast, and the sound of Leila screaming as loudly as her little lungs could manage.

  “Alex? Is that you?” Tia called from the bedroom.

  Edmunds glanced into the kitchen as he passed, which looked like it had been ransacked. He climbed the stairs to find Tia cradling their daughter. She looked absolutely exhausted.

  “Where have you been?”

  “Pub.”

  “The pub?”

  He nodded innocently.

  “Are you drunk?”

  Edmunds shrugged sheepishly. He’d intended to have only the one drink, but Baxter had an awful lot of awful news to catch him up on. Now that he thought about it, keeping up with her always tended to leave him feeling dodgy the following day.

  “I told you this morning,” he said, picking things up off the floor as he walked across the room.

  “No,” Tia corrected him. “You just said Emily was coming back today. Or am I supposed to deduce that once she’s back in the country, of course you’ll run straight out to go drinking with her?”

  “We’ve got a case!” blurted Edmunds.

  “No . . . you . . . don’t! She has a case! You work in Fraud!”

  “She needs me.”

  “You know what? This weird, little relationship you two have . . . it’s fine. If you want to run around after her like some pathetic lapdog, you just go right ahead.”

  “Where’s all this coming from? You love Baxter! You’re friends!”

  “Oh, please!” scoffed Tia. “The woman is a train wreck. She’s rude to the point of being farcical. She’s more opinionated than anybody I’ve ever met, and she’s as stubborn as a mule.”

  Edmunds went to argue, then realized he did not really have a retort for any of those perfectly valid points. He suspected that Tia had been practicing this Baxter-slamming tirade.

  Leila started crying even louder at her mother’s raised voice.

  “And have you seen how many wines she can put away in a night? Jesus!”

  Edmunds’s stomach grumbled in agreement. Another valid point.

  “If you like domineering women so much, how about this: go drink a pint of water, eat some toast, and sober up,” yelled Tia. “You’re taking care of Leila tonight. I’m sleeping on the sofa!”

  “Fine!”

  “Fine!”

  She threw a teddy bear at him on his way out. He picked it up and took it downstairs with him, remembering how awkward Baxter had been when she’d handed it to him on Leila’s first birthday. It made him sad to think of how difficult she found even the simplest interactions with people.

  He loved Tia more than anything and could understand her point of view, but she could not imagine the things that his best friend had been through, the devastating horrors and loss she’d suffered in the past week alone. He was going to do anything and everything in his power to help her through this.

  She needed him.

  Initiation

  Tuesday, 24 November 2015

  9:13 P.M.

  She knew it was her turn.

  She could feel their eyes on her, and still she didn’t move.

  A fleeting glance behind her confirmed what she had already known: that the only way out might as well have been on the other side of the world.

  She couldn’t make it.

  “Sasha?” a voice said softly in her ear.

  Alexei was standing beside her. She needed to remind herself to address him formally in front of the others. He didn’t let just anybody call him by his first name, but he had told her
that she was special.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” he said kindly, holding his hand out to her. “Come on.”

  They walked between the others. For those on Sasha’s left, the ordeal was already over, but the anxious wait for those on her right had been drawn out a little longer by her cowardice.

  Green led her to the front of the room, to where a red smear had been dragged across the polished floor, one of her “brothers” having lost consciousness halfway through. A man she didn’t recognize regarded her emotionlessly, a bloody blade waiting in his hands. He wouldn’t clean it, not before disfiguring her—that was the point. They were one now, equal, connected.

  “Ready?” asked Green.

  Sasha nodded, taking short, rapid breaths.

  He moved behind her to unbutton her blouse and slide it off her shoulders.

  But as the stranger brought the blade toward her, she flinched, stumbling backward into Green.

  “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m OK.” She stepped back up to the dead-eyed man, closed her eyes, and nodded.

  He raised the knife once more . . . She felt the cold metal push against her skin.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she said, beginning to cry as she moved away. “I can’t.”

  While she sobbed in front of her audience, Green embraced her tightly: “Shhhh . . . Shhhh,” he soothed her.

  “I’ll do whatever you want me to, I swear,” Sasha told him. “This means everything to me. I just . . . can’t.”

  “But, Sasha, you do understand why I’m asking you to do this for me?” asked Green.

  A violent branding couldn’t have been as painful as the look of betrayal he shot her.

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me . . . In fact, even better, tell us all,” said Green, releasing her.

  She cleared her throat:

  “It shows you that we would do anything for you, that we are yours, and that we will follow you anywhere, do what you say without question.” She looked again at the curved blade and started to weep.

  “Good. But you know you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Green assured her. “Are you positive you can’t do this?”

  She shook her head.