Flowers of a Wolf

Chapter 6

DAY 6

Rawford was running across a field, everything awash in silver from the huge oversized moon hanging behind him, his shadow racing ahead. Feet bare, heart hammering, his legs flew him across the wet grass. He was coming up on a dark wood, its tree-lined edge catching the light all saw-toothed and serrated. He knew where he must go, the scent of his enemy filling his nostrils. He was close.

Slowing his pace through the trees, he shifted gears, slipping between the gray trunks, now a thing of stealth. A shadow.

Each tree stood like a silent marker, defining his enemy's territory. Then the trees flickered and became the towers of Heygate estate and London's Southwark of his childhood. He shook his head and he was back in the wood, stalking, hunting his prey. There ahead, a patch of light, showing a glade opening up with a stream running through it. And lying asleep on the other side, the great gray Wolf.

Rawford stepped out into the glade, circling the Wolf. He was not so craven as to attack from behind or even its flank. No, he would look the beast in its cold dark eyes and then kill it.

Without warning, the ground shook. Rawford froze and stared about him. Again it shook and this time he stumbled. Looking around, he saw the trees shaking and bending as a great wind hit the woods. He looked back at the Wolf. Its head was raised and stared at him with his yellow baleful eyes.

"I see you," said the great Wolf, each word a reminder of his failure.

To the left of Rawford, the ground shrugged a huge heave, and trees collapsed. He tried to stand but failed as he was buffeted by the terrible wind. Leaning into it, he focused on what he was here to do.

"I see you," said the Wolf again, now with a great tongue lolling out of its mouth, mocking him, seemingly unaffected by the storm around them.

Rawford shook his head, crawling forward, splashing into the stream. He stumbled and looked down, and saw his reflection. And saw a wolf with yellow eyes. This time the wind knocked him over and he hit the surface, his face full of water. And woke up.

He was lying in a darkened room, a still figure in the bed beside him. Rawford looked at his watch. It read 04:23. Turning on his side, all the pain returned. The dull throbbing band around his head. Check. Sharp stabs from his broken ribs. Check. And for good measure old injuries - his crap knee and back - joined in forming a waking chorus. Check. Gods, he felt like shit.

Fuck it, he thought and got up. He left Pete's bedroom as quietly as he could, swallowing his wincing and moaning so it didn't exit his mouth.

He found his meds in his jacket pocket. He felt the letter from HR still stuffed inside too, the kind of letter with words printed in all caps and bold. A second page detailed the regulations for Sickness Absence Management procedures. Or a 'SAM'. His first SAM meeting was scheduled for tomorrow, 10am with the Chief Super and his Union rep, whoever that might be.

Swallowing the meds, he wandered over to the spaceship-looking kitchen in search of coffee and wondered again not for the first time, how the hell much do contract analysts actually get paid.

Pete's flat was on the ninth floor of a dark mirrored tower in Bermondsey, a stone's throw from the south side of the Thames, the ancient river which wended through the middle of London. As well as its roof garden, gym - with a bloody sauna - and underground car park, it even had a concierge. Which reminded Rawford of something from a US TV show he'd watched with his mum as a kid. This flat made quite the mockery of his own flat - and not just in size and layout. The cardboard boxes in his own spare room - each containing meager possessions and a bunch of his mum's stuff - still waiting to be unpacked. Two years on. I'm busy, OK, he'd of said. Whereas here, elegant oversized paintings played tandem with an abundance of bookshelves - all neat rows, lines of all sizes. Even real records for a bloody record player, he spied when he first walked into the flat.

"Right bi-atch, this time you're mine," Rawford whispered to the coffee machine, which he'd mistaken for a Ferrari engine, sitting on the long marble counter. It was branded Ferrari, so he wasn't completely off the mark. Prodding the screen did nothing. Water, he thought, I should add water. Running his hands over the steel and chrome pipes did nothing to help. How is everything in this place so bloody clean?

"Can I help?"

Pete was standing in a bathrobe covered in manga characters, which looked completely out of place in his swanky home.

"I'm a fucking detective aren't I?" Rawford replied, raising an eyebrow at the other man.

Pete walked over, smiling. "A busted up cop, on sick leave–"

"Copper, Fuzz, or Rozzer. Even the Filth, but no one calls us cops Pete. Get it right eh."

Pete stopped in front of him, hands on his hips. "Step aside you fucking fuzzy filth and I'll make you a coffee." 

Rawford decided not to tell Pete no one combined these words either. Instead, he smiled and hobbled over to the sofa.

Lying on the huge coffee table - Rawford imagined it had had a previous life in a Moroccan prince's home - was a brown manilla folder, police issue. A white sticker in the top right with handwritten letters said September Chairs. The investigation. His investigation. He flicked through the A4 printouts. The top page had a long list of references of what he wasn't sure. On each line, he thought he could discern a location code. Same on the next page. Rawford flicked through the report and stopped when he saw a graph but struggled to understand what he was looking at.

"What's this?" he asked when Pete sat down on the sofa next to him and handed him his coffee.

"Anomalies" began Pete. "Someone - yours truly - decided to do some digging into the CCTV camera traffic. Both police run, TFL, LA, whatever I could get my hands on."

"LA?" Jesus, Ferrari makes a good cuppa, Rawford thought.

"Local Authority." Pete frowned a little at that.

"And you mean the road traffic cameras–"

"No sorry, I mean the data traffic. While a lot of real-time data is freely available via an S3 bucket on AWS, I was interested in the source data. That report is from our Azure servers - actual production servers. There are several interesting spikes on the following...what?"

Rawford was staring hard back at him. "Oi, in English mate. I'm just a stupid Copper right."

"Oh" and there was that smile of his again, thought Rawford.

"Well, the short and curlies of it is–"

"Better" nodded Rawford.

"I think someone's been hacking in via our servers. Not Transport for London, or the Local Authority's cameras, but ours. And somehow...altering the recorded footage."

Rawford sat up, ignoring the sharp pain the tablets seemed to have missed.

"Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure," replied Pete.

"But then couldn't you tell who's logged in and –" Rawford asked, fully awake now.

"Er no, it doesn't work like that, but I can..." Pete wiggled his fingers "Blah techie-tech-speak blah, run some tests. Anyhow, I'm glad your attempts at making coffee woke me up." He stood up and stretched. "Reckon I'll head in early - see what else I can pull together for the 9.30 briefing."

Pete looked almost embarrassed at mentioning the morning meeting, but Rawford waved it away.

"It's cool. You crack on. I'll just laze around your very humble abode if that's OK."

Pete waved over his shoulder and wandered off towards the bathroom.

Rawford' thoughts returned to the blonde-haired Wolf, their killer, and his enemy. Could he be the kind to hack into servers? If not, did he have help? And whoever it was, how the hell long had he been doing this?

Techno-whizz or not, one thing he was sure of, was that head of blonde hair was a syrup, a bloody wig. Bugger was in disguise. Who the hell are you Wolf eh?

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