‘See?’ said Henry. ‘Now it loves you.’
Henry spent years beating love into Patrick. But this isn’t a love beating. It’s just a beating. Patrick knows the difference.
When it’s over, Henry stands over him. His hair is sticking up. His face is pale with loathing. Two pale tributaries of snot run from his nostrils into his mouth.
‘Well, what the fuck do we do now?’ he shouts. ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Everyone’s going to think I’m a fucking kiddie-fiddler.’
He kicks Patrick one more time. Then he retreats to the kitchen, head in hands.
Patrick curls into a ball on the floor. He lies there and doesn’t move.
CHAPTER 9
Maggie Reilly is fifty-one and supremely well groomed — even in the studio, where nobody but her producer and the engineer can see her. Grey trouser suit, cerise shirt, glossy high heels.
Maggie took a roundabout and now obsolete way to get here: Bristol Evening Post at eighteen, straight out of A-levels. At twenty-five she made the move to television, working as a reporter on Westward! an early evening current- affairs programme. Two years later she moved to television news in London.
There were some award shortlistings, including one for rear of the year. She was named as a correspondent in a reasonably high-profile divorce case. There were some unflattering photographs in the papers, most famously of Maggie leaving the ‘love den’ looking frumpy and hungover; a trick of light and shadow added twenty years and several chins. There followed a year or two in the wilderness during which she wrote a newspaper column, renting out opinions she didn’t really hold, or not that strongly.
And now here she is, born again, enjoying solid but unremarkable ratings on the Talk London Drivetime slot, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Yesterday, an elderly immigrant woman was hit and killed by a bendy bus just round the corner from Camberwell Art College; there’s nothing like a bendy bus death to make London ers irate. Maggie’s taken three consecutive calls on the subject and the subject’s getting old. Keen to move on, she hits the dump button, goes to line four.
‘Pete Black from Woking,’ she says. ‘You’re through to Maggie Reilly on London Talk FM.’
‘Hello Maggie,’ says Pete Black from Woking. ‘First-time caller, long-time fan.’
‘Well,’ she chuckles, checking out the monitor on the corner of her desk, ‘a girl can’t have too many of them.’
‘Since ’95, actually,’ says Pete from Woking. ‘I used to live in Bristol.’
‘Did you, my lover?’
He chuckles at the exaggerated accent. ‘I remember that thing you did,’ he says. ‘The thing about little Adrian York.’
Maggie laughs that near-famous cigarette laugh. ‘Well, if I was feeling a bit blue round the edges, I’d say that dates you. So what’s got your back up today, Pete?’
‘Okay. Really, I’m calling to say that I’m the one who killed Tom and Sarah Lambert. It was me.’
There are two full seconds of dead air during which Maggie glances up and makes eye-contact with Danny, her producer. He’s already reaching for the phone to call the station boss.
The engineer, Fuzzy Rob, is already Tweeting.
Holding the phone, Danny makes a gesture: Keep going.
Maggie swallows. Her throat is dry. She says, ‘Are you still there, Pete?’
Detective Sergeant ‘Scary’ Mary Lally finds Luther making himself an instant coffee and eating cream crackers from the packet.
She hands him a thin file. ‘The head we found at the squat. The owner’s a Chloe Hill.’
Luther flicks on the kettle then glances through the file. ‘‘Owner”,’ he says. ‘Do you own your head?’
‘Whatever. It belongs to Ms Hill. She was nineteen. Died in a motorcycle accident. Canvey Island.’
‘So it’s not just dead girls he goes for. It’s dead girls and motorbikes. Blimey.’
‘Her grave had been interfered with,’ Lally says. ‘This is seven or eight months ago. We’re thinking either he dug her up himself or maybe paid a friend to do it for him.’
‘So where’s the rest of her?’
‘Still in the grave, presumably.’
‘We can only hope, eh?’
‘Should I order an exhumation?’
‘Let’s start the process, yeah. So this has nothing to do with the Lambert murder?’
‘I don’t think so, Guv.’
‘Call me Boss.’ He massages his brow, hands back the file. He’s about to say something else when the door bangs open and Teller steams in.
She says, ‘Do you ever listen to London Talk FM?’
‘No,’ says Luther. ‘Why?’
‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘You’ll enjoy this.’
Luther follows her across a weirdly silent and watchful bullpen, wondering what’s going on.
Teller slams her office door, gestures for him to shut up and listen.
She stabs a finger onto her keyboard, unmuting the volume on a streamed radio broadcast.
‘Pete,’ says the husky-voiced woman on the radio. ‘I’m asking you on bended knee. Please. Whether this is true or not, you need help. You need to give yourself in to the proper authorities.’
‘Tom and Sarah Lambert sexually abused my daughter,’ says the caller. ‘They weren’t fit to be parents.’
Luther glances at Teller.
She doesn’t respond. She’s pacing the office, arms crossed, head down.
Luther bows his head. Shuts his eyes. Listens.
‘They seemed a nice couple,’ the caller says. ‘They loved kids. One night we let them take care of our little girl-’
‘Pete, I need to stop you there.’
‘Okay. I get you. All I’m saying is, there were reasons.’
‘Whatever your reasons,’ says Maggie Reilly, ‘right now we’re talking about a helpless baby. So where’s baby Emma, right now?’
Luther mouths: Emma? Since when?
Teller shrugs.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ says Pete Black.
‘A newborn needs medical attention, Pete. You must know that.’
‘She’s fit and well. She’s happy. She’s a very contented little baby. She’s lovely.’
‘You do know you can’t keep her? You have to hand her in to the proper authorities.’
‘That’s why I’m calling. I want her to be well looked after. I want her placed with a loving family that can care for her properly.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’ll drop her off tonight. At a hospital. Something like that. A convent or something.’
‘Don’t wait for tonight. Do it now. Do it as soon as you can, Pete.’
‘Yeah. But I need an assurance, don’t I.’
‘What assurance? From whom?’
‘The police.’
Teller braces herself against the desk. Here it comes.
‘What kind of assurance?’ says Maggie.
‘I want the police to promise me, in front of London, that they’ll let me drop off Emma safely. They won’t be watching the hospitals.’
The strength goes out of Teller and she sits.
‘All I want,’ says Pete Black, ‘all I want is for little Emma to be safe and sound. I need the police to help me with that. I’ll call back later.’
There’s a click and the line goes dead.
Three endless seconds of dead air.
‘Okay, London,’ says Maggie Reilly. ‘Your reactions in a moment. First, let’s go straight to the news.’
After a moment Teller says, ‘So what do we think?’
Luther dry-washes his face. Rasp of skin on stubble.
‘It’s him.’
It’s in the self-justification, the moral blankness. The need to control.
He tugs at his weary eyes. Looks at the ceiling.
‘Holy shit,’ he says.
London Talk FM is run from a corporate office building on the Gray’s Inn Road. Grey and chrome, smoked glass. Luther and Howie arrive early in the evening; they’re obliged to edge through a scrum of media already gathered outside.
There’s a uniformed security guard at the front desk. He asks Luther and Howie to sign in, gives them each a badge, directs them to the lifts.
They go up five floors, then step into an anonymous reception. A few promotional posters have been framed and mounted.