They’re met by a pretty and energetic young intern, who leads them to a glass-fronted conference room. Danish pastries on the long table.
On the other side of the table sit a scruffy man and a good-looking woman in early middle age. Danny Hillman and Maggie Reilly.
The four shake hands across the table, cordial and watchful. Hillman takes two business cards from his wallet and slides them across the table to Luther and Howie.
Luther glances over the card. ‘I’m sorry to cut to the chase,’ he says, ‘but obviously we’re against the clock here, so…’
Maggie Reilly gives him the smile. ‘Ask away.’
‘Obviously,’ Luther says, ‘our first priority is to request that you don’t give this man any more airtime.’
‘Seriously,’ says Hillman. ‘How could we ever justify doing that?’
‘Because he’s not who he says he is?’
‘You don’t know that, any more than we do — unless you’ve caught and arrested the real killer. Have you?’
Luther shrugs, tucks the business card into his wallet.
‘I’m not going to discuss open investigations with you, Mr Hillman. You’ll have to take my word for it.’
‘If you knew who he was,’ says Danny Hillman, ‘you’d have released his name to the media by now.’
‘You think what you want. But I guarantee you this: if you cooperate with this man, nobody will ever see that baby alive. People like Pete Black only ever contact the media because it serves their agenda.’
‘And can we quote you on all this?’ says Maggie, with a warning grin. ‘Senior Investigating Officer warns London Talk FM not to help find little baby Emma?’
Hillman steps in, speaks over Luther’s visible irritation. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a very clear public interest here. We’ve run it past the lawyers. They’re happy. If you try to gag us, we’ll go to air with it, treat it as a story. And once it’s discovered the police tried to stop us helping save a child’s life — what happens then?’
Luther sits back. ‘I can apply for a D-Notice.’
He means a Defence Advisory Notice, an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast certain stories.
Hillman says, ‘We’re not releasing any information that pertains or relates to national security.’
Luther sidesteps that. ‘So how are the ratings?’ he asks. ‘Sky-high, right? Killer calls. You Tweet, you put it on bloody Facebook, it goes viral. You amplify that new interest by running the call as a news headline every what, fifteen minutes? Killer Calls London Talk FM! Other news outlets pick up the story. These things spread like an explosion. In a few hours, you’re sitting on the biggest story in Britain. Which makes you, this station, the biggest story in Britain. We’ve seen them downstairs. The hyenas.’
‘This is a commercial operation, absolutely,’ says Hillman. ‘But believe it or not, we actually do have the interests of our listeners at heart. And our city. Not to mention baby Emma.’
‘Her name’s not Emma. She hasn’t got a name yet. Her parents died before she was born.’
‘She’s got a name now,’ says Maggie. ‘For better or worse.’
‘All right,’ says Hillman. ‘Let’s all calm down.’ He stands and goes to the window. Peers out on London at night; unreal city. He turns to face them, leaning on the windowsill. ‘When you came in here,’ he says, ‘you knew we’d never kill the story. You had to ask, but you knew. So what are you really asking?’
Luther won’t answer, so it’s Howie who says, ‘We’re asking you to help us catch him.’
The intern walks in with their coffees. She places them almost reverently on the conference table and slips away. When she’s gone, some of the tension has drained from the room.
After successfully defending editorial principle, Hillman agrees without caveat to the covert deployment of a police intelligence and surveillance crew. They’ll arrive in plain clothes, and monitor and trace all calls to the station. (They’ll also be surveilling the surrounding area, in case Pete Black shows up in person. But Luther doesn’t feel the need to share this detail.)
The meeting is concluded cordially enough. Luther and Howie button their coats. Then Luther pauses in the doorway. ‘One more thing,’ he says.
‘Ask away,’ says Hillman.
But Luther is speaking to Maggie. ‘There’s a lot of journalists in the world,’ he says. ‘Why did he come to you?’
‘None taken,’ she says. ‘Obviously, he listens to the show. When you’re in the public eye, people imagine they’ve got a relationship with you. So, yeah. He trusts me.’
‘But he was pretty specific.’ Luther checks his notes and recites: ‘That thing you did. Adrian York.’
‘Ah,’ she grins. ‘1995. My annus mirabilis. My one and only ever report for Newsnight. Passion piece. Got nommed.’
‘Nommed?’
‘Nominated. The Margaret Wakely Award for Contribution to Awareness of Women’s Issues in Television Journalism.’
‘You win?’
The grin widens. ‘Always the bridesmaid.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Luther says. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. But the name — Adrian York. It doesn’t ring a bell.’
‘That was kind of the point,’ she says. ‘It was an outrageous case, really. Still makes me angry to think about it.’
Luther and Howie take their seats and let Maggie tell it the way she wants to.
‘Basically,’ she says, ‘decent working-class woman makes a bad marriage. Chrissie York. She’s got one child, Adrian. The marriage breaks down. The husband’s got an Australian passport. Chrissie begins to worry he plans to kidnap the child, take him back to the old country.’
‘It happens,’ Luther says.
‘Too right it happens. Meanwhile, the son makes certain allegations about his father. Drug use, prostitutes and so on. The mother reports the allegations. Some court-appointed psychologist decides she’s coached Adrian to lie in order to discredit the father. She’s therefore causing him what they call “emotional harm”, which is a meaningless catch-all phrase if ever you heard one. And when Adrian actually does go missing, police are slow to respond because they assume the mother’s loony tunes and the father’s done it for the kid’s own good. So the father’s their prime and only suspect, if suspect’s the right word.
‘Eventually, and this is like eighteen months later, they track the father down to some shithole in Sydney. He denies all knowledge of snatching his son, wants nothing to do with him. Denies the kid is even his. But by then the case is cold and the story’s old. Never found any traction with the media. Or the police. No offence.’
‘None taken. Do we know where the father is now?’
‘No idea.’
‘But he definitely wasn’t Pete Black?’
‘He was Aussie. Pete Black sounds pure London to me.’
‘Me too. What happened to the mother?’
‘Last I heard, she was in hospital. Overdose. But that’s a long time ago.’
Luther shakes his head.
Howie mouths the word: Blimey.
‘Chrissie York never saw her son again,’ says Maggie Reilly, with more than a hint of the old anger; the feral ghost of the news journalist she used to be, wishes she still was. ‘She never had any idea what happened to him. Well, she had lots of ideas, obviously. But no proof. And nobody seemed to care. It was an ugly little story. All there was to show was this woman who’d tried her best, who’d been let down by everyone — because she married badly, because she was working class, because she sounded like a hysterical woman. And because there were sexier stories around. Easier stories.’
‘And this is what your piece was about? The piece Pete Black mentioned?’
‘Yeah. It was the best piece I ever did.’
‘Can I see it?’
She gives him a brittle grin. ‘It’s on my website. Click on Archive.’
He nods that he will. Then he says, ‘Anyone ever call you about it? Show undue interest? Write letters? Whatever?’
‘Never. Remember, you’re talking about a long-ago abduction that nobody remembers.’