He enters the dark living room and sets down his backpack.
He shrugs off his pea coat, folds it and lays it on the sofa. He unzips the backpack and removes a pair of painter’s bootees. He slips them over his shoes.
Then he wriggles into a pair of paper overalls. He pulls up the elasticated hood. He stands there in the white paper jumpsuit and the thin rubber gloves.
He reaches into the backpack and removes his tools: a taser, a silvery roll of duct tape (one corner folded over for easy access), a scalpel, a carpet knife.
At the bottom of the rucksack, rolled into a sausage, is a small polar fleece blanket with satinette edging.
He lays the blanket on the sofa. Looks down at it, a pallid rectangle.
The killer’s spirit balloons and seems to leave his body. He hovers above himself.
He watches himself head upstairs: gently now, gently.
He avoids the fifth step, slips back into his body, and proceeds into darkness.
Luther kills time in the waiting area by flicking through a tatty old Heat magazine.
In the far corner, a tramp with ash-grey dreadlocks bellows at God, or perhaps that he is God. It’s difficult to tell.
Reed limps out around 3.15 a.m. Luther takes his coat and helps him through the doors, through the main entrance, blazing bright.
They cross the wet car park to Luther’s decayed old Volvo.
Luther drives Reed home — a top-floor, one-bedroom rented apartment in Kentish Town.
The flat is bare and disorderly, as if it were temporary accommodation, which it is. All Reed’s flats are temporary accommodation.
Reed yearns for a big house, a big garden with a trampoline in it, a horde of kids to bounce on it — his own kids, their friends, their cousins, their neighbours.
Reed dreams of community, of pub lunches on Sunday, of street parties, of wearing comedy aprons as he cooks sausages at well-attended barbecues. He dreams of being adored by his children, adoring them in return.
At thirty-eight, he’s been married four times and is childless.
He hands Luther a buff folder.
Luther leans against the wall and flicks through the file. Sees arrest sheets, mugshots, surveillance reports.
The top sheets detail the kids who were arrested, remanded and released for harassing Bill Tanner: dead-eyed ratboys, English white trash.
Beneath the arrest sheets are more detailed reports on Lee Kidman, Barry Tonga and their boss Julian Crouch.
Luther slips the folder into a carrier bag and checks his watch.
It’s late. He thinks about going home. But what would be the point? He thinks about the dead and can’t sleep. He lies there boiling like a star about to explode.
So he drives to Crouch’s place, a townhouse overlooking Highbury Fields.
He parks and sits at the wheel. He wonders what he’s going to do to Julian Crouch and how he’s going to get away with it.
At length, he pops the boot, walks round the Volvo and pulls out a hickory wood pickaxe handle. He feels its satisfying weight.
He marches across Highbury Fields and waits in darkness, the pickaxe handle clenched in his fist.
Shortly after 4.30 a.m., an immaculate, vintage Jaguar pulls up.
Julian Crouch gets out. He’s got riotously curly hair, thinning on top. Suede coat, paisley shirt. White Adidas.
He opens his front door and hits the lights — but lingers on the threshold, backlit by the chandelier. He sniffs the air like prey at a waterhole. He knows someone’s out there, watching him.
He frowns and shuts the door, squeaks across marble tiles.
Luther stares at the house, breathing.
Lights come on.
Crouch comes to his bedroom window. He looks down like a troubled king from his high castle, peering into blackness. Then he draws the curtains and turns off the light.
Luther stands sentinel. His heart is a furnace.
At length, a fox scurries down the centre of the empty road. Luther can hear the quick, prim click of its claws on tarmac.
He watches the fox until it disappears, and he heads back to his car.
He waits until the winter sun begins to rise and the first joggers pass by. Then he drives home.
CHAPTER 2
Luther walks through the red door before 6 a.m.
Zoe’s already up. She’s in the kitchen making coffee, bed-headed and lovely in silk pyjamas. She smells of sleep and home and that scent behind her ears, the scent of her skin.
She takes a carton of orange juice from the fridge, pours herself a glass. ‘So did you tell her?’
‘Babe,’ he says, taking off his coat. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t get the chance.’
She drinks almost a whole glass of juice, then wipes her mouth with the back of a hand. ‘What does that mean, exactly?’
Luther nods at the floor. It’s his tell, a signal that he’s lying. He knows it. He says, ‘It’s just, the timing was wrong.’
‘The timing’s always wrong.’ She puts the juice back in the fridge. Then she crosses her arms, silently counts down from five. ‘Do you actually want to do this?’
‘I do,’ he says. ‘I absolutely do.’
‘Because you look like death, John. You actually look ill. When’s the last time you slept?’
He doesn’t know. But he knows his mind’s not right. At night his skull cracks open and spiders crawl inside.
‘When’s the last time you did anything,’ she says, ‘except work?’
Zoe’s a lawyer, specializing in human rights and immigration. She earns good money; they’ve got a nice Victorian house with a red door. A little shabby inside. Scuffed skirting. 1970s heating. No kids. Lots of books.
She turned to him in bed one morning, propped her head on the heel of her hand, her hair mussy and chaotic. Winter rain peppered like gravel against the window. The central heating was on the fritz: they’d slept in their socks. It was too cold to get out of bed.
She said, ‘Sod it. Let’s go somewhere.’
He said, ‘Go where?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Wherever. When did we last have a holiday?’
‘We went on that boat thing.’
He was referring to a holiday they’d taken with Zoe’s colleague and her husband. Photographs showed four smiling people propped near the rudder of a barge, raising wine glasses. But it had been a disaster: Luther alienated and withdrawn, Zoe brittle and blithely make-do.
Luther said, ‘That can’t have been the last holiday.’
‘Where then? Where have we been?’
He didn’t know.
‘We made all these promises to each other,’ Zoe said, ending his silence. ‘About how it would be. We’d travel. We’d spend time together. So how come none of it happened?’
He lay on his back and listened to the icy rain. Then he turned, propping himself up on an elbow. He said, ‘Are you happy?’
‘Not really, no. Are you?’
His heart hammered in his chest.
‘We go days and days,’ she said. ‘We hardly speak. I just want to see a bit more of you. I want it to actually be like we’re married.’
‘Me, too,’ he said. ‘But look — if our biggest problem is that we’d like to spend more time together then, well… that’s not so bad, is it? Not when you look at other people.’
She shrugged.
Luther loves his wife. She’s the straw at which he clutches. It mystifies him that he needs to tell her this. When he tries, she gets embarrassed: she laughs and makes a humorously appalled face.
Propped up in bed on that cold morning, he banished thoughts of the dead kid and said, ‘So what are you thinking?’
‘We take a year off,’ she said. ‘Rent out the house to cover the mortgage.’
‘I don’t want strangers living in my house.’
She batted his upper arm, impatiently. ‘Let me finish? Can I at least finish?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Well, actually there’s not much more to say. We just, we pack and we travel.’
‘Where?’
‘Anywhere. Where do you want to go?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘There must be somewhere.’