CHAPTER 12
They seal off a two-kilometre area around King’s Cross, concentrate the search on the Joy Christian Centre, at Saints Church of England, St Aloysius Convent, the Crowndale Health Centre on Crowndale Road, the Killick Street Heath Centre, the New Horizon Youth Centre.
Luther elects to join the squad searching the grounds of St Pancras Old Church, on the edge of the search perimeter.
It’s the largest green area in the parish, and one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in London. Ancient trees. Ancient graves.
He arrives at an archaic ash tree ringed by a rusty fence. Around the tree’s root-base, timeworn gravestones have been crammed together. They stand like weird fungi. Over the years the roots of the tree have grown between the stones, knocked them off-true, seem to be in the process of consuming them.
A baby has been jammed between two of the stones, sprinkled with handfuls of soil and leaf humus.
Luther reaches down.
He takes the baby from the earth.
Then he lays her back. She’s cold.
Luther steps outside the evidence tent. Eyes pass over him. Coppers, onlookers, paramedics.
Outside the gates, misery lights flash blue. Uniformed officers erect crowd barriers.
The media are here, of course: there is a scrum of faces, all colours and ages, the mass homogenized by their eagerness to catch a glimpse.
There’s a helicopter overhead.
He buries his hands deep into his pockets and strides through wet grass to a far, secret corner of the churchyard.
He puts his back to the Victorian brick wall. It crawls with evergreen climbing plants. It’s shockingly wet.
He puts his head in his hands and cries.
When he’s finished, Teller’s there, half sitting, half leaning on a gravestone.
Luther’s eyes are raw and wet. He wipes them with the back of the hand. He’s embarrassed.
Teller doesn’t say a word.
For something to do, they walk to the church.
Inside, they find cool stone and heavy silence. The sweet, dusty fragrance of old incense.
Teller sits on the pew in front but turned to face him, resting her chin on her forearm. She watches him.
He says, ‘Fuck.’
‘I know,’ she says.
Outside is the crime scene, the tape, SOCO, the medical examiners, and beyond them the church gates that lead back into the city, the crush of people, the cameras, the journalists, the mobile phones, the love songs on the radio of passing cars.
At the entrance to the church, a recently added marble stone is inscribed: And I am here/in a place/beyond desire or fear.
She touches his forearm.
He nods at his lap. Then he dry-washes his face to massage some life into it. He stands. Claps his big hands.
She watches him walk outside, through the big doors and into the morning. A big man with a big walk. The world turning like a wheel beneath him.
CHAPTER 13
Henry buys the Mail, the Mirror, the Sun, the Independent and The Times. But not the Guardian. Henry detests the Guardian.
Then he goes to the cafe and orders a full English. He shrugs off his overcoat and scarf and, still trembling, sits at one of the red plastic moulded tables, bolted to the floor in an ungenerous manner that has become the norm.
It saddens him. But proper cafes, cafes like this, are closing by the dozen every week, winking out of existence like fairy lights. So he’ll take what he can get.
He adds sugar to his tea, stirs it with a dirty teaspoon, stained by years of daily immersion in tannin.
Then he can’t put it off any longer. He opens the first newspaper.
They tell the story the same way: LONDON HOLDS ITS BREATH. PRAYERS SAID FOR BABY EMMA. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE PLEDGED LAST NIGHT… HUNDREDS OF POLICE CANCELLED LEAVE LAST NIGHT… WE ALL PRAY… IN DARK TIMES…
Henry burns with rage and embarrassment.
He looks through the window at the damp city coming alive: the market owners setting up stalls, selling organic veg and Indian food and knock-off Caterpillar boots and cheap polo shirts. The women walking to work at the local Tesco, the taxi drivers stopping outside the newsagent to pop in for a paper and a packet of fags.
Then he turns back to the paper — to the photographs of the smiling Lamberts, the woman he sliced open like ripe fruit to remove the fresher fruit within. He’d slit the throbbing blue umbilicus with a folding knife he’d owned since he was a boy.
He’d been sure the Lamberts were ideal; he stuck with them through the years of IVF because he never doubted their fertility. They were too exquisite not to be. Two bodies like that, they were breeding machines.
Simple genetic principles implied their child would be ideal, too. But it wasn’t. It was a mewling little runt.
It’s not Henry’s fault she died. And at least London knows that now. People know that the man who took Baby Emma wasn’t a pervert.
Zoe goes downstairs and turns on the TV, sees the affable morning newsreader pulling her grave face.
‘… an update on this still-developing story,’ she says. ‘Acting on a tip-off from the man who claimed to have kidnapped baby Emma Lambert, visibly devastated police officers reportedly found the body of a baby at St Pancras Old Church in central London early this morning. Simon Maxwell- Davis is at the scene.’
Zoe watches live footage of a London churchyard. A dizzying zoom — and there’s John, stomping away from an evidence tent. Rose Teller is a beat behind him, like a terrier at his heels.
It’s followed by helicopter footage of John leaning against a wall and apparently weeping.
Zoe’s hand goes to her throat.
Cut back to the young man with the microphone. Blond and ruddily handsome, a little chubby.
‘Well, Lorna,’ he says, to the anchor, to the viewers, to Zoe, ‘this must be the moment all police officers dread. Although I should stress that we’ve yet to have official confirmation, our sources do tell us that, following the dramatic call made to a London radio station early this morning, police have indeed found the body of a baby here at St Pancras Old Church in central London. Details are very sketchy at this time-’
Zoe snaps off the TV and calls John.
She gets voicemail.
He never answers his fucking phone. It’s one of those things about him. It drives her insane. He says if you go around answering your phone, all it does is ring.
‘John,’ she says, ‘it’s me. I don’t know what time it is. It’s early. I’ve just seen the news. Give me a call as soon as you can. I just want to know you’re okay. Please. Just — y’know.’
She hangs up. Tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. She puts her face in her hands. She says her own name like a mantra: Zoe, Zoe, Zoe.
Then she cranes her neck and looks at the ceiling.
Her phone rings. She snatches it up. It’s Mark. He says, ‘Have you been watching the news?’
‘I’m watching it now.’
‘Jesus Christ, Zoe. Are you okay?’
She doesn’t know.
Mark says, ‘Have you heard from him?’
‘No.’
‘Do you think he’s okay?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says, testily. ‘I really don’t know who’s okay and who’s not.’
‘Listen,’ he says, not rising to the bait. She loves him for it. ‘Whatever you need me to do, I’m here. If you want me to come over, I’ll be right over. If you want me to stay away, I’ll stay away. Just let me know.’
She says, ‘Look. Thanks. I appreciate it. I really do. But we had a row last night. A pretty bad one. And then, here he is on TV, crying. That’s not like him. And… I just don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got to go.’
‘Go where?’
‘To work.’
After a moment he says, ‘Is that a good idea?’
‘What else am I supposed to do?’ she says. ‘Hang around the house all day, watching the news? If I did that every time John was up to his neck in something horrible, I wouldn’t have a job to go to.’