‘Did it mean anything to you, when you heard it?’
Howie shakes her head.
‘It did to me,’ he says. ‘It meant something.’
‘Like I say. It’s a pretty common name.’
‘Yeah,’ Luther says. ‘But he chose it. And our choices reveal us, don’t they? So do me a favour, look into it. Not at the files. Go a bit wider.’
‘Wilco, Boss.’
Howie sets aside the cold case files and turns to her computer.
Luther doesn’t know what he’s expected to say at the press conference until he’s sitting flanked by Teller and her boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Russell Cornish, addressing the media.
‘The murder of the Lambert family and the kidnap of baby Emma Lambert is a tragedy for all concerned,’ Luther recites. ‘For the victims, for their families, for the police, for the country as a whole. The Metropolitan Police would like to extend a plea to the man who has identified himself as “Pete Black”,’ he pauses, and his eyes take in the room: the journalists, the cameras, the lights, ‘to please contact us on the number listed below. Pete, we know you’re in a great deal of emotional turmoil, and we want to help you. We want to talk to you and we will make every effort to do so. But we cannot communicate via the mass media. So please, call the number listed below. Be assured that we’ll know it’s you we’re talking to.’
He looks at the desk, fighting his embarrassment and shame.
‘We would also like to appeal to the family of the man who calls himself Pete Black. His voice is being made available to you on many news websites, on the police’s own website, and also on a Facebook “tip” page we’ve established for this purpose. Somebody out there knows who Pete Black is. He’s a husband or a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague. So we’re asking members of the public to please listen to the recording of his voice. Is this someone you know?
‘We urge you to bear in mind that “Pete Black” is in a great deal of pain and that by helping us you will not be betraying him, but helping him.
‘Once again I say to the man calling himself Pete Black: we urge you, for your own sake, to please get in contact.’
As he reels off the phone numbers one more time, he surveys the crowd. Then he says, ‘No questions at this time. Thank you very much.’
He gathers up his papers and leaves the clamouring journalists, the shifting HD cameras. The void compound eye.
In the corridor he leans against the wall and closes his eyes.
He waits for his heart to slow, the nausea to pass, the anger.
All Julian Crouch wanted to be was a rock and roll star.
His dad, George, was the entrepreneur — property and secondhand cars, mostly. He made all the money; married an ex-Miss UK when he was fifty-eight.
That was Julian’s mum, Cindy.
George had the rugged Brilliantine looks of a B-movie hero. George had a Soho tailor and wore handmade shoes. He claimed to have played cards with the Krays and exchanged Christmas cards with Nipper Reed. He drank whisky and smoked cigars and fucked Soho hookers and was apparently loved by all who ever set fucking eyes on him.
George was an old man by the time Julian went to the London College of Music, of which George volcanically disapproved. Julian and George barely exchanged a word for eleven years.
Julian was thirty when, in 1997, George had a fatal aneurysm on the toilet during a long weekend in Portugal. He was reading the Daily Mail, his dead hairy fists closed around it.
By then, Julian knew he’d never be a rock and roll star. He was too old. But his ambitions had shattered and reformed; he could still be a kind of Simon Napier Bell figure, a manager, a bon viveur, a club owner, an entrepreneur.
So he stepped in and took over the family business. The cars and the properties ticked along nicely, essentially looked after themselves. He left that side of it to his mum.
He moved into recording studios, nightclubs, dotcoms. And fair play, he made a fortune. In 1998, he invested in, then quickly sold, tookool. com, an online store and delivery service for funky urbanites.
Tookool’s primary attraction, its free delivery, also proved to be its undoing. It went bust in 2000. But by then, Julian had already sold it, making somewhere in the region of ten million pounds. Not much, as dotcom fortunes went, but not bad.
That was pretty much Julian’s entrepreneurial high point. Over the years, asset after asset turned to dust in his hands. The recording studio, Merciless Inc., failed to attract a single major artist and shut its doors in 2004. The nightclubs bumped along the bottom, did okay, never really caught on.
Julian married Natalie. She wasn’t a Miss UK and she never stopped traffic. She did, however, slow it on occasion.
Natalie’s divorcing him. Julian estimates that she’s about to cost him approximately two and a half thousand pounds per orgasm. Probably the first fifty orgasms were worth it. Probably not enough to fill a can of Red Bull.
Then Cindy died and the world economy fell over and the property empire began to subside beneath his feet.
There was a biblical metaphor in there somewhere, something about sand, but Julian had been too busy trying not to sink to look it up.
He’d been able to shrug off the failure of the nightclubs and the recording studio. His timing had been off, that was all.
The collapse of the property empire, however, was vertiginously alarming.
‘Capital,’ George had taught him, ‘is what you don’t spend.’
Julian’s capital was spent.
And now Lee Kidman and Barry Tonga stand dripping in his hallway, the hallway he is shortly to lose if he doesn’t sell that fucking terrace in Shoreditch to that flash fucking Russian from Moscow on fucking Thames.
Basically, they’re here to ask for their money. But Julian’s not really listening.
His eyes drift, as they often do, to Lee Kidman’s crotch. He finds himself contemplating the animal furled in there, that thick and lazy beast.
Julian is not by inclination homosexual, he’s seen Kidman perform in quite a few pornos, pornos of the British variety: middle-aged hookers pretending to be housewives, women who look like they’ve hastily trimmed their snatches with Bic disposables and no foam, ostensibly offered twenty-five quid for a fuck in the back of a van then — ha ha! — left stranded by the side of the road.
Julian recognizes these films for what they are, comforting fantasies of availability, they’re all whores in the end, blah blah blah. He doesn’t, in and of themselves, find them erotic or stimulating, not beyond the occasional animal twitch in his crotch for a pleasured moan or an animal groan, or a pale jiggling breast.
But Lee Kidman’s cock!
Lee Kidman doesn’t use a disposable Bic. He looks depilated and smooth as an Action Man. His cock is as thick as Julian’s wrist. Julian is fascinated by the laziness of it — the way it’s too big to point upwards. It just kind of dangles there. The women stuff it into whatever orifice like half a kilo of uncooked sausages.
Lee Kidman’s cock has started to insinuate itself into Julian’s dreams. It’s not like he wants to do anything with it, let alone have it inside him: the thought fills him with a shudder of biological terror — imagine trying to get that thing in your mouth!
And it takes Kidman so long to come. Although, to be fair, Julian expects it wouldn’t take as long with a man. But still.
Kidman is aware of Julian glancing at his crotch. There’s a kind of half-smile for it.
Julian says, ‘Is the old man still in the house?’
‘Yeah,’ says Kidman. ‘But that copper’s not hanging round any more. Which was the point.’
‘And you did it right? He got the message.’
‘He got the message.’
‘And there’ll be no comebacks?’
‘Nah.’
‘Because I don’t want to go to prison, Lee.’
Julian is terrified of prison. His therapist calls it cleisiophobia: the fear of being locked in an enclosed space. But it’s not that. It’s the fear of being locked in an enclosed space with men who have cocks like Lee Kidman.