Cornish rolls up a sleeve. Doesn’t seem to like it. He unrolls it again and buttons the cuff. ‘Will he make good on this threat?’
‘Yes,’ says Luther. ‘He’s like the rest of them. He’s grandiose, self-important, ego-driven. He can’t stand to be thought of as weak. He’d rather be hated than pitied. And he’d rather be feared than either.’
‘Well,’ Teller says. ‘If we had a PR problem before, we’ve got a humdinger now. Can we find him before tonight?’
‘How?’ says Luther. ‘Tell me how, I’ll do it.’
‘I don’t know. Sprinkle some fairy dust. Do your thing.’
‘Okay. Then let me do what he’s asking. Let me go on TV, on radio, whatever, and apologize.’
‘That’s not going to happen,’ Cornish says.
‘There’s a family in London who won’t see the sunrise tomorrow if it doesn’t. You can bet he’s already picked them out.’
He outlines what Benny told him about the likelihood of Facebook stalking. Cornish and Teller listen, increasingly despondent.
Then Cornish says, ‘But if we give this prick what he wants today, what does he ask for tomorrow? Do we give him that, too? And if we do, what does he ask for the next day? And the day after that? And the day after that?’
Luther sags, knowing he’s right.
‘Take me off the case,’ he says.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘It may be enough to appease him.’
‘We already talked about this. We don’t give in to blackmail. More importantly, we can’t be seen to give in to blackmail.’
‘With respect, Boss, we’ve got to react somehow. We’ve got to give him something.’
‘And if we do,’ Cornish says, ‘we give a green light to all the loonies that come after him. Psychopaths don’t get to use the media to control the investigation of their crimes.’
‘Long term, absolutely. Short term, it’s the best tactic I can think of. Release a statement saying you’ve suspended me, pending investigation into my running of the case. Hang me out to dry.’
‘Holy Christ,’ says Teller. She leans over, digs in her drawer, removes a bottle of aspirin with a tamper-proof lid. Struggles to open it.
‘You can absolutely do this,’ says Luther. ‘You say the police don’t respond to a criminal’s demands. But you can imply I did something wrong, say I mishandled the chain of evidence. Say I’m emotionally incapable. God knows they’re showing footage of me crying about every ten seconds. That might be enough to assuage him, mollify his ego.’
Teller doesn’t answer.
Neither does Cornish.
‘If we don’t do this,’ Luther says, ‘he’ll make good on what he said. Tonight. And he knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing this stuff for a long time without us even noticing him. He’s probably got a pool of possible targets. Families like the Lamberts. Houses he knows inside out. We can’t just sit back and let it happen. We can’t do that, can we?’
There’s a long silence. Then Cornish says, ‘John, I understand. I honestly do. But we can’t grab our ankles and let this psycho have his way with us.’
‘Sir,’ Luther says. ‘Seriously.’
Teller warns him with a glance: Shut. Up.
‘It doesn’t matter how we dress it up,’ Cornish says. ‘We’d be sending a clear message. We’d be telling the entire world that we’re running scared of this prick, that he gets exactly what he wants from us. We can’t have that. We just can’t. For the precedent.’
Luther walks out of Teller’s office. He can feel the eyes on him. All the coppers in the bullpen. He must have been shouting.
Howie lifts a file from her desk and waves it to catch his attention. It’s a shy, defiantly jaunty little gesture, and in that moment he loves her for it.
He approaches. ‘How we looking on that thing?’
‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Actually, Boss, can I borrow you for a minute?’
‘Of course. Bring those.’ He nods at the files.
Howie scoops up the York and Kintry files, neatens them, follows Luther to his narrow office.
She nods to Benny and shuts the door. Luther closes the blinds.
‘Is it just me,’ Benny says, ‘or is this actually getting pretty bad?’
‘It’s actually getting pretty bad,’ Luther says.
Howie and Benny give him a sympathetic look. He shrugs it off; he’s been getting them all day, since weeping at the churchyard.
He takes off his jacket, hangs it over the back of his chair, loosens his tie.
He sits and rubs his face. Takes a series of long, slow breaths. Closes his eyes. Keeps them closed. ‘Okay. Talk me through it. Where are we?’
‘Well,’ says Howie, ‘we know we’re dealing with a very particular animal here. We also know this isn’t his first offence; he’s far too confident. Too self-important. He’s narcissistic with an overdeveloped sense of grievance. And to judge by his voice, word selection, intonation, he’s in his late twenties at the earliest, more like mid-thirties plus. Put all that together, you’re looking at a likely serial offender.’
‘But it’s definitely his first time with this MO.’
‘With this MO, yeah. But MO and signature are two different things. MO consists of everything he requires to carry out the crime: type of crime, victimology, the setting of the crime, method used. MO changes. Signature doesn’t. So what was he doing before he cut open the Lamberts? We’ve been looking at one credible prior offence, maybe two: the abduction of Adrian York and the attempted abduction of Thomas Kintry. This is Bristol, mid-nineties. So we’re talking fifteen, sixteen years ago. And these were slightly older children. Adrian York was six. Thomas Kintry was twelve.’
‘That’s abnormal for a start,’ Benny says. ‘These men, they usually have a very specific preference — age, sex, ethnicity, hair colour.’
‘Okay,’ says Howie. ‘So he abducts children. We don’t know what criteria apply because, even if we assume these cases are genuinely linked, victimology seems inconsistent. At best, he’s working from a radically different MO after an apparent fifteen-year silence. During those fifteen years, we can imagine that either he’s resisted the urge to offend, he’s been in prison, or-’
‘Or he’s been offending under the radar,’ Luther says. ‘So where are we on the name? Pete Black?’
‘Well,’ says Howie. ‘I’m getting to that. That’s actually what I wanted to talk about. It could be a coincidence, but…’
‘But what?’
She dry-swallows, excited and nervous. She slips a note from the thinnest of the files and reads from it. ‘In the Netherlands “Zwarte Piet”, meaning Black Pete, is a servant of Sinterklaas. He delivers presents on the fifth of December and…’ She looks at Luther.
He’s opened his eyes. He’s looking at her.
‘He takes naughty kids away in the empty bags,’ she says. ‘In some stories, the Zwarte Piets themselves were kidnapped as kids, and the kidnapped kids make up the next generation of Zwarte Piets.’
‘Which fits with the Adrian York abduction,’ Luther says. ‘Which was a child abduction nobody even believed was an abduction. Not until it was too late.’
‘So what if, during the last fifteen years he hasn’t been inactive, or in prison? What if he’s just been quiet?’
She begins laying documents on Luther’s desk. Doing so, she tells him that numerous cultures have a mythical bogeyman who’s portrayed as a man with a sack on his back, a man who carries naughty children away.
‘There’s El Hombre de la Bolsa, meaning the Sack Man. In Armenia and Georgia it’s the Bag Man. In Bulgaria, it’s Torbalan. In Hungary it’s zsakos ember, “the person with a sack”. In North India, he’s the Bori Baba or “Father Sack”. In Lebanon he’s Abu Kees, that’s literally “The Man with a Bag”. In Vietnam, it’s Mister Three Bags. In Haiti, it’s The Gunnysack Man.’
Luther looks at the images: trolls and ogres and twisted fairytale things, scrawny, beak-nosed old men bearing away bawling children.
He stands. His legs won’t let him sit. He paces the room.