He lets that dangle, looks at the snipped wire in the pallid grass, feeling that feeling.
Howie tilts her head and looks at Luther in a strange way. She’s got a smattering of freckles across her cheeks that make her look younger; her eyes are green.
He looks over her shoulder and there’s Teller, giving him the same look.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a look inside.’
Howie gathers herself, takes a breath, holds it for a second. Then she leads Luther back along the stepping boards, past the SOCOs and the uniforms and into the house.
It’s a prosperous, middle-class home: family photographs, occasional tables, stripped wood flooring, vaguely ethnic rugs.
There’s a hot, black zoo stink that doesn’t belong in this bright clean place.
He walks upstairs. Doesn’t want to go, but hides it. Trudges down the hall.
He enters the master bedroom.
It’s an abattoir.
Tom Lambert lies naked on the seagrass matting. He’s been opened from throat to pubis. Luther’s eyes follow an imbroglio of wet intestines.
Mr Lambert’s eyes are open. There are forensic bags on his dead hands. His penis and testicles have been sliced off and stuffed into his mouth.
Luther feels the ground shift beneath him. He scans the blood spray, the blood-glutted carpet.
He stands with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets and tries to see Tom Lambert, thirty-eight, counsellor, husband. Not this cluster of depravities.
He’s aware of Howie at his shoulder.
He takes a deep, slow breath, then turns to the bed.
Upon it is spread the carcass that until recently was Sarah Lambert.
Mrs Lambert had been eight and a half months pregnant. She’s been popped like a tick.
He forces himself to look.
He wants to go home to his clean house, to shower and slip under a crisp duvet. He wants to curl up and sleep and wake up and be with his wife, in sweats and T-shirt watching TV, amiably bickering about politics. He wants to make love. He wants to sit in a sunny, quiet room reading a good book.
Mrs Lambert still wears the remains of a baby-doll nightie, probably bought as an ironic gift from a young female workmate. Her ballooned belly must have stretched it comically before her, lifting that high hem even higher.
She had good legs, traced with pregnancy-linked varicose veins.
Luther thinks of Mr Lambert’s fingertips tracing the soft brown stripe that had run from Mrs Lambert’s pubic hair, over the hemisphere of stomach, right to her protruding belly button.
He turns from the enormity on the bed, buries his hands deeper in his pockets. Makes fists.
On the floor not far from his feet, marked out with yellow evidence flags, lies Sarah Lambert’s placenta. He stares at it. ‘What happened to the baby?’
‘Guv, that’s the thing,’ Howie says. ‘We don’t know.’
‘I prefer Boss,’ he says, frowning, mostly absent. ‘Call me Boss.’
He turns from Howie and makes his way downstairs.
In the kitchen, his attention is caught by a magazine page that’s been torn out and stuck to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a teddy bear dressed as a Grenadier Guard.
Ten Mistakes That Stop You Being Happy 1) If you really want to do something, don’t wait ‘until there’s time.’ If you wait, there never will be! 2) When you’re unhappy, don’t seclude yourself. Pick up the phone! 3) Don’t wait for things to be perfect. If you wait until you’re thin enough or married enough you could be waiting for ever! 4) You can’t force someone else to be happy. 5) But you can help them along.
He looks at this list for a long, long time.
The door that leads to the little back garden is open, letting in the cold and the wet.
Eventually he steps through it, ducking his head as he goes.
Teller’s outside, sitting on the low garden wall and sipping a large takeaway coffee. She looks tired and raddled. Pale morning sunlight gleams through her spectacles; he can see a thumb-print on one of the lenses.
She finishes the coffee and calls out, ‘ Oi! ’, catching the attention of a young detective constable. ‘Bin this, Sherlock.’ She tosses over the empty cup.
Luther sits next to her, hunched up in his coat. Looking down on the crown of her head, he feels a rush of tenderness. He loves Rose Teller for the defiant stride she takes through the world.
She says, ‘So what did you want to ask me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You sure?’
‘It’ll keep.’
‘Good.’
She stands, grinds a fist into her lower back. Then she leads him to find the medical examiner.
Fred Penman’s a hayrick of a man in a three-piece pinstripe. Grey mutton-chop sideburns, white hair in a ponytail.
He should be puffing on a Rothman’s, but isn’t allowed, not any more. Instead, he’s chewing on a plastic cigarette, rolling it round his mouth like a toothpick.
Luther’s feeling the cold as he shakes Penman’s hand and nods hello. It’s the adrenaline wearing off. He needs to eat soon or he’ll start trembling.
He says, ‘So what are the baby’s chances? Worst case.’
Penman takes the fake cigarette from his mouth. ‘What does “worst case” mean, in a situation like this?’
Luther shrugs. He doesn’t know.
‘You’ve got a healthy, late-term foetus,’ Penman says. ‘You’ve got a nutjob with an idea what he or she’s doing: they cut through Mrs Lambert’s belly layer by layer. He used clean, sharp instruments. So I’d say the baby may have been extracted successfully.’
‘By “successfully”…’
‘I mean “alive”, yes.’
‘So how long does it live?’
‘Assume it’s given adequate nourishment and warmth. This is finger in the wind, you do know that?’
Luther nods.
Penman looks mournful. He’s a grandfather. ‘We think of babies as weak,’ he says. ‘Because of the instincts they evoke in us: preconscious, very powerful. Actually, they can be tough little buggers. Fierce little survival machines. Much tougher than you’d think.’
Luther waits. Eventually, Penman says, ‘Give it eighty per cent.’
Luther stands without speaking or moving.
Penman says, ‘Ding-dong. Anyone home?’
‘Yeah. Sorry.’
‘Thought we’d lost you for a minute.’
‘I’m just trying to work out how I feel about that answer.’
‘Just pray to God the child was taken by a woman.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Because if a woman took it, at least she wanted to care for it.’
He trails off. Can’t finish.
‘It wasn’t a woman,’ Luther says. ‘Women don’t target women at home in bed with their husbands.’
Penman lets out a long, slow whistle. ‘We’ve seen too much,’ he says. ‘We shouldn’t have room in our heads for thoughts like this.’
Then he pops the plastic cigarette back in his mouth, chews on it, passes it from side to side. He claps Luther on the arm and says, ‘You’ll be in my thoughts.’
Luther thanks him, then goes to join DS Howie.
She’s waiting for him at the tape.
They pass through the thinning crowds, the people at the back reduced to standing on tiptoe.
They reach the tatty Volvo. Luther throws Howie his keys.
The car is cold inside, smells a bit of fast food and rotten upholstery.
Howie starts the engine, works out how to operate the heater. Sets it to full blast. It’s loud.
Luther belts himself in. ‘Any dirt on the victims?’
‘It’s early days yet, but no. From what we know, they seemed to have been devoted. The only dark cloud seems to have been a problem with fertility.’
‘So, what? They used IVF?’
‘That’s the funny thing, Guv.’
‘Boss.’
‘That’s the funny thing, Boss. Five years of IVF. No luck. Then they give it up as a bad lot, start thinking about adoption. Mrs Lambert stops the IVF twelve or thirteen months ago. And then — bingo. She’s knocked up.’
‘They religious?’
‘Mrs Lambert’s C of E, meaning no. Mr Lambert seems to have had some interest in Buddhism and yoga. Tried out a macrobiotic diet for a while.’