The Calling

CHAPTER 21

Luther drives to Highbury Fields and parks across the square. He knits his hands on the steering wheel and watches Crouch’s red Jaguar.

He waits for a long time. He doesn’t know how long. His mind is blank with hate.

Then he grabs the pickaxe handle from the front passenger footwell and gets out of the Volvo.

He marches across the park and smashes the driver’s side window of the Jaguar.

The car begins to beep and shriek in panic.

From his pocket, Luther takes a brand new can of lighter fluid. He squirts it through the car’s broken window, over the dashboard and the leather upholstery.

A car’s interior contains the parts that are easiest to ignite: carpets, seating foam, soft plastic. And a fire in a car’s interior spreads quickly.

He watches the car blaze. He’s not scared of an explosion; petrol tanks are made of thick metal. It’s unlikely the car will explode with concussive force. And if it does, then so be it. He’d welcome it.

He stands upwind, but the smoke still makes his eyes water.

He waits and waits. Flames singe his eyebrows.

He hears distant sirens.

And then Crouch emerges from his house. He’s sockless in slip-on shoes, shock-headed, hurriedly dressed.

He approaches Luther with a strange, crazed expression.

Luther waits.

Crouch’s hands and voice are shaking. He says, ‘And who the fuck are you?’

Luther grabs Crouch’s wrist, twists it, wrenches it between his shoulder blades. He frog-marches Crouch towards the burning car.

‘If I break your neck and throw you into this car,’ he says, ‘by the time an ambulance gets here, you’ll be a pool of melted fat.’

Crouch weeps.

Luther can feel the heat charring his tweed coat, drying his eyes.

‘Stay away from the old man,’ he says.

Then he drops Crouch to the pavement and strides away, across the park.

The sirens are closer. He knows they’re for him. He doesn’t care.

He returns to the Volvo. He sits and waits.

He watches fire-fighters extinguish the merrily burning car.

Crouch is still there. A woman Luther takes to be a hooker hangs around in the background.

Police take statements. One of them is a careworn, older detective in a rumpled suit and an overcoat.

Luther can’t be sure, not from this distance, but he thinks it’s Martin Schenk. Schenk works out of Complaints.

If he’s right, it means Crouch has reported him as a police officer.

Luther doesn’t care. He sits with hands on the steering wheel, fighting the urge to get out and stride over there, badge the officers and the fire-fighters out of the way, shove Crouch in the sternum, grab his neck and squeeze.

He’s still thinking about it when the call comes in.

It’s Teller. It’s after 2 a.m. so he pretty much knows.

He picks up the phone.

‘Sorry to wake you.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he says. ‘I was up.’

There’s a pause. Teller wanting to say something. He helps her out. ‘Where?’

‘Chiswick.’

‘How many?’

‘Four at the scene. Mother. Father. Son. Au pair. The daughter’s missing.’

He sits back and watches the fire-fighters douse the burning Jaguar with retardant foam. He enjoys the blackened skeleton of it, the melted plastic. ‘How old’s the daughter?’

‘Eleven. Name’s Mia. Mia Dalton.’

He wonders how bad it is. He says, ‘Send me the address. I’ll be there as quick as I can. t

‘Before you do that,’ she says, ‘there’s something else.’

‘What else?’

‘We think we got one of them. The son.’

There’s a long moment, like waiting for a second hand to tick. He says, ‘What?’

‘Multiple wounds,’ she says. ‘Two hundred metres from the scene. Witness heard an altercation; two men seemed to be fighting over a little girl. The little girl was bleeding.’

He grips the steering wheel harder, to stop himself floating away. ‘This witness,’ he says. ‘He didn’t think to go out and help?’

‘“He” was a she. Sixty-five years old.’

‘But not everyone who heard it was a sixty-five-year-old woman living alone, were they?’

‘No.’

‘The son?’

‘Alive. On his way to operating theatre as we speak.’

‘Will he live?’

‘I don’t have the latest. It’s a bit tonto round here. The jury’s out, apparently.’

‘So there’s no way I can interview him?’

‘Not right now.’

‘No ID?’

‘Nothing on him. Wallet, cash, pre-paid credit card.’

‘Pre-paid where?’

‘We’re looking into that.’

‘It won’t be traceable,’ he says. ‘They’re too careful for that. You buy one of these cards for cash somewhere. Even better, you slip some hoodie a few quid to go in and buy one for

you. You running his DNA?’

‘It’s being expedited.’

He unwinds the window, slips the magnetic bubble light on the roof. He sets the satnav and turns onto Fieldway Crescent, unseen by everyone.

Except possibly Schenk, who turns in his direction, puts a hand to his brow as if shielding it from the sun and squints across the darkness of the park.

When there’s enough distance between Luther and Schenk, he puts the misery lights and the sirens on. He follows their lament all the way to Chiswick.

He’s the last clown to arrive at the circus. He badges the log officer, ducks under the tape and into harsh lights that throw the night into sudden flat, high definition.

No one looks like they’ve slept for a week.

Teller says nothing. Just nods.

Luther digs his hands into his pockets. He thinks of his wife, wonders what she’s doing.

He steps over the threshold and into the hallway.

He smells it.

SOCO are in here, men and women in jumpsuits, breathing masks, blue bootees. They’ve got cameras and rulers and tape.

Before Luther sees the remains, he sees the upturned furniture, the blood on the walls. The word.

He looks at it. He looks at the word on the wall, blood smeared on there with a human hand, thick as oil paint.

Luther looks at Teller. He sees pity in her eyes and the pity scares him because it’s a reaction to the look on his face.

When he stumbles from the house, he knows that everybody is looking at him, casting sidelong glances.

Outside, the air’s not cold enough. He wants to dive into icy water. He wants to hold his breath until it hurts.

Teller takes his elbow, gestures with her head.

They walk into that liminal time when night is passing into day.

She says, ‘Do you want off?’

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I want off.’

‘Then you’re off.’ She lets him think about it for a moment, then goes on. ‘But you should know, if you come off the case, then that’s it, that’s who you are. It doesn’t matter what you did before or what you do in the future. In their minds, you’ll be the copper who let this happen and walked away. I know that’s not fair. And I know it’s not true. But this bastard said he’d do this if you didn’t apologize to him. And although that could never happen, that’s not the story the media’s going to tell. The story is you and him. We made it you and him. It’s our fault. And if you back off now — which I would if I were you, God help me — but if you do, this is who you become. The man who let what happened in there, happen.’

There are choppers in the sky. Their searchlights sweep the streets.

‘It’s not…’ he says, after a long pause. She doesn’t hear him; his voice has gone. He coughs into his fist to clear his throat, starts again. ‘It’s not unusual for a man like this to humiliate his victims post mortem. We’ve all seen it. He’ll leave a woman with her legs spread, something inserted into her vagina. He’ll mutilate her breasts and her face. He’ll dump a hooker by a “no dumping” sign. But I’ve never seen anything like this.’

Pete Black has removed the victim’s heads and swapped them around.

The son’s head grinning from the mother’s body.

The au pair has been posed in the armchair with her own head in her lap.

‘Like someone playing with toys,’ he says. ‘Like a fucked-up, petulant toddler ripping his sister’s dolls to pieces. Putting Barbie’s head on the teddy hear. The teddy’s bear’s head on the baby doll.’

He shudders in his coat. He wonders if he smells of smoke. Supposes he must. He scuffs his feet. ‘Who’re the victims?’

‘Stephanie Dalton, Marcus Dalton, Daniel Dalton. Gabriella Magnoli. As far as we can tell, they’re pretty much perfect. Mrs Dalton’s a businesswoman. Used to be a model. He’s an architect, wins awards, teaches, mentors. Students love him, apparently. The son’s good-looking, wants to be an actor. The daughter-’

‘What about her?’ Luther says.

‘What am I supposed to say?’ Teller barks, forgetting herself. She has a daughter not much older than the missing girl. ‘She’s eleven. What else is there to say?’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’ Luther says. ‘They’re perfect. He watches them. He’s jealous. He’s resentful. He covets what they’ve got. Happiness. Family. Normality.’

Luther’s finding energy now. Warmth in his blood. He says, ‘Pete Black’s son. Patrick. How old is he?’

‘Twenty? Twenty-one?’

‘Fingerprints on record?’

‘Nope.’

Luther’s smiling. He paces. He rubs the crown of his head.

Teller says, ‘What?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes you do.’

Luther’s laughing now. If he stopped for a moment, he’d see the look on Teller’s face. But he’s swaggering in carnivorous delight, clapping his hands.

‘John,’ says Teller.

He rubs his head, walks in a circle. ‘Boss,’ he says. ‘I need to do something.’

‘So go on then,’ she says. ‘What?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

He waits it out. You don’t rush her.

‘On a theoretical scale of one to ten,’ she says, ‘how much do I not want to know about this?’

‘Twenty.’ He steps in before she can protest. ‘If I went through proper channels, waited for you to cross the Ts and give me the official nod, it would take weeks. And I need to do it now. As in this morning. And if it turns out I’m wrong, which I’m not-’

‘But if you are?’

‘If it turns out I’m wrong, there’ll be hell to pay. You’ll have to sack me. There’ll be an outcry.’

There’s a second, longer wait. At the end of it, she says, ‘Is it going to help us find that little girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay. Then sod off and do it.’

He nods. ‘Where’s Howie?’

‘At the factory,’ says Teller. ‘Be gentle with her.’

As Luther walks away, Teller’s phone rings. She checks it.

DSU Schenk.

She kills the call, pockets the phone. Doesn’t want to know.

For a long time, Mia thinks she’s dead because there is darkness and silence and because she can’t breathe.

But she’s not dead. She’s in the boot of a car. She’s got stuff over her mouth. She can’t move her hands or feet.

She knows her mum and dad are dead, though, because the man told her that. Before stopping to transfer her to the boot, he just shoved her in the passenger well of the car and kept her head pressed down with the flat of his hand as he drove.

She was whimpering for her mum. She was scared and cold and she hurt all over and there was a feeling in her stomach.

Shut up about your mum and cunting dad, he said and she hated his voice.

She knows he’s dangerous, like the stray dog that followed them when they were on holiday in Greece that one time.

It was walking at a funny angle and it had a weird look. Her dad was spooked by it. He lifted Mia and put her into her mum’s arms — she’d been little then. Her dad and brother stooped at the roadside and gathered up armloads of little stones and threw them at the dog until it went away.

This man is the same as that dog. He has the same flecks of saliva round his lips, the same idiot rage in his eyes.

Mia remembers the Stranger Danger classes she took at school, that time the police lady came in to speak to them.

Know your name, address, and phone number. Avoid walking anywhere alone. If a stranger approaches you, you do not have to speak to him. Never approach a stranger in a motor vehicle. Just keep walking.

If a stranger grabs you, do everything you can to stop him or her from pulling you away or dragging you into his or her car. Drop to the ground, kick, hit, bite, scream. If someone is dragging you away, scream, ‘This is not my dad,’ or ‘This is not my mum.’

None of that had been any good. Mia had screamed and screamed and nobody had come.

But Mia knows why. He’s not a stranger. He’s the mad dog in Greece. He’s the thing that sometimes lived in her wardrobe, that peeked through the crack in the door when the lights were out, and Daniel was snoring in his feet-stinking room and Mum and Dad were cuddled up in their big bed. He’s not a stranger, how can he be? She’s known him all her life.

Mia prays. She tries to say something sensible, to ask God for something specific; Dad had talked to her about the way God answers prayers. He gave you what you needed, Dad said, which was not necessarily the same as what you wanted. You might pray for a mountain bike but that might not be what God wanted you to have. Or you might pray for Melissa James to fall over and break her ankle on her stupid inline skates, but God might not want you to have that either.

Mia can’t believe that God wants this for her.

But on the other hand, she heard her dad screaming tonight and although she’s never heard anyone die before, she knows that’s what it was. Her strong and handsome dad dying in terror and helplessness and pain. And she’s pretty sure God can’t have wanted that, either. But it happened.

So she needs to pray, but she’s confused and all that will come is Please God please God please God please.

It goes round and round her head like a train.

She lies curled up in the dark, smelling the car’s wet carpet.

Under yellowish light, the Serious Crime Unit is brim-full of uniformed and plain-clothed personnel.

Men and women in shirtsleeves, smelling sour; people who should be home but aren’t.

They watch Luther pass. He feels their eyes.

He stops at Howie’s desk. She’s hunched, red-faced. Pretending not to have seen him, praying that he’ll walk on by.

He waits until she turns her head and pulls a worried face. She says, ‘Boss…’

‘I don’t care about last night,’ Luther says. ‘You did the right thing. All I care about is, are you ready to work with me now? Right now. Or do I need to pull in someone else?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Don’t do that.’

‘Good.’

He marches to his cramped little office, full of Benny’s energy drinks and sandwich containers.

Howie follows, shuts the door behind her.

‘Seriously,’ she says.

‘We don’t need to talk about it.’

‘I feel terrible. I didn’t know what to do.’

‘You did the right thing,’ he says again. ‘Let’s leave it.’

‘But if I hadn’t…’

‘What?’

‘Would you have found him? I mean, before…’

‘Before he did this? Tonight?’

‘Yes.’

He locks eyes with her. For a cruel moment he considers saying yes. Letting her live with it.

He sits. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think so. I was trying. I was really trying, but I don’t think I could’ve done that.’

She nods. She doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth.

Neither does Luther.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘I got tunnel vision. I lost my sense of perspective. You’re right: I needed someone to stop me. You did me a favour. And it took courage.’

He thinks about telling Howie about Irene, an old woman, now long-dead, found mummified in her chair. His callow shame for not stepping up and confronting his superiors for the jokes they told. The lack of respect.

He doesn’t tell her. He just says, ‘I admire what you did.’

There is a long, good moment.

‘So,’ Howie says, ‘what are we looking for?’

‘I need a current address.’

‘Whose address?’

Luther tells her.

Howie doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t register the name. Just logs on, enters her password, accesses the database. A universe of enormity. Faces stored as binary data. Faces that grin in school photographs, wedding photographs, faces that grin from newsprint and news broadcasts.

She double-checks the spelling and hits Return.

And there she is.

And now Howie understands. She turns to Luther. There’s an expression on her face that Luther has seen before. There’s a kind of admiration in it. But there’s a kind of pity too.

Luther says, ‘What do you think?’

She nods.

‘Print me this stuff off,’ Luther says. ‘And get me a picture of Mia.’

Howie is staring into the middle distance. She says, ‘Holy shit.’

Luther hesitates in the doorway. He wants to say something wise, something about the human spirit. But there’s nothing to say and there are no lessons to be learned.

‘You need to hurry up,’ he says, and leaves her to it.

Henry drives through the electric gates and parks the car. He gets out and opens the boot.

Mia’s curled up inside.

She’s shocked and compliant.

She looks up at him. He thinks of the tired look in a bait dog’s eyes, the surrender, and knows he won’t need the ketamine.

But he keeps it to hand anyway, in case it’s a trick. Henry’s been tricked before. Henry has learned his lessons the hard way.

He unties her and hands her the choke collar. ‘Be a good girl and put this on.’

She slips the chain over her head.

Henry gives it a gentle but sharp tug, just to show he can. Then he smiles to pretend he’s only playing.

Mia’s legs are stiff and everything about her hurts, and there’s a swimmy feeling as if none of this is really happening. She climbs out of the boot of the car and into the garden.

It doesn’t seem possible that she can be here in the first glimmers of daylight and she can be standing in a huge garden, one of the biggest gardens she’s ever seen, with a man all covered in dried blood. He’s got blood in his hair and it’s dried like thin black mud all over his face. He’s got a black crust of blood inside the whorls of his ears and under his nails.

When she really looks at the house she sees that it’s very large but unmaintained. It doesn’t look like a rich man’s house. It looks like a haunted house. Or a witch’s house.

‘Shhhh,’ says the man.

Mia nods submission. She knows that if she makes a noise, he’ll pull on the chain and she won’t be able to breathe.

She walks alongside the man, at his heel, towards the house.

He says, ‘Do you like dogs?’

Mia nods.

‘Good,’ the man says. ‘We’ve got lots of dogs.’

He leads her into the house. Inside, it’s old fashioned. Wood panelling and hunting pictures on the walls. The glass in the frames is so smeared and dusty you can hardly see the pictures. It smells funny, like the windows have been kept shut for a hundred years and nobody has ever washed the sheets.

The man leads her to a door under the stairs. He makes her stand to one side. Then he pulls back some heavy iron bolts that keep the door locked. He leans into what Mia takes to be a cupboard and pulls on a light cord. A bare bulb comes on, dusty on top. The dust starts to smell as the bulb gets hotter.

‘Down we go,’ he says.

Mia is uncertain. But the man jerks the chain and she steps through the door. It’s not a cupboard. There are stairs leading down.

It’s all concrete down here, and the sound is echoey.

Then there’s a corridor with cupboards lining it, with mops and buckets in the cupboards, except all the mops are old and their grey heads have dried and gone stiff. The mop buckets are dented metal. They smell like hospital disinfectant, a clean smell that’s also a dirty smell.

At the end of the corridor is a door.

The door has iron bolts on it, and a big, heavy padlock. The man hangs the loop of the dog lead over a big hook set high in the wall. Mia has to stand on tiptoes and it gets hard to breathe. He struggles to unlock the padlock and pull back the rusty bolts.

The door opens onto a little room. It’s the kind of room where if you were on holiday in a house like this with your friends and your brother, you’d dare each other to go inside.

It’s not that much smaller than her bedroom at home, but it feels much smaller because there are no windows. There are spiderwebs everywhere, and in the spiderwebs are tiny, dry black beetle husks. There’s only one bulb and it’s a kind of sickly yellow that makes the room seem darker not lighter.

The man unhooks her and says, ‘In you go.’

She tells him she can’t, so he pulls on the choke chain until the world goes red. Then he gently shoves her inside.

There is a low bed with a damp grey blanket and a thin pillow like Mia had to sleep on once on holiday in France, except this pillow doesn’t have a pillow-case and it’s got big yellow circles on it, stains that remind her of skin disease.

‘Sit down,’ says the man.

She sits on the edge of the horrible bed. It makes her skin crawl along her bones like a caterpillar on a tree. She glances into a corner and in the corner there’s a little bookshelf and on the bookshelf are some books.

They’re children’s books: The House at Pooh Corner, The Secret Garden, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. The books are very old and dog-eared and some of the pages have come loose from the binding. Seeing them makes terror mushroom inside her. She glances at the open door and makes a move and the man slaps her in the face.

She sits on the edge of the bed. She can’t speak.

The man kneels down. He puts his face very close to hers. She can smell his breath. He says, ‘Are you hungry?’

She shakes her head.

‘Thirsty?’

She nods.

‘I’ll get you some water in a minute. Okay?’

She nods.

‘Now. I know that right now you’re scared. Last night was very upsetting for all of us, wasn’t it?’

She doesn’t know what to say. She says, ‘That’s all right.’

‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘I know this isn’t the nicest bedroom in the world, but you’ll soon get used to it.’

Mia swallows. Her throat is dry and shaky. She says, ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. This is your home now.’

‘I don’t want it to be my home.’

‘I know you feel like that now,’ says the man. ‘And you’ll keep feeling like that for a little while. But soon it’ll change, and it’ll get so you like it here. And once you’ve grown to like it a little bit, I’ll let you come upstairs, watch some TV. Do you like TV?’

‘Yes,’ says Mia.

‘Good,’ says the man. Then he gives her a look like he loves her and he’s glad she’s home. It makes her wet herself again. The dark pool spreads all over the blanket.

‘Don’t worry about that,’ says the man. ‘It’ll dry.’

He shuts the door and Mia hears the screeching slide of the bolt.

She sits in silence, clasping the edge of the bed. She’s too scared to move. She can’t even think. When she turns her head she sees the bookshelf in the corner and its meaning wells up inside her until the thought is too big for her head.

An hour later, or five minutes, he comes back. She hears the door under the stairs opening, his footsteps on the concrete steps. Then the frightful shriek of the rusty bolt and the hinge and he stands in the doorway.

In one hand he’s got a bucket.

He passes it to her. He says, ‘This is for you to do your business in. But if you look extra closely, there’s a present inside.’

She stares into the blue plastic bucket. Inside it is a tiny rabbit. It’s trembling. She reaches in to lift it out. It turns in the bucket and bites her finger.

She withdraws sharply. She considers the baby rabbit, cowering and terrified in its circular blue prison.

‘Just leave him in there for a bit,’ says the man. ‘Then tip over the bucket. Let him have a sniff round and get used to the place. Once he’s done that, you can be best friends. Would you like that?’

She gives the man a nod because she’s too scared not to.

‘Smile,’ says the man. ‘I just got you a present.’

She smiles.

‘That’s good,’ says the man. ‘What are you going to call it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s got to have a name,’ says the man.

Mia can’t think of any names. She can’t think of any words at all. But she wants to please the man. She glances in desperation at the bookshelf.

‘Peter,’ she says.

‘Excellent,’ says the man. Then he says, ‘Well, you and Peter have had a long night. Why don’t you take forty winks?’

‘Okay.’

‘If you need to do a wee or a poo,’ he says, ‘do it in that bucket, okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll get you a proper toilet tomorrow. Ones like they have in caravans. That’ll be nice.’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Good,’ says the man. ‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight.’

The man hesitates in the doorway, seems to chew something over. Then he says, ‘Do you like babies?’

‘Yes,’ says Mia.

‘Do you want lots of babies, when you’ve grown up?’

‘Yes,’ says Mia.

‘Good,’ says the man.

He closes and bolts the door and walks upstairs and closes and bolts that door, too.

And in here it stinks of mouldy blankets and damp air and those old books, the smell of age and decay in them. Mia knows she will never open those books, not even if she’s so bored she wants to die, because she knows that many children have leafed through those books in the before time. There may be drawings in there in another childish hand and if there are she couldn’t bear it.

Mia sits on the bed, looking down at the rabbit. Its nose is twitching, super-alert to its surroundings.

Gently, Mia tips the bucket onto its side. Then she inches back on the bed and puts her back to the cold wall and tries not to move or breathe and just concentrates on the rabbit.

After a long, long time the bucket moves slightly on the cold floor. She can see the rabbit’s nose, twitching away at the edge.

Then the rabbit pokes out its head and looks around. Its eyes are liquid brown.

The rabbit bolts from the bucket so quickly Mia gives out a little scream and jumps.

The rabbit bolts under the bed into the corner. It huddles there, terror-stricken.

Mia knows not to disturb it. She knows to give it time. She begins, patiently, to pick the scab on her knee. She sings herself a song. It’s a happy song that makes her think of happy times. But thinking of happy times is like being kicked in the tummy. She doesn’t know what to do.

Mia shuts down. She curls into a ball on the bed. She puts her thumb in her mouth.

Sucking it, she falls asleep.