The Calling

CHAPTER 26

Henry Madsen lives in a large, rambling old property that stands on a quarter-acre of grounds, isolated from its neighbours by high hedges and a screen of trees. It overlooks Richmond Park.

The house is already on fire when the first responders arrive.

The blaze has picked up by the time the fire crew shows up, a few minutes later. They are closely followed by an Armed Response Unit and the EMTs.

A number of pit bull terriers run loose in the grounds. They attack the first responders, then the fire crew. This slows the operation.

The order is given to shoot the dogs.

By then, the fire has taken a firmer hold.

En route to Richmond Park, Luther calls Benny.

‘Going back twenty-five years,’ Benny tells him. ‘We’ve got six Henry Madsens. Four we can dismiss outright: white-collar criminals. Traffic offences, that sort of thing.’

‘No one on the sex offenders register?’

‘Oh yes. Henry John Madsen. String of juvenile offences: burglary, vandalism, theft, assault, arson.’

‘Arson?’

‘Attempted murder of his adoptive parents.’

‘What’s the story?’

‘He broke into their house and set fire to their beds.’

‘That’s our boy,’ Luther says. ‘What happened to him after that?’

‘He does his time. Comes out at eighteen. Has some counsel ling. He re-offends at nineteen — GBH during a pub conversation about abortion. Apparently he’s anti. He’s remanded into psychiatric care. Comes out at twenty-one. After that he drops off the radar.’

‘Which isn’t to say he hasn’t been busy. You got photographs?’

‘Old ones.’

‘How’s he look?’

‘Short hair. Very neat.’

‘Parted?’

‘On the left.’

‘No glasses, no beards, no moustaches?’

‘No.’

‘Excellent. Let’s get this prick’s face all over the news.’

‘Won’t that make him panic?’

‘It’ll drive him to ground,’ Luther says. ‘Make him hole up somewhere. Stay in London.’

‘Yeah, but where?’

‘Well, mate. That’s the question.’

Twenty minutes later, Luther reaches the scene. He’s wearing a high-viz jacket over the parka he keeps in the trunk of the Volvo. He had to ditch the overcoat. It smelled of petrol and smoke.

He approaches Teller. Nods at the burning building. ‘How long to make this place safe?’

It can take days for a building to cool properly and structural damage to be assessed. Normally, it would be tomorrow at least before Luther was granted access to the house.

But Teller makes some phone calls. She shouts and wheedles and pleads. She claims exigent circumstances, the threat to Mia Dalton’s life.

The fire-fighters are still darkening the glowing embers when Luther slips on a Cromwell 600 helmet and breathing apparatus, then walks past the corpses of the dogs, through the high spray of the dampening hoses and into the charred house.

The hallway is blackened with soot, ash, and smoke. The windows are blown out. Everything’s wet. He hadn’t expected so much water. It’s still raining down on his head. Holes in the wall expose pink insulation material. The swollen ceiling threatens to collapse.

Upstairs, he finds a child’s bedroom. A cot, a changing mat. Clothes on a rail: boys’ and girls’. Many still display price tags. On the wall are hung burned prints of Pooh Bear. In the cot is an ancient, water-sodden teddy.

Luther looks at the teddy bear.

He checks out two adult bedrooms. Water-drenched beds, burned clothing. Everything doused in accelerant and set alight.

Downstairs, a torched library. Nazis. Eugenics. Dog-rearing. Biology. Burned portraits of prominent National Socialists. Speer and Hitler. Noble dogs.

All of it forensically useless.

The kitchen has been touched less by the fire. It’s wet and badly smoke damaged, but one or two of the windows, although streaked black, haven’t blown.

Luther looks in the pantry. Canned goods. He looks in the cupboards. Pots and pans. He looks in the tall cupboard nearest the kitchen door. A bottle sterilization kit.

Several bottles. All of them blackened now.

He opens the fridge. And there, essentially undamaged, are ranks and ranks of children’s milk bottles.

He takes one of the bottles from the fridge. Shakes it. Puts it close to his face. But he’s seeing it through a screen.

His heart is beating.

He searches the fridge. At the back, he finds a bar of chocolate, half eaten. Teeth prints.

A fire-fighter leads him through a reinforced door down to the basement. Luther feels the weight of the house above him. They edge along a dark, earth corridor, heavy with smoke. He concentrates on his breathing, worried he might panic down here.

They arrive at what might have been a vegetable storage room. Another reinforced door.

The fire-fighter opens it.

A bed. A bookcase.

Luther looks at the books. Water damaged. He knows he wouldn’t like to touch them with an ungloved hand. He doesn’t believe in ghosts, but it seems to him that objects soaked in human misery retain traces of it.

He leaves that terrible basement, his breath quick and loud in his ears. He goes upstairs and outside. The water from the dampening hoses is a mist over his head. There are slick patches of mud. A helicopter overhead.

Behind a rainbow in the mist stands Rose Teller. ‘Anything?’

‘He’s gone. Mia’s with him.’

‘Well, thank God for small mercies.’

He grunts at that. Looks at the plumes of smoke that rise from the house, spread thinner and thinner against the pale dome of London sky.

‘He’ll need to leave London,’ Luther says.

‘You think the son can help us, tell us where he’s likely to go?’

‘Madsen didn’t tell him anything.’

He frowns.

He looks at the dog corpses dotted like fungi all over the wet lawn.

He cups his mouth.

He wanders to the nearest dog corpse.

He kneels.

He has a flash of something — a memory of kneeling at the corpse of a dog, a yellow dog, a retriever in a strange hallway. And then the memory, if it was a memory, is gone.

This dog, a pit bull terrier, has been shot in the shoulder. Then one of the ARV mob has walked over and put a bullet through its head, an act of mercy.

The bullet has passed through the dog’s skull and into the soil.

A chunk of the dog’s upper lip on one side is missing. But it’s an old scar, long-healed. Her nose is mutilated.

Luther reaches out an index finger and draws it along her fur. She’s still warm. He feels it through the latex gloves.

Her chest and flanks are heavily criss-crossed with old scars.

He pats the dog, fondly. He brushes against the nap of her fur. Feels the slight, pleasing resistance.

Then he walks across the garden to another dog: pale brown with a white flash. The bullet has blown away half its face. It’s impossible to see any scarring there. But there are ropes of scar tissues on its back and ribs. Heavy damage to its hind legs.

The third dog has more Staffordshire than pit bull in it. Luther is sentimental about dogs, the way Reed is about old soldiers. Especially Staffies. Staffies have qualities that Luther admires. A Staffy will fight to the death to defend a child. It will bite down and it won’t let go.

He trudges round to the back of the house, to the double garage. He enters. Finds cages full of panicking, white-eyed dogs. They leap at the wire. They bare their teeth. They roll insane and murderous eyes.

They do not bark.

Luther watches them. He’s perversely tempted to slip a hand through the bars of the cage. Just to see what they’d do with it.

Then he turns and strides away.

Teller’s waiting in the square of light at the end of the garage. He walks past her.

He says, ‘Let me know if anyone finds anything.’

He shoves through the crowds outside, through the people and the media.

He looks around and finds Howie. She’s grabbing a coffee with an EMT crew and a couple of uniforms.

He leads her away by the elbow.

She says, ‘What’s up?’

‘Isobel,’ he says. ‘I’m giving you a choice now.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘Madsen knows we’re just behind him,’ Luther says. ‘It’s going to get messy.’

‘Messier than it already is?’

‘Yes.’

‘Boss, I don’t get what you’re asking.’

‘Come with me,’ he says, ‘and there could be repercussions for you. Stay and there won’t be. It’s up to you. But if you come, we’re in it together. Come what may. You with me?’

Howie hesitates. But only for a moment. She ditches her coffee and follows Luther to the car at a half-jog.

Henry drives her somewhere quiet: there are trees and no traffic sounds. He pulls over to the side of the road. There is the sound of tyres in wet leaves.

He presses Mia further down into the passenger footwell and leans over to open the glove box. He takes out a notepad and begins to scribble something. He writes faster than Mia can believe.

He writes, crosses out, writes again, more neatly.

When a lot of time has passed, he says, ‘Sit up.’

Mia looks at him through her hair. She is shaking.

‘Sit here,’ he says. ‘Next to me.’

She sits up, next to him.

He lays the notepad in her lap and flicks on the interior light. ‘Can you read that? Can you read my writing?’

Mia nods.

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Now. We’re going to play a trick on someone. Is that okay?’

Mia nods.

‘It’s a kind of joke. What I’m going to make you say isn’t true. But if you don’t do as I say, I’m going to have to punish you, okay? I don’t want to, but I will.’

Mia sniffs and nods.

‘Excellent,’ he says. ‘Ready?’

She nods again.

He produces a mobile phone. Mia knows it’s her dad’s. It’s her dad’s iPhone and it’s full of photographs of her and her brother and her mum. Her dad embarrasses her by showing them to everyone, all the time.

Henry dials a number from memory, then puts the phone to Mia’s ear.

Mia hears the ringing phone down the line, then a nice voice is saying, ‘Hello?’

Mia glances sideways at the man, who nods.

‘My name is Mia Dalton,’ says Mia, reading the note.

She has to hesitate before she reads the rest. Her voice catches in her throat and she looks fearfully at the man.

But he doesn’t seem to mind.

The more scared she sounds, the more he seems to like it.