The Calling

CHAPTER 9

Maggie Reilly is fifty-one and supremely well groomed — even in the studio, where nobody but her producer and the engineer can see her. Grey trouser suit, cerise shirt, glossy high heels.

Maggie took a roundabout and now obsolete way to get here: Bristol Evening Post at eighteen, straight out of A-levels. At twenty-five she made the move to television, working as a reporter on Westward! an early evening current- affairs programme. Two years later she moved to television news in London.

There were some award shortlistings, including one for rear of the year. She was named as a correspondent in a reasonably high-profile divorce case. There were some unflattering photographs in the papers, most famously of Maggie leaving the ‘love den’ looking frumpy and hungover; a trick of light and shadow added twenty years and several chins. There followed a year or two in the wilderness during which she wrote a newspaper column, renting out opinions she didn’t really hold, or not that strongly.

And now here she is, born again, enjoying solid but unremarkable ratings on the Talk London Drivetime slot, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Yesterday, an elderly immigrant woman was hit and killed by a bendy bus just round the corner from Camberwell Art College; there’s nothing like a bendy bus death to make London ers irate. Maggie’s taken three consecutive calls on the subject and the subject’s getting old. Keen to move on, she hits the dump button, goes to line four.

‘Pete Black from Woking,’ she says. ‘You’re through to Maggie Reilly on London Talk FM.’

‘Hello Maggie,’ says Pete Black from Woking. ‘First-time caller, long-time fan.’

‘Well,’ she chuckles, checking out the monitor on the corner of her desk, ‘a girl can’t have too many of them.’

‘Since ’95, actually,’ says Pete from Woking. ‘I used to live in Bristol.’

‘Did you, my lover?’

He chuckles at the exaggerated accent. ‘I remember that thing you did,’ he says. ‘The thing about little Adrian York.’

Maggie laughs that near-famous cigarette laugh. ‘Well, if I was feeling a bit blue round the edges, I’d say that dates you. So what’s got your back up today, Pete?’

‘Okay. Really, I’m calling to say that I’m the one who killed Tom and Sarah Lambert. It was me.’

There are two full seconds of dead air during which Maggie glances up and makes eye-contact with Danny, her producer. He’s already reaching for the phone to call the station boss.

The engineer, Fuzzy Rob, is already Tweeting.

Holding the phone, Danny makes a gesture: Keep going.

Maggie swallows. Her throat is dry. She says, ‘Are you still there, Pete?’

Detective Sergeant ‘Scary’ Mary Lally finds Luther making himself an instant coffee and eating cream crackers from the packet.

She hands him a thin file. ‘The head we found at the squat. The owner’s a Chloe Hill.’

Luther flicks on the kettle then glances through the file. ‘‘Owner”,’ he says. ‘Do you own your head?’

‘Whatever. It belongs to Ms Hill. She was nineteen. Died in a motorcycle accident. Canvey Island.’

‘So it’s not just dead girls he goes for. It’s dead girls and motorbikes. Blimey.’

‘Her grave had been interfered with,’ Lally says. ‘This is seven or eight months ago. We’re thinking either he dug her up himself or maybe paid a friend to do it for him.’

‘So where’s the rest of her?’

‘Still in the grave, presumably.’

‘We can only hope, eh?’

‘Should I order an exhumation?’

‘Let’s start the process, yeah. So this has nothing to do with the Lambert murder?’

‘I don’t think so, Guv.’

‘Call me Boss.’ He massages his brow, hands back the file. He’s about to say something else when the door bangs open and Teller steams in.

She says, ‘Do you ever listen to London Talk FM?’

‘No,’ says Luther. ‘Why?’

‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘You’ll enjoy this.’

Luther follows her across a weirdly silent and watchful bullpen, wondering what’s going on.

Teller slams her office door, gestures for him to shut up and listen.

She stabs a finger onto her keyboard, unmuting the volume on a streamed radio broadcast.

‘Pete,’ says the husky-voiced woman on the radio. ‘I’m asking you on bended knee. Please. Whether this is true or not, you need help. You need to give yourself in to the proper authorities.’

‘Tom and Sarah Lambert sexually abused my daughter,’ says the caller. ‘They weren’t fit to be parents.’

Luther glances at Teller.

She doesn’t respond. She’s pacing the office, arms crossed, head down.

Luther bows his head. Shuts his eyes. Listens.

‘They seemed a nice couple,’ the caller says. ‘They loved kids. One night we let them take care of our little girl-’

‘Pete, I need to stop you there.’

‘Okay. I get you. All I’m saying is, there were reasons.’

‘Whatever your reasons,’ says Maggie Reilly, ‘right now we’re talking about a helpless baby. So where’s baby Emma, right now?’

Luther mouths: Emma? Since when?

Teller shrugs.

‘I can’t tell you that,’ says Pete Black.

‘A newborn needs medical attention, Pete. You must know that.’

‘She’s fit and well. She’s happy. She’s a very contented little baby. She’s lovely.’

‘You do know you can’t keep her? You have to hand her in to the proper authorities.’

‘That’s why I’m calling. I want her to be well looked after. I want her placed with a loving family that can care for her properly.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘I’ll drop her off tonight. At a hospital. Something like that. A convent or something.’

‘Don’t wait for tonight. Do it now. Do it as soon as you can, Pete.’

‘Yeah. But I need an assurance, don’t I.’

‘What assurance? From whom?’

‘The police.’

Teller braces herself against the desk. Here it comes.

‘What kind of assurance?’ says Maggie.

‘I want the police to promise me, in front of London, that they’ll let me drop off Emma safely. They won’t be watching the hospitals.’

The strength goes out of Teller and she sits.

‘All I want,’ says Pete Black, ‘all I want is for little Emma to be safe and sound. I need the police to help me with that. I’ll call back later.’

There’s a click and the line goes dead.

Three endless seconds of dead air.

‘Okay, London,’ says Maggie Reilly. ‘Your reactions in a moment. First, let’s go straight to the news.’

After a moment Teller says, ‘So what do we think?’

Luther dry-washes his face. Rasp of skin on stubble.

‘It’s him.’

It’s in the self-justification, the moral blankness. The need to control.

He tugs at his weary eyes. Looks at the ceiling.

‘Holy shit,’ he says.

London Talk FM is run from a corporate office building on the Gray’s Inn Road. Grey and chrome, smoked glass. Luther and Howie arrive early in the evening; they’re obliged to edge through a scrum of media already gathered outside.

There’s a uniformed security guard at the front desk. He asks Luther and Howie to sign in, gives them each a badge, directs them to the lifts.

They go up five floors, then step into an anonymous reception. A few promotional posters have been framed and mounted.

They’re met by a pretty and energetic young intern, who leads them to a glass-fronted conference room. Danish pastries on the long table.

On the other side of the table sit a scruffy man and a good-looking woman in early middle age. Danny Hillman and Maggie Reilly.

The four shake hands across the table, cordial and watchful. Hillman takes two business cards from his wallet and slides them across the table to Luther and Howie.

Luther glances over the card. ‘I’m sorry to cut to the chase,’ he says, ‘but obviously we’re against the clock here, so…’

Maggie Reilly gives him the smile. ‘Ask away.’

‘Obviously,’ Luther says, ‘our first priority is to request that you don’t give this man any more airtime.’

‘Seriously,’ says Hillman. ‘How could we ever justify doing that?’

‘Because he’s not who he says he is?’

‘You don’t know that, any more than we do — unless you’ve caught and arrested the real killer. Have you?’

Luther shrugs, tucks the business card into his wallet.

‘I’m not going to discuss open investigations with you, Mr Hillman. You’ll have to take my word for it.’

‘If you knew who he was,’ says Danny Hillman, ‘you’d have released his name to the media by now.’

‘You think what you want. But I guarantee you this: if you cooperate with this man, nobody will ever see that baby alive. People like Pete Black only ever contact the media because it serves their agenda.’

‘And can we quote you on all this?’ says Maggie, with a warning grin. ‘Senior Investigating Officer warns London Talk FM not to help find little baby Emma?’

Hillman steps in, speaks over Luther’s visible irritation. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a very clear public interest here. We’ve run it past the lawyers. They’re happy. If you try to gag us, we’ll go to air with it, treat it as a story. And once it’s discovered the police tried to stop us helping save a child’s life — what happens then?’

Luther sits back. ‘I can apply for a D-Notice.’

He means a Defence Advisory Notice, an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast certain stories.

Hillman says, ‘We’re not releasing any information that pertains or relates to national security.’

Luther sidesteps that. ‘So how are the ratings?’ he asks. ‘Sky-high, right? Killer calls. You Tweet, you put it on bloody Facebook, it goes viral. You amplify that new interest by running the call as a news headline every what, fifteen minutes? Killer Calls London Talk FM! Other news outlets pick up the story. These things spread like an explosion. In a few hours, you’re sitting on the biggest story in Britain. Which makes you, this station, the biggest story in Britain. We’ve seen them downstairs. The hyenas.’

‘This is a commercial operation, absolutely,’ says Hillman. ‘But believe it or not, we actually do have the interests of our listeners at heart. And our city. Not to mention baby Emma.’

‘Her name’s not Emma. She hasn’t got a name yet. Her parents died before she was born.’

‘She’s got a name now,’ says Maggie. ‘For better or worse.’

‘All right,’ says Hillman. ‘Let’s all calm down.’ He stands and goes to the window. Peers out on London at night; unreal city. He turns to face them, leaning on the windowsill. ‘When you came in here,’ he says, ‘you knew we’d never kill the story. You had to ask, but you knew. So what are you really asking?’

Luther won’t answer, so it’s Howie who says, ‘We’re asking you to help us catch him.’

The intern walks in with their coffees. She places them almost reverently on the conference table and slips away. When she’s gone, some of the tension has drained from the room.

After successfully defending editorial principle, Hillman agrees without caveat to the covert deployment of a police intelligence and surveillance crew. They’ll arrive in plain clothes, and monitor and trace all calls to the station. (They’ll also be surveilling the surrounding area, in case Pete Black shows up in person. But Luther doesn’t feel the need to share this detail.)

The meeting is concluded cordially enough. Luther and Howie button their coats. Then Luther pauses in the doorway. ‘One more thing,’ he says.

‘Ask away,’ says Hillman.

But Luther is speaking to Maggie. ‘There’s a lot of journalists in the world,’ he says. ‘Why did he come to you?’

‘None taken,’ she says. ‘Obviously, he listens to the show. When you’re in the public eye, people imagine they’ve got a relationship with you. So, yeah. He trusts me.’

‘But he was pretty specific.’ Luther checks his notes and recites: ‘That thing you did. Adrian York.’

‘Ah,’ she grins. ‘1995. My annus mirabilis. My one and only ever report for Newsnight. Passion piece. Got nommed.’

‘Nommed?’

‘Nominated. The Margaret Wakely Award for Contribution to Awareness of Women’s Issues in Television Journalism.’

‘You win?’

The grin widens. ‘Always the bridesmaid.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Luther says. ‘I don’t mean to be rude. But the name — Adrian York. It doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘That was kind of the point,’ she says. ‘It was an outrageous case, really. Still makes me angry to think about it.’

Luther and Howie take their seats and let Maggie tell it the way she wants to.

‘Basically,’ she says, ‘decent working-class woman makes a bad marriage. Chrissie York. She’s got one child, Adrian. The marriage breaks down. The husband’s got an Australian passport. Chrissie begins to worry he plans to kidnap the child, take him back to the old country.’

‘It happens,’ Luther says.

‘Too right it happens. Meanwhile, the son makes certain allegations about his father. Drug use, prostitutes and so on. The mother reports the allegations. Some court-appointed psychologist decides she’s coached Adrian to lie in order to discredit the father. She’s therefore causing him what they call “emotional harm”, which is a meaningless catch-all phrase if ever you heard one. And when Adrian actually does go missing, police are slow to respond because they assume the mother’s loony tunes and the father’s done it for the kid’s own good. So the father’s their prime and only suspect, if suspect’s the right word.

‘Eventually, and this is like eighteen months later, they track the father down to some shithole in Sydney. He denies all knowledge of snatching his son, wants nothing to do with him. Denies the kid is even his. But by then the case is cold and the story’s old. Never found any traction with the media. Or the police. No offence.’

‘None taken. Do we know where the father is now?’

‘No idea.’

‘But he definitely wasn’t Pete Black?’

‘He was Aussie. Pete Black sounds pure London to me.’

‘Me too. What happened to the mother?’

‘Last I heard, she was in hospital. Overdose. But that’s a long time ago.’

Luther shakes his head.

Howie mouths the word: Blimey.

‘Chrissie York never saw her son again,’ says Maggie Reilly, with more than a hint of the old anger; the feral ghost of the news journalist she used to be, wishes she still was. ‘She never had any idea what happened to him. Well, she had lots of ideas, obviously. But no proof. And nobody seemed to care. It was an ugly little story. All there was to show was this woman who’d tried her best, who’d been let down by everyone — because she married badly, because she was working class, because she sounded like a hysterical woman. And because there were sexier stories around. Easier stories.’

‘And this is what your piece was about? The piece Pete Black mentioned?’

‘Yeah. It was the best piece I ever did.’

‘Can I see it?’

She gives him a brittle grin. ‘It’s on my website. Click on Archive.’

He nods that he will. Then he says, ‘Anyone ever call you about it? Show undue interest? Write letters? Whatever?’

‘Never. Remember, you’re talking about a long-ago abduction that nobody remembers.’

‘Except Pete Black from Woking.’

‘Apparently.’

‘And he’s never been in contact before?’

Maggie gets her fair share of funny phone calls. Do a quick google and there she is: her dimpled, smiling face photoshopped onto some younger, bustier and definitely more naked woman’s body.

‘I’ve had my issues,’ she says. ‘Restraining orders and all the rest of it. It comes with the territory.’

‘Do you have a list of names?’

‘No, but my agent does.’

‘And they’ll be happy to pass it on?’

‘More than.’

She gives her agent’s details. Howie writes them down.

Then Maggie says, ‘Actually, there was one person who kept showing an interest.’

‘Who?’

‘Police officer in Bristol. Pat Maxwell. A few months before Adrian York, there’d been an attempted abduction. Just a few miles away. A little boy called Thomas Kintry.’

‘She thought they were linked?’

‘She seemed pretty positive. Apparently no one else did.’

‘When’s the last time you spoke to Pat Maxwell?’

‘Gosh, this is years back. She’d be retired now, I expect. Assuming she’s even still around.’

Luther and Howie walk silently through the office, back to the lift. The doors open. They step inside.

Howie presses the button for ground.

The doors close.

She says, ‘So what do you think?’

‘About what?’

‘Pete Black?’

‘Either he’s a stalker,’ Luther says, ‘some freak who’s genuinely been a fan of this woman for fifteen-odd years. In which case, you’d expect some kind of prior communication.’

‘Or?’

‘Or he’s the man who kidnapped and killed Adrian York. And maybe tried to abduct that other little boy.’

‘Kintry. So why does he make this call?’

‘Maybe because Maggie was the only one who ever paid attention to what he’d done. But I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right. Does it feel right to you?’

‘No.’

‘Good. Because it’s not right, is it? It’s not right.’

‘You think he’s serious about giving back the baby?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t get him. I can’t see him.’

The doors open.

They step out of the elevator, pass across the bright lobby, shove through the news crews and pass on, into the rainy night.

Then Luther stops.

Commuters, shoppers and tourists flow round him like water surging round a boulder.

‘Adrian York,’ he says. ‘That’s an abduction that nobody even knew was an abduction. Right?’

Howie nods, knowing not to interrupt.

‘So. Victimology one-oh-one: what if that’s why he chose Adrian York? The other abduction, the Kintry kid, if they really are connected… it sounds like an unplanned snatch and grab gone wrong.’

‘A trial run,’ Howie says.

‘Exactly. So, say he was learning. Refining his methods. He tries brute force in broad daylight. That doesn’t work out. Maybe he’s closer to getting caught than we realize. So he decides to go another way.’

‘I don’t get you.’

‘I’m saying, what if he knew about the complaints the mother made.’

‘Chrissie York.’

‘What if he knows about the complaints Chrissie York made to social services? What if he knew they treated her with contempt? If he knew that, he knew he could snatch the York kid right off the street. And if he’s fast enough, and nobody sees… nobody would believe it had even happened.’

‘Which makes it the perfect abduction,’ Howie says. ‘But that doesn’t alter the fact that he’s completely silent about it for fifteen years. So why start phoning radio stations now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Luther says. ‘Maybe because the Adrian York thing went well and the Lambert thing didn’t?’

‘Didn’t in what way? He got the baby.’

‘Depends what he needed from it. But maybe he’s feeling embarrassed. Feeling the need to justify what he did.’

‘But why does he feel that need now?’

‘Because he’s a psychopath. He doesn’t feel shame or guilt. He’s superior. He’s unique. He looks down on us. He detests us. But it matters to him that we know he’s better than us. He needs our admiration.’

On the way to the car he calls Teller. He asks her to call Avon amp; Somerset, get them to bike over the Adrian York and Thomas Kintry cold case files.

He asks for the contact details of Detective Inspector Patricia Maxwell, probably retired.

He calls Ian Reed at home and asks him to look over Maggie Reilly’s old news report to see if anything strikes him as relevant or odd.

They’re all long shots: the York case is sixteen or seventeen years old. But the ground has to be covered.

Then he phones Zoe and asks her to meet him.