by Neil Cross
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.