by Neil Cross
He means his boss, Detective Superintendent Teller.
Zoe makes a mouth with her fingers and thumb: yada yada yada. Heard it before.
Luther picks up a bowl of muesli, turns his back to her, shovels cereal into his mouth. ‘The thing is, Ian got hurt.’
He allows her a moment. Ashamed of himself.
‘Oh, God,’ she says. ‘How bad?’
‘Not too bad. I picked him up from A and E, took him home.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was cornered somewhere. We’re not sure by who. But they gave him a pretty good kicking. So we’re a detective down.’
‘Okay,’ she says, relieved that Ian’s all right. ‘But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell her, does it? Whatever happens, she’ll need a few weeks to arrange cover for you. You know that. Ian being in hospital is not an excuse.’
‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not. You’re right.’
‘So tell her?’
‘I will.’
‘Seriously,’ she says. ‘Tell her.’
She’s imploring him. But it’s not about the holiday. It’s about something else.
Zoe sometimes has flashes of what she believes to be psychic insights. Many involve him. Two nights ago, she cried out in her sleep. ‘Marked!’ she said.
He’d meant to ask what that meant. What was marked? What had she been seeing in that secret time behind her eyes?
He says, ‘I will. I’ll ask her. I promise.’
‘Or else, John,’ she says. ‘Seriously.’
‘Or else what?’
‘You can’t go on like this,’ she says. ‘You just can’t.’
He knows she’s right.
He’s trudging upstairs to the shower when his phone rings. He checks out the caller display: Teller, Rose.
He answers, listens.
Tells her he’ll be there as soon as he can. Then he washes his face, brushes his teeth, puts on a clean shirt. He kisses his wife.
‘I’ll ask her today,’ he says, meaning it. ‘I’ll ask her this morning.’
Then he heads out to the crime scene.
CHAPTER 3
He’s forced to park some way off and walk to the scene.
The morning is damp and chilly; he feels it in his knees. He thinks it’s all the bending over, all the ducking through doors and under tape; half a lifetime spent cramming himself into spaces that aren’t quite big enough for him.
It’s sunrise, but already plain clothes and uniform are conducting a house to house. Curious neighbours stand blinking in doorways, huddled in sweats and nightgowns. Some will ask the police inside; none will have heard or seen anything. But all will sense their deliverance from something sombre and profound, something that passed them by like a hunting shark.
The house is behind tape. Two and a half storeys, double-fronted Victorian semi. Probably a million and a half.
Luther shoves through the rubberneckers, the citizen journalists hoisting iPhones, not drowning but filming; he shoulders aside the real, old-fashioned journalists. He badges the Log Officer, who signs him in, then he ducks under the tape.
Detective Superintendent Rose Teller steps up to greet him. Five foot four, fine-boned, hard-faced. Teller’s grown into the pinched expression she first adopted as a younger woman who sought to accommodate superior officers, men who saw frivolity in grace. She’s wearing a forensic suit, bootees.
He says, ‘Morning, Boss. What’ve we got?’
‘Nasty piece of business.’
Luther claps his hands, vigorously rubs them. ‘Can you give me a minute, first? I need to ask a favour.’
She gives him the look. They don’t call her the Duchess for nothing.
She says, ‘You really choose your moments, don’t you?’
‘Later,’ he says, taking the hint. ‘Whenever you’ve got a minute. Won’t take long.’
‘Okay. Good.’
She clicks her fingers and DS Isobel Howie hurries over, trim in her white forensic bunny suit; strawberry-blonde hair worn short and spiky. Howie’s a second-generation copper, doesn’t like to talk about it. Some issue with her dad.
She nods good morning to Luther, hands him a manila file.
‘Victims are Tom and Sarah Lambert. He’s thirty-eight, she’s thirty-three.’ She shows him photographs: Mr Lambert dark, handsome, fit-looking. Mrs Lambert blonde, athletic, freckled. Stunning.
‘Mr Lambert’s a youth counsellor. Works with troubled kids.’
‘Which means a lot of people with emotional and mental problems,’ Luther says. ‘Mrs Lambert?’
‘She’s an events manager; organizes weddings and parties, that sort of thing.’
‘First marriage?’
‘First marriage for both of them. No jealous exes that we know of, no restraining orders. Nothing like that.’
‘Point of entry?’
‘Front door.’
‘What? He just let himself in?’
Howie nods.
Luther says, ‘What time is this?’
‘The 999 call came in around 4 a.m.’
‘Who made the call?’
‘Male, walking his dog, didn’t leave his name. Claimed to hear screams.’
‘I need to hear the recording.’
‘We can do that.’
‘Neighbours? They didn’t report any screams?’
‘Didn’t hear a thing, apparently.’
‘No cars? No slamming doors?’
‘Nothing.’
He turns back to the open door.
‘So who’s got spare keys? Neighbours, babysitters, mothers, fathers, cousins? Dog walker, house-sitter, cleaner?’
‘We’re looking into all that.’
‘Okay.’
Luther nods to the interior of the house. Howie follows the line of his gaze, sees a plastic keypad set into the wall. A small red light is flashing. Yapping like a silent dog. A burglar alarm.
Howie beckons Luther with a nod, leads him along the stepping plates that SOCO have placed along the side of the house.
Near the drainpipe, Luther shoves his hands deep into his overcoat pockets; it reduces the temptation to touch things. He squats heel to haunch, nods at the point where the phone line has been snipped. Then he takes one hand from his pocket and mimes a pair of scissors. The cut is close to the ground, half hidden by the spindly city grass that grows round the bottom of the drainpipe.
‘So he’s got a key. He also knows they’ve got an alarm. And he knows how to disable it.’ He stands, rotating his head to loosen a stiff neck. ‘Let’s find out who installed the alarm. Start with the contractor, the actual bloke who fitted it. I’ve seen that before. If you don’t get any joy with him, go to the security company that employs him. Check out everyone. Invoicing department, IT department, the boss, the boss’s PA. The sales force. All of them. If you don’t get anywhere, go wider. Look at employee spouses. And hope that comes up trumps. Because if it doesn’t…’
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 pubi
s. 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.’
‘His dad die young?’
Howie checks the paperwork. ‘Doesn’t say.’
‘Men get close to the age their dad was when he died, they start thinking about diet and exercise. Mr Lambert was in pretty good shape.’
‘Better than pretty good. Played tennis. Squash. He liked to fence, ride mountain bikes. Ran a marathon or two. He was pretty ripped.’
‘Anything else?’
‘We looked into the alarm,’ she says. ‘Tom Lambert used it extensively the first year it was fitted, then gradually his usage dropped off. That’s a pretty typical behaviour pattern, probably applies to four out of five people w
ho’ve had them fitted. His usage drops off almost to zero. Then four or five months ago, he starts using it again.’
‘That might not mean anything,’ Luther says. ‘Mrs Lambert was pregnant. Sometimes men get extra vigilant when their partner’s expecting. It brings out the caveman in us.’
‘Or,’ Howie says, ‘maybe he was nervous about something specific. Something he’d seen or heard.’
‘At work, you mean?’
‘You said it yourself: the people he deals with every day.’
Luther gives her the nod. Pleased, she enters the coordinates into the satnav.
As she drives Luther says, ‘Can I hear the 999 recording?’
She makes a call, passes him her phone.
He listens. Operator: Police Emergency Caller: Yeah, I’d like to report something really weird. I was walking my dog down Bridgeman Road. I heard, like, a noise. And I saw something really weird.
(Sound of typing) Operator: And what’s your name? Caller: I don’t want to say. Do I have to say? Operator: Not if you’d prefer not to. What did you see? Caller: A man. He was, like, sneaking out of this house. Operator: You saw a burglary in progress? Caller: I don’t know. He didn’t look like a burglar. He was too old to be a burglar. Operator: How old was he? Caller: Forties? I don’t know. Like a man in his forties.
(Typing) Operator: Okay. Calm down. What was he doing? Caller: I don’t know. He had something with him. He had like a bundle. He had blood all on him. Blood on his face and that. He sort of ran down Crosswell Street, carrying the bundle. It looked really bad. It looked really, really bad. Operator: Okay, officers are on the way. Can you hold the line? Caller (sobs): No, I can’t. I can’t. Sorry. I have to go. I’ve got to go.
Luther listens to it three times. ‘Have we traced the number?’
‘Number belongs to a mobile phone reported missing by a Robert Landsberry of Lyric Mews, Sydenham. Two days ago.’
‘Mr Landsberry have any idea who nicked his phone?’
‘We’ll re-interview this morning. But not really. He’s not even sure exactly when it was taken.’
‘So what do we think? The caller’s a burglar on the prowl, maybe? Or someone trying to put a deal together, shift a bit of weed?’
Howie shrugs.
Luther chews his lip as they drive. He says, ‘And this is our only witness?’