The Calling l-1

by Neil Cross

  ‘Maggie Reilly, we’ll leave it there. Thank you.’

  Luther rubs the flat of his hand in slow circles around the crown of his head.

  He says, ‘This is all such bullshit. The baby was long dead. She’s been dead since yesterday. He’s mortified by that. The baby dying wasn’t part of his plan, whatever his plan was. He can’t accept the blame, so it must be someone else’s fault. He’s passing the burden of guilt on to us.’

  ‘I know that. You know that. Whether people out there,’ she gestures, meaning the wider world, ‘actually want to believe it. That’s a different matter.’

  Luther tugs at his ear, considering. He says, ‘I don’t think I can do this.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘This.’

  She gives him the Duchess look.

  ‘Things aren’t good,’ he says. ‘At home. Between me and Zoe.’

  ‘I see. She’s being a madam, is she?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘It’s always that. You’re not the first copper to marry a spoiled cow. You won’t be the last.’

  ‘Boss, that’s not fair. She just-’

  Teller gestures with open palms: Just what?

  Luther rubs his face, exhausted. He needs to shave and change his shirt. ‘I’m not right,’ he says. ‘In myself.’

  ‘So what are you suggesting we do?’

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask about leave of absence. Stress leave. Whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘And whose idea was this? Yours, or Princess Tippietoes?’

  ‘Both of ours.’

  Teller removes her spectacles, blinks at him like an owl. ‘If we take you off this now, it looks like an admission of guilt. It’s like declaring we did something wrong.’ She puts the glasses back on, shoves them up the bridge of her nose. ‘They’ll crucify the fucking lot of us.’

  Luther practically folds in on himself. Crossed arms, hunched shoulders. ‘We shouldn’t react to this bullshit anyway,’ he says. ‘You can’t run a case via the media.’

  ‘You can’t run a case like this any other way,’ she says. ‘That’s the truth of it. If Pete Black controls the story, he controls everything. We look like the Keystone fucking Cops. That’s why we’ve called a press conference, and that’s why you’re going to front it.’

  He can’t speak.

  ‘Welcome to the world of modern policing.’ She points to the TV, the endlessly cycled image of Luther in the graveyard, weeping. ‘Like it or not,’ she says, ‘this little Kodak moment makes you the caring, sharing face of the Metropolitan Police Service. People might be quick to stand in judgement where the Met’s concerned. But everyone loves a big, tough man who can cry over a baby. Which makes you the public face of the investigation. Congratulations.’

  ‘I’m not competing with this psychopath to make people see who cares the most.’

  Teller pinches the bridge of her nose as if she’s got the worst migraine in history. ‘You need to get out there,’ she says, ‘and do whatever needs to be done.’

  ‘What else?’ he says. ‘You want me to cuddle a puppy?’

  ‘This isn’t my idea.’ She looks pointedly at the ceiling. ‘And it’s not for negotiation. And don’t suggest the puppy thing to Cornish, because he might go for it.’

  She means her boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Russell Cornish.

  Teller hands him a printed statement. He folds it and slips it into his pocket.

  ‘Doing this,’ he says, ‘all it’s going to do is feed his ego. To see us running around like headless chickens.’

  ‘His ego’s not our concern right now.’

  Luther thanks her automatically, and shoves the press conference to the back of his mind. It’s another thing to deal with later. He crosses the bullpen, finds Howie at her desk.

  ‘Anything in the York or Kintry file?’

  Howie swivels on her chair, massaging her neck. She passes him the Adrian York file. It’s pitifully thin. ‘Not really.’

  She tells him that Adrian was out riding his new BMX while his mother, Chrissie, watched from the bedroom window. Chrissie had a clear and uninterrupted view of the park.

  The phone rang, a landline. Mobile phones weren’t that common in 1996. The caller was Adrian’s grandmother, asking when she could bring round his birthday cake. When Chrissie got back to the window, no more than three minutes later, Adrian had gone. She saw his bike lying in the grass and went out to look for him. Ten minutes later, she called Avon and Somerset Police. Attending officers immediately began to search for Adrian’s father, David York. The senior investigating officer was Detective Chief Inspector Tim Wilson.

  As far as Howie can see, no serious attempt was ever made to rule out a stranger abduction.

  Luther glances over the file. ‘Where’s David York now?’

  ‘In Sydney, Australia.’

  ‘And the Kintry abduction?’

  ‘If this is the same man, you’re right. It looks like a first attempt, and a bit of a botch job. There were many more witnesses. Mr Pradesh Jeganathan, a local shopkeeper, apparently witnessed a white male leading a black child towards a small white van. He challenged the driver. There was an altercation during which the alleged abductor actually bit Mr Jeganathan on the ear and cheek.’

  ‘Bit him? They get DNA?’

  ‘Mr Jeganathan suffered a heart attack at the scene. They rushed him to the Bristol Royal Infirmary before he could be forensicated.’

  ‘Bite imprints?’

  ‘Poor quality, but on file.’

  ‘That’s something. But teeth can change a lot in fifteen years. Other eyewitnesses?’

  ‘One more. Kenneth Drummond, freelance illustrator. Claimed to have seen a small white van cruising past the Kintry boy a few minutes before the attempted abduction.’

  ‘He give a description of the driver?’

  ‘Nothing that contradicts what we’ve already got.’

  ‘But nothing to add to it either?’

  ‘Sorry, Boss. It’s pretty slim pickings.’

  ‘Fifteen-year-old cold case,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be a long shot.’

  ‘It’s more than a cold case. Maggie Reilly was right, actually. It’s a scandal.’

  ‘What about the senior on the Kintry case? Pat something. Did we contact her?’

  ‘Inspector Pat Maxwell. Retired. I made a few calls. She died a couple of years back.’

  Luther takes that in. Old cases close up like wounds, knit together.

  He thanks Howie and heads towards the door.

  He hesitates, thinks again, turns back to her. ‘Pete Black,’ he says. ‘Obviously that’s not his real name. So why’d he choose it? Of all the names available to him, why that one?’

  Howie shrugs. ‘It’s a pretty blah name,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t give much away. There must be a million Pete Blacks in London. They’re being eliminated as we speak.’

  ‘Did it mean anything to you, when you heard it?’

  Howie shakes her head.

  ‘It did to me,’ he says. ‘It meant something.’

  ‘Like I say. It’s a pretty common name.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Luther says. ‘But he chose it. And our choices reveal us, don’t they? So do me a favour, look into it. Not at the files. Go a bit wider.’

  ‘Wilco, Boss.’

  Howie sets aside the cold case files and turns to her computer.

  Luther doesn’t know what he’s expected to say at the press conference until he’s sitting flanked by Teller and her boss, Detective Chief Superintendent Russell Cornish, addressing the media.

  ‘The murder of the Lambert family and the kidnap of baby Emma Lambert is a tragedy for all concerned,’ Luther recites. ‘For the victims, for their families, for the police, for the country as a whole. The Metropolitan Police would like to extend a plea to the man who has identified himself as “Pete Black”,’ he pauses, and his eyes take in the room: the journalists, the cameras, the lights, ‘to please contact us on the
number listed below. Pete, we know you’re in a great deal of emotional turmoil, and we want to help you. We want to talk to you and we will make every effort to do so. But we cannot communicate via the mass media. So please, call the number listed below. Be assured that we’ll know it’s you we’re talking to.’

  He looks at the desk, fighting his embarrassment and shame.

  ‘We would also like to appeal to the family of the man who calls himself Pete Black. His voice is being made available to you on many news websites, on the police’s own website, and also on a Facebook “tip” page we’ve established for this purpose. Somebody out there knows who Pete Black is. He’s a husband or a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague. So we’re asking members of the public to please listen to the recording of his voice. Is this someone you know?

  ‘We urge you to bear in mind that “Pete Black” is in a great deal of pain and that by helping us you will not be betraying him, but helping him.

  ‘Once again I say to the man calling himself Pete Black: we urge you, for your own sake, to please get in contact.’

  As he reels off the phone numbers one more time, he surveys the crowd. Then he says, ‘No questions at this time. Thank you very much.’

  He gathers up his papers and leaves the clamouring journalists, the shifting HD cameras. The void compound eye.

  In the corridor he leans against the wall and closes his eyes.

  He waits for his heart to slow, the nausea to pass, the anger.

  All Julian Crouch wanted to be was a rock and roll star.

  His dad, George, was the entrepreneur — property and secondhand cars, mostly. He made all the money; married an ex-Miss UK when he was fifty-eight.

  That was Julian’s mum, Cindy.

  George had the rugged Brilliantine looks of a B-movie hero. George had a Soho tailor and wore handmade shoes. He claimed to have played cards with the Krays and exchanged Christmas cards with Nipper Reed. He drank whisky and smoked cigars and fucked Soho hookers and was apparently loved by all who ever set fucking eyes on him.

  George was an old man by the time Julian went to the London College of Music, of which George volcanically disapproved. Julian and George barely exchanged a word for eleven years.

  Julian was thirty when, in 1997, George had a fatal aneurysm on the toilet during a long weekend in Portugal. He was reading the Daily Mail, his dead hairy fists closed around it.

  By then, Julian knew he’d never be a rock and roll star. He was too old. But his ambitions had shattered and reformed; he could still be a kind of Simon Napier Bell figure, a manager, a bon viveur, a club owner, an entrepreneur.

  So he stepped in and took over the family business. The cars and the properties ticked along nicely, essentially looked after themselves. He left that side of it to his mum.

  He moved into recording studios, nightclubs, dotcoms. And fair play, he made a fortune. In 1998, he invested in, then quickly sold, tookool. com, an online store and delivery service for funky urbanites.

  Tookool’s primary attraction, its free delivery, also proved to be its undoing. It went bust in 2000. But by then, Julian had already sold it, making somewhere in the region of ten million pounds. Not much, as dotcom fortunes went, but not bad.

  That was pretty much Julian’s entrepreneurial high point. Over the years, asset after asset turned to dust in his hands. The recording studio, Merciless Inc., failed to attract a single major artist and shut its doors in 2004. The nightclubs bumped along the bottom, did okay, never really caught on.

  Julian married Natalie. She wasn’t a Miss UK and she never stopped traffic. She did, however, slow it on occasion.

  Natalie’s divorcing him. Julian estimates that she’s about to cost him approximately two and a half thousand pounds per orgasm. Probably the first fifty orgasms were worth it. Probably not enough to fill a can of Red Bull.

  Then Cindy died and the world economy fell over and the property empire began to subside beneath his feet.

  There was a biblical metaphor in there somewhere, something about sand, but Julian had been too busy trying not to sink to look it up.

  He’d been able to shrug off the failure of the nightclubs and the recording studio. His timing had been off, that was all.

  The collapse of the property empire, however, was vertiginously alarming.

  ‘Capital,’ George had taught him, ‘is what you don’t spend.’

  Julian’s capital was spent.

  And now Lee Kidman and Barry Tonga stand dripping in his hallway, the hallway he is shortly to lose if he doesn’t sell that fucking terrace in Shoreditch to that flash fucking Russian from Moscow on fucking Thames.

  Basically, they’re here to ask for their money. But Julian’s not really listening.

  His eyes drift, as they often do, to Lee Kidman’s crotch. He finds himself contemplating the animal furled in there, that thick and lazy beast.

  Julian is not by inclination homosexual, he’s seen Kidman perform in quite a few pornos, pornos of the British variety: middle-aged hookers pretending to be housewives, women who look like they’ve hastily trimmed their snatches with Bic disposables and no foam, ostensibly offered twenty-five quid for a fuck in the back of a van then — ha ha! — left stranded by the side of the road.

  Julian recognizes these films for what they are, comforting fantasies of availability, they’re all whores in the end, blah blah blah. He doesn’t, in and of themselves, find them erotic or stimulating, not beyond the occasional animal twitch in his crotch for a pleasured moan or an animal groan, or a pale jiggling breast.

  But Lee Kidman’s cock!

  Lee Kidman doesn’t use a disposable Bic. He looks depilated and smooth as an Action Man. His cock is as thick as Julian’s wrist. Julian is fascinated by the laziness of it — the way it’s too big to point upwards. It just kind of dangles there. The women stuff it into whatever orifice like half a kilo of uncooked sausages.

  Lee Kidman’s cock has started to insinuate itself into Julian’s dreams. It’s not like he wants to do anything with it, let alone have it inside him: the thought fills him with a shudder of biological terror — imagine trying to get that thing in your mouth!

  And it takes Kidman so long to come. Although, to be fair, Julian expects it wouldn’t take as long with a man. But still.

  Kidman is aware of Julian glancing at his crotch. There’s a kind of half-smile for it.

  Julian says, ‘Is the old man still in the house?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Kidman. ‘But that copper’s not hanging round any more. Which was the point.’

  ‘And you did it right? He got the message.’

  ‘He got the message.’

  ‘And there’ll be no comebacks?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Because I don’t want to go to prison, Lee.’

  Julian is terrified of prison. His therapist calls it cleisiophobia: the fear of being locked in an enclosed space. But it’s not that. It’s the fear of being locked in an enclosed space with men who have cocks like Lee Kidman.

  ‘Seriously,’ Julian says. ‘This is an old man living alone in a shitty little house. How hard can it be?’

  Kidman and Tonga have the grace to look embarrassed.

  Julian says, ‘I’m not giving you a fucking penny until you’ve got that old cunt out of my fucking house. Jesus Christ. You’re unbelievable. Coming round here with the job half done. Have some pride.’

  Kidman gives him a mock-innocent look.

  Barry Tonga just looks blank, stands there with his massive arms crossed, judging him. And Julian doesn’t like to be judged. It makes him uncomfortable.

  He dreams of just getting out from under this shit, just getting on a plane and flying away.

  He’s been thinking of moving to Thailand, perhaps opening a little bar. He can see himself in cut-off jeans and flip-flops, generally hanging out.

  Of course, if Julian were to get into the Thai bar business, there’d be another tsunami and he’d be left with flotsam and jetsam.
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  But even that seems better than this: shitty London, shitty properties, shitty old people standing between him and liquidating assets. And the shitty fucking knowledge that George, his dad, would probably know exactly what to do.

  Patrick has slept in the park. He’s done it before, when Henry’s in a mood.

  It’s the largest open space in London. It’s like being in a different epoch. There are bogs and bracken, archaic oak trees. There are herds of red deer, a population of badgers, even parakeets: birds with incongruous, bright feathers and rosy red beaks.

  Patrick walks back to the house. He brings a sack of rabbits for the dogs.

  Before moving here, he and his dad lived all over. They even lived abroad for a while, he thinks, possibly in France. But it’s difficult to be sure. Patrick was very young and not permitted to speak to anybody but Henry.

  They were long years but not unhappy; there was always so much to do. And there was just him and Henry; the blinding spotlight of Henry’s love, the cold light of Henry’s rage.

  Now Patrick walks through the front door and there’s Henry in the living room. Patrick can almost smell his depression.

  When Henry’s unhappy you can see the thing inside him, the twisted thing that Patrick thinks of as a demon. It’s ill-knit and crooked, full of hate and wrath.

  Patrick lingers in the doorway, in case another beating is imminent. He says, ‘Dad, what’s wrong?’

  Henry looks up. He’s not a big man and his hair is dark and neat. His eyes are all wrong.

  Henry picks up the Sky Plus remote and rewinds to a recorded news broadcast. ‘Look at this,’ he says. ‘Just fucking look at it.’

  On TV, Patrick sees a black police officer with broad shoulders. He’s sitting behind a long desk, flanked by uniformed officers whom Patrick presumes to be of a higher rank.

  ‘Here he goes,’ says Henry. ‘Here he fucking goes. Listen.’

  On screen, the policeman is saying how sorry he feels for Henry.

  ‘ We know you’re in a great deal of emotional turmoil, and we want to help you. We want to talk to you and we will go to every effort to talk to you.’

  Patrick goes cold from his feet to his head.