The Calling (33 page)

‘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.

Howie pulls up close to Milton House. She kills the engine, glances at Luther. ‘You okay there, Boss?’

‘Yeah. Why?’

‘You don’t look right.’

‘When we’ve got Mia Dalton back,’ he says, ‘I’ll go to bed for a week.’

‘I’ll join you,’ says Howie. Then she blushes from her sternum to her hairline. She’s a redhead, so it shows. ‘By which I don’t mean—’

‘I know what you mean,’ Luther says. ‘Wait here. Keep an eye on things.’

She watches him swagger towards the morose grey columns. She wonders if this display is in inverse proportion to his confidence; the shakier the man, the bigger the walk.

Luther passes a skeletal, rusting children’s playground. No kids playing. A skinny dog trots in a delirious circle. Broken glass on the happy, cracked mosaic.

He chin-nods to a group of hoodies who loiter like crows on the stationary roundabout. Then he ducks his head and enters the permanent twilight of Milton House.

Luther takes the stairs three at a time. They stink.

He’s breathless and ill-tempered when he bangs on Steve Bixby’s door. ‘Steve. DCI Luther. Open up.’

No answer.

He beats on the door. It jolts in its frame. Luther can feel the resistance of heavy-duty deadbolts and mortice locks.

He backs off a step, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

The door to the adjacent flat opens. A woman, a girl really, stares at him. Pasty face. Kappa.

It was on an estate just like this that Luther met his first thirty-year-old grandmother.

He nods at Bixby’s door. ‘He in?’

‘You’re waking the baby.’

‘Do you know where he might have gone?’

‘Do I look like Derren Brown?’

‘How much do you know about him?’ Luther says. ‘The man who lives next door to you and your babies?’

That’s enough for Bixby, who’s listening on the other side of the door.

He calls out, ‘All right!’

Luther waits while Bixby goes through the rigmarole of getting the door unlocked and opened.

He stands in the doorway, the dog at his heels. ‘What now?’

Luther plants a hand on Bixby’s sternum and shoves. Bixby pinwheels backwards. Falls on his bony arse.

Luther steps in. The air in the flat is rank with Bixby, dog and frying.

The dog backs away. It angles itself into the corner and lowers at him, daring him to make a move.

Luther turns.

The neighbour stands in the open doorway, mobile phone in hand. She’s filming him.

‘You can’t do that,’ she says. ‘He’s got human rights.’

Luther grabs her wrist, twists it, seizes the phone, pockets it, shoves her out of the flat and slams the door.

She presses her face to the window. Mashes her nose against it. Sees Bixby on the ground.

Luther pulls the curtains.

‘
Oi! Give me my phone. Thieving cunt.’

Luther lifts Bixby to his feet. Rams him into the jerry-built wall.

Dog ornaments topple to the dank carpet.

The old pit bull watches from the corner. Its shanks tremble. It’s pissed itself.

Luther puts his face to Bixby’s. ‘You’re a liar, Steve. You said you didn’t know Henry Madsen very well. You cooked up some story about some fictional dead mate, Finian Ward, putting you in contact. But that was bullshit. Because you do, don’t you? You know him.’

Bixby swallows. Glances at the window. The neighbour’s still out there, banging on the glass, crying out obscenities and threats.

Luther squeezes Bixby’s jaw. Turns his head until they’re eye to eye. ‘Which makes you an accessory after the fact.’

‘To what?’

‘To all the things he’s done since we last spoke.’

‘She’s right,’ says Bixby, nodding at the window. ‘This is assault.’

Luther laughs. Then he slaps Bixby in the chops. Once. Gently. ‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t know.’

He slaps Bixby again. Not so gently. Bixby’s eyes water.

‘Where is he? Where’s Henry?’

The dog advances and retreats. Makes snapping feints at Luther’s legs. He turns to it. It runs away in a transport of panic.

Luther twists Bixby’s ear. ‘Where is he?’

‘I don’t. Fucking. Know.’

Luther weighs it up. Then he lets Bixby go.

He reaches out. Grabs the toothless dog.

It twists in his hands, trying to bite. It gums the fabric of his parka. It’s still strong, all sinew and muscle. And it’s heavy.

Luther closes one fist around its collar and one fist around its hind legs. The dog yelps and strains, tries to twist free.

Luther marches to the door. Struggles to open it.

He shoves the neighbour out of the way. Then he dangles the dog over the concrete balcony.

The neighbour stares at him. Her mouth is open.