LUTHER: The Calling

by Neil Cross

  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.

  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.

  ‘Those cunts,’ says Henry, blinking and tearful. ‘Those fucking cunts. Look at them. Who the fuck do they think they’re talking to?’

  Henry watches the press conference twice more, mouthing along with it. Patrick doesn’t move from his position in the doorway.

  ‘They feel sorry for me?’ Henry says. ‘They’re trying to fucking embarrass me. They’re trying to fucking show me up. Who are they, eh? Who are these cunts to feel sorry for me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Patrick.

  ‘I’ll do them,’ Henry says. ‘I’ll fucking do them. The fucking cunts.’

  Henry goes to the cabinet and takes out a disposable mobile phone, still boxed. He opens the box, takes out the phone, takes off the bubble wrap and fits the battery. He puts all the bits of cardboard in a Tesco Metro carrier bag, ready to be thrown in someone else’s bin.

  All the while, he’s muttering to himself. I’ll do you, you cunts. I’ll fucking do you. Fucking show me up. I’ll do you.

  When Henry’s got the phone, then his wallet, he stands waiting in his neat grey coat with the black suede collar, his square-toed Church’s shoes. He looks almost small, like an angry bantam. It hurts Patrick to see it.

  Henry tells Patrick to drive to Hyde Park. There are few CCTV cameras there.

  Henry hates CCTV cameras. He sometimes talks about moving away, moving to a country where it’s more difficult to be seen.

  Patrick and Henry drive to Hyde Park and sit on a bench.

  Henry calls the radio station and rages.

  CHAPTER 14

  Pete Black: ‘Are we on air?’

  Maggie Reilly: ‘You’re live on the air to London.’

  ‘Good. I saw what that policeman said about me on the news. The press conference. He was lying about me. That policeman. So let me tell you this. I want him to apologize. Properly. I want him to say sorry for the lies he told about me.’

  ‘What lies did he tell? As far as I can see—’

  ‘That I’m pathetic. That I’m in pain. I’m not in pain. I was trying to help. I wanted to help that little baby. And he comes on TV and insults me. Well, I’ve had enough. More than enough. I’ve had it up to here with scum like that, pricks who think they can talk to me any way they want to. I want an apology. A public apology.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, Pete. I don’t think the police will apologize to you.’

  ‘Well, they’d better.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘I want you to get a police officer on the line and I want an apology. I know they’re listening. I know they’re tracing this call. They think they’re so clever. They think they’re so smart. They think they’re whiter than white. Well, I’ve had enough.’

  Silence.

  ‘Either they apologize – or what happens next is their fault.’

  ‘What does that mean, Pete? What’s going to happen next?’

  ‘That’s not for me to say. All I want is for the police to come on here, on the radio, on your show, and say sorry for what they said about me.’

  ‘Pete, you’ve freely admitted to killing two people.’

  ‘What about all the hookers and all the dealers, eh? What happens to them? All the vandals and all the hoodies and all the dole scum? All these lowlifes, all these generations of parasites living in shitty, dirty, horrible council flats. They get away with murder. The police turn a blind eye to them, don’t they?’

  ‘Pete, I’m not sure—’

  ‘If they don’t apologize, I’ll do it again.’

  ‘Do what again?’

  ‘I think you know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I think London needs you to be very clear here. I think London needs to know exactly what you’re saying.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’m saying. I’ve got keys to all your houses. I’ve got keys to all the houses in London. If they don’t apologize to me, then I’m going to come for all the mummies and all the daddies and all their little babies. I’m going to let myself into someone’s house tonight and I’m going to open them up and I’m going to gobble on their insides and I’m going to fuck them and I’m going to fucking eat them, all right? Do you understand me now? Do you fucking feel sorry for me now? Do I sound like I’m in pain now? You lying cunts. Do you understand me? Do you understand what I’m going to do?’

  Teller clicks a mouse to stop the playback. ‘That’s enough of that, I think.’

  Luther sits back in the chair. His eyes flick to Cornish. ‘There’s more?’

  ‘Another minute or so. They killed the live feed, of course.’

  ‘Another minute of—’

  ‘Just ranting,’ Teller says. ‘Cunt this, cunt that.’

  ‘I need to hear it.’

  ‘You can hear it at your own desk. I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘We get a location?’

  ‘Hyde Park. Two and a half square kilometres of open parkland. Limited CCTV coverage. Thousands of people moving in thousands of different directions. He might as well have called from the moon.’

  Cornish rolls up a sleeve. Doesn’t seem to like it. He unrolls it again and buttons the cuff. ‘Will he make good on this threat?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Luther. ‘He’s like the rest of them. He’s grandiose, self-important, ego-driven. He can’t stand to be thought of as weak. He’d rather be hated than pitied. And he’d rather be feared than either.’

  ‘Well,’ Teller says. ‘If we had a PR problem before, we’ve got a humdinger now. Can
we find him before tonight?’

  ‘How?’ says Luther. ‘Tell me how, I’ll do it.’

  ‘I don’t know. Sprinkle some fairy dust. Do your thing.’

  ‘Okay. Then let me do what he’s asking. Let me go on TV, on radio, whatever, and apologize.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ Cornish says.

  ‘There’s a family in London who won’t see the sunrise tomorrow if it doesn’t. You can bet he’s already picked them out.’

  He outlines what Benny told him about the likelihood of Facebook stalking. Cornish and Teller listen, increasingly despondent.

  Then Cornish says, ‘But if we give this prick what he wants today, what does he ask for tomorrow? Do we give him that, too? And if we do, what does he ask for the next day? And the day after that? And the day after that?’

  Luther sags, knowing he’s right.

  ‘Take me off the case,’ he says.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘It may be enough to appease him.’

  ‘We already talked about this. We don’t give in to blackmail. More importantly, we can’t be seen to give in to blackmail.’

  ‘With respect, Boss, we’ve got to react somehow. We’ve got to give him something.’

  ‘And if we do,’ Cornish says, ‘we give a green light to all the loonies that come after him. Psychopaths don’t get to use the media to control the investigation of their crimes.’

  ‘Long term, absolutely. Short term, it’s the best tactic I can think of. Release a statement saying you’ve suspended me, pending investigation into my running of the case. Hang me out to dry.’

  ‘Holy Christ,’ says Teller. She leans over, digs in her drawer, removes a bottle of aspirin with a tamper-proof lid. Struggles to open it.

  ‘You can absolutely do this,’ says Luther. ‘You say the police don’t respond to a criminal’s demands. But you can imply I did something wrong, say I mishandled the chain of evidence. Say I’m emotionally incapable. God knows they’re showing footage of me crying about every ten seconds. That might be enough to assuage him, mollify his ego.’

  Teller doesn’t answer.

  Neither does Cornish.

  ‘If we don’t do this,’ Luther says, ‘he’ll make good on what he said. Tonight. And he knows what he’s doing. He’s been doing this stuff for a long time without us even noticing him. He’s probably got a pool of possible targets. Families like the Lamberts. Houses he knows inside out. We can’t just sit back and let it happen. We can’t do that, can we?’

  There’s a long silence. Then Cornish says, ‘John, I understand. I honestly do. But we can’t grab our ankles and let this psycho have his way with us.’

  ‘Sir,’ Luther says. ‘Seriously.’

  Teller warns him with a glance: Shut. Up.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how we dress it up,’ Cornish says. ‘We’d be sending a clear message. We’d be telling the entire world that we’re running scared of this prick, that he gets exactly what he wants from us. We can’t have that. We just can’t. For the precedent.’

  Luther walks out of Teller’s office. He can feel the eyes on him. All the coppers in the bullpen. He must have been shouting.

  Howie lifts a file from her desk and waves it to catch his attention. It’s a shy, defiantly jaunty little gesture, and in that moment he loves her for it.

  He approaches. ‘How we looking on that thing?’

  ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Actually, Boss, can I borrow you for a minute?’

  ‘Of course. Bring those.’ He nods at the files.

  Howie scoops up the York and Kintry files, neatens them, follows Luther to his narrow office.

  She nods to Benny and shuts the door. Luther closes the blinds.

  ‘Is it just me,’ Benny says, ‘or is this actually getting pretty bad?’

  ‘It’s actually getting pretty bad,’ Luther says.

  Howie and Benny give him a sympathetic look. He shrugs it off; he’s been getting them all day, since weeping at the churchyard.

  He takes off his jacket, hangs it over the back of his chair, loosens his tie.

  He sits and rubs his face. Takes a series of long, slow breaths. Closes his eyes. Keeps them closed. ‘Okay. Talk me through it. Where are we?’

  ‘Well,’ says Howie, ‘we know we’re dealing with a very particular animal here. We also know this isn’t his first offence; he’s far too confident. Too self-important. He’s narcissistic with an overdeveloped sense of grievance. And to judge by his voice, word selection, intonation, he’s in his late twenties at the earliest, more like mid-thirties plus. Put all that together, you’re looking at a likely serial offender.’

  ‘But it’s definitely his first time with this MO.’

  ‘With this MO, yeah. But MO and signature are two different things. MO consists of everything he requires to carry out the crime: type of crime, victimology, the setting of the crime, method used. MO changes. Signature doesn’t. So what was he doing before he cut open the Lamberts? We’ve been looking at one credible prior offence, maybe two: the abduction of Adrian York and the attempted abduction of Thomas Kintry. This is Bristol, mid-nineties. So we’re talking fifteen, sixteen years ago. And these were slightly older children. Adrian York was six. Thomas Kintry was twelve.’

  ‘That’s abnormal for a start,’ Benny says. ‘These men, they usually have a very specific preference – age, sex, ethnicity, hair colour.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Howie. ‘So he abducts children. We don’t know what criteria apply because, even if we assume these cases are genuinely linked, victimology seems inconsistent. At best, he’s working from a radically different MO after an apparent fifteen-year silence. During those fifteen years, we can imagine that either he’s resisted the urge to offend, he’s been in prison, or—’

  ‘Or he’s been offending under the radar,’ Luther says. ‘So where are we on the name? Pete Black?’

  ‘Well,’ says Howie. ‘I’m getting to that. That’s actually what I wanted to talk about. It could be a coincidence, but . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  She dry-swallows, excited and nervous. She slips a note from the thinnest of the files and reads from it. ‘In the Netherlands “Zwarte Piet”, meaning Black Pete, is a servant of Sinterklaas. He delivers presents on the fifth of December and . . .’ She looks at Luther.

  He’s opened his eyes. He’s looking at her.

  ‘He takes naughty kids away in the empty bags,’ she says. ‘In some stories, the Zwarte Piets themselves were kidnapped as kids, and the kidnapped kids make up the next generation of Zwarte Piets.’

  ‘Which fits with the Adrian York abduction,’ Luther says. ‘Which was a child abduction nobody even believed was an abduction. Not until it was too late.’

  ‘So what if, during the last fifteen years he hasn’t been inactive, or in prison? What if he’s just been quiet?’

  She begins laying documents on Luther’s desk. Doing so, she tells him that numerous cultures have a mythical bogeyman who’s portrayed as a man with a sack on his back, a man who carries naughty children away.

  ‘There’s El Hombre de la Bolsa, meaning the Sack Man. In Armenia and Georgia it’s the Bag Man. In Bulgaria, it’s Torbalan. In Hungary it’s zsákos ember, “the person with a sack”. In North India, he’s the Bori Baba or “Father Sack”. In Lebanon he’s Abu Kees, that’s literally “The Man with a Bag”. In Vietnam, it’s Mister Three Bags. In Haiti, it’s The Gunnysack Man.’

  Luther looks at the images: trolls and ogres and twisted fairytale things, scrawny, beak-nosed old men bearing away bawling children.

  He stands. His legs won’t let him sit. He paces the room.

  He says, ‘I think this is good. I think this has meaning. Benny, I need you both to trawl records, look for a link to any of these characters. Black Peter. The Gunnysack Man. Father Sack, whoever. Anything pops up, anything, let me know straight away.’

  At 4.07, Cornish and Teller front the second hastily convened press conference of the day
.

  DCI Luther is not present.

  Cornish reads the following statement:

  ‘As you know, the Metropolitan Police Service is investigating a very serious offence and has no comment to make regarding any threats made by the man who calls himself Pete Black.

  ‘I’d like to remind you at this time that whoever committed this atrocity against Mr and Mrs Lambert and their child, nobody made him or her do these things. He or she perpetrated these horrors of his or her own free will. If the perpetrator of these crimes is indeed the man calling himself Pete Black, then the Metropolitan Police Service once again extends its heartfelt wish for him to hand himself over to the proper authorities. He can be assured that he will be treated in full accordance with the law.

  ‘We believe that the phone calls made to a London radio station are in fact a cry for help from a very desperate man. And we’re keen, if he’ll let us, to give him the help he needs.

  ‘However, given the danger to the public this man represents, let me reiterate that we’re asking members of the public to help us identify and apprehend him. Someone out there knows who he is. In order to hasten this process, the Metropolitan Police Service has authorized a reward of one hundred thousand pounds for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man calling himself Pete Black.

  ‘That’s concludes the statement. I will, however, take one or two questions. Let’s keep it orderly please, ladies and gentlemen.’

  Here they come, in a flashing, overlapping babble:

  ‘Will you be making an apology to Pete Black?’

  ‘I refer you to my statement, which you should consider the last word on this matter.’

  ‘Will Pete Black kill again if you refuse to do as he says?’

  ‘That would be entering into unwarranted realms of speculation.’

  ‘How big is the threat?’

  ‘That’s impossible to gauge at this time.’

  ‘If Pete Black does kill another family, will heads roll in the police service?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure I understand what that question means.’

  ‘Who takes responsibility for signing off DCI Luther’s tactics?’