The Calling l-1

by Neil Cross

  She steps over the threshold. Reed shuts the door. She follows him down the hall to the living room and drips on the parquet.

  He says, ‘Tea?’

  ‘Tea would be great.’

  ‘I’ve got something stronger, if you’d like it?’

  ‘If I start drinking now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop.’

  ‘Tea it is, then. So what’s wrong?’

  ‘Bad day.’

  ‘For everyone, apparently. What can you do?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ian. What can I do?’

  She hangs her head and starts to cry.

  Reed steps up. He embraces her. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘Hey, hey, hey.’

  She says, ‘Can you call John?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I need you to make sure he’s all right.’

  ‘He’s all right,’ Reed says. ‘He’s okay. He’s stressed, but he’s okay, I think.’

  ‘He’s not. He’s making himself ill.’

  ‘Shhh,’ says Reed. ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Talk to him,’ she says. ‘He loves you. He’ll listen to you.’

  ‘He loves you, too.’

  She laughs as if that were a bitter joke.

  ‘Zoe,’ says Reed. ‘Hand to God, I never knew anyone loved his wife half as much as John loves you.’

  There’s a moment of embarrassed intimacy between them, almost normal enough to make them laugh and pretend this isn’t happening.

  Zoe fills a glass with water. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’

  ‘There’s Nurofen in the drawer,’ he says. ‘Or I’ve got some codeine. You should try it. I’m a convert.’

  She opens the drawer and palms a couple of painkillers.

  Reed says, ‘Okay. Look. This thing, the thing that’s happening today. It’s pretty bad. You’re right, he’s probably wound up a bit tight by it. The first chance I get, I’ll take him to one side. Have a word.’

  ‘He’s going to kill himself,’ she says. ‘He can’t carry on the way he is.’

  He takes her shoulders, holds her at arm’s length. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I’ll never let that happen, okay? Because you two, John and Zoe, you’re the ones who give the rest of us hope.’

  ‘God help you then,’ she says.

  Bill Tanner lives in a two-up, two-down, end-of-terrace in Shoreditch.

  It’s worth a lot less than it was three years ago, but it’s worth a lot more than it was when the original landlord, George Crouch, acquired it in 1966.

  Luther rings the doorbell. Inside, a small dog erupts in a spasm of yapping. The floral curtains part a little.

  Aware that he’s being watched, Luther raises his arms, two Tesco Metro carriers in each hand. ‘I called. I’m a mate of Ian Reed. John.’

  The curtains close and the hallway light comes on. At length, Bill Tanner opens the door.

  Although he’s shuffling and hunched, Tanner still carries the air of the powerful man he used to be: broad in the beam with immense, knobby fists at the end of meaty forearms. He’s got a thick head of white hair, pinkie bald only at the crown. More white hair erupts in great tufts from his nostrils and ears. He’s wearing a brown cardigan.

  At his foot is a skinny, moist-eyed Yorkshire terrier. It continues to yap as Tanner digs in his pocket with a shaking hand.

  He excavates a wadded-up five pound note and tries to give it to Luther — who waves a hand, still with the heavy bags in it. ‘Don’t worry. It’s on the house. All part of the service.’

  Bill nods his old lion’s head and stuffs the fiver back into his pocket. ‘Cheers, son. Do you fancy coming in for a cuppa, then?’

  Luther hesitates. Then he says, ‘Go on then. Just the one.’

  He steps into the hallway.

  The carpets, curtains and furniture are old, carefully maintained for many years but now grubby in the way of the old; Luther spots more than one tiny dog turd in dark corners, one under the music centre.

  Yorkies are prone to it. Luther knows, because his nan had one.

  He follows Bill to the kitchen and pulls up a vinyl chair. It has a bright sunflower print, the kind of thing coveted by Shoreditch hipsters. Bill could sell them at Spitalfields market and make some decent cash.

  Bill puts the kettle on and dumps a Tesco Value teabag into a mug whose interior Luther does not wish to glimpse.

  He opens the fridge, takes out a carton of milk, dumps it on the worktop. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘One, please.’

  Bill begins to shake. Luther stands, taking the old man’s elbow. Helps him sit.

  Bill Tanner sits with his head low. He’s still holding the carton of milk. Luther can smell it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ve got no sugar in the house.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Luther says. ‘I’ll have it without.’

  ‘I hate tea without sugar. It’s piss without sugar.’ He’s trembling. ‘I’m too scared to go down the fucking shops, that’s the trouble. Imagine that. A grown man, and I’m too scared to leave my own fucking house. The doorbell goes at night, I nearly have fucking heart failure.’

  ‘Everyone feels like that when the doorbell goes at night,’ Luther says. ‘You sit there. I’ll make the tea.’

  When the tea is drunk, Luther empties out the carrier bags and catalogues what he’s bought: bread, milk, some proper teabags, instant coffee, tins of beans, tins of Irish Stew, tins of soup, toilet paper, toilet bleach, lamb chops, tissues, a buttercream gateau, some bourbon biscuits, some custard creams. Then, at the end, he lays out twelve cans of Caesar dog food in tiny cans. ‘Show me where all this stuff goes,’ he says. ‘I’ll put it away.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that.’

  ‘You’re a mate of Ian’s,’ Luther says. ‘I promised I’d make sure you were looked after. He thinks a lot of you.’

  ‘He’s a decent lad, that Ian,’ says Bill Tanner.

  ‘He is.’

  When Luther’s put away the shopping, he asks for the dog’s lead and takes the doddery old Yorkie for a walk round the block. It pisses on every third lamp post, finally squats to shit on the corner.

  Luther takes automatic note of everyone who chuckles as they pass him; a young couple, hand in hand; a bunch of white kids hanging round outside a Chinese takeaway.

  The kids give him the evil eye, call out a few insults. He’s embarrassed by the little dog with its prim little feet skittering along next to him. But he gives them the passive eye, the eye that tells them he isn’t afraid, and their eyes slide silently from his.

  He walks the dog back home and lets himself in.

  He helps the old man upstairs and into his musty bed.

  Then he pads downstairs. He sits in the armchair and tunes the portable radio to London Talk FM.

  He listens. But he can’t sit still. He can’t stop thinking. His head is a city. He paces the floor. He rubs at his crown with the palm of his hand.

  The dog trots joyfully at his heel, showing the tip of its tiny pink tongue.

  The radio murmurs.

  Howie lets herself through the front door, trudges up two flights of stairs and opens the door to her flat.

  Robert’s asleep and she doesn’t want to wake him. So she sneaks to the tiny second bedroom, rolls a polar fleece into a tube to serve as a pillow and sleeps in her clothes.

  Around 5 a.m. she cries out, loud enough to wake Robert. He comes padding through. He stands half naked in the doorway, wondering whether to wake her or not.

  He decides not to. He goes back to bed. He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

  Zoe takes a long bath, ignoring that she’s already showered twice today, then lies on the sofa in pyjamas and thick socks, her hair tied back. She lets News 24 flicker silently in the background and keeps Maggie Reilly low on London Talk FM while she reviews case notes, drinks half a bottle of wine and grows weepy.

  She checks her phone every five minutes.

  Around 1 a.m. she gives up. She wraps herse
lf in a soft fleece blanket, sets aside the papers, turns up the radio and scans the news websites: COUNTRY HOLDS ITS BREATH FOR

  BABY EMMA. TENSE WAIT FOR BABY EMMA. LONDON HOLDS ITS BREATH IN ‘BABY EMMA’ DRAMA.

  She slips into sleep, and straight into a dream in which she and Mark are fucking. He is shoving his fingers into her mouth and she is biting them. All the while, John searches for something in the wardrobe.

  She wakes before hitting the ground and turns back to the news.

  The same two photographs of Baby Emma’s mother and father. The same audio of the man claiming to be their killer. The same sober newsreaders, the same grave, gleeful trepidation.

  She flashes back to yesterday afternoon, the way she and Mark writhed around each other, in her head, it seems that their legs had intertwined like snakes. She thinks of Mark’s mouth at her breast and between her legs, his tongue between her lips, his cock in her mouth, and she wants to be sick.

  She falls asleep sometime after 3 a.m.

  At 4.17 she jolts awake from another dream, worse than the first.

  She sits there until just after 5, gummy-eyed and with a crick in her neck, listening to the low, demented murmur of talk radio and refreshing the BBC News homepage every few seconds.

  Danny Hillman sits in the narrow production room, monitoring the newsfeeds, RSS feeds, Reuters.

  But mostly, he’s waiting for Pete Black to call.

  Just before midnight, Lucy phones to see how he’s getting on. The girls are sleeping okay, they send him kisses. Danny’s dad had called to ask about Christmas. Danny’s dad is in a home and calls to ask about Christmas eight or nine times a week. After Christmas, he’ll start worrying about Easter. But that’s all the news Lucy had. She hoped he was okay.

  Danny tells his wife he loves her. She tells him she loves him back. And good luck, she says. Fingers crossed.

  Maggie sits at the microphone, taking calls. She is exhausted and exhilarated.

  The news cameras are waiting downstairs. The station itself is news. The show is news. But Maggie is the real news.

  She’s dressed for the occasion — for the impromptu press conference she hopes to take before the day is out. But the crisp clothes and new shoes feel wrong against her tired body.

  The clock ticks.

  The light seems bright and glares on white walls.

  She looks into the corner and there are her new shoes, and it seems strange to her to be doing this in bare feet. A call like this, you want to be ready when it arrives.

  Luther sits in the upright chair, wrapped in his coat. He closes his eyes and listens to the low murmur of the radio.

  In the darkness, he hears Bill Tanner snoring upstairs.

  He tries not to think about where the Lamberts’ baby might be and what the man who calls himself Pete Black might be doing to her. He tries not to think about the things he’s seen. This twenty-year skid of blood and bone and marrow.

  He does what he always does when the train in his head won’t stop: he thinks of his wife. He thinks of the first day he saw her. Her gypsy skirt and flat shoes, her smile. Her voice, which sent tingles up his spine. It still does.

  He scrolls through his memories of her — his personal koan. Her graduation day, the day they moved in together. The week she nursed him through flu. Their wedding day. Watching TV cuddled up on the sofa. Her nudity. Shopping in supermarkets together. Her forbearance as he stalks the fragrant rows of second-hand bookshops.

  But the memories are like recordings of recordings. He searches them for something recent but good — something that belongs to him, here and now.

  All he finds is Zoe tonight, in the park, kissing him on the cheek and walking away.

  Luther’s heart pumps queasily in his chest. He thinks about calling her. He doesn’t.

  Benny Deadhead goes home, gets changed, puts on some sweats. He thinks about getting it all out of his head by watching some TV, maybe one of the Korean horror DVDs he’s been stacking up for about two years and which challenge him, still unwatched, from the middle shelf.

  Instead he thinks fuck it. He racks up a couple of lines, sniffs them back, logs on to World of Warcraft.

  He steps for a few enchanted hours into a better and braver world.

  Teller wanders the Serious Crime Unit. The tired personnel under bright lights, the flickering monitors, the filing cabinets with their terrible secrets. The peeling plaster and the smudged glass bricks.

  Downstairs, in the ringing bowels of the building, the drunks and the gang members and the burglars and the junkies shiver under strip lights.

  She thinks of the people out there in London tonight, the plain clothes and uniformed coppers waiting on roofs and in cold cars. Men and women who’ve been up for forty-eight hours straight: the people who’ve come in off sick leave and off their holidays.

  She’s tired and she feels sick and she’s worried about her daughter, fourteen years old and sleeping at the neighbour’s house.

  Via laptops and cellphones, memes propagate and bring forth:

  … someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby in her garden last nite!!! and she called the police because it was late and she thought it was weird the police told her

  WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!!! WE ALREADY HAVE A UNIT ON THE WAY DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!! He told her they think it is a SERIAL KILLER!! The man has snatched 2 girls in Manchester and is now in London and has a baby’s cry recorded, he uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone has left a baby. He said they have not verified it, but have had MANY MANY CALLS BY WOMEN SAYING THEY HEARD BABIES’ CRIES OUTSIDE THEIR DOORS WHEN THEIR HOME ALONE AT NIGHT. Please pass this on!!!!! And DO NOT open the door for a crying baby!!!!!!

  At 10.56 p.m. two newlyweds in Finsbury Park hear a baby screaming in their back garden.

  They call the police. No baby is found.

  Attending officers believe the anxious couple may have heard the mating cries of urban foxes, which are often mistaken for babies in distress.

  At 12.52 a.m. Claire Jackson, who lives in Wandsworth, calls 999 claiming that ‘a tall black man’ tried to lure her into opening her door late at night by using a recording of a crying baby.

  Ms Jackson claims to have heard ‘bumping sounds’ outside. She got up to see what was going on. It was then she heard a baby crying from her front garden.

  She and her husband saw the ‘tall black man dressed all in black’ outside their home, walking quickly away.

  At 1.03 a.m. three young sisters, including a baby, are rescued by a neighbour from a smoke-filled house.

  Left alone by their mother, who has gone speed dating, the two older children — aged six and eight — are trying to bake cakes. They inadvertently turn on both the grill and the oven.

  Hearing a crying baby, Mo Sullivan, who lives two doors down, calls 999 before running out to pound on her neighbours’ door.

  The house is filling with smoke when the front door is opened a crack by eight-year-old Olivia. She’s been told not to open the door to strangers.

  Mrs Sullivan convinces Olivia to call 999 and obtain the police’s ‘permission’ to leave the burning house with her sisters.

  Mrs Sullivan, a Christian, will later tell the papers it was a miracle. She was only watching TV at that time of night because she was so anxious about dear Baby Emma. Any other night, she’d have taken her pill and gone to sleep.

  Mrs Sullivan has been taking the pills since her husband died. They’d been married thirty-five years and were never blessed with children.

  ‘Jesus led me by the hand to save this little tot and her sisters,’ she says. ‘All praise to him.’

  At 1.42 a.m. Matthew Alexander, a motorist, is forced to escape the scene of a crash after being attacked by the men who had at first tried to rescue him.

  Mr Alexander, returning from a dinner party, crashes his Ford Mondeo into a central reservation near Manor Fields in Putney.

  Spotting Mr Alexander
’s baby son strapped into a car seat, the group — led by Graeme Kershaw, 23 — begin asking Mr Alexander questions about ‘Baby Emma’.

  Mr Alexander’s protestations about the gender of his child are ignored by the gang, who become violent when Mr Alexander suggests they confirm what he’s saying by checking inside the child’s nappy.

  Mr Alexander sustains moderate but not life-threatening injuries.

  Police are accused of being heavy-handed after four officers storm a young couple’s house at 3.54 a.m. because a 999 caller claims their baby is ‘crying non-stop, like something’s wrong.’

  Lab Assistant Sean Scott and his girlfriend Becky Walker, wake up to find two police officers in their bedroom demanding to see their two-month-old daughter, Frankie.

  Police reduce Becky to tears by threatening to call social services, but leave after confirming Frankie is safe and well.

  At 5.12 a.m. a man is seen approaching Homerton Hospital carrying ‘a suspicious bundle’.

  He is apprehended and set upon by a large group of young men and teenagers. The youngest of the attackers is three weeks short of his thirteenth birthday.

  The victim is Olusola Akinrele, a hospital worker on his way to an early shift. The ‘bundle’ was his gym bag.

  Fortunately for Mr Akinrele, who loses the sight in one eye, the attack takes place less than a hundred metres from the Homerton Accident and Emergency department, which is where he works as a nurse.

  At 5.47 a.m., Maggie Reilly comes to the microphone and announces that Pete Black has at last called back to London Talk FM.

  ‘Pete,’ she says. ‘Is that you?’

  Luther stops pacing. He snatches up the portable radio and holds it close to his ear.

  ‘I’ve driven all over London,’ says Pete Black, tearful with self-pity. ‘There’s police everywhere. I just want London to know that. I want London to know what the police are doing. I try to help, and this is what I get.’

  ‘You can’t blame the police for doing their job.’

  ‘Yes I can. Because if it wasn’t for them, Emma would be with the doctors now. But she’s not, is she?’

  ‘So where is she, Pete? Where’s Baby Emma?’

  ‘I’ve put her where I could. I hope she’s safe.’