by Neil Cross
One evening, Megan had gone home from work and taken an overdose. Her flatmate found her in bed the next morning. Eight days later, Caitlin was sitting on a hard church pew in brand new funeral clothes and brand new funeral shoes that pinched her feet. And she sat dazed, looking at the coffin.
The instant permanence of it hit her hard; the fact that somebody could simply pop out of the world like a bubble.
It made the world seem less real. Caitlin slipped into what she now recognizes as a mild depressive illness. Everything felt like a film set; everyone she knew seemed like an actor. She looked through the rainy window of her fifth-storey flat, out at the London cityscape and thought: That looks really realistic.
After a few dismal months, she decided to do something about it; to do something good. So here she is, answering calls to the Samaritans, three volunteer shifts a month.
Right now it’s 5.38 p.m., and at the end of the line a young man is sobbing. When Caitlin asks what he wants to talk about he says, ‘It’s my dad. I want to kill him. I want to fucking kill him.’
‘What about your dad makes you feel like this?’
There is a long silence on the line. At the end of it, the caller says, ‘He took the baby. Emma. It was my dad.’
Quite often, you get a crank call. In your bones, you know it for what it is, but you have to take it seriously — because what if you were wrong?
‘Baby Emma?’ she says.
‘I was waiting in the car. I called the police, but they were too slow. She was all purple and wriggling. And then she got sick, like really sick, and he wouldn’t take her to hospital.’
Caitlin controls her voice. ‘And how did you feel about that?’
‘Fucked up. All fucked up in my head. I want to kill him. I honestly do. It would be so much easier if I could just kill him.’
Caitlin’s hands are cold.
‘There’s this family,’ says the caller. ‘The Daltons. He likes them.’
‘Likes what about them?’
‘Their little girl. They’ve got a daughter. He wants her to make babies for him. He says he’s never tried it with a virgin. She’s only little. She’s only eleven.’
Caitlin’s scared of flying, and she’s got the feeling now that she gets when boarding an aircraft, like her blood sugar has crashed. Her hands and feet are cold. Her voice is weak.
Samaritans never call the police, no matter what a caller might say; it would transgress their code of absolute confidentiality. And you categorically cannot offer advice. But it’s not advice Caitlin wants to offer; it’s an instruction.
Whether the caller is telling the truth or enumerating a strange fantasy, she wants to tell him to stay where he is and wait while she dials 999 and has him picked up for his own sake.
She casts around, looking at the other desks, all the bowed heads.
‘I hate him,’ says the caller. ‘I hate him. I don’t know what to do.’
‘What do you think you’ll do?’
‘What he says. Cut them up.’
‘You’ll cut them up?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I have to.’
‘Why do you have to?’
‘Because he’s my dad.’
Caitlin glances over her shoulder. Her shift supervisor, Matt, is there. A short man with wispy hair and a prominent facial mole.
He pulls up a chair and just sits beside her. Offering his support, just as a presence. Suddenly, Caitlin knows she’s way out of her depth.
‘I don’t want to do it,’ the caller says. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
Don’t do it! she says, but only inside her head.
She looks into Matt’s calm eyes.
‘I have to go,’ says the man on the line. ‘I’m in the garage with the dogs. He’s coming. We’re leaving now.’
Before Caitlin can speak, he’s hung up.
He leaves behind an atmosphere on the empty line. You get it sometimes, when something really bad has happened. It spreads like a cloud.
Matt takes Caitlin to a little office upstairs. She clasps a mug between two hands, blows on the surface of her tea.
She says, ‘How can we do it? How can we not tell someone?’
‘Because it’s not our place to do that. Our promise to our callers is that everything they say is confidential.’
‘But what if he’s telling the truth? What if there’s a family out there tonight, the Daltons or whoever? And he’s going to cut them up?’
‘Cate, I understand how you feel.’
‘All the respect in the world, Matt, but I’m not sure you do.’
Matt tells her about a time he answered a call from a woman who’d taken an overdose. She just wanted someone to be there on the phone with her as she died. Matt had to respect that. So he sat and listened as she slipped away.
Years later, the suicide troubles his dreams. In his dreams he sees her clearly, although in life he never saw her face. He sees her so clearly that sometimes he thinks she’s actually a ghost. In the dreams, he asks her name. She tells him a different name every time.
‘If you break one confidence you break them all,’ he says. ‘And then being a Samaritan stands for nothing.’
Caitlin nods.
Then Matt says, ‘Would you like to speak to somebody?’
She laughs because — well, because that would be ironic.
She says no, she’s fine. And by then her shift’s over, so she puts on her coat and says goodbye to everybody.
She pops to the loo and fiddles with her make-up. Then she goes to get drunk.
CHAPTER 17
The Hallissey estate was built in 1964. The design was influenced by Le Corbusier, who admired ocean liners and believed them to be the perfect model for housing estates.
The estate went up quickly and not well. Shabby concrete citadels are accessed via dank passageways, dark stairwells and concrete walkways. Grimy curtains hang at rotten window frames.
Steve Bixby lives on the fifth floor of Milton Tower. He’s a lanky man in a Hawaiian shirt and combat trousers. Small eyes, heavily bagged, and thinning hair in a fuzzy crew cut.
He lingers in the doorway, stuttering slightly, asking why Howie and Luther want to come in.
It’s 5.51 p.m.
Howie tells him they just want to ask some questions.
She glances down. At Bixby’s ankle lurks a tan-and-white pit bull terrier. It looks at her with close-set, moronic eyes.
Bixby clocks her wariness. ‘Don’t worry about Lou,’ he says. ‘He’s a sweetheart, aren’t you, boy? Aren’t you?’
Luther says, ‘Do you mind?’
Bixby doesn’t. So Luther drops to one knee and summons the dog by sucking his teeth and rubbing his thumb across his fingers. Lou lumbers warily towards him. Luther pats its bony, muscular head, mutters to it in a low, comforting voice. He looks up at Bixby. ‘Nice dog.’
‘You a dog person?’
‘The more I learn about people, the more I like dogs,’ Luther says, straightening. ‘Lou’s got scars down his flanks. He been fighting?’
‘He’s been in a lot of fights,’ Bixby says. ‘They found him down by Waltham Forest. They reckon he’d been a bait dog.’
‘Bait dog?’ Howie says.
‘Old dogs that’ve lost the will to fight,’ Luther says. ‘They chain them down. Let other dogs practise on them.’
Howie looks at the dog’s wide triangular head, its beady little eyes, its absurdly muscular chest. She feels a twinge of pity for it. Its hot tongue lolls in the corner of its mouth.
‘Are we okay to come in?’ Luther says. ‘He’s not going to bite, is he?’
Bixby shakes his head and steps aside. ‘He’s got no bite left in him, have you, boy?’
He means it literally. Most of the dog’s teeth have been removed.
They enter a cramped flat; floral curtains and psychedelic carpet that surely belonged to the previous occupant; the kind of armchair usually dest
ined to be garnished with antimacassars, now blackened and greasy. A fat TV on a spindly coffee table. Canine kitsch: porcelain dogs, plastic dogs.
Bixby sits with his hands writhing between his bony knees. He asks why Luther and Howie are here.
Luther says, ‘Your name’s been mentioned in connection with an investigation. And we’d like to speak with you about it.’
‘What investigation?’
‘What investigation do you think?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.’
Luther watches Bixby’s fretful hands. ‘You must be thinking something, Steve. It’s difficult not to think something.’
‘I haven’t done a thing.’
‘Well, like I say. Your name came up.’
‘Then someone’s lying to you. Speak to my supervisor, go see my probation officer. Speak to my shrink; I’m in counselling — group counselling and voluntary one-to-one. I accept full responsibility for my previous offending. I stay away from high-risk situations. I’m really trying here.’
‘Trying to what?’
‘Get better.’
‘Do men like you actually get better?’
‘Do you know what it’s like, being me? Do you think I like it?’
His eyes search Luther’s face, then Howie’s. See nothing. No judgement. No pity.
‘I used to drink,’ Bixby says. ‘To blank it out. I’d see a picture of a girl who’d been kidnapped and all I could think was yeah, I could see why he took her. She’s lovely. I’d go to family birthday parties and I’d be singing happy birthday and the whole time I’m thinking: I’d love to take your daughter away and fuck her. What do you think that feels like?’
Howie looks at the shelf of DVDS. Top Gear. Bear Grylls. The Matrix Trilogy.
‘I don’t know,’ Luther says.
‘I’ll tell you. It makes you hate yourself and want to die.’
‘Yet somehow, here you are. Not dead.’
Bixby looks at Luther as if he’s been slapped. ‘Fuck you,’ he says. ‘Fuck you.’ He wrings those skinny hands at the end of bony wrists. ‘Have you ever tried to be someone you’re not? Hating every thought in your head, having them go round and round and round like a fucking train, and you can’t stop them?’
‘I know exactly what that’s like, Steve. But you don’t have to act on those thoughts, do you?’
‘I didn’t,’ he says. ‘I never even touched a child. Not once. Are you gay or straight?’
‘Straight, if it matters.’
‘Then can you imagine what it would be like, never to touch a woman? To have craved it since you were ten or eleven years old, to see women every day, beautiful women, sexy women? And never, ever, be able to lay even a finger on them, let alone make love to them? Not ever. To die a virgin. To know that your most loving touch would ruin them.’
‘No,’ Luther says. ‘I can’t imagine that. But then, I can’t imagine trading in child pornography either.’
‘I did that, yeah.’
‘So you hurt kids second-hand. Did it ever occur to you that the kids in those photos would never have been hurt if there wasn’t a market of people like you waiting to buy the pictures?’
‘I think the people who took those pictures might have thought twice about selling them,’ Bixby says. ‘Not taking them.’
‘So,’ Luther says. ‘You ran a network. People would come to you. You’d put people in contact with other people. People with similar interests.’
‘Not any more.’
‘I know. But we’re looking for a man who may have come to you. A while ago maybe.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know. But he’d be a man who wanted something very specific.’
‘They all want something very specific. That’s their curse.’
‘You love children, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you watch the news?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Did you watch it today?’
‘I think so. I don’t know. Why?’
‘I think you know why.’ Luther leans forward. Speaks low, the same way he did to the dog, forcing Bixby to lean in closer.
The dog shifts uneasily on the carpet. Whines low in its throat.
‘Night before last, somebody cut a child from its mother’s womb,’ Luther says. ‘A man like that, a man who’d do that sort of thing — I think you’d know him. Or know of him. I think part of you’s been waiting for a knock at the door since this happened. Because you know who this man is.’
Bixby blinks. He pats his lap. The old dog struggles into the chair. Bixby strokes it.
‘Yeah, I knew a lot of these men,’ he says at length. ‘But the thing about them, about us, you have to remember, there’s no such thing as a “paedophile”. Same way there’s no such thing as a “straight man”. Some straight men like high heels, or underwear, or bondage, or being submissive, or dressing as babies — whatever. I don’t know. Sexuality is a broad church, okay?’
Luther nods. Lets him talk.
‘It’s the same with men who want sex with children,’ Bixby says. ‘There are a million and one variations — heterosexual, homosexual. Men who want to kill children. Men who idolize them, who honestly can’t accept that it’s impossible for a child to feel sexual desire for them. That was my problem, and I’m working with it.’
‘And babies?’
‘It’s rare, but it exists. But for all that I’ve seen, I never, ever, in all the thousands of hours I spent communicating with these men, not once did I hear anybody fantasize about cutting a baby from a mother’s womb for the purposes of sexual gratification.’
‘So what are we saying?’
‘That the man you’re looking for isn’t a paedophile.’
Luther takes a moment. ‘So you do know him?’
Bixby looks away. Luther looks at his frantic hands, tickling the dog’s sternum, scratching its angular head. Every now and again he leans in to nuzzle its neck.
The dog stares at Luther.
Luther says, ‘DS Howie, would you mind waiting in the car?’
Howie doesn’t look at him. She says, ‘I’m okay, Boss. It’s nice and warm in here.’
Bixby reads the vibe between them.
Luther says, ‘Steve. It’s important you tell me what you know about this man.’
‘I don’t even know it’s the same man.’
‘But you’ve got a feeling it might be, right?’
Bixby bites his lower lip and nods.
Luther says, ‘Then I don’t understand your reticence.’
‘Aiding and abetting.’
‘Did you help this man in some way?’
‘I think I may have.’
‘And you’re worried about going back to prison?’
‘I’d honestly rather die.’
‘We’ll see what we can do to avoid that. If you help us, right here and right now.’
‘I want immunity. From prosecution.’
Luther laughs. It startles the dog. It gets down from the sofa. Stands in front of Bixby’s spindly legs, protecting him.
‘Everyone wants something,’ Luther says. ‘Except a dog. A dog’s just happy to be here.’
‘Do you know what happens in prison?’ says Bixby. ‘To men like me?’
‘I don’t know. Poetic justice?’
‘I see. So rape’s all right as long as you hate the victim.’
The dog barks — or tries to. Its throat has been damaged. It glares at Luther with its good eye.
‘This man, your friend, is going to kill someone,’ Luther says. ‘Maybe tonight. You know that. You saw it on the news, you listen to the radio. Been on the internet.’
‘I’m not allowed on the internet.’
‘Whatever. But you know what he says he’s going to do. And you can help me. If you like, I’ll get on my knees and beg you to tell me what you know. But I’m in a hurry here. The clock’s ticking.’
‘Then I can’t help. I’m sorry.�
�
‘Steve,’ says Howie. ‘We don’t need to tell anyone where this information comes from.’
Bixby looks up at her, his eyes widening in transitory hope. ‘Would that work?’
‘Absolutely it would work. We do it all the time. We’d log you as an “anonymous source”. If it helps us catch a triple murderer before he kills again, trust me — no questions will be asked.’
‘But you can’t guarantee that, can you? I mean, not absolutely.’
Luther tugs at his thumb, hears the joint pop. He sits back in the armchair as if it’s a throne or an electric chair. He says, ‘Do you know when I last slept?’
‘No,’ says Bixby.
‘Neither do I. And I don’t mind telling you, Steve, I’m having a bad day. A really, really bad day. I pulled a dead baby out of the earth this morning. And I’ve got this stuff going round in my head. Bad stuff. Right now, it’s telling me that if this man kills someone else tonight, it’ll be my fault — for not trying hard enough, for not pushing hard enough to catch him, for saying those things at the press conference. You get me?’
Bixby nods.
‘Okay,’ Luther says. ‘So the way I see it, you’ve got two options. Option one: you take DS Howie’s advice. Which is good advice, by the way.’
‘What’s option two?’
‘You sit there while I order DS Howie to leave the flat.’ He lifts his hip, digs in his pocket, removes his pepper spray and his extensible baton. Sits with them in his hands.
Bixby clenches and unclenches his fists.
‘Boss,’ says Howie.
Luther shoots her a look. ‘Shut your mouth, Sergeant.’
Howie shuts her mouth. Sits there shaking, not knowing what to do.
Luther says, ‘Help me, Steve. Help me catch this man. I promise we’ll do the right thing by you. I promise.’
Bixby hugs the dog like a teddy bear. Kisses its muscular neck.
Then he says, ‘A man came to me. A while ago. Two years? Three, maybe. He wanted a baby.’
‘What was this man’s name?’
‘Henry.’
‘Henry?’
‘Grady, I think. I don’t think it was his real name.’
