The Calling l-1

by Neil Cross

‘All right, ta.’

  ‘Good,’ says Reed. ‘Good, good, good.’

  Luther steps up. Tonga stands a head taller than him.

  ‘We’re in a rush,’ Luther says. ‘So do me a favour, put down the bouquet and come with us.’

  ‘Why?’ says Tonga. ‘Where we going?’

  ‘To the woods. We’re going to beat you shitless, shoot you in the head and throw you in the river.’ He shows his teeth; you wouldn’t call it a smile. ‘Only joking.’

  Barry Tonga stands there with the secateurs, towering over them.

  His eyes flit from Reed to Luther. Luther can still hear the tinny drumbeat emerging from the dangling ear bud.

  They cuff Tonga and drive him to the corner of Meriam Avenue. Reed points out a low-rise, redbrick building. Ex-local authority. Tonga’s flat.

  Three police cars are parked outside it.

  Tonga says, ‘That’s my flat.’

  ‘I know,’ says Reed. ‘I’ve just been in there.’

  ‘What do you mean? What’s going on? Why’s Billy Filth all over it?’

  ‘What’s going on is this,’ says Reed. ‘You gave me a kicking and now life as you know it is coming to an end.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means, we got you away from your wife’s shop about five minutes before a swarm of coppers descended on it, looking for you.’

  ‘This is bullshit, man. What did I do?’

  ‘Besides assaulting a police officer?’

  ‘I didn’t assault any police officer.’

  Reed laughs, then turns in his seat, stuns Tonga with his sudden, shocking malevolence. ‘Giving me a kicking’s all in the game, Barry. But you intimidated an old man, you cowardly fucker. Look at the size of you. You should be ashamed. You killed his little dog.’

  Tonga holds Reed’s gaze, but not for long. He looks at his lap and shifts a bit in his seat. He mutters something about the dog.

  ‘What?’ says Reed. ‘You’re embarrassed by that, are you?’

  ‘I want my lawyer.’

  ‘He wants his lawyer,’ Reed says.

  Reed and Luther laugh.

  ‘You’re not under arrest,’ Luther says. ‘This is a kidnap.’

  ‘What do you mean? You’re Filthy Bill, right? I saw the badges and that.’

  Reed points to the police vehicles outside Tonga’s door. ‘What we did,’ he says. ‘We called in an anonymous tip to someone who’d take it very seriously indeed.’

  ‘What kind of tip?’

  ‘That there was a dirty gun on the premises.’

  ‘There’s no gun,’ says Barry Tonga. ‘Not in my house.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find there is,’ says Reed. ‘One that’s been used in a number of previous crimes. Including two shootings.’

  He enjoys the sweat on Tonga’s brow.

  ‘As well as the gun,’ Reed says, ‘they’ll find a few ounces of heroin. Enough for intent to supply. Send you down for a long time. Long enough for your wife to find someone else who’s good with organza.’

  ‘This is shit, man,’ Tonga says. ‘It’s shit. This is police corruption. This is wrong.’

  ‘Totally,’ says Luther.

  Tonga sits back. The car lurches on its springs. He looks at them from under his brow.

  ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘To tell our bosses that you’ve been working for us. Off the books.’

  ‘As what?’

  ‘A grass.’

  ‘I’m not a grass.’

  ‘No. But you’ll pretend to be.’

  ‘And if I do that, what then?’

  ‘We protect you,’ Luther says.

  ‘What does that mean, though, protect me? Protect me from what?’

  ‘From us.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You admit to harassing the old man,’ Reed says. ‘You say you were acting on Julian Crouch’s instruction.’

  Tonga watches as two Scenes of Crime Officers emerge from his flat. One of them passes an evidence bag to a uniformed sergeant.

  ‘Okay, I can do that,’ he says. ‘I don’t have a problem with that. Crouch is a prick. But the gun. A gun’s a big deal. You can’t magic a gun away.’

  ‘Well, there’s the beauty of it,’ Luther says. ‘You say Crouch supplied the gun. You’d never seen it before yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah, but why would he do that?’

  ‘Because he wanted you to get rid of the old man.’

  ‘Get rid? As in, kill him?’

  Luther nods.

  ‘The old geezer?’

  Luther nods.

  ‘Crouch?’

  Luther nods.

  ‘He hasn’t got the bottle. The man’s a pantywaist.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘And you’re seriously doing this for him? For that old geezer?’

  ‘Yep,’ says Reed.

  ‘Planting guns, planting drugs, perjuring a witness?’

  ‘Yep,’ says Reed.

  ‘Fair play to you,’ says Barry Tonga. ‘I can respect that.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ says Luther. ‘Hurry up. Yes or no.’

  ‘You can’t get away with shit like this, though. It can’t be done.’

  Luther cries out in fury and slams his hand onto the dashboard.

  The glovebox pops open, spills out old papers and crushed wax cups.

  Tonga cringes.

  Luther starts the engine.

  ‘Wait!’ says Tonga. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Over there,’ Reed says, pointing to the police outside Tonga’s flat.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘To hand you over, Barry. You’re a wanted man. And we’re in a rush. We can’t hang around all day, waiting for you to make up your mind.’

  ‘Whoa,’ says Tonga. ‘Slow down.’

  Luther doesn’t kill the engine, but he doesn’t pull away either. He says, ‘What? I haven’t got time to piss about.’

  ‘If I help,’ Tonga says, ‘that’s it? No comebacks.’

  ‘No comebacks,’ Reed says.

  ‘What about Kidman?’

  ‘Will you testify against him?’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Conspiracy.’

  ‘Shit, yeah. The man’s a dick. There was no need to hurt the little dog. My nanna had a dog like that.’

  ‘Mine too,’ Luther says. ‘So where are we? Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Tonga.

  Henry marches round the house, closing curtains and locking doors.

  He knows that, soon enough, he and Mia will have to decamp, find a new house and begin again. That’ll mean leaving London, maybe even the country.

  But to do that, Henry’s going to need to make some money. There’s less than five hundred pounds in the strongbox, and less than a hundred in the ancient bank account he maintains in the name of Henry Jones.

  But more than anything, for the next week or two it means gritting his teeth, holding his nerve and staying put.

  Henry’s got diarrhoea. He paces the floor. He keeps vomiting into the kitchen sink.

  But he’s done this kind of thing enough before to know the house is safe; it’s a safe place. There’s nothing to lead anyone back here. Not now he’s killed Patrick.

  You never get used to it, not really. You never relax. But Henry doesn’t mind it, living on his nerves like this. It makes him feel alive.

  He knows he’ll miss Patrick. He wonders if he should have exerted more parental discipline in the early days. Perhaps that would have intensified the emotional imprinting.

  But that’s exactly the problem with adopted children — ultimately, you don’t know what you’re getting.

  That’s why far more children are murdered by step-parents than birth parents. And step-parents obviously means step-fathers. (To be fair, step-mothers often exact their own toll — less murderous, perhaps, but no less barbarous.)

  All Henry ever wanted was to be a good dad. It would’ve been easier if he’d
been able to have his own kids, but he gave up trying for that years ago.

  Nothing was wrong with him. Not physically. He just got so fucking tense. While a woman lay next to him, keening and moaning like a dog in pain, his cock would shrink to an inch of inert gristle, like connective tissue in a pork chop.

  She’d kiss it, tug it, do whatever else she thought might work. But nothing did.

  The second she left the room, however, or the minute Henry crouched outside her window or crept round her house without her knowing it, boom! there it was, rising first like a daffodil then an iron rod. She was a perfect idea. No matter her cellulite arse, her saggy tits.

  Of course, Henry quickly realized it was all about who was boss. So his first attempt at starting a family was with Joanne.

  He could fuck Joanne, all right. She knew who was boss. He could fuck her for hours, until his cock was red raw. He kept her chained in the basement in the old house, the one in the West Country.

  But pretty soon, despite keeping her fit and well and despite her whimpering protestations of undying love, it became clear that Joanne would never conceive a child.

  For a while, Joanne cohabited with Lindsay — same basement, same house.

  Henry ate lots of vitamins and protein, stuff that was good for sperm production. But neither woman would quicken. They were both hookers, so probably there was something wrong with their wombs. It was all the abortions, all that scraping out of their insides.

  And it turned out, there was an optimum time they could be kept in the basement. He moved sunlamps down there, gave them a decent diet, lots of greens and red berries. But that didn’t stop them becoming depressed and listless.

  That was when he bought his first dogs. The dogs ate Joanne and Lindsay.

  By the time Oona moved in (she was chosen for her hips, as much as her availability, stumbling back alone from Reeves nightclub after a row with her boyfriend) Henry had become pretty half-hearted about it all.

  He took Oona to the basement, but she never learned to love it the way Joanna had, submitting to intercourse with a stoic silence that Henry found off-putting.

  Her heart really wasn’t in it.

  Around then, Henry decided to change tactics. And those tactics had worked pretty well, all things considered.

  Patrick had grown into a good lad until he began to show that sullen, defiant streak. It had come in late — so late that, for a while, Henry believed they might have escaped that stage altogether. But in the end, breeding will out.

  Briefly, Henry had considered giving up and just buying an orphan from Eastern Europe. But there was still that question of breeding, of what you get in the package. Caveat emptor.

  Which had been the point of Baby Emma. Her breeding was perfect. The Lamberts were perfect. But that fiasco had nearly left everyone in London thinking he was a child killer or a pervert.

  So now Henry’s arrived at a place that, in a perfect world, he’d have chosen to avoid.

  By the time Mia becomes ready to breed she’ll love him as a father, which makes what Henry’s planning a creepy kind of incest.

  That makes Henry uncomfortable, but it makes him excited too. He won’t touch Mia that way until she wants him to. But the thought of it, the extra level of transgression, is stimulating. It’ll be exciting. Father and daughter, lovers, parents.

  As these thoughts run through Henry’s head he’s obliged several times to masturbate into a cotton handkerchief.

  This has more to do with survival than pleasure. Henry knows that sexual desire muddies logical thought. Being sexually aroused is like being chained to a madman.

  So he sits with his fly unzipped and the sodden handkerchief clasped like a flower-head in one hand. He strokes his belly and watches the blank TV and makes plans.

  He imagines that from downstairs he can hear sobbing, but he knows he can’t. He and Patrick tested the basement enough times, with tape recorders and sound meters. You think you can hear crying in an empty house, but you play back the tape and all you get is silence.

  The sobbing is just Henry’s imagination. There’s just him and the blank TV, the feel of his taut belly under the palm of his hand. He turns on the TV, flicks from channel to channel. Keeps the volume down. Enjoys the pictures.

  The house in Chiswick. Pasty-faced police. Eager onlookers. The tape, the lights, the rain. Earnest reporters.

  A hospital. A gaggle of police.

  And passing through it, a face he recognizes.

  A woman. Much older than the last time he saw her. Her face taut and exhausted, pale under the rain lights.

  Police lead her through the automatic sliding doors of the London hospital.

  Henry’s penis shrinks. His balls retreat into his body.

  He has a feeling of lightness, like he’s leaving his body.

  Julian wanders in a slight daze up and down the congested, confusing Chapel Market; past the fruit and veg stalls, the fishmongers, the cheap clothes, the transistor radios, multipacks of batteries. There’s even a computer-repair stall, which would strike Julian as quirkily interesting, if he wasn’t so fretful.

  Half an hour ago, Barry Tonga called to say they had to meet urgently. Soon as possible. Somewhere public. He mustn’t tell anyone. Least of all Lee Kidman.

  Tonga wouldn’t say why.

  That’s got to be bad, doesn’t it?

  So he squeezes up and down the congested road, past the smell of fish, then the whiff of banana, trying to get a glimpse of Tonga’s huge frame somewhere in the tides of people.

  But it’s not Barry Tonga he sees. It’s Reed and Luther.

  Julian briefly considers running away, but what would be the point? They’d chase him and arrest him and use it as an excuse to give him a quiet beating.

  If he doesn’t run, what can they do with all these people around?

  ‘Wotcher,’ says Luther.

  ‘Hello, you car-burning fucking psychopath,’ says Julian.

  Luther laughs, twitchy and wired.

  Luther and Reed hustle Julian into Manze’s pie and mash shop: wooden benches, tiled walls, marble counters.

  They order three large mince beef and onion. The waitress scoops the mash onto the plates with a spatula, spreads green liquor down the middle.

  They collect their cutlery and find a quiet, high-backed booth. Luther sees that Julian sits nearest the wall, then squashes himself in beside him.

  He frowns, beetle-browed and distracted. He fidgets with salt and pepper shakers. Radiates an urgent desire to be elsewhere.

  Reed is very liberal with the chilli vinegar. Then he tucks into his pie with gusto.

  He looks at Luther. ‘You not eating?’

  Luther shrugs, distracted and fretful.

  Crushed against the wall, Julian looks at them both in terror.

  Luther says, ‘Sorry to rush you, Julian. But we haven’t got much time.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ says Julian. ‘London must be absolutely full of cars you haven’t set fire to yet.’

  Luther swivels his face. Gives Julian a monumental, brutal stare.

  Julian wants to piss. He looks longingly at a passing customer, a builder with a newspaper tucked under his arm. But the builder walks past, oblivious, texting.

  ‘So,’ Luther says, ‘you’ve got friends in the police, yeah?’

  ‘My lawyer does. Why?’

  ‘I just wondered why Complaints were so quick off the mark. I’ve got a bloke sniffing round me. Martin Schenk.’

  ‘Yeah, I met him. Are we being recorded?’

  ‘No,’ says Luther. ‘No, this is off the record.’

  ‘Are you going to hit me?’

  ‘What, in here? Do I look stupid?’

  ‘You did set fire to my car.’

  ‘Good point. The thing is, though, Julian, we do need to have a chat.’

  ‘I don’t see what about.’

  Reed grins through a mouthful of pie.

  ‘We know you’re in trouble,’ Luther says. �
�Financially.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

  ‘I bet. And do you know what else I bet?’

  ‘No,’ says Julian Crouch. ‘What else do you bet?’

  ‘I bet you’re not the complete prick you appear to be. Intimidating old men. War heroes. I bet you’re actually pretty ashamed of yourself. Deep down.’

  Crouch says nothing, all huddled against the wall while Reed tucks into his lunch and Luther scowls, fidgeting with the salt and pepper like he can’t wait to get away, be somewhere else.

  ‘Trouble is,’ Luther says, ‘everyone knows you’re in deep financial shit. Deep enough to really, really want that old man out of your way.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So there’s a very short list of motivations for murder,’ Luther says. ‘Sex and money being the two odds-on favourites. You’ve got a nasty divorce going on. There’s your sex. And as for your business portfolio — well. There’s your money. What a mess you’re in, eh? What a mess.’

  Julian frowns, juts out his lower lip. He mentally rewinds. Then he says, ‘What do you mean, motivations for murder?’

  ‘I mean,’ says Luther. ‘You’re about to be indicted.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Conspiracy to murder.’

  Julian makes to stand. Luther says, ‘Calm down. And sit down.’

  Julian sits down.

  ‘We found the gun,’ Luther says.

  ‘What gun? What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I think you know what gun.’

  ‘No, I don’t know what gun. What gun? I don’t have a gun. Do I look like I’ve got a gun?’

  ‘Thing about this gun,’ Luther says. ‘They found it in Barry Tonga’s flat. Do you know Barry Tonga?’

  ‘I don’t think I do, no. Barry who?’

  Luther gives him a bright, predacious grin. ‘That’s the spirit. If in doubt, lie.’

  Julian changes tack. ‘What about Tonga? What’s he got to do with this?’

  ‘Well. Between me, you and the gatepost, Barry works for us. He’s what you’d call a confidential informant. Has been for years. And he’s going to testify that you paid him five grand to stage a burglary at the old man’s house. And shoot him dead.’

  ‘But that’s not true. That’s fucking outrageous. It’s not true. He can’t say that.’

  ‘He’s saying it.’

  ‘How can he say that if it’s not true?’

  ‘We found the gun.’