‘Scary’ Mary Lally meets the Dog Section van outside the squat at Hill Park Crescent. She greets Jan Kulozik, a uniformed patrol handler.
A stately German Shepherd waits at the leash. Kulozik encourages Lally to kneel and greet the dog.
Then Lally pulls all personnel out of the squat, leaves them hunched and carping in the drizzle.
She follows Kulozik and the dog inside, Kulozik droning words of encouragement. The animal’s obvious joy makes Lally smile despite herself.
In the farthest, dark corner of the farthest, darkest flat, the dog becomes agitated. It scrabbles and paws at the floor under Malcolm Perry’s grey mattress.
Kulozik pulls the dog back and murmurs low encouragement, pats it, as Lally kicks the skinny mattress aside.
Her foot finds a loose floorboard. And then another. Lally scowls, then kneels and pulls aside the loose boards, exposing a small cavity.
In the cavity is a black bin liner.
She removes the bin liner.
In the bin liner is a grey woollen blanket.
Wrapped in the grey woollen blanket is a woman’s head.
CHAPTER 7
Henry is surprised by how well the baby slept on the way home.
She is in the back seat of the car, wrapped in the soft blanket with satinette lining. The street lights pulse above her as Henry’s son, Patrick, drives fastidiously under the limit.
Every now and again Henry glances at her over his shoulder and feels a warm surge of fulfilment. A tired, happy grin spreads across his chops.
Patrick pulls over near the park; he wants to pick up some rabbits. So Henry slides over and gets behind the wheel.
Soon, he is chasing the headlamps through the electric gates at the end of the long gravel drive.
The house is very large. It overlooks the park. It’s worth somewhere in the region of two and a half million pounds, but Henry has far too many secrets buried in the garden to consider selling it.
He’s lived here for twelve years. Elaine, his elderly landlady, has been five feet down in the garden for eleven and a half of them. He catches himself talking to her sometimes. Doesn’t really know why.
The neighbour to his left is a banker with a young family; they moved in two years after Elaine died. As far as they’re concerned, Henry is Elaine’s son. That’s fine by Henry.
Elaine’s real son is another of the secrets buried in the garden.
The neighbours to the right are foreign, Arabs probably; he sees them rarely and has never spoken to them.
Henry parks, gets out of the car, looks around at the morning, then opens the back door and reaches inside. The baby turns her black eyes upon him.
She’s surprisingly warm. She’s scrawny and has that weird, dark purple colour, almost beetroot in places.
Henry’s hand is dirty, still carrying traces of blood, but he didn’t think to bring a pacifier. So he offers his thumb to the baby. She accepts it into her hot, gummy little mouth. Under a soft rubbery layer, the gums are surprisingly hard. The sensation is not displeasing.
He’s decided to call her Emma.
He bundles her into his arms, lifts her gently from the car seat and tucks the blanket around her, nice and tight. This is called swaddling.
‘Welcome home,’ he says. ‘Welcome home. Would you like to see your bedroom? Yes, I bet you would. I bet you would, baby girl.’
Henry is interested and strangely moved to note that although he’s speaking quietly, and although there is no danger of being overheard, he speaks to the baby in the babbling, glissando intonation known as motherese.
‘Youwannaseeyourroom?’ he says, delighting in it. ‘Do you do you do you? Yes you do! Yes you do want to see your room! You do!’
He carries her through the front door into the wood-panelled hallway. It’s old fashioned, of course; Elaine was in her eighties when Henry suffocated her. She hadn’t remodelled for at least a generation. But Henry quite likes it. He thinks of it as timeless.
The baby is in his arms, still bite-sucking his thumb. ‘Are you hungry?’ he says. ‘Are you hungry, baby girl? Yes you is! You is a hungry liddle girl.’
He takes her up to her room, the nicest room in the house. Inside is a brand new cot from John Lewis, a brand new changing table and mat from Mothercare. Her new clothes, many still displaying price tags, hang from a chrome rail. (There is a second rail, which contains boy’s clothes, but Henry pretends not to see it. When Emma’s asleep, he’ll take the boy’s clothes away and quietly burn them. There’s a wood-burning furnace in the basement. It comes in handy.)
On the wall are prints of Pooh Bear and Piglet. Henry has waxed and polished the oak floor and laid down pretty rugs. The only item that isn’t new is a manky, one-eyed teddy bear, bald in patches. She’s called Mummy Bear. She’s Henry’s.
He lays the baby on her back. Her loose purple skin is streaked with blood and other ochres. But Henry’s read that babies don’t like to be clean: the smell of sweat and shit and sebum comforts them. So he tucks Emma tight under the blanket and gazes down upon her with tear-pricked eyes.
She opens and closes her mouth like an animatronic alien. And she has a curiously extra-terrestrial look of absolute wisdom in those ebony eyes. She has a perfect nub of a nose with finely etched little nostrils so pink they seem faintly illuminated. There’s the trembling, downturned rage and sorrow in her mouth, the balled fists on spindly arms. And her bowed legs! It’s funny, that her mother should have such good legs, while the baby’s should be like a wishbone! He expects they’ll straighten.
The baby begins to mewl as Henry steps back from the cot. Her cry is low and warbling, wet in the throat and not as loud as he’d feared it might be. But it’s piercing, a depleted sound that seems to cut through walls like a wire through cheese.
‘Don’t worry, iddle baby,’ he says. ‘Don’t oo worry.’
He leaves the room. His heart is thin and anxious in his chest. He hurries down to the kitchen. It has recently been scrubbed down so thoroughly the stink of bleach stings his eyes and he’s forced to open a window.
He reaches into the fridge. Inside are lined up twelve or thirteen sterilized bottles containing formula milk.
Henry takes a bottle and warms it slightly in the microwave. He tests its temperature against his forearm, then hurries upstairs through the faltering but gathering squall of his new daughter’s crying.
Luther goes to find Benny, who’s set himself up at Ian Reed’s desk.
Reed’s spare suit jacket, tie and shirt hang from the back of the door, still in dry-cleaner’s cellophane. In Reed’s desk drawer is a wash and shave kit: soap, disposable razors, deodorant, moisturizer for sensitive skin.
Benny’s already surrounded by empty cans of energy drink, takeaway coffees, bottles of multivitamins, half- eaten protein bars.
Luther says, ‘How’s it going?’
‘Slowly,’ Benny says. ‘I’ve been checking the Lamberts’ phone accounts, work email accounts. No extra- curricular flirting that I can see. Nothing of real interest.’
Luther pulls up a chair. ‘No old loves popped up on Facebook?’
‘We’re checking out all the friends,’ Benny says. ‘Right now.’
‘Yeah, but that’s what…’
‘Nearly three hundred people.’
‘Nearly three hundred people. We need to find this baby today.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
