‘From memory,’ he says, ‘were there any marks on the envelope? Any words or drawings, or-’
‘I don’t think so. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. You’ve been very helpful.’
Luther and Howie stand, head for the door.
Mrs Kwalingana says, ‘Do you have any ideas?’
‘About what?’
‘Why he gave me my keys back?’
Luther hesitates. He wonders what to say.
The burglar needed a set of keys to copy, he thinks. So he took them from you. But he didn’t want you to tell your boss. Because your boss would have to tell the people the keys belonged to. And they’d have changed the locks.
He can’t say that. But he can’t think of anything reassuring to say either.
He gives Mrs Kwalingana a smile and an encouraging nod, and leaves the interview room.
Patrick gets home to find Henry sitting on the lowest step with his head in his hands.
He looks up when Patrick walks through the door. He rubs his eyes. He’s been awake for hours. He says, ‘So where is she?’
Patrick steels himself. ‘She wouldn’t come.’
‘So why not fucking make her come?’
‘I couldn’t, Dad.’
Henry stands. He advances on Patrick. ‘Couldn’t? Or wouldn’t?’
‘I’m sorry, Dad.’
Henry twists his lip and leers. ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ he mimics.
‘I really tried,’ says Patrick.
‘I really tried,’ repeats Henry.
‘I did.’
‘I did.’
Henry slaps Patrick.
He grabs a fistful of Patrick’s hair and bends him double. A flurry of rabbit punches to the ear and cheek, then Henry spins Patrick round and throws him into the wall. Four vicious little jabs to the kidneys.
Then he bites Patrick’s scalp.
Patrick cries out. He pleads and begs.
Henry spits away a coin-sized chunk of hair and skin.
Once — a long time ago, years and years — Henry made Patrick torture a dog. It was a German Shepherd, an intelligent and noble beast. Henry tied it up in the garden and gave Patrick a chain to beat it with.
At first, as Patrick thrashed the dog, it snapped and snarled, bared gritted teeth, snapped and lunged. But near the end, when it had shat and pissed everywhere, smearing Patrick with its excrement and its blood, it dragged itself towards him on its belly, using its forepaws. Its ears were pinned back. It was whimpering and trying to wag its tail.
‘See?’ said Henry. ‘Now it loves you.’
Henry spent years beating love into Patrick. But this isn’t a love beating. It’s just a beating. Patrick knows the difference.
When it’s over, Henry stands over him. His hair is sticking up. His face is pale with loathing. Two pale tributaries of snot run from his nostrils into his mouth.
‘Well, what the fuck do we do now?’ he shouts. ‘What the fuck am I supposed to do? Everyone’s going to think I’m a fucking kiddie-fiddler.’
He kicks Patrick one more time. Then he retreats to the kitchen, head in hands.
Patrick curls into a ball on the floor. He lies there and doesn’t move.
CHAPTER 9
Maggie Reilly is fifty-one and supremely well groomed — even in the studio, where nobody but her producer and the engineer can see her. Grey trouser suit, cerise shirt, glossy high heels.
Maggie took a roundabout and now obsolete way to get here: Bristol Evening Post at eighteen, straight out of A-levels. At twenty-five she made the move to television, working as a reporter on Westward! an early evening current- affairs programme. Two years later she moved to television news in London.
There were some award shortlistings, including one for rear of the year. She was named as a correspondent in a reasonably high-profile divorce case. There were some unflattering photographs in the papers, most famously of Maggie leaving the ‘love den’ looking frumpy and hungover; a trick of light and shadow added twenty years and several chins. There followed a year or two in the wilderness during which she wrote a newspaper column, renting out opinions she didn’t really hold, or not that strongly.
And now here she is, born again, enjoying solid but unremarkable ratings on the Talk London Drivetime slot, 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. Yesterday, an elderly immigrant woman was hit and killed by a bendy bus just round the corner from Camberwell Art College; there’s nothing like a bendy bus death to make London ers irate. Maggie’s taken three consecutive calls on the subject and the subject’s getting old. Keen to move on, she hits the dump button, goes to line four.
‘Pete Black from Woking,’ she says. ‘You’re through to Maggie Reilly on London Talk FM.’
‘Hello Maggie,’ says Pete Black from Woking. ‘First-time caller, long-time fan.’
‘Well,’ she chuckles, checking out the monitor on the corner of her desk, ‘a girl can’t have too many of them.’
‘Since ’95, actually,’ says Pete from Woking. ‘I used to live in Bristol.’
‘Did you, my lover?’
He chuckles at the exaggerated accent. ‘I remember that thing you did,’ he says. ‘The thing about little Adrian York.’
Maggie laughs that near-famous cigarette laugh. ‘Well, if I was feeling a bit blue round the edges, I’d say that dates you. So what’s got your back up today, Pete?’
‘Okay. Really, I’m calling to say that I’m the one who killed Tom and Sarah Lambert. It was me.’
There are two full seconds of dead air during which Maggie glances up and makes eye-contact with Danny, her producer. He’s already reaching for the phone to call the station boss.
The engineer, Fuzzy Rob, is already Tweeting.
Holding the phone, Danny makes a gesture: Keep going.
Maggie swallows. Her throat is dry. She says, ‘Are you still there, Pete?’
Detective Sergeant ‘Scary’ Mary Lally finds Luther making himself an instant coffee and eating cream crackers from the packet.
She hands him a thin file. ‘The head we found at the squat. The owner’s a Chloe Hill.’
Luther flicks on the kettle then glances through the file. ‘‘Owner”,’ he says. ‘Do you own your head?’
‘Whatever. It belongs to Ms Hill. She was nineteen. Died in a motorcycle accident. Canvey Island.’
‘So it’s not just dead girls he goes for. It’s dead girls and motorbikes. Blimey.’
‘Her grave had been interfered with,’ Lally says. ‘This is seven or eight months ago. We’re thinking either he dug her up himself or maybe paid a friend to do it for him.’
‘So where’s the rest of her?’
‘Still in the grave, presumably.’
‘We can only hope, eh?’
‘Should I order an exhumation?’
‘Let’s start the process, yeah. So this has nothing to do with the Lambert murder?’
‘I don’t think so, Guv.’
‘Call me Boss.’ He massages his brow, hands back the file. He’s about to say something else when the door bangs open and Teller steams in.
