She says, ‘Do you ever listen to London Talk FM?’
‘No,’ says Luther. ‘Why?’
‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘You’ll enjoy this.’
Luther follows her across a weirdly silent and watchful bullpen, wondering what’s going on.
Teller slams her office door, gestures for him to shut up and listen.
She stabs a finger onto her keyboard, unmuting the volume on a streamed radio broadcast.
‘Pete,’ says the husky-voiced woman on the radio. ‘I’m asking you on bended knee. Please. Whether this is true or not, you need help. You need to give yourself in to the proper authorities.’
‘Tom and Sarah Lambert sexually abused my daughter,’ says the caller. ‘They weren’t fit to be parents.’
Luther glances at Teller.
She doesn’t respond. She’s pacing the office, arms crossed, head down.
Luther bows his head. Shuts his eyes. Listens.
‘They seemed a nice couple,’ the caller says. ‘They loved kids. One night we let them take care of our little girl-’
‘Pete, I need to stop you there.’
‘Okay. I get you. All I’m saying is, there were reasons.’
‘Whatever your reasons,’ says Maggie Reilly, ‘right now we’re talking about a helpless baby. So where’s baby Emma, right now?’
Luther mouths: Emma? Since when?
Teller shrugs.
‘I can’t tell you that,’ says Pete Black.
‘A newborn needs medical attention, Pete. You must know that.’
‘She’s fit and well. She’s happy. She’s a very contented little baby. She’s lovely.’
‘You do know you can’t keep her? You have to hand her in to the proper authorities.’
‘That’s why I’m calling. I want her to be well looked after. I want her placed with a loving family that can care for her properly.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘I’ll drop her off tonight. At a hospital. Something like that. A convent or something.’
‘Don’t wait for tonight. Do it now. Do it as soon as you can, Pete.’
‘Yeah. But I need an assurance, don’t I.’
‘What assurance? From whom?’
‘The police.’
Teller braces herself against the desk. Here it comes.
‘What kind of assurance?’ says Maggie.
‘I want the police to promise me, in front of London, that they’ll let me drop off Emma safely. They won’t be watching the hospitals.’
The strength goes out of Teller and she sits.
‘All I want,’ says Pete Black, ‘all I want is for little Emma to be safe and sound. I need the police to help me with that. I’ll call back later.’
There’s a click and the line goes dead.
Three endless seconds of dead air.
‘Okay, London,’ says Maggie Reilly. ‘Your reactions in a moment. First, let’s go straight to the news.’
After a moment Teller says, ‘So what do we think?’
Luther dry-washes his face. Rasp of skin on stubble.
‘It’s him.’
It’s in the self-justification, the moral blankness. The need to control.
He tugs at his weary eyes. Looks at the ceiling.
‘Holy shit,’ he says.
London Talk FM is run from a corporate office building on the Gray’s Inn Road. Grey and chrome, smoked glass. Luther and Howie arrive early in the evening; they’re obliged to edge through a scrum of media already gathered outside.
There’s a uniformed security guard at the front desk. He asks Luther and Howie to sign in, gives them each a badge, directs them to the lifts.
They go up five floors, then step into an anonymous reception. A few promotional posters have been framed and mounted.
They’re met by a pretty and energetic young intern, who leads them to a glass-fronted conference room. Danish pastries on the long table.
On the other side of the table sit a scruffy man and a good-looking woman in early middle age. Danny Hillman and Maggie Reilly.
The four shake hands across the table, cordial and watchful. Hillman takes two business cards from his wallet and slides them across the table to Luther and Howie.
Luther glances over the card. ‘I’m sorry to cut to the chase,’ he says, ‘but obviously we’re against the clock here, so…’
Maggie Reilly gives him the smile. ‘Ask away.’
‘Obviously,’ Luther says, ‘our first priority is to request that you don’t give this man any more airtime.’
‘Seriously,’ says Hillman. ‘How could we ever justify doing that?’
‘Because he’s not who he says he is?’
‘You don’t know that, any more than we do — unless you’ve caught and arrested the real killer. Have you?’
Luther shrugs, tucks the business card into his wallet.
‘I’m not going to discuss open investigations with you, Mr Hillman. You’ll have to take my word for it.’
‘If you knew who he was,’ says Danny Hillman, ‘you’d have released his name to the media by now.’
‘You think what you want. But I guarantee you this: if you cooperate with this man, nobody will ever see that baby alive. People like Pete Black only ever contact the media because it serves their agenda.’
‘And can we quote you on all this?’ says Maggie, with a warning grin. ‘Senior Investigating Officer warns London Talk FM not to help find little baby Emma?’
Hillman steps in, speaks over Luther’s visible irritation. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘there’s a very clear public interest here. We’ve run it past the lawyers. They’re happy. If you try to gag us, we’ll go to air with it, treat it as a story. And once it’s discovered the police tried to stop us helping save a child’s life — what happens then?’
Luther sits back. ‘I can apply for a D-Notice.’
He means a Defence Advisory Notice, an official request to news editors not to publish or broadcast certain stories.
Hillman says, ‘We’re not releasing any information that pertains or relates to national security.’
Luther sidesteps that. ‘So how are the ratings?’ he asks. ‘Sky-high, right? Killer calls. You Tweet, you put it on bloody Facebook, it goes viral. You amplify that new interest by running the call as a news headline every what, fifteen minutes? Killer Calls London Talk FM! Other news outlets pick up the story. These things spread like an explosion. In a few hours, you’re sitting on the biggest story in Britain. Which makes you, this station, the biggest story in Britain. We’ve seen them downstairs. The hyenas.’
‘This is a commercial operation, absolutely,’ says Hillman. ‘But believe it or not, we actually do have the interests of our listeners at heart. And our city. Not to mention baby Emma.’
‘Her name’s not Emma. She hasn’t got a name yet. Her parents died before she was born.’
‘She’s got a name now,’ says Maggie. ‘For better or worse.’
‘All right,’ says Hillman. ‘Let’s all calm down.’ He stands and goes to the window. Peers out on London at night; unreal city. He turns to face them, leaning on the windowsill. ‘When you came in here,’ he says, ‘you knew we’d never kill the story. You had to ask, but you knew. So what are you really asking?’
Luther won’t answer, so it’s Howie who says, ‘We’re asking you to help us catch him.’
The intern walks in with their coffees. She places them almost reverently on the conference table and slips away. When she’s gone, some of the tension has drained from the room.
After successfully defending editorial principle, Hillman agrees without caveat to the covert deployment of a
