‘Zoe,’ says Reed. ‘Hand to God, I never knew anyone loved his wife half as much as John loves you.’
There’s a moment of embarrassed intimacy between them, almost normal enough to make them laugh and pretend this isn’t happening.
Zoe fills a glass with water. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’
‘There’s Nurofen in the drawer,’ he says. ‘Or I’ve got some codeine. You should try it. I’m a convert.’
She opens the drawer and palms a couple of painkillers.
Reed says, ‘Okay. Look. This thing, the thing that’s happening today. It’s pretty bad. You’re right, he’s probably wound up a bit tight by it. The first chance I get, I’ll take him to one side. Have a word.’
‘He’s going to kill himself,’ she says. ‘He can’t carry on the way he is.’
He takes her shoulders, holds her at arm’s length. ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘I’ll never let that happen, okay? Because you two, John and Zoe, you’re the ones who give the rest of us hope.’
‘God help you then,’ she says.
Bill Tanner lives in a two-up, two-down, end-of-terrace in Shoreditch.
It’s worth a lot less than it was three years ago, but it’s worth a lot more than it was when the original landlord, George Crouch, acquired it in 1966.
Luther rings the doorbell. Inside, a small dog erupts in a spasm of yapping. The floral curtains part a little.
Aware that he’s being watched, Luther raises his arms, two Tesco Metro carriers in each hand. ‘I called. I’m a mate of Ian Reed. John.’
The curtains close and the hallway light comes on. At length, Bill Tanner opens the door.
Although he’s shuffling and hunched, Tanner still carries the air of the powerful man he used to be: broad in the beam with immense, knobby fists at the end of meaty forearms. He’s got a thick head of white hair, pinkie bald only at the crown. More white hair erupts in great tufts from his nostrils and ears. He’s wearing a brown cardigan.
At his foot is a skinny, moist-eyed Yorkshire terrier. It continues to yap as Tanner digs in his pocket with a shaking hand.
He excavates a wadded-up five pound note and tries to give it to Luther — who waves a hand, still with the heavy bags in it. ‘Don’t worry. It’s on the house. All part of the service.’
Bill nods his old lion’s head and stuffs the fiver back into his pocket. ‘Cheers, son. Do you fancy coming in for a cuppa, then?’
Luther hesitates. Then he says, ‘Go on then. Just the one.’
He steps into the hallway.
The carpets, curtains and furniture are old, carefully maintained for many years but now grubby in the way of the old; Luther spots more than one tiny dog turd in dark corners, one under the music centre.
Yorkies are prone to it. Luther knows, because his nan had one.
He follows Bill to the kitchen and pulls up a vinyl chair. It has a bright sunflower print, the kind of thing coveted by Shoreditch hipsters. Bill could sell them at Spitalfields market and make some decent cash.
Bill puts the kettle on and dumps a Tesco Value teabag into a mug whose interior Luther does not wish to glimpse.
He opens the fridge, takes out a carton of milk, dumps it on the worktop. ‘Sugar?’
‘One, please.’
Bill begins to shake. Luther stands, taking the old man’s elbow. Helps him sit.
Bill Tanner sits with his head low. He’s still holding the carton of milk. Luther can smell it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’ve got no sugar in the house.’
‘That’s all right,’ Luther says. ‘I’ll have it without.’
‘I hate tea without sugar. It’s piss without sugar.’ He’s trembling. ‘I’m too scared to go down the fucking shops, that’s the trouble. Imagine that. A grown man, and I’m too scared to leave my own fucking house. The doorbell goes at night, I nearly have fucking heart failure.’
‘Everyone feels like that when the doorbell goes at night,’ Luther says. ‘You sit there. I’ll make the tea.’
When the tea is drunk, Luther empties out the carrier bags and catalogues what he’s bought: bread, milk, some proper teabags, instant coffee, tins of beans, tins of Irish Stew, tins of soup, toilet paper, toilet bleach, lamb chops, tissues, a buttercream gateau, some bourbon biscuits, some custard creams. Then, at the end, he lays out twelve cans of Caesar dog food in tiny cans. ‘Show me where all this stuff goes,’ he says. ‘I’ll put it away.’
‘You don’t have to do that.’
‘You’re a mate of Ian’s,’ Luther says. ‘I promised I’d make sure you were looked after. He thinks a lot of you.’
‘He’s a decent lad, that Ian,’ says Bill Tanner.
‘He is.’
When Luther’s put away the shopping, he asks for the dog’s lead and takes the doddery old Yorkie for a walk round the block. It pisses on every third lamp post, finally squats to shit on the corner.
Luther takes automatic note of everyone who chuckles as they pass him; a young couple, hand in hand; a bunch of white kids hanging round outside a Chinese takeaway.
The kids give him the evil eye, call out a few insults. He’s embarrassed by the little dog with its prim little feet skittering along next to him. But he gives them the passive eye, the eye that tells them he isn’t afraid, and their eyes slide silently from his.
He walks the dog back home and lets himself in.
He helps the old man upstairs and into his musty bed.
Then he pads downstairs. He sits in the armchair and tunes the portable radio to London Talk FM.
He listens. But he can’t sit still. He can’t stop thinking. His head is a city. He paces the floor. He rubs at his crown with the palm of his hand.
The dog trots joyfully at his heel, showing the tip of its tiny pink tongue.
The radio murmurs.
Howie lets herself through the front door, trudges up two flights of stairs and opens the door to her flat.
Robert’s asleep and she doesn’t want to wake him. So she sneaks to the tiny second bedroom, rolls a polar fleece into a tube to serve as a pillow and sleeps in her clothes.
Around 5 a.m. she cries out, loud enough to wake Robert. He comes padding through. He stands half naked in the doorway, wondering whether to wake her or not.
He decides not to. He goes back to bed. He doesn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
Zoe takes a long bath, ignoring that she’s already showered twice today, then lies on the sofa in pyjamas and thick socks, her hair tied back. She lets News 24 flicker silently in the background and keeps Maggie Reilly low on London Talk FM while she reviews case notes, drinks half a bottle of wine and grows weepy.
She checks her phone every five minutes.
Around 1 a.m. she gives up. She wraps herself in a soft fleece blanket, sets aside the papers, turns up the radio and scans the news websites: COUNTRY HOLDS ITS BREATH FOR
BABY EMMA. TENSE WAIT FOR BABY EMMA. LONDON HOLDS ITS BREATH IN ‘BABY EMMA’ DRAMA.
She slips into sleep, and straight into a dream in which she and Mark are fucking. He is shoving his fingers into her mouth and she is biting them. All the while, John searches for something in the wardrobe.
She wakes before hitting the ground and turns back to the news.
The same two photographs of Baby Emma’s mother and father. The same audio of the man claiming to be their killer. The same sober newsreaders, the same grave, gleeful trepidation.
She flashes back to yesterday afternoon, the way she and Mark writhed around each other, in her head, it seems that their legs had intertwined like snakes. She thinks of Mark’s mouth at her breast and between her legs, his tongue between her lips, his cock in her mouth, and she wants to be sick.
She falls asleep sometime after 3 a.m.
At 4.17 she jolts awake from another dream, worse than the first.
She sits there until just after 5, gummy-eyed and with a crick in her neck, listening to the low, demented murmur of talk radio and refreshing the BBC News homepage every few seconds.
Danny Hillman sits in the narrow production room, monitoring the newsfeeds, RSS feeds, Reuters.
