But mostly, he’s waiting for Pete Black to call.
Just before midnight, Lucy phones to see how he’s getting on. The girls are sleeping okay, they send him kisses. Danny’s dad had called to ask about Christmas. Danny’s dad is in a home and calls to ask about Christmas eight or nine times a week. After Christmas, he’ll start worrying about Easter. But that’s all the news Lucy had. She hoped he was okay.
Danny tells his wife he loves her. She tells him she loves him back. And good luck, she says. Fingers crossed.
Maggie sits at the microphone, taking calls. She is exhausted and exhilarated.
The news cameras are waiting downstairs. The station itself is news. The show is news. But Maggie is the real news.
She’s dressed for the occasion — for the impromptu press conference she hopes to take before the day is out. But the crisp clothes and new shoes feel wrong against her tired body.
The clock ticks.
The light seems bright and glares on white walls.
She looks into the corner and there are her new shoes, and it seems strange to her to be doing this in bare feet. A call like this, you want to be ready when it arrives.
Luther sits in the upright chair, wrapped in his coat. He closes his eyes and listens to the low murmur of the radio.
In the darkness, he hears Bill Tanner snoring upstairs.
He tries not to think about where the Lamberts’ baby might be and what the man who calls himself Pete Black might be doing to her. He tries not to think about the things he’s seen. This twenty-year skid of blood and bone and marrow.
He does what he always does when the train in his head won’t stop: he thinks of his wife. He thinks of the first day he saw her. Her gypsy skirt and flat shoes, her smile. Her voice, which sent tingles up his spine. It still does.
He scrolls through his memories of her — his personal koan. Her graduation day, the day they moved in together. The week she nursed him through flu. Their wedding day. Watching TV cuddled up on the sofa. Her nudity. Shopping in supermarkets together. Her forbearance as he stalks the fragrant rows of second-hand bookshops.
But the memories are like recordings of recordings. He searches them for something recent but good — something that belongs to him, here and now.
All he finds is Zoe tonight, in the park, kissing him on the cheek and walking away.
Luther’s heart pumps queasily in his chest. He thinks about calling her. He doesn’t.
Benny Deadhead goes home, gets changed, puts on some sweats. He thinks about getting it all out of his head by watching some TV, maybe one of the Korean horror DVDs he’s been stacking up for about two years and which challenge him, still unwatched, from the middle shelf.
Instead he thinks fuck it. He racks up a couple of lines, sniffs them back, logs on to World of Warcraft.
He steps for a few enchanted hours into a better and braver world.
Teller wanders the Serious Crime Unit. The tired personnel under bright lights, the flickering monitors, the filing cabinets with their terrible secrets. The peeling plaster and the smudged glass bricks.
Downstairs, in the ringing bowels of the building, the drunks and the gang members and the burglars and the junkies shiver under strip lights.
She thinks of the people out there in London tonight, the plain clothes and uniformed coppers waiting on roofs and in cold cars. Men and women who’ve been up for forty-eight hours straight: the people who’ve come in off sick leave and off their holidays.
She’s tired and she feels sick and she’s worried about her daughter, fourteen years old and sleeping at the neighbour’s house.
Via laptops and cellphones, memes propagate and bring forth:
… someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby in her garden last nite!!! and she called the police because it was late and she thought it was weird the police told her
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!!! WE ALREADY HAVE A UNIT ON THE WAY DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR!! He told her they think it is a SERIAL KILLER!! The man has snatched 2 girls in Manchester and is now in London and has a baby’s cry recorded, he uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone has left a baby. He said they have not verified it, but have had MANY MANY CALLS BY WOMEN SAYING THEY HEARD BABIES’ CRIES OUTSIDE THEIR DOORS WHEN THEIR HOME ALONE AT NIGHT. Please pass this on!!!!! And DO NOT open the door for a crying baby!!!!!!
At 10.56 p.m. two newlyweds in Finsbury Park hear a baby screaming in their back garden.
They call the police. No baby is found.
Attending officers believe the anxious couple may have heard the mating cries of urban foxes, which are often mistaken for babies in distress.
At 12.52 a.m. Claire Jackson, who lives in Wandsworth, calls 999 claiming that ‘a tall black man’ tried to lure her into opening her door late at night by using a recording of a crying baby.
Ms Jackson claims to have heard ‘bumping sounds’ outside. She got up to see what was going on. It was then she heard a baby crying from her front garden.
She and her husband saw the ‘tall black man dressed all in black’ outside their home, walking quickly away.
At 1.03 a.m. three young sisters, including a baby, are rescued by a neighbour from a smoke-filled house.
Left alone by their mother, who has gone speed dating, the two older children — aged six and eight — are trying to bake cakes. They inadvertently turn on both the grill and the oven.
Hearing a crying baby, Mo Sullivan, who lives two doors down, calls 999 before running out to pound on her neighbours’ door.
The house is filling with smoke when the front door is opened a crack by eight-year-old Olivia. She’s been told not to open the door to strangers.
Mrs Sullivan convinces Olivia to call 999 and obtain the police’s ‘permission’ to leave the burning house with her sisters.
Mrs Sullivan, a Christian, will later tell the papers it was a miracle. She was only watching TV at that time of night because she was so anxious about dear Baby Emma. Any other night, she’d have taken her pill and gone to sleep.
Mrs Sullivan has been taking the pills since her husband died. They’d been married thirty-five years and were never blessed with children.
‘Jesus led me by the hand to save this little tot and her sisters,’ she says. ‘All praise to him.’
At 1.42 a.m. Matthew Alexander, a motorist, is forced to escape the scene of a crash after being attacked by the men who had at first tried to rescue him.
Mr Alexander, returning from a dinner party, crashes his Ford Mondeo into a central reservation near Manor Fields in Putney.
Spotting Mr Alexander’s baby son strapped into a car seat, the group — led by Graeme Kershaw, 23 — begin asking Mr Alexander questions about ‘Baby Emma’.
Mr Alexander’s protestations about the gender of his child are ignored by the gang, who become violent when Mr Alexander suggests they confirm what he’s saying by checking inside the child’s nappy.
Mr Alexander sustains moderate but not life-threatening injuries.
Police are accused of being heavy-handed after four officers storm a young couple’s house at 3.54 a.m. because a 999 caller claims their baby is ‘crying non-stop, like something’s wrong.’
Lab Assistant Sean Scott and his girlfriend Becky Walker, wake up to find two police officers in their bedroom demanding to see their two-month-old daughter, Frankie.
Police reduce Becky to tears by threatening to call social services, but leave after confirming Frankie is safe and well.
At 5.12 a.m. a man is seen approaching Homerton Hospital carrying ‘a suspicious bundle’.
He is apprehended and set upon by a large group of young men and teenagers. The youngest of the attackers is three weeks short of his thirteenth birthday.
