The victim is Olusola Akinrele, a hospital worker on his way to an early shift. The ‘bundle’ was his gym bag.
Fortunately for Mr Akinrele, who loses the sight in one eye, the attack takes place less than a hundred metres from the Homerton Accident and Emergency department, which is where he works as a nurse.
At 5.47 a.m., Maggie Reilly comes to the microphone and announces that Pete Black has at last called back to London Talk FM.
‘Pete,’ she says. ‘Is that you?’
Luther stops pacing. He snatches up the portable radio and holds it close to his ear.
‘I’ve driven all over London,’ says Pete Black, tearful with self-pity. ‘There’s police everywhere. I just want London to know that. I want London to know what the police are doing. I try to help, and this is what I get.’
‘You can’t blame the police for doing their job.’
‘Yes I can. Because if it wasn’t for them, Emma would be with the doctors now. But she’s not, is she?’
‘So where is she, Pete? Where’s Baby Emma?’
‘I’ve put her where I could. I hope she’s safe.’
‘Where is she, Pete?’
‘If she’s not safe, it’s not my fault. I wanted you all to know that. I tried my best. I was only trying to help.’
‘Pete, where is she? Where’s Baby Emma?’
‘They’re tracing my call,’ says Pete Black. ‘They’ll know.’
Luther turns off the radio and shrugs on his coat. He dials Teller.
He says, ‘Where?’
She says, ‘King’s Cross.’
Luther’s already out the door.
CHAPTER 12
They seal off a two-kilometre area around King’s Cross, concentrate the search on the Joy Christian Centre, at Saints Church of England, St Aloysius Convent, the Crowndale Health Centre on Crowndale Road, the Killick Street Heath Centre, the New Horizon Youth Centre.
Luther elects to join the squad searching the grounds of St Pancras Old Church, on the edge of the search perimeter.
It’s the largest green area in the parish, and one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in London. Ancient trees. Ancient graves.
He arrives at an archaic ash tree ringed by a rusty fence. Around the tree’s root-base, timeworn gravestones have been crammed together. They stand like weird fungi. Over the years the roots of the tree have grown between the stones, knocked them off-true, seem to be in the process of consuming them.
A baby has been jammed between two of the stones, sprinkled with handfuls of soil and leaf humus.
Luther reaches down.
He takes the baby from the earth.
Then he lays her back. She’s cold.
Luther steps outside the evidence tent. Eyes pass over him. Coppers, onlookers, paramedics.
Outside the gates, misery lights flash blue. Uniformed officers erect crowd barriers.
The media are here, of course: there is a scrum of faces, all colours and ages, the mass homogenized by their eagerness to catch a glimpse.
There’s a helicopter overhead.
He buries his hands deep into his pockets and strides through wet grass to a far, secret corner of the churchyard.
He puts his back to the Victorian brick wall. It crawls with evergreen climbing plants. It’s shockingly wet.
He puts his head in his hands and cries.
When he’s finished, Teller’s there, half sitting, half leaning on a gravestone.
Luther’s eyes are raw and wet. He wipes them with the back of the hand. He’s embarrassed.
Teller doesn’t say a word.
For something to do, they walk to the church.
Inside, they find cool stone and heavy silence. The sweet, dusty fragrance of old incense.
Teller sits on the pew in front but turned to face him, resting her chin on her forearm. She watches him.
He says, ‘Fuck.’
‘I know,’ she says.
Outside is the crime scene, the tape, SOCO, the medical examiners, and beyond them the church gates that lead back into the city, the crush of people, the cameras, the journalists, the mobile phones, the love songs on the radio of passing cars.
At the entrance to the church, a recently added marble stone is inscribed: And I am here/in a place/beyond desire or fear.
She touches his forearm.
He nods at his lap. Then he dry-washes his face to massage some life into it. He stands. Claps his big hands.
She watches him walk outside, through the big doors and into the morning. A big man with a big walk. The world turning like a wheel beneath him.
CHAPTER 13
Henry buys the Mail, the Mirror, the Sun, the Independent and The Times. But not the Guardian. Henry detests the Guardian.
Then he goes to the cafe and orders a full English. He shrugs off his overcoat and scarf and, still trembling, sits at one of the red plastic moulded tables, bolted to the floor in an ungenerous manner that has become the norm.
It saddens him. But proper cafes, cafes like this, are closing by the dozen every week, winking out of existence like fairy lights. So he’ll take what he can get.
He adds sugar to his tea, stirs it with a dirty teaspoon, stained by years of daily immersion in tannin.
Then he can’t put it off any longer. He opens the first newspaper.
They tell the story the same way: LONDON HOLDS ITS BREATH. PRAYERS SAID FOR BABY EMMA. THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE PLEDGED LAST NIGHT… HUNDREDS OF POLICE CANCELLED LEAVE LAST NIGHT… WE ALL PRAY… IN DARK TIMES…
Henry burns with rage and embarrassment.
He looks through the window at the damp city coming alive: the market owners setting up stalls, selling organic veg and Indian food and knock-off Caterpillar boots and cheap polo shirts. The women walking to work at the local Tesco, the taxi drivers stopping outside the newsagent to pop in for a paper and a packet of fags.
Then he turns back to the paper — to the photographs of the smiling Lamberts, the woman he sliced open like ripe fruit to remove the fresher fruit within. He’d slit the throbbing blue umbilicus with a folding knife he’d owned since he was a boy.
He’d been sure the Lamberts were ideal; he stuck with them through the years of IVF because he never doubted their fertility. They were too exquisite not to be. Two bodies like that, they were breeding machines.
Simple genetic principles implied their child would be ideal, too. But it wasn’t. It was a mewling little runt.
It’s not Henry’s fault she died. And at least London knows that now. People know that the man who took
