CHAPTER 3
He’s forced to park some way off and walk to the scene.
The morning is damp and chilly; he feels it in his knees. He thinks it’s all the bending over, all the ducking through doors and under tape; half a lifetime spent cramming himself into spaces that aren’t quite big enough for him.
It’s sunrise, but already plain clothes and uniform are conducting a house to house. Curious neighbours stand blinking in doorways, huddled in sweats and nightgowns. Some will ask the police inside; none will have heard or seen anything. But all will sense their deliverance from something sombre and profound, something that passed them by like a hunting shark.
The house is behind tape. Two and a half storeys, double-fronted Victorian semi. Probably a million and a half.
Luther shoves through the rubberneckers, the citizen journalists hoisting iPhones, not drowning but filming; he shoulders aside the real, old-fashioned journalists. He badges the Log Officer, who signs him in, then he ducks under the tape.
Detective Superintendent Rose Teller steps up to greet him. Five foot four, fine-boned, hard-faced. Teller’s grown into the pinched expression she first adopted as a younger woman who sought to accommodate superior officers, men who saw frivolity in grace. She’s wearing a forensic suit, bootees.
He says, ‘Morning, Boss. What’ve we got?’
‘Nasty piece of business.’
Luther claps his hands, vigorously rubs them. ‘Can you give me a minute, first? I need to ask a favour.’
She gives him the look. They don’t call her the Duchess for nothing.
She says, ‘You really choose your moments, don’t you?’
‘Later,’ he says, taking the hint. ‘Whenever you’ve got a minute. Won’t take long.’
‘Okay. Good.’
She clicks her fingers and DS Isobel Howie hurries over, trim in her white forensic bunny suit; strawberry- blonde hair worn short and spiky. Howie’s a second-generation copper, doesn’t like to talk about it. Some issue with her dad.
She nods good morning to Luther, hands him a manila file.
‘Victims are Tom and Sarah Lambert. He’s thirty-eight, she’s thirty-three.’ She shows him photographs: Mr Lambert dark, handsome, fit-looking. Mrs Lambert blonde, athletic, freckled. Stunning.
‘Mr Lambert’s a youth counsellor. Works with troubled kids.’
‘Which means a lot of people with emotional and mental problems,’ Luther says. ‘Mrs Lambert?’
‘She’s an events manager; organizes weddings and parties, that sort of thing.’
‘First marriage?’
‘First marriage for both of them. No jealous exes that we know of, no restraining orders. Nothing like that.’
‘Point of entry?’
‘Front door.’
‘What? He just let himself in?’
Howie nods.
Luther says, ‘What time is this?’
‘The 999 call came in around 4 a.m.’
‘Who made the call?’
‘Male, walking his dog, didn’t leave his name. Claimed to hear screams.’
‘I need to hear the recording.’
‘We can do that.’
‘Neighbours? They didn’t report any screams?’
‘Didn’t hear a thing, apparently.’
‘No cars? No slamming doors?’
‘Nothing.’
He turns back to the open door.
‘So who’s got spare keys? Neighbours, babysitters, mothers, fathers, cousins? Dog walker, house-sitter, cleaner?’
‘We’re looking into all that.’
‘Okay.’
Luther nods to the interior of the house. Howie follows the line of his gaze, sees a plastic keypad set into the wall. A small red light is flashing. Yapping like a silent dog. A burglar alarm.
Howie beckons Luther with a nod, leads him along the stepping plates that SOCO have placed along the side of the house.
Near the drainpipe, Luther shoves his hands deep into his overcoat pockets; it reduces the temptation to touch things. He squats heel to haunch, nods at the point where the phone line has been snipped. Then he takes one hand from his pocket and mimes a pair of scissors. The cut is close to the ground, half hidden by the spindly city grass that grows round the bottom of the drainpipe.
‘So he’s got a key. He also knows they’ve got an alarm. And he knows how to disable it.’ He stands, rotating his head to loosen a stiff neck. ‘Let’s find out who installed the alarm. Start with the contractor, the actual bloke who fitted it. I’ve seen that before. If you don’t get any joy with him, go to the security company that employs him. Check out everyone. Invoicing department, IT department, the boss, the boss’s PA. The sales force. All of them. If you don’t get anywhere, go wider. Look at employee spouses. And hope that comes up trumps. Because if it doesn’t…’
He lets that dangle, looks at the snipped wire in the pallid grass, feeling that feeling.
Howie tilts her head and looks at Luther in a strange way. She’s got a smattering of freckles across her cheeks that make her look younger; her eyes are green.
He looks over her shoulder and there’s Teller, giving him the same look.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a look inside.’
Howie gathers herself, takes a breath, holds it for a second. Then she leads Luther back along the stepping boards, past the SOCOs and the uniforms and into the house.
It’s a prosperous, middle-class home: family photographs, occasional tables, stripped wood flooring, vaguely ethnic rugs.
There’s a hot, black zoo stink that doesn’t belong in this bright clean place.
He walks upstairs. Doesn’t want to go, but hides it. Trudges down the hall.
He enters the master bedroom.
It’s an abattoir.
Tom Lambert lies naked on the seagrass matting. He’s been opened from throat to pubis. Luther’s eyes follow an imbroglio of wet intestines.
Mr Lambert’s eyes are open. There are forensic bags on his dead hands. His penis and testicles have been sliced off and stuffed into his mouth.
Luther feels the ground shift beneath him. He scans the blood spray, the blood-glutted carpet.
He stands with his head bowed and his hands in his pockets and tries to see Tom Lambert, thirty-eight, counsellor, husband. Not this cluster of depravities.
He’s aware of Howie at his shoulder.
He takes a deep, slow breath, then turns to the bed.
Upon it is spread the carcass that until recently was Sarah Lambert.
Mrs Lambert had been eight and a half months pregnant. She’s been popped like a tick.
He forces himself to look.
He wants to go home to his clean house, to shower and slip under a crisp duvet. He wants to curl up and sleep and wake up and be with his wife, in sweats and T-shirt watching TV, amiably bickering about politics. He wants to make love. He wants to sit in a sunny, quiet room reading a good book.
Mrs Lambert still wears the remains of a baby-doll nightie, probably bought as an ironic gift from a young
