‘Seriously,’ she says.
‘We don’t need to talk about it.’
‘I feel terrible. I didn’t know what to do.’
‘You did the right thing,’ he says again. ‘Let’s leave it.’
‘But if I hadn’t…’
‘What?’
‘Would you have found him? I mean, before…’
‘Before he did this? Tonight?’
‘Yes.’
He locks eyes with her. For a cruel moment he considers saying yes. Letting her live with it.
He sits. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I don’t think so. I was trying. I was really trying, but I don’t think I could’ve done that.’
She nods. She doesn’t know if he’s telling the truth.
Neither does Luther.
‘Look,’ he says. ‘I got tunnel vision. I lost my sense of perspective. You’re right: I needed someone to stop me. You did me a favour. And it took courage.’
He thinks about telling Howie about Irene, an old woman, now long-dead, found mummified in her chair. His callow shame for not stepping up and confronting his superiors for the jokes they told. The lack of respect.
He doesn’t tell her. He just says, ‘I admire what you did.’
There is a long, good moment.
‘So,’ Howie says, ‘what are we looking for?’
‘I need a current address.’
‘Whose address?’
Luther tells her.
Howie doesn’t look at him. Doesn’t register the name. Just logs on, enters her password, accesses the database. A universe of enormity. Faces stored as binary data. Faces that grin in school photographs, wedding photographs, faces that grin from newsprint and news broadcasts.
She double-checks the spelling and hits Return.
And there she is.
And now Howie understands. She turns to Luther. There’s an expression on her face that Luther has seen before. There’s a kind of admiration in it. But there’s a kind of pity too.
Luther says, ‘What do you think?’
She nods.
‘Print me this stuff off,’ Luther says. ‘And get me a picture of Mia.’
Howie is staring into the middle distance. She says, ‘Holy shit.’
Luther hesitates in the doorway. He wants to say something wise, something about the human spirit. But there’s nothing to say and there are no lessons to be learned.
‘You need to hurry up,’ he says, and leaves her to it.
Henry drives through the electric gates and parks the car. He gets out and opens the boot.
Mia’s curled up inside.
She’s shocked and compliant.
She looks up at him. He thinks of the tired look in a bait dog’s eyes, the surrender, and knows he won’t need the ketamine.
But he keeps it to hand anyway, in case it’s a trick. Henry’s been tricked before. Henry has learned his lessons the hard way.
He unties her and hands her the choke collar. ‘Be a good girl and put this on.’
She slips the chain over her head.
Henry gives it a gentle but sharp tug, just to show he can. Then he smiles to pretend he’s only playing.
Mia’s legs are stiff and everything about her hurts, and there’s a swimmy feeling as if none of this is really happening. She climbs out of the boot of the car and into the garden.
It doesn’t seem possible that she can be here in the first glimmers of daylight and she can be standing in a huge garden, one of the biggest gardens she’s ever seen, with a man all covered in dried blood. He’s got blood in his hair and it’s dried like thin black mud all over his face. He’s got a black crust of blood inside the whorls of his ears and under his nails.
When she really looks at the house she sees that it’s very large but unmaintained. It doesn’t look like a rich man’s house. It looks like a haunted house. Or a witch’s house.
‘Shhhh,’ says the man.
Mia nods submission. She knows that if she makes a noise, he’ll pull on the chain and she won’t be able to breathe.
She walks alongside the man, at his heel, towards the house.
He says, ‘Do you like dogs?’
Mia nods.
‘Good,’ the man says. ‘We’ve got lots of dogs.’
He leads her into the house. Inside, it’s old fashioned. Wood panelling and hunting pictures on the walls. The glass in the frames is so smeared and dusty you can hardly see the pictures. It smells funny, like the windows have been kept shut for a hundred years and nobody has ever washed the sheets.
The man leads her to a door under the stairs. He makes her stand to one side. Then he pulls back some heavy iron bolts that keep the door locked. He leans into what Mia takes to be a cupboard and pulls on a light cord. A bare bulb comes on, dusty on top. The dust starts to smell as the bulb gets hotter.
‘Down we go,’ he says.
Mia is uncertain. But the man jerks the chain and she steps through the door. It’s not a cupboard. There are stairs leading down.
It’s all concrete down here, and the sound is echoey.
Then there’s a corridor with cupboards lining it, with mops and buckets in the cupboards, except all the mops are old and their grey heads have dried and gone stiff. The mop buckets are dented metal. They smell like hospital disinfectant, a clean smell that’s also a dirty smell.
At the end of the corridor is a door.
The door has iron bolts on it, and a big, heavy padlock. The man hangs the loop of the dog lead over a big hook set high in the wall. Mia has to stand on tiptoes and it gets hard to breathe. He struggles to unlock the padlock and pull back the rusty bolts.
The door opens onto a little room. It’s the kind of room where if you were on holiday in a house like this with your friends and your brother, you’d dare each other to go inside.
It’s not that much smaller than her bedroom at home, but it feels much smaller because there are no windows. There are spiderwebs everywhere, and in the spiderwebs are tiny, dry black beetle husks. There’s only one bulb and it’s a kind of sickly yellow that makes the room seem darker not lighter.
The man unhooks her and says, ‘In you go.’
She tells him she can’t, so he pulls on the choke chain until the world goes red. Then he gently shoves her inside.
There is a low bed with a damp grey blanket and a thin pillow like Mia had to sleep on once on holiday in France, except this pillow doesn’t have a pillow-case and it’s got big yellow circles on it, stains that remind her of skin disease.
‘Sit down,’ says the man.
She sits on the edge of the horrible bed. It makes her skin crawl along her bones like a caterpillar on a tree. She glances into a corner and in the corner there’s a little bookshelf and on the bookshelf are some books.
They’re children’s books: The House at Pooh Corner, The Secret Garden, The Tiger Who Came to Tea. The books are very old and dog-eared and some of the pages have come loose from the binding. Seeing them makes terror mushroom inside her. She glances at the open door and makes a move and the man slaps her in the face.
She sits on the edge of the bed. She can’t speak.
