Needham turns to her. ‘Not Tom.’
‘I mean, do you treat young women at this practice?’
‘You think a woman did this?’
‘It’s possible,’ Luther says.
‘Tom’s a strong man. He’s very fit. A woman. It just…’
Silence falls. The clock ticks. ‘We do treat women,’ Needham says. ‘But I don’t know. It seems strange. Why a woman?’
‘We’re just trying to cover all the possibilities.’ Luther tucks his notepad into a pocket. ‘Just one more thing. Do you know anyone who may have a key to the Lamberts’ house?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t. I’m sorry. Their cleaner, presumably. But that’s all I’ve got.’
Luther thanks him and stands. Howie is half a beat behind him.
Needham leads them out. At the door, he says, ‘Are you going to catch this man?’
‘We’re doing all we can.’
‘Well, sorry to be rude, but that sounds like generic police speak to me.’
Luther hesitates, lets Howie take the lead.
She says, ‘Mr Needham, do you have any reason to be worried for your own safety?’
‘Objectively, no more than usual I suppose. But I do have a wife and children, y’know. I’m only human.’
‘Then you can help us. Let us see Tom Lambert’s patient records.’
‘Obviously I can’t do that.’
‘We know,’ Howie says. ‘Absolutely. But do you really think it’s ethical to gamble with your children’s safety?’
Needham gives her a measured look.
Howie returns it.
Quietly, Luther says, ‘Whoever did this, they let themselves into the house while Tom and Sarah were sleeping. They cut off Tom’s genitals and choked him with them. They cut open Sarah’s belly and they took her baby. The baby may still be alive. We both know what Mr and Mrs Lambert went through to conceive that child. If you want to help them, Dr Needham, then help me find it — before whoever took it does whatever they’re planning to do.’
Needham glances at his hand, still clasping the door handle. It takes him a moment of concentration to make the hand let go. Then he wipes it on his shirt. He says, ‘Like I said, I suppose the cleaner must have a key. She must, surely?’
‘It stands to reason,’ Luther says. ‘Did Mr Lambert keep details of people who may have access to the house? Cleaners, builders, that kind of thing?’
‘He did,’ Needham says. ‘Tom’s very diligent when it comes to record keeping.’
‘Where did he keep these records?’
‘On his work computer.’
‘Do you have Mr Lambert’s password and log-in details?’
‘I do. But you do understand, I’d be trusting you not to access his patient database or his work diary. Those items are subject to doctor-patient confidentiality.’
‘Absolutely,’ Luther says.
‘Then I don’t see a problem.’
Needham leads them to Tom Lambert’s office, similar to his own. Tom uses an older IBM ThinkPad. His chairs are comfy dark leather. Needham sits at Tom’s computer, logs on, then pointedly checks his watch. ‘I need to make some calls, cancel Tom’s appointments and so on. I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes?’
‘That’s plenty of time,’ Luther says.
‘Excellent,’ Needham says.
There’s a moment. Then Needham backs out of the room like a servant, leaving Howie and Luther alone with Tom Lambert’s computer.
Luther says, ‘Okay. Get on with it.’
Howie shrugs off her jacket and hangs it over the back of Tom Lambert’s chair.
She gets on with it.
They leave without seeing Needham again. They nod goodbye to the receptionist, who sits at the desk wearing the raw, blank expression of the recently bereaved.
Luther makes a note to have her interviewed. But not today.
As Howie negotiates the traffic, chewing her lower lip and cursing under her breath, Luther consults Tom Lambert’s diary and patient records.
Finally, he calls Teller.
She says, ‘What’ve you got?’
‘A few possibles,’ he says. ‘People worth having a look at. But right now, one name’s leaping out: Malcolm Perry. Made a number of death threats to Lambert over the course of a year, eighteen months.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Lambert was trying to help him with his paraphilia.’
‘What paraphilia we talking about?’
‘Sex with corpses.’
‘Nice. So he was angry enough to threaten Mr Lambert. Was he angry enough to follow through?’
‘According to Lambert’s notes, Perry’s the reason they started setting the burglar alarm every night.’
‘What a world,’ Teller says, down the line. ‘So where do we find this charmer?’
CHAPTER 5
Clive, Zoe’s boss, has cancelled a longstanding community outreach engagement. So a day that started badly soon gets worse; Zoe finds herself addressing a gaggle of sixth formers about the work of Ford and Vargas, and about the nature of human rights legislation.
She tells them about Lisa Williams, twelve years old when she was killed in a hit-and-run. This was back in 2003. The driver was Aso Ibrahim, an Iraqi asylum seeker already on bail for driving while disqualified.
Lacking clear evidence that Ibrahim had been driving dangerously, the Crown Prosecution Service charged him with Driving While Disqualified; the more serious offence of Causing Death While Disqualified didn’t become law until 2008.
Ibrahim served two months in prison. Since his release, he’s been appealing against his deportation.
Zoe tells the class that over the course of nine years, Aso Ibrahim cost the taxpayer several hundred thousand pounds in legal aid for lawyers and interpreters. There were immigration hearings and trials, at which he was convicted variously of harassment, possession of illegal drugs and, three years after Lisa Williams’s death, Driving While Disqualified.
Then she asks the sixth formers what they’d do about him.
The consensus, as she’d presumed it would be, is — send him home.
‘But he’s entitled to stay,’ she tells them, ‘because he’s the father of two children with a British woman. Though he doesn’t actually live with those children, taking him away from his estranged girlfriend and those kids would breach his rights under Article Eight of the Human Rights Act.’
She asks them what they think about that.
She sits back and listens. The kids debate the danger Ibrahim would be in, back in Iraq. They talk about his two children and their right to a father. They talk about the bereaved parents of Lisa Williams, and their right to a daughter.
Zoe lets them discuss it for a bit, then tells them about how the British National Party had used Lisa Williams’s death as a propaganda tool during local elections in Barking.
She tells them how Lisa Williams’s father, a good and broken man, had made a public appeal for the people of Barking not to vote BNP because this injustice had nothing to do with the colour of his daughter’s skin.
One of the sixth formers, a good-looking, supercilious kid called Adam, suggests that Aso Ibrahim should be
