The Calling (13 page)

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 café 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 cafés, cafés 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 Baby Emma wasn’t a pervert.

Zoe goes downstairs and turns on the TV, sees the affable morning newsreader pulling her grave face.

‘. . . an update on this still-developing story,’ she says. ‘Acting on a tip-off from the man who claimed to have kidnapped baby Emma Lambert, visibly devastated police officers reportedly found the body of a baby at St Pancras Old Church in central London early this morning. Simon Maxwell- Davis is at the scene.’

Zoe watches live footage of a London churchyard. A dizzying zoom – and there’s John, stomping away from an evidence tent. Rose Teller is a beat behind him, like a terrier at his heels.