The Crime Tsar

by Nichola McAuliffe

  She remembered Gary at Labour Party conferences, passionate about the care of the less fortunate, those who had no place in a Britain led by a mad woman.

  The four of them so sure the revolution would come, not seeing how far they had moved from their old ideals. How contaminated they had been. They had become defined by their jobs, their cars, their ambitions.

  Now Lucy and Gary were the less fortunate and the books they’d read, the music he’d played on the boudoir grand, now silent and covered in the contents of a chemist’s pharmacy, the things they still had inside them counted for nothing. They had crossed into the vacuum.

  The Chief’s dark-blue Jaguar stopped in front of the gates. Gordon, his driver, a dull man who didn’t read for pleasure and only rarely for information, pressed the buttons and eased the car close to the front door. Lucy watched Jenni’s husband get out and felt that internal pancake throw of excitement.

  His suit was expensive, his shoes very nearly Gucci. She could feel his breath on her neck again, the softness of his lips. His eyelashes on her cheek.

  The security light went out. He was inside with Jenni. She wondered if he’d have a whisky and soda. If Jenni would scream at him for putting the glass in the dishwasher. Lucy wondered if tonight she was ‘doing a Diana’, as her eldest daughter, Tamsin, had once described it. If the mood swings made famous in the legend of the Princess of Wales were condemning Shackleton to an evening of appeasement.

  Gary’s bell was ringing. She went in to see him. The remains of their dining room framed the ripple bed, the wheelchair, the debris of slow dying. Gary’s spine was hurting.

  ‘Lucy, will you give me a pull? Sorry.’

  ‘Will you stop apologising? Ready?’

  She got him under the armpits. The idea was to pull him so his back would realign itself more comfortably. When the pain was really bad she’d get him into the wheelchair, put him in the van and drive over speed bumps. Gary would yell out the Dam Busters march with tears of pain running down his face, till the thumping up and down shifted something in his vertebrae. But this was a different principle – she had to stretch him slowly. Sudden movement could put him into spasm.

  ‘What is it he’s got?’ asked Jenni after he’d fallen over at school again.

  ‘Multiple sclerosis.’

  ‘Oh, my uncle had that.’ She always pulled the focus back to herself. ‘I found him a diet, you know, no refined sugar, no caffeine or oranges – don’t know why oranges – and he was fine for years. You’ll have to put Gary on one, oh and I’ll get you a healing crystal, they are fantastic. In fact, I’ve heard there’s a new tantric meditation which does wonders for MS patients. I’ll have a word with my paradiviner, she knows all about these things. And of course cannabis, but don’t say I said so.’

  ‘Yes … yes,’ Lucy remembered saying blankly, too numb to be hurt by Jenni’s casual packaging up of Gary’s death sentence into a New Age bundle of hope.

  Lucy thought vaguely about no good marriage having a happy ending. But that was before she knew release could promise a kind of happiness. Before she gave up work, before she had to be grateful to Jenni. Before Tom had touched her, kissed her, quivered inside her.

  ‘Here goes, then.’ She pulled, leaning her whole body back. Gary was gasping for her effort and his pain.

  ‘That’s it. Yes, I think that’s it.’

  She released him and waited a moment in silence to see what his back would do. The crumbling of the bones in his spine was found after the MS. A little bonus, a little addition of pain to sharpen his appreciation of loss of feeling elsewhere.

  She filled the time by pulling his anti-clot socks further over his feet, swollen and smelly, the skin stretched so much sometimes she imagined popping them with a pin. Those feet that had searched for hers in bed. So they wouldn’t be lonely.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Perfect.’

  He smiled. No shadow of self-pity, no whiff of the pathetic. The (then) shadow Education Secretary had called him a remarkable man but he had no idea how remarkable. There was no one who met Gary who didn’t feel happier for the encounter. She looked down at him and wondered how she could still think him handsome. Ridiculous in red pyjamas with blue piping. The man who never wore anything in bed. Who was so proud of his long, lithe body. His chest now a sort of medieval soup bowl, an old man’s turkey neck growing out of it. The flesh of his face unable to cling to the bones, falling away to gather round his ears. The once blond hair brittle, colourless, thin as a chemo patient’s, even though that was one treatment he had not yet been subjected to.

  His eyes were fixed on the ceiling rose, listening to the pain. Still smiling. Staring out a cruel God. He let his breath go, sure it was quiet. Relaxed. She leaned over and kissed him. Lucy had married him before she’d learned gratitude for affection wasn’t love. It had taken time to put aside fear of rejection, and learn she wasn’t a supplicant to be granted the occasional emotional concession. She had grown to love him, encouraging healthy feelings like blind crocuses. Now she was closing down those small emotions. Putting them into hibernation. Protecting herself against the day her black suit would be once more worn in anger.

  ‘I don’t half fancy you, you know.’ The old words.

  He smiled, knowing it a lie.

  ‘Go and watch the television, woman. Go on, give us peace.’

  ‘Sure? Want anything else?’

  ‘No … go on.’ She left him reluctantly but knew he needed privacy to give in to the exhaustion.

  She sat in front of the television. A political talk programme was just starting. The ringmaster one of those plump media graduates still relishing popularity with the Labour government. The debate was about inner-city policing and racial tensions on the streets.

  ‘We’re joined by the Association of Chief Police Officers’ spokesman, Tom Shackleton, on the borders of whose area last night’s disturbances occurred. Good evening, Mr Shackleton …’

  Again the pancake flip. The sweat, the shaking hands. She smiled at the thought of the Pope’s blessing only working if it was a live broadcast. Tom Shackleton was just as potent recorded. He was in uniform, the darling of the tabloids, the people’s copper, the liberal chief constable who could be relied on to speak out on behalf of debate and openness. Tipped to take over the Met if Labour got in at the next election. If? Where was the competition?

  She wondered if Jenni’s ambition for her husband was the lubrication for her potential affair. Jenni’s obsession was the furtherance of her family. Her husband was her creation no less than her children. Her hysterical outbursts were not the result of an excess of emotion but a fear of loss of control.

  Tom took refuge from the volatility of his wife in the masculine predictability of the Job. Lucy, unwilling to betray Gary or Jenni, had tried briefly to play therapist, that day in the study, while he was talking about his wife’s treatment of him.

  ‘You must love her very much,’ Lucy had said, unwilling to believe the fairy-tale marriage was just that, a fairy-tale.

  ‘I think I despise her,’ he had replied without anger. Indeed he spoke about Jenni with a curious hurt.

  Lucy watched him on the television and couldn’t believe this powerful, confident police chief was the same man who’d made such gentle, apologetic love to her.

  Jenni was watching him too. Her head at an angle. He sat in the armchair opposite her, intent on the television screen. The interview was opened out to include some other talking heads.

  ‘He thinks you’re a fool,’ said Jenni dispassionately. ‘The BBC want Geoffrey Carter to get the Met. He was at university with most of them.’

  Tom didn’t say anything. He could see the interviewer becoming irritated with his replies. With his pedantic police speak, his uniform. The others on the programme were intellectuals. There was still that prejudice among the chattering classes towards plod, no matter how high plod rose.

  He knew Jenni was right, the intelligentsia would prefer Carter.
He was as reasonable and charming as Tom Shackleton but he was an Oxford graduate. Double first in theology, organ scholar and now Chief Constable of Tom Shackleton’s neighbouring county.

  Shackleton had a degree too, first-class law degree. From night school and day release, done while fast-tracking through the force. Where Jenni and Tom had come from, Oxford and Cambridge were just words on the front of coaches leaving the bus station by the chip shop.

  Geoffrey Carter spoke French, relaxed in Provence and Tuscany and came from a family with immaculate old Liberal credentials. An unusual policeman and outspokenly critical of knee-jerk home secretaries who used the police as a blunt instrument. Urbane, intelligent and popular with the politicians. He and Shackleton had known each other over the years, meeting at various command courses and colleges around the country. Their wives had shopped and taken coffee together. They got on. Everybody got on with Carter. Everybody, even Jenni, was drawn to Eleri, his wife.

  When Tom arrived at the studio the researcher let it slip they’d asked for Carter first but he had a meeting in London. Tom knew he’d be schmoozing the Home Office. No, not schmoozing – Geoffrey Carter would never do anything so vulgar. He’d never need to. He had charisma, natural unforced charm, exquisite manners and a formidable ability driven by a good brain. Shackleton had often felt inadequate beside him but knew, like a shark faced with a tiger, each had strengths the other lacked. And like the tiger and the shark each must avoid conflict in the other’s element.

  The programme finished and Jenni left Tom to catch up on the news while she went to fetch his supper, lightly grilled chicken, salad and a small pile of wild rice. She put their drinks on the tray and carried it through to the living room.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, watching the screen but thinking about the interview.

  ‘I’d put it on your lap but your stomach’s in the way.’

  All day he’d been Chief Constable, sir, the power in his fiefdom. She had just reduced him to a fat man being served a television dinner. Subconsciously he tightened his stomach muscles. It didn’t make much difference.

  ‘Looks very nice.’ Shackleton was careful to appreciate the food; Jenni was usually too busy to cook for him.

  ‘Oh, it’s only a bit of chicken,’ she muttered, but he’d said the right thing.

  She took her drink and sat down, watching him eat. Almost immediately she got up and straightened the cushions on the sofa. She sat down again. Took a sip of her drink.

  Tom didn’t look at her as she got up again and straightened the already regimented cushions.

  ‘Did you have a good day? Has Jason done his homework?’

  He hoped he could distract her. Long years of experience taught him the distance between Jenni the attentive wife and Jenni the critical harpy was the length of an obsessive thought.

  ‘That interviewer made you look a prat.’ Jenni’s tone warned Tom not to reply. She turned off the television. The following silence was leaden with her anger.

  He knew that anger came out of fear but it didn’t make it easier to live with. What was she afraid of this time?

  ‘I said they’d try and make a fool of you. But you wouldn’t listen. They’re out to get you, T.’

  He carried on chewing, longing to say his name was Tom. But she’d always thought it a rather common name. Like her own, Monica. She’d changed to her middle name as soon as she could, to the incomprehension of her parents who never understood the beautiful but alien daughter they’d bred. Jenni saw nothing to be proud of in being lower middle class.

  ‘I don’t understand you, I really don’t.’ She was turning her glass slowly on the arm of her chair.

  ‘Oh there’s nothing to understand, Jenni. You know that. This is delicious, by the way. Thank you.’

  But she wasn’t to be deflected by his humility.

  She spoke quietly. To his surprise she was smiling slightly, her head tilted to one side, looking at him affectionately.

  ‘You want to go further, don’t you? You don’t want to end your days as just another seven-year-spin chief constable. You’ve always said you want to make a difference. And,’ she leant forward, ‘the only place to do that is the Met? Isn’t it?’

  He dipped his head. Neither yes nor no.

  ‘I know you want it but I don’t know if you’ve got it in you to get it.’ She said this very softly, with no malice. ‘Carter’s the favourite but we can change their minds. You’re a better man than he’ll ever be.’

  That was too close to a compliment to be comfortable for either of them. He took refuge in his whisky.

  ‘But what if we don’t persuade them, Jenni?’

  It was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘You find your balls and we’ll persuade them.’

  His timidity infuriated her – she was seething with resentment. Going back to the interview, the imagined slights were now insults. Jason, his son, hearing her voice raised, quietly closed the door of his room, knowing his mother was heading for one of her moods. When he’d come home from school Jenni had been hoovering the curtains in the downstairs cloakroom. Something she more often did in the middle of the night, unable to sleep more than four hours at a time.

  ‘What were you thinking of, letting him run rings round you like that?’

  ‘He didn’t run rings, don’t exaggerate.’ Tom’s tone was soft, conciliatory.

  It infuriated her.

  ‘Oh… you’re so bloody wet. Carter’s going to walk off with the Met and you’ll just get some inspectorate of prison lavatories. Why don’t you go and see someone? Get down to London and pull some strings.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as that, Jenni –’

  He didn’t get any further – the heavy-bottomed tumbler from which she had been sipping a vodka tonic narrowly missed his face.

  ‘God, you’re such a prat. Look at you! Christ knows why I ever married you.’

  He tried to defuse the situation with a little quiet humour. ‘Because you loved me?’

  ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid.’

  She rarely swore but when she did she had a way of articulating the word, of articulating each syllable, slowly, with a slight raising of her upper lip. Like a dog scenting fear.

  ‘How can one love an invertebrate?’

  Tom stood up, unwilling to engage with her. He knew the pattern, that she would not stop until she had listed his failings, his moral cowardice, his domestic laziness, his meanness, lack of ambition, his neglect of the family.

  He looked at her as she became more and more agitated, moving round the room touching and tidying the already neatly placed ornaments and statuettes that decorated her dust-free surfaces. Would she throw something else at him? Although he was a tall man he seemed to shrink under her vicious onslaught, though his face remained completely unreadable. He often wondered why she occasionally resorted to throwing things when her tongue could inflict far more damage.

  Her favourite trick had been to humiliate him, then, as if nothing had happened, want to have sex. His increasing inability to perform under these circumstances simply added to her ammunition. For a moment he felt miserable, lonely, and desperate for her to be quiet. He wanted her to be affectionate, soft. He wanted to lie on her breasts.

  ‘Are you listening, you shit?’ she screamed.

  ‘Yes,’ he said automatically.

  No, it wasn’t her breasts he wanted to rest his cheek on, not her nipple he wanted at the corner of his mouth. With a sense of detached surprise he realised it was Lucy’s breast he could taste. The slight smell of soap and deodorant. He hadn’t thought about her since their strange encounter in his study.

  It was a deliberate blocking out: Lucy had made him unexpectedly happy. He remembered leaning over her whispering, ‘You’ll never hurt me, will you?’ He was embarrassed at the recollection. Asking a woman not to hurt him was like asking a scorpion not to sting.

  He had a mistrust of sex, of his libido distracting him. He had satisfied a physical urge and ha
d felt faintly disgusted with himself afterwards. During the act he had no thought of the woman, whether it was Jenni or one of his rare, furtive experiments elsewhere. Sex had been something inflicted on him and now he inflicted it, rarely, on others. He knew Jenni had no more emotional involvement in the act than he had but knew she relished seeing him helpless afterwards, exhausted even if only for a moment. As always giving but not sharing.

  He became aware it was silent. Jenni had finished her ravings and had stormed upstairs. She switched off the light as she went and he stood unmoving in the darkness.

  It was different with Lucy. She had received him with gentleness and affection. He touched his face where she had stroked him. Had she cried? Or did he imagine that. He looked across at her darkened window. Unseeing she looked back.

  ‘Darling Lucy … what would I do without you.’

  Jenni was glittering the next morning as Lucy cleared away the remains of a heavy-bottomed tumbler from the living-room carpet.

  ‘Now … I’ve decided to have a little dinner party. Just the Chief and me and our politician friend.’

  Lucy glanced up to see if the conspiratorial intimacy of yesterday was still in Jenni’s face. There was nothing. The mask of make-up was inscrutable.

  ‘And Lucy … I’ve a huge favour to ask you.’

  Lucy composed her face into her ‘of course I will’ smile.

  ‘Would you be the fourth?’

  It was so unexpected Lucy’s smile almost slipped. Misinterpreting the hair’s-breadth pause for reluctance Jenni applied a little more charm, a little more dazzle.

  ‘Gary could ring across for you if he needed anything. Do say yes, Lucy. It would be awkward if we weren’t a four, and his wife lives somewhere miles away, and anyway he only sees her at weekends. From what I’ve heard about her that’s probably quite enough.’

  ‘Well … thank you. Yes. I’d love to.’ Lucy spoke quietly. ‘I haven’t been out for ages.’

  ‘Oh it’s hardly out… but at least you can get your best frock on, and put a bit of make-up on too? Ah Jason … at last. Come on, let’s go, I don’t want to be late.’