The Crime Tsar

by Nichola McAuliffe

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Jenni? It’s Eleri. What on earth have our husbands got themselves into now?’

  Jenni could hear the noise of the television and children in the background. She could see in her mind the domestic chaos of the house and Eleri voluptuous and unmade up, dressed in one of her husband’s shirts and a pair of multi-pocketed trousers. No shoes.

  ‘Saving the world, no doubt.’

  ‘Look, Jenni, Geoffrey called me before they went – he had a feeling it might not go too smoothly. Anyway, we thought if you were on your own you might like to come over. You’re very welcome. It’s just me and the boys.’

  Oddly, Jenni’s hackles didn’t rise at this cosy and utterly inappropriate suggestion. There was something so warm about Eleri and her fondness for Jenni and Tom was so transparently genuine that Jenni, despite her initial suspicion, liked her. She liked Eleri as she would have a scatty but aristocratic red setter.

  ‘Oh Eleri, that’s such a sweet thought but I’ve the family here. And I really ought to be home for Tom when it finishes.’

  Eleri quite understood and the two women said their goodbyes without articulating their real feelings about what was happening. Jenni put down the phone, Eleri already forgotten. The little boy was still rigid on the sofa, staring at his grandmother. Jenni smiled at him, although he had provoked her … She felt a sudden surge of affection for him. He was, after all, the next generation of the Shackletons. A dynasty she had created.

  ‘Tamsin,’ she called. ‘Bring Kit some biscuits – I’m going to change my trousers.’

  On the television an aggressive young woman was debating with an aggressive young man what the youths would do with the two chief constables.

  The three women had taken off Tom’s jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He was put on a fourth chair. This one two pieces of carved wood that slotted into each other to form a low, high-backed chair. He was nervous it wouldn’t take his weight but it was surprisingly comfortable. It forced him to sit back. Relax. The sky was clear and the stars brighter than usual in England. The night was hot. Dry. Good rioting weather. His burned skin was painful now, an insistent pain that pulsed with his heartbeat.

  The thin woman had gone into the flat and returned with a plastic bucket and a bulging carrier bag emblazoned with HARRODS – THE SALE. She put the bucket down in front of the fat woman and sat in her sagging deckchair. They were now a circle with the bucket in the centre.

  The African woman, unsmiling and unblinking, reached into the carrier bag. She pulled out a bottle of oil. It had no label and when she unscrewed the top and poured a thin gold stream into the bucket it smelled of smooth Mediterranean geranium leaves. A sharp sweet smell. The desiccated woman took out a bunch of herbs and tore them roughly before dropping them into the bucket.

  Tom watched, recognised the leaves as khat, a drug favoured by West Africans. Illegal. He wanted to say something but, as if from a distance, he saw himself unable to speak. With a sort of removed disapproval he watched the big woman stir the leaves into the oil with his swagger stick. Where did she get it? Where was Gordon? He should be going home – Jenni would be in one of her moods.

  As the great brown hand stirred, the other two women added more things from the carrier bag. A bottle of spring water, powders and the foul-smelling contents of three small plastic syringes.

  Tom knew he should get up and walk away but couldn’t. He’d once been hypnotised at a club. He was a young PC and desperate to fit in; he’d volunteered. Unwilling to say it hadn’t worked he went along with the mumbo jumbo and cooperated with the tatty hypnotist. Then he’d decided enough was enough and tried to leave the stage. He found he couldn’t. Sitting with these three women round a plastic bucket on the edge of a restless inner-city estate, he felt the same helplessness.

  The women were singing softly over the brew, which was giving off a strange attractive repellent smell. With an effort he got his brain to identify it. Tom tried to discipline his mind into creating concrete thoughts. It was the sharp clinging odour he’d smelled between women’s legs. At once comforting and repulsive, it was so strong he could taste it.

  The African woman moved behind him and leaned over his shoulder to take his wrists in her long elegant fingers. He felt the skin of her cheek against his own. He was surprised at the softness of it. He couldn’t stop himself – he reached up, her hand still on his arm, and touched her face. He couldn’t see what he touched but it felt like the scales of dead fish. Cold and smooth one way, cutting the other. He pulled back, shocked. The women laughed.

  ‘Here,’ said the big one, shifting her great bulk so he could see the ravine between her breasts. The top buttons of her dress had given up the struggle and the thin cotton gaped open. She scooped up a handful of the sludge from the bucket. The black hands on his wrists gripped him and held out his burned hands. He felt fear but the fear was someone else’s. He watched the women apply the ointment to his skin. The relief was immediate, cool, like being wrapped in cotton sheets on a hot night.

  ‘Now, Thomas …’

  The big woman was smiling at him, holding his hands in hers. Hers were bigger.

  ‘Drink this.’

  The thin one dipped a royal-wedding mug into the bucket then diluted the contents with British sherry from a bottle by her chair. He didn’t resist. He drank.

  ‘I want you to listen to us, Thomas.’

  The three women were now sitting, watching him. The big one continued, still smiling, still vast with welcoming flesh.

  ‘You’ve got a big future, Thomas. You are going to get what you want.’

  ‘What you deserve,’ added the thin one. Her voice was dry and brittle, a voice heard in bus queues.

  The African woman spoke, her accent so strong he almost didn’t understand what she said.

  ‘That is not the same thing. We are telling him about his dreams. Not his nightmares.’

  ‘Don’t confuse him.’

  The great warm brown face in front of him was kind, affectionate. She didn’t want him upset. He could feel her affection for him. Her maternal care. The care he’d always longed for but learned couldn’t be trusted. He wanted to ask questions. He wanted a drink of water. He wanted milk and a dash – no, cup of tea. Milk and a dash was what he’d drunk as a child in rare moments of comfort at his mother’s hands. Cup of tea was better. He wanted to leave. He couldn’t.

  ‘Thomas, what is it you want?’

  Shackleton found it difficult to formulate the words. As if in slow motion he said, ‘Commissioner. Metropolitan Police …’

  He couldn’t read the women’s expressions. Their faces were closed as if they hadn’t heard him.

  ‘I want … to be … the Commissioner.’

  They nodded.

  ‘But … Carter’s favourite. Geoffrey Carter …’

  He didn’t feel drunk, just distant, as if watching himself down the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it must be a dream because he never told anyone his wants, his needs. No one. Jenni told him what he wanted.

  The blue-black face and blank eyes of the African woman came close to his.

  ‘Carter’s story is not your story. You want what you want, he’ll get what he gets.’

  The other two faces crowded in on him.

  ‘So you be careful, Thomas, careful you stay in your story – don’t you go stray into someone else’s or you’ll go mash up the future. You mash up the future and that will bring badness. Death in your soul. You hear me, Thomas? You hear me? The Wages Of Sin Is Death.’

  Their voices were as distant as a nurse’s calling from the other side of an anaesthetic but they were conjuring pictures of his future. They had made him articulate his desire and in escaping into the air his words had made that desire concrete. His ambition now roosted in the dark trees like maggotpies, choughs and rooks.

  Gordon rang the doorbell. Lucy watched from the darkness of her living room. She couldn’t see Shackleton in the car. She had seen
the end of the siege on television. Watched Tom help his badly burned colleague through the blue-and-white tape. Listened to him talk, relieved and quietly courageous, now his car was home. But no Tom.

  The front door opened and Jenni stood talking to Gordon for a moment, then the two of them went to the car, followed by Jason, Tamsin and Jacinta. Lucy watched dully as they pulled Shackleton, inert, from the back seat. They looked so close she felt excluded, irrelevant. They carried him into the house. The security light went off. Lucy felt as though she was straining to see through black glass.

  Inside the house an argument had started about what to do with Tom. Jenni was convinced he was drunk and was disgusted. Gordon tried to reassure her he was ill and exhausted. Jason seeing his burns insisted on calling a doctor.

  ‘God … he stinks. Where has he been?’

  Gordon didn’t reply. Whatever he said to Mrs Shackleton would be wrong, it always was.

  ‘Gordon, you weasel, why does the Chief smell like that?’

  Gordon gave his impression of a deaf mute with learning difficulties.

  ‘All right, take him upstairs, to the guest bedroom. That stink will get into everything. Is it that stuff on his hands? Jacinta, get some water and wash your father’s hands. Who put it there? Was it a doctor? Oh God, I don’t know why I bother.’

  Gordon watched her run up the stairs and followed, almost carrying Tom. With the Chief’s head on his shoulder he tried to separate the poison from the saccharine in Mrs Shackleton’s words. As usual he couldn’t. As usual he kept his mouth shut.

  Jenni immediately opened the windows of the slightly musty room. Gordon started to undress Shackleton, thinking he was to be put to bed.

  ‘Leave him alone.’ Jenni realised she was too sharp. Too out of character.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gordon. I’ll do that. You go home. Off you go. It’s obviously been a long day and a hard one, eh?’

  Gordon nodded and smiled, glad to be released. All he wanted was to be rid of the gun and on the outside of a modest drink. The only thing that had really frightened him all night was the Chief’s wife.

  Jason passed Gordon on the stairs and tried to be polite but Gordon was gone before he could make up for his mother’s lack of manners.

  Jenni was sitting watching Tom from a distance when Jason went into the bedroom. He was lying spread-eagled on the bed, his shirt half undone by Gordon. He was sweating and mumbling.

  ‘Drunk,’ said Jenni.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Mem. Really. Look at him, he’s ill. Really. Look.’

  But Jenni just sat hugging herself, wanting but unwilling to touch him. The smell she could smell on him she’d come across before. It was the smell of the Gnome’s breath. The smell of women.

  Jason knew better than to go on. He undressed his father and pulled the duvet over him. Gently he laid the burned hands on the top; there were blisters too on the side of his face and ear. The girls fussed in carrying water and an odd selection from Jenni’s first-aid box. Jason saw athlete’s-foot powder and surgical spirit.

  ‘I’ve called the doctor. There are hundreds of messages on the machine and the fax is having a nervous breakdown,’ said Jacinta, a sensible girl of nineteen, who had an unfortunately large bottom and thick ankles and was studying to be a stage manager at a drama college Jenni could boast about.

  She thumped down on the bed next to her father. Capable and unflappable, she started to wash his hands in the bowl of cold water held by Tamsin but she soon saw the only way the ointment would come off was with the flesh beneath. The water was quickly red with blood. She stopped. She felt sick.

  Jason saw what was going on.

  ‘Leave it, Jacinta. Wait for the doctor.’

  The children felt awkward. Their mother was, not unusually, wrapped in an internal conflict of emotions and unreachable. Tamsin, having put Kit to bed, was free to cry and carry on like a Greek widow. Jacinta and Jason simply sat either side of their father trying to calm him and cool him.

  These two had no difficulty loving Tom Shackleton. There was no complication, no qualification. The room was quiet but for the muffled sobs from Tamsin, each person in their own thoughts.

  Jenni knew the messages and faxes would be radio, television and newspapers wanting interviews with her husband. She had deliberately not answered the phone since speaking to Eleri. She would sift them through the night. Come the morning he’d be a hero or a joke.

  Jenni thought back over her brief conversation with Gordon. Hadn’t he said Carter was taken to hospital? In a bad way. Good. He wouldn’t be out tomorrow, Tom would do all the interviews, Tom would have the spotlight. Bandaged and frail, he’d be perfect. Jenni knew she would have to phone the Gnome in the morning to make sure the right people were aware of him and to get the Party machine working for her. Them.

  The doctor arrived and she was free to check the messages. They were gratifyingly numerous and heavyweight. The last was a television producer saying the crew that had gone into the siege with him had got some incredible footage. Amazing. They were going to stay up all night editing it.

  Jenni sat back, pleased but not complacent. It would be good if he was well enough to speak briefly by phone to the early morning radio news. Serious radio only and no breakfast television except news. No sitting on garish sofas looking silly. Then possibly an appearance on the lunchtime bulletins.

  She had a thought that bandages would look good; perhaps she ought to go back upstairs and make sure the doctor was applying them. But she was pleased the whole thing was on video; as long as her husband had been his usual charming persuasive self, it would speak volumes for him. He would be, she knew, irresistible. But to tell him she was proud would be weakness. Her approval must stay always out of reach.

  More than a day’s worth of soundbites and interviews. She stood up, tidied the faxes, checked her appearance automatically in the mirror, and went back upstairs.

  The doctor was still examining the inert body in the bed.

  ‘He seems fine. Just in a deep sleep. As if he’d been drugged.’

  ‘Not drunk then?’ Jenni said it as if her husband were a teetotaller. ‘Oh doctor, I was only joking.’

  ‘Er … Mrs Shackleton, did you put this stuff on his hands?’

  The doctor was obviously disapproving of whatever it was but too young to say it: just a locum, not his place.

  ‘No, doctor, I didn’t. They were like that when he came home.’

  The man was relieved, but slightly worried.

  ‘It’s just… well, I don’t know what it is and I can’t seem to get it off without causing more damage, so I’m going to bandage up his hands for now and keep an eye on them for infection. I’ll give him an injection too. He’s not allergic to antibiotics, is he?’

  Jenni couldn’t see the point of the fuss over a couple of minor burns.

  ‘No, no, of course not. Doctor, look, will my husband be all right in the morning, only …’ She finished off with her prettiest smile. ‘There is rather a lot of media interest.’

  ‘Oh yes, he should be fine once he wakes up. Whatever it is he’s taken seems to have knocked him out pretty well. But that’s good – he’d be in quite a lot of pain if he were awake.’

  The doctor left leaving a selection of painkillers and a prescription. He was seen out by Jacinta. Tamsin had expended too much emotion on the whole event and had retired to bed, exhausted by her devotion to her father. She had cried real tears and worked herself up to a high pitch of emotion. To her, it wasn’t a performance.

  Jacinta waited until all was quiet then discreetly went home to the small flat in Earls Court she shared with another student. Her sister was asleep and her mother prowling the house planning her assault on the morning. Jason sat beside his father, not really thinking, just being with him and too tired to go to sleep.

  Jacinta looked across the bed at him before she left. They smiled at each other, two whole people in a family of parts. She wanted to but didn’t kiss her fathe
r. He was shy of intimacy when awake; it would seem an intrusion when he was asleep.

  Carter’s driver had phoned Eleri immediately after the ambulance left. She sounded calm but he knew she wasn’t. As always she asked after him, was concerned no one had been hurt and seemed in no hurry to get him off the line. He wanted to pick her up and take her to the hospital but she was adamant his day had been long enough and that he should go home. She’d make her own way.

  The elderly widow next door was only too glad to be of use as a babysitter and Eleri drove herself to the hospital.

  Carter had been sedated and his burns dressed. Eleri stood over him stroking his hair and crying quietly. She didn’t just love him, she worshipped him.

  ‘He’s a very brave man, your husband.’

  The nurse was taking his blood pressure and vital signs as he would throughout the night.

  ‘Some might say foolish,’ Eleri replied. ‘I don’t know whether to hug him or slap him.’

  The nurse, grey with tiredness and reeking of coffee and cigarettes, looked at Eleri from under outrageous eyelashes, suddenly a drag queen.

  ‘Well, daughter, I know which I’d do.’

  Part Two

  A fit of dry-mouthed coughing woke Gary early. Too early. The day would be longer than usual. He turned his head on the built-up pillows to see where his drink was. Behind the pills on top of the Scrabble box. Good. He could reach it, he wouldn’t have to wake Lucy. He looked at it for a while. It was to his left. If he used his left arm he could reach it easily but would he be able to turn his hand at the right angle to grasp it?

  The cup was slightly behind him so it would mean getting hold of it in a back-hand grip. No. He was sure that would be too risky; the water might end up on the floor, giving Lucy two jobs. But if he reached out and found the cup with the back of his hand then tried to raise his hand above and then behind the cup, like those miniature cranes in fairground arcades, he was sure the bedhead would prevent his arm completing the manoeuvre. Also the cup had a lid fitted out of which stuck a red-and-white bendy straw – they had run out of blue-and-white, his team’s colours, on Monday. So the height of the straw would make such a move impossible.