‘Hello.’
Lucy jumped so hard she banged her head.
‘I … er … I didn’t hear you come in. Sorry.’
Why she was apologising for being frightened out of her wits she didn’t know.
Tom stood over her.
‘Did you bang your head?’
‘No … well, yes, a bit.’
She stood up. He was wearing a tracksuit and no shoes. She noticed how neat his feet were, high arches, pale.
‘It’s all I could put on with these.’
He held up his bandaged hands.
‘Oh yes … how do you feel? What an experience – it must have been awful for you. I saw the film, well, the video on television this morning.’
Lucy listened to herself rabbiting on. Making a complete fool of herself. Shut up, Lucy, her brain was shouting. He’s bored already. Shut up.
He smiled.
‘Could you … would you mind making me a cup of coffee? Only Jenni’s just grabbed a quiet moment to run our daughter and grandson home.’
Lucy burbled, ‘Yes, yes, of course. Coffee, black, isn’t it? One sugar?’
As if she could forget. Look what happened the last time she gave him a cup of coffee. She realised her hands were shaking when she tried to fill the kettle through the spout as she usually did. A spray of water soaked her shirt. Oh God, he’d think it was a wet T-shirt competition. She tried to rub herself down with a teacloth. Hopeless.
She took a deep breath, removed the lid of the kettle and filled it properly. She managed all the business with the cafetière and poured the coffee into a cup without spilling it. She turned to give it to him. He had disappeared. She called out, ‘Tom …? Excuse me, Tom, I have your coffee. Where would you like it?’ She felt silly being so correct but then, as her aunt had said, sexual intercourse didn’t constitute a formal introduction.
‘Here, Lucy.’
His voice came from upstairs. The bedroom. By the time she got there most of the coffee was in the saucer. She upended it and poured it back then knocked politely on the open door.
‘Come in, Lucy.’ The room smelt of his aftershave, Czech and Speke 88 with something else, something muskier, underneath. ‘Could you help me?’
He had taken off his tracksuit and was standing in his uniform trousers and open shirt.
‘I managed to do up the zip but… the buttons have defeated me.’
He looked so lost Lucy wanted to throw her arms round him.
‘And your socks. Where are your socks?’
‘Over there, in the drawer.’
She took out a pair of fine black wool socks and knelt down in front of him. He sat on the bed. There was something symbolic, something sensual about unrolling them on to his feet. She kept her eyes down.
‘It’s a long time since anyone did this for me. Thank you.’
‘Oh, I have to do it every day for Gary.’
Shut up about Gary. Talk about him.
‘Are you all right? How are your hands? It must be very painful.’
Lucy, an interrogation is not a conversation.
‘They feel fine. Thank you. Someone put some ointment on them for me.’
Lucy picked up his highly polished black shoes and guided his feet into them.
‘Who was that? The doctor?’
‘No. I haven’t told Jenni …’
Lucy looked up at him. He paused, looking down at her. She didn’t breathe, didn’t blink, willing him to confide in her.
‘It was three women. At the estate. I think they drugged me.’ He laughed at the absurdity of the idea. ‘And they put this stuff on my hands. Anyway I passed out and I’m fine this morning. No pain, nothing. But I dreamt. Dreams.’
He stopped. Lucy waited. She could see he’d closed down. Excluded her.
‘What dreams?’
She saw something in him she hadn’t seen before. A glimmer of self-doubt. Confusion.
‘Tom? What dreams?’ Then softly: ‘Tell me. Please.’
He stood up but didn’t move away. She took this as a sign he wanted his shirt done up. She stood too. Close to him. Her fingers brushing his skin as she slowly did up the buttons. The centre of his chest was covered in fine black hair, the nipples small and pinkish, hard with cold, or with her closeness? A few hairs around them. High on his chest, just below the neck a small red dot like a biro stain, where a blood vessel had burst. His skin was silky, fine. So much better quality than her own. She was desperate to touch it.
‘It sounds daft… but there were three women. Three black women and they told my fortune in a way. It was just a dream. Strange.’
‘What did they say?’
‘Nothing much. Just that I’d get what I wanted. Something like that. Daft.’
His shirt was done up. She picked up his tie.
‘Could you bend down a bit? Thanks.’
His face was now almost level with hers. She could see the fine hairs on his cheekbones. The coarser ones of his eyebrows. The small scar on his cheek; was it from shaving or something more romantic?
‘Sounds like something out of the Scottish Play.’
He looked puzzled. ‘Macbeth?’
‘My aunt told me it was bad luck to say the name. She was in the theatre. Well, she was box-office manager at Eastbourne.’
‘Could you fetch the jacket? It’s in the wardrobe.’
He said the words flatly. Dismissively. The subject of the women seemed closed.
Lucy fetched the jacket and did it up, struggling with the buttons and belt. Finally she reached up with both hands to flick imaginary flecks from the shoulders, below the crowns and insignia of his rank. Her eyes were level with his lips. It was not a wide mouth – the lower lip was slightly fuller, softer than the upper. Unable to stop herself she looked up at his eyes. He was looking at her, and his eyes which she’d always thought were dark brown were, in fact, indigo blue, an extraordinary colour, the depth and texture of a pair of velvet monogrammed slippers she’d once seen in a Jermyn Street shop.
‘What is it, Lucy?’
She didn’t move, her hands still on his shoulders, her breasts touching uniform buttons.
‘Your eyes … they … they’ve changed colour.’
For God’s sake, she was thirty-seven years old and was talking like an adolescent groupie.
He frowned.
‘Oh … I must be happy then.’
She was breathless.
‘They’re like the sea – deep sea.’ Sea you’d want to dive into and allow to rush into every orifice, Lucy thought, then remembered the last time that had happened, off the beach at Coleraine in February. She’d been in bed with pleurisy for three weeks afterwards.
‘Jenni says they go the colour of a chemically polluted river. She says it’s a sign that I’m happy. And she’s always right.’
They smiled at each other conspiratorially. Lucy stayed close to him a moment longer, hoping he’d do something. Desperate for him to kiss her.
‘What else did the women say?’
‘Nothing. It was just a dream. Like you.’
And he kissed her. Suddenly. The way he did it she knew he hadn’t planned it. The angles were slightly wrong and the impact a little hard. His lips weren’t open at first and hers were, which made her feel awkward. Foolish. But they adjusted to each other and tentatively their tongues touched and withdrew.
His tongue was quite hard. She liked that, it excited her, she curled her lips round it and met it with the centre of her own. She was astonished by the softness of his lips. Not slackness. No, they were like pillows, yielding but firm. Suddenly she was self-conscious. What were her lips like? A little dry? A little thin? She took a tiny step towards him, pressed herself against him, but there seemed to be no reaction, no responding pressure.
They heard the front door open at the same time. He turned away wiping his mouth quickly as she retrieved his coffee cup and was at the top of the stairs.
‘Jenni … I’m up here. Just helping Tom wi
th his uniform.’
Lucy was at the bottom of the stairs by the time she’d finished speaking. Jenni just nodded vaguely and went up to his bedroom with a pile of newspapers and a sheaf of faxes which she’d retrieved from the hall table.
‘Great show in the third editions. You were just too late for much in the first, but look –’ She spread the papers out across the bed. ‘The Mail’s a bit snipey but the others are all excellent. Hurry up, Tom, you’ve got to be at the BBC by twelve-fifteen. Janet’s faxed through all the people who are bidding for you. It’s good. Very good. Don’t make a fool of yourself on the lunchtime news.’
Tom could see how high she was, how little he mattered to her excitement. He watched her picking up and putting down the papers, shuffling the faxes. Her face was set, hard. This was Jenni. The real Jenni. But without her what would he be? Happy? Whenever his thoughts veered towards any other life he shut them down. Brutally unwilling to imagine.
If he did that he might feel frustration, a longing for an emotional life, and he was afraid, afraid that giving up the hair shirt of his unhappiness and isolation would make him less efficient, less able to focus on his goal. Their goal. He had only had relationships with two women. His mother and his wife. He couldn’t imagine intimacy with either but now, in his forties, late at night and only rarely, he felt a yearning to be close to someone. To talk. To admit vulnerabilities.
But as quickly as these betraying thoughts began he squashed them, controlling his mind as rigidly as his fledgling emotions. He had made this bed, with Jenni, and would lie in it. Easier, more comfortable than the snake pit of emotional involvement. He clumsily picked up his hat and gloves. He couldn’t find his swagger stick.
‘I’m ready.’ He looked out of the window.
‘Gordon’s downstairs.’
‘Oh Gordon.’
Jenni let her façade of good nature drop in front of her husband, in the way one has no pretence in front of the family pet. She hurried out of the bedroom and down the stairs; Tom followed slowly. She hadn’t asked anything about the events of last night. He could hear her:
‘Tom, if you want to tell me something, you will, there’s no point my asking.’
But he’d lost the way to tell. He talked fluently, at length, but rarely said anything. Nothing that might reveal the small boy curled up in the corner of the large hall.
Jenni was sitting in the back of the Jaguar. Tom saw Lucy was standing at the front door. He nodded as he passed her. He did not look at her. She watched the car leave; Tom’s head was bent over papers put into his hand by Jenni. She didn’t exist again. The kiss hadn’t happened.
Gary watched her from across the road and felt sadness. Not because his wife was gazing like a spaniel after a man he detested, but because she was unhappy. But if he were dead and Jenni were in a mental institution, which he had always felt was her natural habitat, would Tom Shackleton take Lucy to be his lawful wedded wife? Gary thought not.
‘So’ he said out loud. ‘Not worth topping myself then.’
He turned back to the computer console and continued to stab the keys with a knuckle. To keep his mind occupied he had started a paper on the possibility of Mozart suffering from Asperger’s syndrome. Now he had to finish it before he lost the use of his hands altogether. He hoped it would be published. He hoped it would be taken up. He never seemed to be able to shake off hope.
The following days were taken up with interviews, photo opportunities and phone calls. Shackleton enjoyed it all. There was no time for free-range thinking. By the Wednesday evening he had become one of the best-known and most sought-after celebrities in the country.
It was noted at Party headquarters that his recognition factor with the public was now 78 per cent. Good for a politician, excellent for a police officer who hadn’t let someone die in the back of a van or stolen evidence in a drugs trial. Tom Shackleton, it was agreed by those who counted, was a triumph of presentation over content, politically photogenic and the man for London.
The Gnome had stayed away from Jenni since the riot. She had tried to telephone him and even sent an e-mail but he was unavailable. He wanted her desperate for information. He couldn’t imagine Jenni Shackleton ever ‘gagging for it’, a phrase he privately enjoyed when weighing up the possibilities of a woman’s sexual potential.
But he knew she’d be gagging for what he could tell her. It was Thursday: her dinner party was that evening. He lay in bed thinking about it. About her. Would there be a chance of anything tonight? With her husband and the cleaner there? He shook his head on the pillow.
Why was he bothering? He knew the minute he’d had her she’d be no more than a trophy fuck. Another notch on the gun barrel. Well, that’s all any of them were, wasn’t it?
He looked round at the lump in the bed beside him. His wife. She was snoring slightly. He looked at her with great gentleness. Huge arse and varicose veins now but he still saw the girl she’d been. Married for thirty-two years, two kids, well-balanced, attractive, popular kids. Neither afflicted with his condition. People he liked as well as loved. Big house in town, bigger house in the country. Success.
She enjoyed her kids, loved her dogs and she had never, even in their vilest rows, called him ugly or short or deformed.
The one woman he’d ever met who he trusted. Her snoring got louder. She looked like a beached walrus. He felt a surge of sentimental affection towards her: her intelligence and inelegant ordinariness had long since become beauty in his eyes. The jagged, striving women he ritually humiliated during sex had nothing in common with her.
She had attended a debate he’d spoken at when he was sixteen and she a beanpole seventeen. He’d won the motion brilliantly but, as usual, endured his peers’ sniggering afterwards. He remembered standing holding a cherryade he didn’t want, pretending to read the fire instructions on the hall wall. As always, isolated by the glory of his mind and the deformity of his body. He hadn’t been able to read past ‘In case of fire …’ because of the tears in his eyes. As always, it was the pretty girls he saw as the root of his torture. Encouraging their dim beaux to greater heights of ridicule. One day, he thought, one day …
‘Bloody good closing speech. Want some crisps? Oh, I’m Elizabeth, Lizie. Not Lizzie. Lizie James.’
She’d taken his small hand in her large one and smiled at him. He’d expected to see pity in that smile, a show of generous understanding to be boasted of among liberal friends and approving parents:
‘Oh Mummy, I was awfully nice to a dwarf today.’
‘Well done, darling! Did you touch his hump? It’s frightfully good luck, you know.’
But she was just smiling at him. All he could see in her big blue eyes was admiration. He was armed against any condescension but completely unprepared for this naked, honest look of adolescent adoration.
Watching her now, his fingers lightly touching her greying hair, he remembered how cruel he’d been, how he’d tried to force her into being nasty to him, into conforming to his view of women. But she wouldn’t. She waited patiently for eight years until he recognised her. Looking at her now he couldn’t imagine punishing her for what he’d suffered but she’d long since forgiven him and in return he’d allowed her to cultivate his charm, his humour, which previously he’d used to wound, and his raw sensitivity to all things beautiful. Lizie had touched every part of him but that so destroyed and perverted by cruelty. That stagnant pond was MacIntyre’s alone and hate it though he did, part of him yearned for the debasement it brought. Lizie had no idea of his sexual practices outside her grandmother’s four-poster bed.
He leaned over and kissed her gently; a stray untweezed bristle caught his cheek.
She opened her eyes.
‘Morning, Smudge. Was I snoring?’
‘You never snore.’
She giggled and sat up.
‘No, I never fart either … aren’t you supposed to be in London today?’
She lumbered out of bed, her sensible tartan nightie ri
ding up over her good British thighs, the candle-thin girl long gone.
‘I’m just on my way. Oh … and I’ve got that dinner tonight, the Chief Constable’s –’
‘Oh yes, Tom Shackleton. Odd face. Rather too much of it. Looks like a serial killer …’
MacIntyre could never believe how differently his wife saw the world.
‘He’s supposed to be handsome.’
She shrugged. ‘Handsome is as handsome does. Well … have a good time.’
They kissed goodbye on the lips with warmth. MacIntyre thought for a moment about cancelling dinner and coming back here where he wasn’t the Gnome or the machiavellian schemer or the consumer of pretty wives. The thought passed as quickly as it had formed.
One day he’d stop. One day his conscience would get the better of him, one day he’d tire of revenge and just come home. Not just to this house and this wife but to himself. Home was Robert MacIntyre, husband, father and immensely generous but modest supporter of charities and individuals. But for now, in the snake-infested corridors of Whitehall and Westminster, he had to be the Gnome, charming, brilliant, enigmatic, fascinating, loved, hated in some quarters but always warily respected. The side of himself he honestly despised was, in that world, what kept him ahead of the game. And it was intoxicating to be utterly without morals or scruples. To have such power over men … and those brittle striving women.
‘Kiss the llamas for me. See you at the weekend.’
Robert MacIntyre lingered in the warmth of Lizie’s crumpled nightie while his other self closed the door and got into his chauffeur-driven car.
He had a full day of meetings before the delicious prospect of Mrs Chief Constable’s knicker elastic. He opened his attaché case and didn’t think about her again until he rang her doorbell at seven-thirty that night.
Lucy’s week had been a confusion of highs and lows. So high after the kiss, rock bottom when she saw him the next day and he didn’t say good morning. High every time she saw him on television or when she cut out pictures of him from the papers, which she put into an old shoe-box.
The Crime Tsar Page 10
