The Crime Tsar

by Nichola McAuliffe

  In the depths of depression when she saw how little her figure had altered in six days. But today was the dinner party. She woke early – she wanted to get everything out of the way so she could spend the afternoon with cleansers and face packs, exfoliators and depilators. She had got some bikini wax strips and wasn’t looking forward to trying them.

  She’d heard some dancers plucked their pubic hair, you could do it in an evening in front of the telly, but she didn’t have very good tweezers. Creams and razors had a legacy of itchy stubble so wax strips it was to be. She knew Tom wouldn’t know if she had or had not a perfect heart of soft hair beneath her pants but… he might. If a miracle happened. She wanted to be ready for anything.

  Gary had a bit of a cold when she went in to see him and, unusually for him, seemed a bit down. He was always saying some people with MS had feelings of euphoria and he was one of the lucky ones. He was always saying how lucky he was: to see a tree, to hear music, to smell perfume. Lucy didn’t believe him, of course, but he rarely allowed the mask to slip. She looked at the clock. Seven-thirty. Only another twelve hours. This time tomorrow it would be all over. The phone rang.

  ‘Oh Lucy darling. Thank God you’re in!’

  Where else would I be? thought Lucy. Jenni had her ‘Darling, I’m desperate’ voice on:

  ‘Darling, I’m desperate, only you can get me out of this.’

  ‘Yes, Jenni,’ said Lucy obediently.

  By the phone there was a half-eaten biscuit. She must have left it there. Absently she ate it while Jenni rushed on.

  ‘The caterers are due here at nine but I have to go out and Tom and I have to go to a garden party this afternoon. They are such a bore, bridge rolls and fish-paste sandwiches, ghastly –’

  I’ll go, thought Lucy. I’d like to go. Listen to Gilbert and Sullivan and wear a big hat. Why not? Beats manually expressing your husband’s stools.

  ‘But, Lucy … calamity. I’ve forgotten the flowers. Could you? Would you? I’m so sorry to be a pest. I’ll leave the money in your pinny pocket. Is that OK?’

  No, Jenni, I want you to come the ten yards across the road, knock on my door and hand it to me.

  ‘Yes, that’ll be finé, Jenni.’

  ‘I’ll leave a list of what I want and you know where the vases are, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not very good at flower-arranging.’

  ‘Nonsense, Lucy – I’ve seen what you can do with a couple of catkins and a bit of oasis.’

  She laughed. Lucy knew Jenni had borrowed the line from a comedienne’s act, she’d hardly bothered to take the quotes off it.

  ‘And could you let the caterer in? Oh and would you send a potted plant or something to Geoffrey Carter, something frightfully impressive – and exotic, something very me, you know – he comes out of hospital today, poor thing. And maybe some flowers for Eleri, his wife? Their address is in the book on the hall table. If it’s more than I left I’ll settle up with you later. I don’t know how I’ll find the time today. But you know my husband …’

  No I don’t, Jenni, I wish I did.

  ‘Can’t thank you enough. Oh, there’s Gordon. We must go – Tom’s got a couple of meetings on the way. You know him. Never stops. My husband, eh? What would you do with him?’

  Cover him with cream and lick him clean, thought Lucy, but Jenni had put the phone down. That problem was dealt with. There was no need to spend any more time on it, or Lucy.

  I’m very well, thanks, but Gary’s got a bit of a cold, nothing serious, but it’s miserable for him. You know my husband. Never stops. Never gives in. So brave.

  The tone purred in her ear, she hung up. A week ago they weren’t going to the garden party. There were always invitations but they never went then a letter had come from the Palace: ‘His Royal Highness would like to meet …’ and suddenly they were going. Jenni couldn’t bear not to. This was her week. Carter was out of the way and her husband was in the ascendant. Jenni wanted it all and she was getting it.

  Lucy felt suddenly guilty. Jenni was being as kind as she could be. It wasn’t fair to blame a cat for being a defective kind of dog.

  Lucy knew the amount of flowers Jenni would want would be roughly equivalent to a day’s take at the Golders Green Crematorium so her peaceful afternoon would be a quick hour in the bathroom with a steamed-up mirror. She felt her chin. Spot. Well, less of a spot, more a second head.

  Maybe she should pull out of the dinner, say she couldn’t leave Gary. No, she’d go. If Tom Shackleton loved her he wouldn’t mind her spot. If he behaved the way he had all week it wouldn’t matter if she had three heads, he wouldn’t notice. She stopped her thoughts and rewound the last few feet. Tom Shackleton and love in the same sentence? Oxymoron.

  ‘Gary, I’ve got to go out and get Jenni’s flowers for tonight. And I want some bath salts so I’m going to stop off at the Body Shop. Anything you want?’

  ‘Yes please, a new one, forty-two-inch chest with an elasticated waist.’

  Lucy laughed. She’d heard it before but she always laughed. Tom Shackleton didn’t make her laugh. He just made her confused and unhappy so why not just walk away? She pulled a baseball cap on over her unwashed hair.

  ‘Because I don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘What did you say?’ called Gary.

  ‘Nothing. Just beating myself up. See you later.’

  Geoffrey Carter’s week had been very different from Tom and Jenni’s. The burns to his legs were deep and agonising. No arrests had been made. It was felt by the CPS there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution. The video didn’t show the young man throwing the cigarette; further action wasn’t felt to be ‘appropriate’.

  Appropriate? Carter knew it would not be appropriate for the government to have an untidy end to the story. The heroics of the two chiefs and the dignity of the community elders had made good copy. Britain Talks. Jaw Jaw Prevents War War in Inner City. Any arrests and prosecutions would be messy. Spoil the big picture and leave open the possibility of criticism. Should he and Shackleton have gone in like that?

  In the aftermath Carter saw very clearly how stupid they’d been and how lucky to get away with it. Thinking about it, there was something about Shackleton that made him uneasy. Not scared exactly – frightened was too adult a word for what he felt. What did he feel? Admiration? Yes. Envy? A little, of his lack of compassion, his ability never to involve himself. What else?

  Carter was sitting waiting in the hospital foyer for his car, reading a magazine. But he wasn’t aware of the toothpaste advert he was looking at – all he could see and feel was Shackleton wrapped around him as he put out the fire. He remembered the same feeling for his housemaster, a rugby-playing hardman who’d cuddled him when his father died. All wrapped up in authority, father, big man, protection, warmth, affection … stop. The same feelings he’d experienced at those all-male lock-ins where danger and triumph had released normally closed-off emotions. Carter had never had a homosexual encounter, for all the teasing he’d endured as a young man – pretty boy, Jessie, poof… at first he’d been too scared then too ambitious. At the time no gay policeman was going to make it past community beat office. But he wasn’t gay. No, he’d never slept with a man, never wanted to, but sometimes, when making love to his wife, unbidden images filled his mind. But not Tom Shackleton. No. Never Tom Shackleton.

  He was still on painkillers and hadn’t had a nightmare for two nights, though his dreams were vivid and disturbing. It must be the drugs, yes, they were cleaning out the unconscious mind and, like a blocked sink, strange scum was being thrown up. His mind seemed more burned than his legs. Raw. Did he say something to provoke the attack? Could he have done more? Every minute, from ducking under the blue-and-white tape to vomiting over the bonnet of his car, he lived and re-lived.

  Where Tom Shackleton’s conscious mind was a desert, Geoffrey Carter’s was a rain forest. Teeming with life on all levels, with great beauty and dangerous darkness jostling for space. He
wished his mind would be quiet. That it would leave him alone, just for an hour of tranquillity. A moment of Shackleton’s spare inner landscape.

  His deputy chief arrived to take him home to his wife, his children, his home. Normality that would chase away the demons.

  ‘Ready, sir?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  As he left the hospital a couple of reluctant hacks were standing waiting for him. A photographer whose mobile phone was bleating insistently got a couple of smudges.

  ‘This way, Chief Constable. Can you hold your walking stick up? Great.’

  A rattle of shutter clicks and the man was running to his car, talking into his phone about catching a footballer drunk at an awards ceremony.

  The journalists asked him what his feelings were towards the people who set him on fire. Had it changed his attitude at all towards ethnic minorities, this last question from a tiny, ferocious girl from The Voice. His driver held the car door open for him; his deputy lightly held his elbow as he lowered himself carefully on to the back seat.

  A car swerved in ahead of them and a television crew jumped out as if they were about to cover an armed siege in Africa. They wore camouflage trousers and multi-pocketed sleeveless jerkins. The director, a vacuous girl not long out of Sheffield Hallam with a second-class degree in media studies, shoved a microphone at Carter, looping her lank hair behind her ear as she did so.

  His legs were hurting and he was suddenly tired, desperate to get back into bed and sleep. But he was polite and charming. She knew he’d make a splendid martyr on the early evening news. As his car drove away she remarked to the cameraman that he seemed quite bright for a policeman.

  Carter didn’t have the energy to talk on the way home. His deputy sat in the front watching him in the mirror. There was quite an affection for the Chief among his staff and they had all been worried about him.

  ‘I’m all right, Danny.’ He caught his deputy’s eye in the mirror. ‘Thanks.’

  Danny, who had been an accelerated-promotion candidate since Hendon, had found himself virtually in orbit when the police started looking round for non-white talent to promote high and fast. He was the first black DCC and was on track to become the first black chief. But he would never know if it was because he was good.

  Carter told him not to dwell on it.

  ‘Becoming Chief Constable has nothing to do with being a good copper. It’s being a good politician, being a good accountant, and not allowing anything to distract you from what you want. It has very little to do with care in the community or any ideals you came in with.’

  Danny knew if that were true Carter would never have made it, but he was a rarity. Danny admired his intellect and his beliefs.

  ‘And, Danny, if it is only because you’re black, not because you’re good, you’ll soon make a mistake and there’ll be plenty to pull you down.’

  The car stopped at Carter’s house. Danny helped him out and up the steps of the Regency-style terrace. Carter had his door keys ready but was looking at the windows of the house. Danny misread the look as apprehension. In fact Carter was disappointed, no, worse than that, he felt as if his birthday had been forgotten or he’d come first in the hundred metres and no one had seen him. He’d thought there would be excited sticky faces at the windows, shouts of excitement, something more than silence.

  ‘Shall I come in with you, sir?’

  ‘No, Danny, thanks.’ He opened the front door. ‘Bloody hell, what’s that?’

  In the middle of the hall, impossible to pass, was the largest potted plant Carter had seen outside Kew Gardens.

  ‘Good God, it’s a triffid. Where’s the card? Is there one? Do you think it’s a terrorist bomb?’

  Danny handed him the small square envelope.

  ‘“From Jenni and Tom. Get well soon.”’

  He looked at his deputy. They had both seen the acres of newsprint devoted to Tom Shackleton since the night of the siege, the television chats, the modest acknowledgements of bravery, and since the first hours after they had got out Geoffrey Carter’s name had hardly been mentioned. It was, at best, as if Shackleton had saved his life, at its worst it was made to look as if he had been a liability in a delicate situation. The footage shot in the community centre had been edited to feature Shackleton, a lighted cigarette and his subsequent smothering with his own body of the fire that engulfed Carter.

  Danny looked at the plant.

  ‘Nice gesture. And so subtle.’

  Carter smiled. ‘Mrs Shackleton will have sent it.’

  ‘Don’t put it in your bedroom then. It might strangle you in your sleep.’

  They stared at the monstrosity. Danny tried to move it.

  ‘Oh come on, Danny, she’s not that bad.’

  Danny grunted. Carter decided it was because of the effort, not a comment on the fragrant Mrs Shackleton.

  Danny had been Shackleton’s staff officer for a year and had briefly been the object of their daughter Tamsin’s infatuation. She was still at school and persistently dogged Danny with tales of cruelty at home and staged faints beside his car. Every time there was a bizarre incident with the girl, who Danny had decided was unstable, he told her parents. Jenni had always been charming, Shackleton had made it obvious that it was women’s business and didn’t want to know.

  Then Danny’s wife decided to divorce him. She was having an affair with an officer at another station and one of his colleagues had thoughtfully pinned a pair of her pants to the noticeboard with a graphic photograph of how she lost them.

  She took him for half his house and all his children, leaving him in a spiral down towards the bottom of a bottle. He’d pulled himself back but not before Jenni had decided he was flaky.

  ‘I think there’s something just a tiny bit flaky about Dan Marshall,’ she had said in passing to HM Inspector of Constabulary.

  And though she never said it Danny knew it was because she didn’t believe a black man could ever really make it. That there was an inherent weakness. Then he knew that Jenni was as crazy as her daughter. For all her veneer of sophisticated liberalism, Jenni Shackleton was a provincial mind in an elegant body and towards Danny she had always alternated between condescension and suspicion. It had never occurred to her he would make DCC and in her mind he had only done so because the police needed a black face for Question Time.

  ‘I’ll call round later, to make sure everything’s OK?’

  Danny dumped the pot plant by the umbrella stand and returned to the front door.

  Carter held out his hand.

  ‘Thanks, Danny, there’s no need, my wife …’

  Danny glanced around, up the stairs.

  ‘Is she here, sir?’

  Carter suddenly looked quite lost. Bambi.

  ‘I thought she would be. And the boys … maybe they forgot it was today. But don’t worry. They won’t be far away.’

  ‘I could stay, sir, make a cup of tea …?’

  Danny saw his boss wanted company but was shy of saying so. Without waiting for a reply Danny opened the living-room door. The noise hit them at the same time as a young boy launched himself at Carter.

  ‘Surprise!’

  ‘Daddy … Daddy … Daddy.’

  ‘Welcome home!’

  Danny saw the whole room and the kitchen beyond was festooned with banners and bunting saying everything from ‘We love you, Daddy’ to ‘Welcome home, hero.’

  He also saw Carter’s other son rocking from side to side, lost somewhere in an autistic world in which liquid, any liquid, was the only focus. And that focus was obsession. Danny knew no glass, vase or bottle must be left unguarded in case Alexander found it and drank the contents. Whisky, meths and undiluted Ribena all been pumped out of his stomach at one time or another.

  He seemed not to know Carter, who greeted the child no differently from the other boy, Peter. Peter’s intelligence and love of life was always enough for two, as if he was trying to compensate for his lost brother.

  Eleri was
trying in vain to attend to the children, kiss her husband and make Danny feel welcome.

  ‘Sit down, Danny. You’ll stay for tea, won’t you? We’ve got jelly and blancmange –’

  Peter was now sitting on Carter screaming, ‘And chocolate icecream!!’ He turned to Danny. ‘That’s Daddy’s favourite, you’re not allowed, it’s all for him.’

  The boy started bouncing up and down on his father’s legs. Eleri saw the pain on Carter’s face and quickly pulled the child off, dispatching him upstairs to get the welcome-home offerings Peter had made for their father.

  Danny felt awkward and intrusive as Eleri sat on the arm of Carter’s chair stroking his suddenly exhausted face. She was an attractive woman with a pre-Raphaelite tumble of auburn hair which she tried to smooth with vast applications of Frizz-Ease. Her face was lightly freckled with prettily tilted hazel eyes and lips that always smiled. She was at once mumsy and sexy but, thought Danny, she’d never make a dirty woman. Not like the mad Mrs Shackleton. What on earth had put that thought in his head?

  ‘No, I’d better go. Thanks anyway. I’ll see you in a couple of days then, sir. I’ll see myself out.’

  ‘Yes please, Danny … Eleri will have given me egg-custard poisoning by then.’

  He turned to go and was almost knocked over by Alexander who’d suddenly changed from what Danny had thought was a lowbrowed zombie into a furious, biting, thrashing animal. Not a sound did he utter as he attacked Danny. Eleri pulled him off so violently Danny was worried the boy’s arms might be broken, but he saw quickly it was the only way to deal with him.

  ‘Too much excitement, I’m so sorry. Once he’s in one of these tantrums there’s nothing we can do – I’m so sorry. Can you see yourself out?’

  Danny was only too pleased to go. Guilty though he felt about it he found Alexander’s autism repellent. There was something not yet human about the boy. But the Carters loved him. Danny felt rotten that he couldn’t detect anything to love.

  Peter however was a totally different thing. He was hurtling downstairs with his dad’s presents as Danny reached the front door. As always the child paused to spread happiness where his brother may have sown discord. He smiled at Danny and wished him goodbye, apologising for not shaking hands because his hands were full.