The Crime Tsar

by Nichola McAuliffe

  ‘Oh Jenni … come on. Shh. You don’t really think that.’

  Eleri stroked her hair. Jenni allowed the other woman to comfort her but she was out of reach, somewhere in her head.

  Eleri spoke very softly, her accent taking any judgement out of her words.

  ‘I think sex is the most precious part of yourself. I … I couldn’t imagine … well, just doing it, like, like animals. I couldn’t do it without love, Jenni.’

  Jenni looked at her.

  ‘Does it really mean that much to you?’

  ‘I mean that much to me.’

  Jenni wasn’t really listening.

  ‘Tom has never done it with love – he can’t. D’you know that? Sex is something he does to you, but he doesn’t like it, Eleri. None of our children was any more than a fuck to him.’

  ‘And what about you? What did it mean to you?’

  ‘He doesn’t like women. Not really. Oh, he likes tits. But you know what he does? He grabs you by the scruff of the neck. That’s how you know he wants it… No. No, I’ve never felt what you do. Christ. I wouldn’t want to. Sex isn’t about being sentimental and love really isn’t enough.’

  Jenni said it with such contempt Eleri was upset. She knew her love-making with Carter was probably a bit staid, a bit dull, that maybe he’d prefer something more exotic. She wanted to leave, get away from the thought of her modest sexual vocabulary not being enough. That love didn’t change everything.

  She stopped herself but changed the subject.

  ‘What did the psychiatrist say?’

  Jenni reached for a cigarette. Eleri was surprised; she’d never seen Jenni smoke before. It was, as she might have guessed, extra long and extra thin. Lit with an incongruous throwaway lighter. Jenni took the cliché deep inhalation, bent her left arm across her body and rested her right elbow on it. She pushed her hair back with her little finger, holding the cigarette between index and middle. Suddenly the picture of forties Hollywood sophistication.

  ‘He said I have poor self-image and asked me if I’d ever heard of borderline personality disorder.’

  ‘What did you say.’

  ‘I told him he was a cunt.’

  Eleri didn’t visit again for ten days but then guilt and her genuine fondness for Jenni had her making the journey to the clinic again. Her pregnancy was beginning to tire her and she almost collapsed into the easy chair opposite Jenni. Jenni, seemingly recovered from her previous outburst, brought her a cup of tea and fussed over her. Eleri thought it better not to mention it; after all, it may just have been a side effect of Jenni’s medication.

  That afternoon Eleri told her Geoffrey was thinking of taking early retirement to spend time looking after her and to watch this miracle baby grow up. She was sadly serious when she talked about the impossibility of caring for Alexander and a newborn. Apart from the possibility that Alexander might attack the baby.

  Jenni appeared shocked at the thought but Eleri just said, ‘I know, Jenni, it’s awful and I didn’t want to think about it but it’s something we’ve got to consider. You know he hates change. He’ll attack anything new. It frightens him, poor dab. Everything frightens him, poor little boy.’

  So it seemed the choices were: a full-time nanny, residential care for Alex, or Geoffrey staying home. He could of course take the statutory thirteen weeks’ paternity leave but … was a chief constable an employee? And would thirteen weeks be enough for her to find some way of coping? Her worries were beginning to overwhelm her.

  ‘But I don’t want to put pressure on him because the Home Office has dropped some heavy hints about another job. Something bigger.’

  Not a hope, thought Jenni. She waited for her to finish, watching the mobile, attractive face shadow with barely suppressed panic. Eleri was the only person Jenni had ever met who was transparent.

  Jenni’s enthusiasm for Geoffrey to retire took Eleri aback. Jenni told her in no uncertain terms that it would be for the best.

  ‘After all he’s been chief of a large force – what else is there? I mean, London’s not really a challenge, is it? Not in real terms. More money and a higher profile, yes, and of course you get a knighthood, but really it’s just bigger. And you’d have to move. Or he’d have to commute. I spent far too long trying to keep a marriage alive with Tom doing all that. No, Eleri, it’s ridiculous. He has to resign. The baby’s far more important.’

  Eleri was touched. She assumed it was because Tom had missed so much of his own children’s early years.

  ‘And, darling. I’m not being funny, but you are forty-one.’

  ‘Forty-four.’

  Jenni managed to control her look of horror. A first baby at forty-four? The woman needed psychiatric help more than she did.

  ‘Well, you don’t look it. But, Eleri … you’re already wiped out, aren’t you? You can’t do this on your own. You need his help. I mean, when I get out of here I’ll do what I can – come and sit with the boys to give you a break. Now don’t argue. I really don’t mind Alexander at all. I’ll just remember to leave the Versace at home. Oh … and of course you’ve no family here, have you? And even if you did they’re usually more trouble than help. No, you’re going to need him at home. You tell him: this is far too important to miss.’

  ‘I think you’re right, Jenni, I know you’re right but I’ve got to let him make his own decision.’

  Jenni, convinced the future was clear and the recent past was merely a bad dream, dropped the last vestiges of her ever-present suspicion and wariness; so for a brief time Eleri became the best friend she’d never had.

  But now, sitting in the lavatory at the Ivy …

  She wished she could claw back all the trust she’d given. All the naive belief she’d put in the hands of a stranger. She wished Carter dead. She wished his gypsy bastards dead and especially she wished dead Eleri and her unborn baby …

  The pills kicked in. She found that place that didn’t hurt, a little above and a little to the left of real life. Where revenge was just a pleasure, not the only thing that would keep her from screeching like a banshee through the restaurant.

  She was ready to go back to the awful Belinda and get the whole story. She opened the loo door. There was no tall black woman. They seemed to have gone as she could hear nothing. She walked out to the washbasins and was startled to find the three women there. She smiled at them quickly and bent slightly to wash her hands, watching herself, and them, in the mirror.

  ‘You look like you need a little sleep, girl. Thinking so hard about all those little chickens.’

  Jenni wanted to tell the fat woman to shut up and mind her own business. The pills and good manners stopped her.

  ‘Thank you …’ she murmured.

  ‘Sleep. Balm of hurt minds. You think so, Mrs Shackleton? The balm of hurt minds?’

  The three black faces were smiling at her. Standing behind her. Too close. Jenni felt panicky, even through the cotton wool of the tranquillisers.

  ‘Who are you? What are you doing in here?’

  The women continued to smile.

  ‘You gotta knit up that ravelled sleeve of care, girl. Knit it up, I say!’

  It was the thin woman speaking, her voice in the decayed cadence of the very old. She laid her bird’s-claw hand on Jenni’s arm. It was like thin dry paper. She peered with her bloodhound eyes at the others. They were not smiling now, but serious, nodding and agreeing with one another that this was the only way she could save herself. Then, as if a prayer meeting had ended, they went, the fat one skewering a hat to her head as she left.

  Jenni was desperate to get out but didn’t want their company on the stairs. The door opened, she jumped. Belinda came in.

  ‘You all right, Jenni? You’ve been gone ages.’

  ‘Yes … I was talking to those women.’

  ‘What women?’

  ‘The three … black ladies – cleaners, I think … you must have passed them on the stairs.’

  ‘No. I didn’t see anyone.’ Be
linda looked at her, through the mirror, with pity.

  Jenni recognised the look from hospital. Jenni the Sad Case. Oh no, that’s not how Jenni Shackleton saw herself. She turned and looked at Belinda, unblinking, daring her to repeat that look.

  ‘They must have gone the other way, into the function room.’

  Belinda looked doubtful.

  ‘There’s a private room. Have you never been in it? Oh it’s lovely – Tom and I were there for a party a few months ago …’

  And still talking, Jenni led the way back down to the restaurant.

  It was almost eleven-thirty when Tom got home that night, announcing himself in his usual ‘don’t be angry with me’ tone. Jenni was waiting for him. Normally she went up to her room when he was late, leaving him to creep round, careful of disturbing her and provoking an attack. But since she’d been in hospital something had changed between them. He hadn’t mentioned the marks on her body; she didn’t know whether to be angry or hurt. What if she’d been raped? But he’d found something to keep him working late almost every night since she’d come home.

  ‘Tom … in here. I’m in the living room.’

  There was a moment’s pause, then he came in. She was surrounded by notes and press cuttings, preparing a piece for one of the Sundays for their regular column, ‘Making Dreams Come True’.

  ‘You’re up late, Jenni. Everything all right?’ He asked as if they were flatmates.

  ‘Fine. Look, I heard something today … yes, I’ll have a vodka tonic. Thanks.’

  Tom prepared their drinks. He didn’t really want a drink but then he didn’t want to have to sit down and talk to Jenni either. He handed her her glass and sat in an armchair. Not beside her.

  ‘I had lunch with one of the Follies today.’ ‘Blair’s Babes’ had changed their name to celebrate the nouvelle entente cordiale with Europe. ‘She said there’s going to be some sort of national police force and Geoffrey Carter’s going to run it. Well?’

  She looked at him as if he had kept the secret from her.

  ‘Well what? It doesn’t affect the Met. He’s thinking of putting his ticket in anyway but if it puts him out of the running, what’s the problem?’

  ‘The problem, you prat, is that he will be higher up the evolutionary scale than you. Don’t you see? This Crime Tsar –’

  ‘Oh God, not another Tsar. They’ll have a Tsar’s Tsar next –’

  He saw she was within a hair of losing control.

  ‘He’ll have the power to coordinate police crime strategy. The chiefs and commissioners won’t be autonomous any more. He will be more senior than you. He isn’t going to sit at home changing nappies if they’re offering that kind of power. He’ll be the fucking king. Do you see?’

  A pause. Tom saw very well. He’d come second. Again.

  ‘Yes. I see.’

  There was a silence between them. Not emptiness occasionally flooded with antipathy but a companionable quietness full of thought.

  ‘You’re sure Geoffrey’s’s got it, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not absolutely sure. It may just be gossip-mongering. But I am sure you’re getting the Met.’

  He knew he didn’t want to know how she knew. Tom sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair, his little finger stroking his eyebrow. When he spoke it was quietly, reasonably.

  Jenni watched him and knew he wasn’t speaking to her but to himself.

  ‘I heard a long time ago there was a plan to make a national investigation team. They wanted to see if NCIS took off first. But I didn’t think … I thought it would be … I didn’t think it would be for another couple of years. I spoke to MacIntyre about it at dinner –’

  ‘I know you did, I was there.’

  Tom didn’t hear her.

  ‘He said not yet. He said there’d be plenty of time for that …’ Tom stopped. He looked at Jenni. ‘When did they decide?’

  ‘No idea. I’m going to look into it tomorrow.’

  She spoke his feelings.

  ‘But there’s no point in getting London if you have to answer to that long streak of piss.’

  He watched her gather up her papers, watched her feed her anger.

  ‘He might turn it down.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh Tom, Geoffrey Carter might seem to have his mind on higher things but believe me, he’s as ambitious as you. He’d no more walk away from this than you would. For God’s sake, this isn’t just a job, this is the crown.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Jenni?’

  ‘We are going to fight.’

  He knew better than to ask who or what.

  ‘But if we lose –’

  The ice cubes hit his face before he realised she had thrown the drink at him but it was the look on her face that really shook him. He had never seen such undisguised hatred and contempt.

  ‘We won’t lose.’

  She put her glass down carefully on an embossed silver coaster, turned and went upstairs. She hadn’t wanted to get angry but waiting up for him had been torture because she couldn’t take her pills, the little bits of heaven that knocked her out for the night, stopped her dreaming, thinking, but let her sleep, a good deep dreamless oblivion. The companion she craved. And if she took them more and more often with vodka, what did it matter?

  Downstairs Shackleton went to the kitchen and used a tea towel to dry his face. Since seeing another man’s territory marked out on her skin he’d found himself outside the prison into which he was first put by her casual callousness. He looked in the mirror – the impact of the ice had bruised his cheekbone. He could hear Janet saying, ‘Ooh, Mr Shackleton, have you been in the wars again?’ And himself blaming the car door or his grandson’s exuberance. He must make sure it wasn’t an excuse he’d used before for the damage Jenni did.

  Through the mirror he looked back on himself and on their past. It used to make him wince but now he could watch it all like an old film.

  No one then could understand what Jenni saw in such a tongue-tied lump as Tom Shackleton. He was a policeman and he was a virgin. Jenni pretended he wasn’t but as he was so paralysingly shy no one believed her.

  But in the place where they were brought up, a wind-blown village long since concreted into suburbs by estates of cheap bungalows for newly-weds, everyone knew Jennifer’s reputation. All the neighbours knew she’d had an abortion at fifteen. Those that didn’t relish that piece of tittle-tattle enjoyed the memory of her seducing the father of a child in the same class as her younger brother. And the fine sight of the boy’s mother throwing a bucket of paint over her at the school gates. She’d moved in with the man for a while but left him when the money ran out. Further scandalising northern sensibilities.

  By the time Jenni was eighteen she had the face of an angel and the reputation of a prostitute. But Jenni wasn’t stupid, she’d decided to go to college – she barely scraped the necessary exams – and she’d decided to get married and get away from the minty women who’d found a lifetime’s hairstyle and sprayed it with Locktite. Those disapproving wives for whom possession was nine-tenths of a marriage.

  Unfortunately there was no one left in the village who didn’t know her reputation. None of the ‘nice boys’ would marry her; she’d had sex with most of them in almost every place except a bed and there was nothing more conservative than a provincial stud.

  But there was always Tom Shackleton. He was a huge shy twenty-two-year-old who had been brought up by his mother in a house by the canal, at the end of a short, ugly terrace. His mother was an enigma in the village; she had little to do with anyone but had always had Tom. Son, husband, lover. His father had made an early exit and Tom’s unwanted arrival had been the reason; so little Tom had to pay for spoiling her life.

  Tom had always been alone with her unpredictable aggression and it had made him withdraw into his schoolwork and then his police studies. His ambition, the warmest place in his heart, took the place of love or shared humour.

  His mother’s only reaction to his announce
ment that he was joining the police was: ‘Well, your feet are big enough.’

  And she laughed. As always, at him.

  Then one day he was walking his beat and there was Jenni. Pretty, tiny Jenni. Bused in from estates called villages to a vast comprehensive in the next county the children gazed out from their barred concrete playground longing for something to excite them. She was nearly fourteen and she looked up at him as though he was a prize, something to be desired, like gold hoop earrings in a Saturday-afternoon shop window.

  When she was sixteen and taking a break from the repercussions of teenage copulation she let him kiss her and was gentle with him, stroking his hair and listening to his hopes for the future. He fell in love easily. He brought her bunches of wild flowers and put them on her rendered wall. He enjoyed turning scarlet at her quiet flattery. He was proud that people looked at them together, thinking they were impressed at his catch. But most of all he remembered being happy, more than happy, to have found a female who was kind to him, who was predictable and supportive. And who laughed at his jokes.

  Two years later, when he was a young fast-tracking sergeant, he proposed.

  The only thing he found awkward was sex. The first time they fumbled in the darkness of the cinema he thought they had done it. She was patient with his ignorance and clumsiness. Pretended not to notice when he climaxed before she’d released him from his clothes. He didn’t dare tell her he had never gone further than fantasy – and had no friends to tell him she had.

  The day of their wedding was fixed but his mother didn’t like her. At the time it didn’t occur to him it was because they were too similar. His mother’s tongue had plenty of exercise in the weeks running up to the wedding, her son’s stupidity being the main subject of her onslaughts. She often said ‘his girl’ was nothing more than a prostitute without even the sense to charge for her services. Tom, as usual, looked at the wall and disappeared inside himself.

  He started work on his degree. Then came the night before her hen night and his stag night, to which he’d begged colleagues to come. He had no friends; even his best man was from the station, an old PC who remembered his father. That night Jenni said she was going out with the girls.