The Crime Tsar (2 page)

Lucy had a vision of unused condoms and apocalyptic results and was surprised to find she didn't care.

He moved very quickly – not the long slow strokes of popular fiction but with almost rabbit-like rapidity. A wide vibrato. Lucy just stayed in the position he'd placed her in.

When he came his breathing quickened but he made no sound. Lucy didn't see his face. But she felt the soft quiet kiss just below her ear as he withdrew. Not wanting him to let her go she raised her hand and stroked his cheek.

Her legs were shaking when she pulled her pants up and adjusted her skirt.

It seemed inappropriate to say anything.

Jenni was still on the phone when she got back to the kitchen with Tom's empty cup.

Hours after the conversation with Jenni, when the nurses had put her husband to bed, Lucy realised why she had felt so angry. It was because Jenni wanted her to know about the politician. It wasn't the affair, it was the chance to publicise it. Where was the moral rectitude in thinking it more virtuous to be unfaithful but silent? And she was the only person Jenni could tell because she was bound to Jenni by gratitude.

When her husband, Gary, became ill and Lucy became a carer she slipped out of the world they'd known. They'd joined the socially excluded, gently impoverished but not poor, not struggling on a sink estate so not even really included in the excluded.

Gary didn't give in; he had tutored kids at home and when that became too much he held a ‘virtual' maths class on the Internet. He discussed Mozart the pre-revolutionary humanist in a chat room dominated by ideas of Mozart the political subversive. Gary had never defined himself as the sum of public opinion but Lucy, never certain of her own value, dwindled in her own eyes as she saw herself shrink in the eyes of others.

Lucy, wife of one of the most successful and sought-after heads in the country, who made stained glass to commission, would never have allowed Jenni to patronise and dismiss her. But her label had changed and she saw herself as a distressed gentlewoman who deserved no more than well-intentioned condescension. And now ‘poor Lucy' did a bit of cleaning for Jenni and Tom, ran errands: not a servant, no, but no longer in the same way an equal.

The only thing that made her husband really angry was her assumption of this veil of martyrdom and her neglect of her art. He had encouraged her to be ambitious, to believe in herself, and couldn't understand her willing transformation into a doormat. He wanted to move away, for her to return to work; it was bad enough that change in him was inevitable – he needed her to stay the same. But he didn't see the silt of depression dam up her spirit, didn't understand that it was easier for her to let go than cling on to a life for which she had no confidence without him. The idea of being superwoman frightened her so she had gradually allowed herself to
drift downwards and, like a bottom-dwelling fish, she found sustenance sifting through the detritus of others' lives. She had never flown as high as Gary or the Shackletons and had often felt panic at the thought of trying to keep up with them, feeling safer in the company of her tiny miniatures of coloured glass. Though she'd never admit it, Gary's illness had provided a sort of relief but had taken away her desire to create beauty.

They had been the Policeman, the Social Services Manager, the Artist and the Headmaster. Equals. Close but not close enough to threaten intimacy. Jenni was always suspicious Gary and Lucy were trying to ‘keep in' with the Shackletons, as if they might use Tom's rapid elevations to advance their social standing. It was beyond Jenni's comprehension that Gary, and so Lucy, wanted nothing more than easy-going friendship or that Gary's standing in education was on a par with Tom's in the police. In Jenni's experience everybody was after something. Lucy had learned how important it was to Jenni to keep her in her place when Jenni had once heard her sing. ‘I heard you screeching,' she laughed. Lucy had been hurt, but that wasn't the intention – Jenni simply needed to maintain her position and Lucy's … But now there were the £10 notes popped into her jacket pocket. Slipped into her pinny. Jenni could give and generously – she just couldn't share. And now Lucy was no competition, it was safe to like her.

‘Oh Lucy darling … would you mind? Could you just wipe out the cutlery drawer? Run a duster along the dado rail? I got you a little something in Harrods. I thought you might like this La Prairie moisturiser.'

Always in that tone, the one reserved for ‘poor Lucy'.

Lucy sat in her living room on a once fine sofa, now, like everything else, in need of care and attention, thinking about her father and Tom Shackleton. She would have walked on water for her father, but if she had he'd only have accused her of showing off. She'd always wanted him to hold her safe, fold her up and put her in his pocket but he'd never really liked her. Her arrival had been an unwelcome intrusion in an ordered life. Perhaps if she'd been a boy. Maybe if she'd been as pretty as Jenni he'd have liked her more. But Shackleton had found comfort in Lucy, or had he just taken advantage of her
neediness, her craving for affection? She knew she was still chasing the smile of a man who'd been dead ten years.

It got dark. She didn't turn the lights on. She looked across at Jenni and Tom's house with its gravel drive and wrought-iron gates: ‘We had to have them, Lucy – for security. The Chief is vulnerable to attack, you know.'

Not least from sexually frustrated neighbours in fluffy panda slippers.

She sat eating rice pudding out of the tin.

Putting Gary to bed always exhausted her, even though she was little more than a spectator to the changing of the catheter, the washing, the hoist. The invasive smell of talcum powder. When she allowed herself to think about Gary's dying, one of the things she looked forward to was throwing away the medicated talc. And the incontinence pads, the plastic apron, the latex gloves.

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.