The Crime Tsar (24 page)

‘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 announcement 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.

He'd worked all evening at home, reading and re-reading his law books, trying not to listen to his mother talking to the television. Eventually he'd had enough. He decided to go into work for some peace but then, restless, walked round to Jenni's, although his station was in another area, young police officers not being trusted in their own communities. It was raining. A fine drizzle. Loud teenagers were swearing at each other for lack of anything more interesting to do.

When he arrived at Jenni's house, he wasn't sure if he should ring the doorbell. Maybe it wouldn't be right. Her parents would be embarrassed, feel they had to ask him in. The television would be turned down but not off… He stood, unwilling to go home. Drizzle turned to rain.

A car pulled up. The lights were out. The rain made it impossible to see into the car. He stood watching for ten minutes. He didn't know if Jenni was in the car but he was dully sure she was. Dull. His mother said he was dull. Everything about him was dull. He was looking forward to moving away from her. To starting again with his lovely Jenni. She didn't think he was dull. She loved him and he loved her like he'd never loved anything in his dry life. And now, at almost twenty-six, thanks to her he was a success, envied and disliked for his beautiful fiancée and obviously glittering future.

The passenger door opened and Jenni's legs appeared: her skirt was rucked up high under her thighs. As she leaned forward to get out of the car the driver's hand reached round and pulled her back. She hung half in and half out of the car, he watched her kiss the unseen man. Straining to satisfy him she stretched herself the better to accommodate his tongue and hands.

Tom watched.

He watched, no less dull than before. There was no move in him to pull her out of the car, to punch the man whose tattooed hand he could see slipping under her skirt. He just stood, dully staring. Finally she got out, a little bit tipsy, a little bit giggly. She waved to the unseen driver as he roared off, fuelled not by petrol but testosterone.

She balanced, stork-like, searching for her door keys. Tom walked across. She was standing under a street lamp, the better to see past
the contents of her bag. She was startled when he said hello and she looked up at him. The same pure green eyes as when she was thirteen. He remembered the shining admiration then and saw the alcoholic resentment now. Her blouse was open and he could see the lace of her bra. And on her skin the pattern of the driver's teeth, the red-brown blotches of his sucking lips. Her smeared face smiled at him above a collar of love bites.

‘He's more of a man than you'll ever be.'

She was drunk and the words were spat out in angry self-defence but nothing could have hurt him more. He turned away and walked up to her front door. His love was left to die on the rendered wall as so many of his flowers had been before. The evening was never mentioned again. They married and moved away; they had children and created an image of success and confidence.

The children came quickly and Tom was separated from his family for the first time after four and a half years of marriage. A posting to another area, a place Jenni didn't want to live in with a gaggle of fractious under-fives.

A female officer saw him alone in the canteen and took pity on him, the lonely handsome giant. The same pity got him into the beds of numerous women over the next five years. Then he stopped. Stopped sleeping with all the women who wanted to nurse his shyness or who perceived in him a lack of need. There was no point. He had never been close enough to anyone to find out that all women would not, in time, metamorphose into his mother or his wife.

But each time he bedded a woman he'd ask the same question: ‘You won't hurt me, will you?'

And each one would cradle him and reassure him. But he never waited to find out. Always got his retaliation in first and left them puzzled and angry at his sudden indifference. His withdrawal and denial.

Eventually, disgusted with himself and their easy availability, he just stopped having any contact with women. It was easy in the police force, in the days before it became a police service, easy to deal only with a uniform. Sex was a form of release to him and now he was being promoted quickly through the hierarchy he didn't need that release any more – he was no longer frustrated. So ambition took the place of affection and his marriage was founded on the common
ground of wanting to escape upwards from the mud of the past. It was a way to live. He'd never known any other. Until he saw the love bites on Jenni again and found the comfort of Lucy.

Examine your life … He kept hearing the women. But it was uncomfortable, painful. And it was frightening. For the first time he felt fear. Fear of failing, fear of allowing a woman in, the real fear that there was nothing for that person to discover. He had looked into himself and found nothing looking back: no garden, no morality, no soul. And Lucy wanted to love him. Love what? There was nothing in him to love. He was afraid he didn't exist. With Jenni he was safe.

When the doctors told him of Jenni's mental condition they said one of the symptoms was ‘an inability to introspect'. Shackleton had thought he'd been blessed with that gift too, until now.

He changed the channel of his thoughts to Geoffrey Carter and the new force. He would have to refuse the Met now, when, if, it was offered. He could not be seen to be subordinate to Carter. Soft, sentimental Geoffrey. Then what? Retirement? Ultimate failure. He dismissed that thought and changed the perspective. He must make it known he wanted the new force. But what would be the point? It was a political appointment, a political creation – they would have decided on Carter from the beginning. Shackleton knew his strengths but he knew Carter's just as well. He couldn't fault his intellectual ability or his political skill and administrative flair. Old-fashioned coppering hadn't counted since the Sheehy Report.

Who was it that had put his wife over the edge? Who had she allowed to write his signature in her flesh? He shook his head. The thoughts were intrusive, unwelcome. He had never had difficulty controlling his thoughts before: control was a pleasurable vice. But in these few weeks rogue thoughts had leaked in, emotions, jealousies, affections. He found himself missing his son in the house, becoming sentimental. No, feeling sentiment.