The Crime Tsar (3 page)

Shackleton had a degree too, first-class law degree. From night school and day release, done while fast-tracking through the force. Where Jenni and Tom had come from, Oxford and Cambridge were just words on the front of coaches leaving the bus station by the chip shop.

Geoffrey Carter spoke French, relaxed in Provence and Tuscany and came from a family with immaculate old Liberal credentials. An unusual policeman and outspokenly critical of knee-jerk home secretaries who used the police as a blunt instrument. Urbane, intelligent and popular with the politicians. He and Shackleton had known each other over the years, meeting at various command courses and colleges around the country. Their wives had shopped and taken coffee together. They got on. Everybody got on with Carter. Everybody, even Jenni, was drawn to Eleri, his wife.

When Tom arrived at the studio the researcher let it slip they'd asked for Carter first but he had a meeting in London. Tom knew he'd be schmoozing the Home Office. No, not schmoozing – Geoffrey Carter would never do anything so vulgar. He'd never need to. He had charisma, natural unforced charm, exquisite manners and a formidable ability driven by a good brain. Shackleton had often felt inadequate beside him but knew, like a shark faced with a tiger, each had strengths the other lacked. And like the tiger and the shark each must avoid conflict in the other's element.

The programme finished and Jenni left Tom to catch up on the news while she went to fetch his supper, lightly grilled chicken, salad and a small pile of wild rice. She put their drinks on the tray and carried it through to the living room.

‘Thank you,' he said, watching the screen but thinking about the interview.

‘I'd put it on your lap but your stomach's in the way.'

All day he'd been Chief Constable, sir, the power in his fiefdom. She had just reduced him to a fat man being served a television dinner. Subconsciously he tightened his stomach muscles. It didn't make much difference.

‘Looks very nice.' Shackleton was careful to appreciate the food; Jenni was usually too busy to cook for him.

‘Oh, it's only a bit of chicken,' she muttered, but he'd said the right thing.

She took her drink and sat down, watching him eat. Almost immediately she got up and straightened the cushions on the sofa. She sat down again. Took a sip of her drink.

Tom didn't look at her as she got up again and straightened the already regimented cushions.

‘Did you have a good day? Has Jason done his homework?'

He hoped he could distract her. Long years of experience taught him the distance between Jenni the attentive wife and Jenni the critical harpy was the length of an obsessive thought.

‘That interviewer made you look a prat.' Jenni's tone warned Tom not to reply. She turned off the television. The following silence was leaden with her anger.

He knew that anger came out of fear but it didn't make it easier to live with. What was she afraid of this time?

‘I said they'd try and make a fool of you. But you wouldn't listen. They're out to get you, T.'

He carried on chewing, longing to say his name was Tom. But she'd always thought it a rather common name. Like her own, Monica. She'd changed to her middle name as soon as she could, to the incomprehension of her parents who never understood the beautiful but alien daughter they'd bred. Jenni saw nothing to be proud of in being lower middle class.

‘I don't understand you, I really don't.' She was turning her glass slowly on the arm of her chair.

‘Oh there's nothing to understand, Jenni. You know that. This is delicious, by the way. Thank you.'

But she wasn't to be deflected by his humility.

She spoke quietly. To his surprise she was smiling slightly, her head tilted to one side, looking at him affectionately.

‘You want to go further, don't you? You don't want to end your days as just another seven-year-spin chief constable. You've always said you want to make a difference. And,' she leant forward, ‘the only place to do that is the Met? Isn't it?'

He dipped his head. Neither yes nor no.

‘I know you want it but I don't know if you've got it in you to get
it.' She said this very softly, with no malice. ‘Carter's the favourite but we can change their minds. You're a better man than he'll ever be.'

That was too close to a compliment to be comfortable for either of them. He took refuge in his whisky.

‘But what if we don't persuade them, Jenni?'

It was the wrong thing to say.

‘You find your balls and we'll persuade them.'

His timidity infuriated her – she was seething with resentment. Going back to the interview, the imagined slights were now insults. Jason, his son, hearing her voice raised, quietly closed the door of his room, knowing his mother was heading for one of her moods. When he'd come home from school Jenni had been hoovering the curtains in the downstairs cloakroom. Something she more often did in the middle of the night, unable to sleep more than four hours at a time.

‘What were you thinking of, letting him run rings round you like that?'

‘He didn't run rings, don't exaggerate.' Tom's tone was soft, conciliatory.

It infuriated her.

‘Oh… you're so bloody wet. Carter's going to walk off with the Met and you'll just get some inspectorate of prison lavatories. Why don't you go and see someone? Get down to London and pull some strings.'

‘It's not as simple as that, Jenni –'

He didn't get any further – the heavy-bottomed tumbler from which she had been sipping a vodka tonic narrowly missed his face.

‘God, you're such a prat. Look at you! Christ knows why I ever married you.'

He tried to defuse the situation with a little quiet humour. ‘Because you loved me?'

‘Don't be so fucking stupid.'

She rarely swore but when she did she had a way of articulating the word, of articulating each syllable, slowly, with a slight raising of her upper lip. Like a dog scenting fear.

‘How can one love an invertebrate?'

Tom stood up, unwilling to engage with her. He knew the pattern, that she would not stop until she had listed his failings, his moral cowardice, his domestic laziness, his meanness, lack of ambition, his neglect of the family.

He looked at her as she became more and more agitated, moving round the room touching and tidying the already neatly placed ornaments and statuettes that decorated her dust-free surfaces. Would she throw something else at him? Although he was a tall man he seemed to shrink under her vicious onslaught, though his face remained completely unreadable. He often wondered why she occasionally resorted to throwing things when her tongue could inflict far more damage.

Her favourite trick had been to humiliate him, then, as if nothing had happened, want to have sex. His increasing inability to perform under these circumstances simply added to her ammunition. For a moment he felt miserable, lonely, and desperate for her to be quiet. He wanted her to be affectionate, soft. He wanted to lie on her breasts.

‘Are you listening, you shit?' she screamed.

‘Yes,' he said automatically.

No, it wasn't her breasts he wanted to rest his cheek on, not her nipple he wanted at the corner of his mouth. With a sense of detached surprise he realised it was Lucy's breast he could taste. The slight smell of soap and deodorant. He hadn't thought about her since their strange encounter in his study.

It was a deliberate blocking out: Lucy had made him unexpectedly happy. He remembered leaning over her whispering, ‘You'll never hurt me, will you?' He was embarrassed at the recollection. Asking a woman not to hurt him was like asking a scorpion not to sting.

He had a mistrust of sex, of his libido distracting him. He had satisfied a physical urge and had felt faintly disgusted with himself afterwards. During the act he had no thought of the woman, whether it was Jenni or one of his rare, furtive experiments elsewhere. Sex had been something inflicted on him and now he inflicted it, rarely, on others. He knew Jenni had no more emotional involvement in the act than he had but knew she relished seeing him helpless afterwards, exhausted even if only for a moment. As always giving but not sharing.

He became aware it was silent. Jenni had finished her ravings and had stormed upstairs. She switched off the light as she went and he stood unmoving in the darkness.

It was different with Lucy. She had received him with gentleness and affection. He touched his face where she had stroked him. Had
she cried? Or did he imagine that. He looked across at her darkened window. Unseeing she looked back.

‘Darling Lucy … what would I do without you.'

Jenni was glittering the next morning as Lucy cleared away the remains of a heavy-bottomed tumbler from the living-room carpet.

‘Now … I've decided to have a little dinner party. Just the Chief and me and our politician friend.'

Lucy glanced up to see if the conspiratorial intimacy of yesterday was still in Jenni's face. There was nothing. The mask of make-up was inscrutable.

‘And Lucy … I've a huge favour to ask you.'

Lucy composed her face into her ‘of course I will' smile.

‘Would you be the fourth?'

It was so unexpected Lucy's smile almost slipped. Misinterpreting the hair's-breadth pause for reluctance Jenni applied a little more charm, a little more dazzle.

‘Gary could ring across for you if he needed anything. Do say yes, Lucy. It would be awkward if we weren't a four, and his wife lives somewhere miles away, and anyway he only sees her at weekends. From what I've heard about her that's probably quite enough.'

‘Well … thank you. Yes. I'd love to.' Lucy spoke quietly. ‘I haven't been out for ages.'

‘Oh it's hardly out… but at least you can get your best frock on, and put a bit of make-up on too? Ah Jason … at last. Come on, let's go, I don't want to be late.'

Jason thumped down the stairs in boots heavy enough to tackle the Matterhorn. Jenni's seventeen-year-old son, her favoured child, was a negative picture of his father. Where Tom Shackleton was dark-haired and dark-eyed, Jason was blond with pale blue-green eyes. The sensuality of the father's face was a pretty softness in the son's, but the power in the body was the same.

Jason watched his mother, weighing up her mood. He decided it was good and the wariness dropped from his face. He smiled. It was the same shy smile accompanied by a little dip of the head his father had. He saw Lucy watching him and he gave her a stroke with a piece of that smile.

Jenni picked up keys, bag and sunglasses, although it was overcast with rain forecast.

‘Lucy, I've got to dash, I'm taking Jason to school. It'll be Thursday – does that suit? Good. About seven-thirty, all right?'

They were gone. A faint odour of Allure by Chanel settled around Lucy. Thursday. Six days. Six days to lose half a stone, get the tone back in her inner thighs, have laser treatment on her frown lines and find something to wear.

She knelt on the carpet picking up tiny slivers of glass with marigold fingers and couldn't conjure up the indignation she had felt about Jenni's infidelity. She had forgotten she could feel this excited.

Jenni stopped the car outside Jason's exclusive academy. He kissed his mother briefly on the cheek. She never returned these kisses, but he knew what trouble there would be if he stopped.

He was always aware of his size around her, or rather he was aware of how fragile she seemed. Exquisite was a word that seemed to suit her and, even though she was technically middle-aged, her skin was almost perfect, rarely exposed to the sun. His hand on her shoulder was clumsy on her tiny bones.

‘Mind my hair, Jason.' The rebuke was mild, habitual.

‘Sorry, Mem.' As the children grew up ‘Mum' was too ageing, ‘Mummy' too precious, so when one of Tom's admiring colleagues called her the Memsahib, ‘Mem' was accepted as a sweet alternative. ‘See you later.' He unfolded himself from the car and lolloped off.

The image of predator as attentive mother was uncannily apt for Jenni. Her treatment of her brood was practical, unsentimental. She never lavished them with overt signs of affection and had always shunned their sticky, childish embraces.

Her physical treatment of them had always been brusque but never rough. There was no room for softness in love – the world was too harsh a place for that. Love, to Jenni, was possession. ‘My family', ‘my husband'. ‘Mine' was the first word she ever spoke. And she would brook no criticism of her children; even Tom's mild observation that one of them might be less than perfect earned a bitter rebuke and several days of icy silence. Especially Jason, who, during Shackleton's long periods away from home, had become her little
man. The repository of her bitterness against her husband's neglect. Jason had grown up believing his father treated her cruelly. It was only now he was beginning to see cracks in the flawless portait of his mother.

Jenni watched her son go, proud of his good looks. He was as handsome as his father but the strength of Shackleton's face and body were filtered through the delicacy of Jenni's features. The resulting pure beauty delighted her.

She stretched slightly and eased the Volvo into the traffic. At the traffic lights she absently reached down for her sunglasses, not noticing the appreciative glances from her neighbouring driver.

Her delicacy and femininity were palpable even through side impact bars.

Jenni enjoyed, relished, being the Chief Constable's wife; the position, the perks, the recognition and subtle respect almost as much as being beautiful.

While Tom had been inching his way up the pole she had worked her way up the Social Services system, developing a quiet, sly inflexibility indispensable when parting children from unfit parents. It was a career for which she was singularly unsuited, having no interest in or sympathy for those whose lives were lived in a confusion of ignorance, poverty and cruelty. But with limited qualifications, becoming a social worker had seemed preferable to sitting behind a till. Determined to escape the daily contact with the squalor she found, she worked to get an office-based job, supervising others. She was so successful so quickly she was offered an award, but she declined it. Her determination to stay out of the spotlight was interpreted as modesty; Shackleton knew it was mistrust. In Jenni's experience nothing was given without obligation.