The Crime Tsar (42 page)

Tom felt almost happy. Carter would resign, Tom Shackleton would be Crime Tsar, the investigation would turn up nothing and Eleri would take her husband back.

It would all work out.

Lucy was washing Gary when she heard the news. Geoffrey Carter had been found dead in his home three months after the start of a
police investigation concerning paedophile pornography found at his home … There were no other details. Lucy was shocked. Gary cynical.

‘One less neck for Shackleton to step on.'

‘Oh Gary, don't … it's awful.'

‘Yes, you're right. I'm sorry – one fewer neck.'

She continued to wash him, making sure her flannel soaked the sheet. A small revenge but her own. She'd comforted the man, they'd shared a tiny intimacy. And now he was dead …

‘Come on, Luce, you'll give me nappy rash.'

She sighed. What could she do? Nothing. But she felt she should.

Wanting to talk about it, she went over to see Jenni as soon as she could.

Tamsin and her little boy were just leaving. There was noisy laughter, the child shrieking and waving to his nice granny. Lucy felt like a ghost walking into a happy family scene.

Lucy went into the house with her, Jenni still smiling, relaxed.

As soon as the pleasantries were out of the way and Jenni had poured out another coffee Lucy said, ‘Have you heard? About Geoffrey Carter? He's dead.'

She would never forget the look on Jenni's face. Surprise and pleasure hastily covered by sadness and regret. It was such a quick transformation Lucy wasn't even certain it had happened.

But then Jenni said with an undisguised eagerness, ‘Are you sure?'

Lucy nodded.

‘Oh dear. How sad.'

And that was it. But Lucy could still see the triumph behind the modestly downcast eyes. Not long after, she went home and tried to explain the incident to Gary.

Shackleton was in meetings all morning so it wasn't until one-thirty his secretary had the opportunity to tell him.

‘Mr Shackleton?' Her voice was even more melodious and quiet than usual. ‘It's Mr Carter, sir, he's been found dead. Possible suicide. Don't forget you've got the Police Authority at two o'clock. Would you like a sandwich?'

He shook his head and closed his office door. The walk to his desk seemed unreal. He looked out of the window. Uniformed police
wandered across his view coming and going to lunch. The words free will and personal responsibility, hitherto meaningless mantras trotted out by development gurus, swirled round his head.

No matter how fast he ran round the corridors of his mind the rat-tailed words ‘You killed him' kept up. There was real terror in the reality of it. This wasn't part of the scenario. He wasn't responsible for Jenni. He hadn't known anything about it. But it was too late for that. He'd changed. He'd joined the human race. He was infected with weakness for the first time. The weakness of conscience. Geoffrey Carter wasn't an abstract obstacle, he was a man who was dead.

No, who he had killed.

But Jenni did it … no, not Jenni. Me.

Only a fraction of the reality was being allowed to filter into his mind. He knew imagining the pain Carter had experienced would destroy his control, would eat away at him until he couldn't function any more. Guilt. Responsibility for your brother. No man is an island. Carter being cleared away in a black plastic bag as they all were. Suicides. The dramatic gesture that always finished in the back of the body men's grubby van. A discarded body bagged up, like any other rubbish. Then the slab and the unknown fingers probing and turning the naked dead body. The body that had been a friend, a fellow chief constable, a known success not a month before. Being sliced up and weighed for disease and legal requirement. The organs put back in any order. Brain in the stomach and newspaper in the skull. That's what you did to him, Shackleton. Why? For what? Nothing's worth killing for, is it?

‘I didn't kill him.'

He said it out loud. The phone rang and Janet said, mindful of the tragedy, that Mrs Shackleton was on the line.

‘Tom? Tom?'

He didn't want to speak to her. Ever.

‘Yes, Jenni?'

‘Have you heard?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well?'

‘It's tragic.'

She snorted.

‘For who? Not us. Mind you, I didn't think he'd go that far – bit melodramatic after all.'

She paused.

‘I think it just proves he was a paedophile. Why would he kill himself otherwise? I mean, he still had his job, he hadn't actually been prosecuted. They must have found something against him, don't you think?'

Shackleton put down the phone. He felt the ties that had bound him to Jenni dissolving in the acid of self-hatred. What she had done was no worse than many of the things she'd done in his name before. But no one had ever died before. His eyes were staring, unseeing, out of the window, but something wanted to be seen. His eyes found focus and saw the three black faces.

They weren't smiling now. They carried a heavily filled black plastic sack, and it lay, like a body, across their arms. A pietà triptych. The woman who frightened him, the African woman with the blind seashell eyes, lifted her hand to him. Its white palm was red and wet with blood. Slowly, deliberately, she smeared it across her face and opened her mouth in a silent ululation. The other two stretched their lips wide too. Then the sound – it seemed the only sound in the world – filled his head. The wild, high, rippling cry of grief. The three voices invoking misery for the dead and the living.

He didn't know what prayer he made but when he raised his face from his hands there was silence. The women had gone.

Danny Marshall went to the house immediately the call came in that Carter had been found by the local beat bobby. The window cleaner had raised the alert.

When he arrived the place was quietly full of scenes-of-crime officers, CID, police photographers and the soberly dressed men whose job it was to take away the body. The body, unaccompanied by anyone who had known or cared for its inhabitant, was just a sad mess to be cleared up.

He asked what had happened. The first officer he approached shrugged, embarrassed.

Down the stairs was the lumbering Inspector Davidge. Danny had served under him when he'd been starting out. Davidge was a very good copper. Three commendations for bravery, lived in Essex and collected Minton sugar bowls. His girth was remarkable and his offwhite
shirts always had a triangle of pale stomach peeping out from under his tie which lay, stranded, halfway down his vast belly.

He spoke with the intimate dodginess of a second-hand car salesman.

‘Sorry for your loss, sir.'

He stepped respectfully across Carter's body which was still being measured and photographed as it lay at the bottom of the stairs, any dignity it had had in life dispelled by violent and surprising death.

‘What happened?'

Davidge nodded at the question and led the deputy into the garden. Danny looked at the stone sculptures Carter had brought back in his hand luggage from Zimbabwe, pretending his bag weighed nothing, and remembered they'd talked about Danny's ancestors who had been taken as slaves from Ghana. They'd laughed at Danny's description of a ship-load of artists being dumped on Barbados because they were only good for housework. The tough ones went to Jamaica.

Davidge lit up a Rothmans. The deputy thought if he made retirement without a heart attack there was no justice, but although he wheezed and waddled and drank for Britain his blood pressure and cholesterol gave no cause for alarm. Bastard, thought Danny.

‘What happened, Bob?'

Davidge took a long pull on his fag and looked at the apple tree from which hung a child's empty swing.

‘He's gone up to his study, right? And he's writing a letter. Fond farewells, I suppose. We found the hoover hose taped to the car exhaust and he's taken enough aspirin to fell an ox. So far so good. Anyway his pen runs out. Nice Mont Blanc fountain, black ink. Not realising how far gone he is he tries to get downstairs to refill it – we found a new bottle of ink in his briefcase. But… he gets to the top of the stairs and loses his footing – the nib of the pen went through his eye into his brain. And he died. Quicker than carbon monoxide. Lucky, I suppose. A paedophile's life is not a happy one.'

Danny looked down the garden.

‘He wasn't a paedophile.'

Davidge looked at his cigarette end.

‘No, sir. Of course not.'

Danny felt like the disciple who had thrice denied his master. Only evangelism would make up for betrayal.

‘He told me. Swore he was innocent.'

Davidge thought about this for a few moments.

‘Well, whatever. Doesn't make him any less dead, does it?'

He shook his head and put another Rothmans between his lips. An acutely intelligent man, he had great respect for his instinct and his instinct told him Danny was telling the truth. The atmosphere between them shifted. Davidge had no taste for witch hunts and that is what Carter had been put through.

‘I'll light a candle. By the way, sir, I found this upstairs. The letter he was writing. No point in it going through official channels, eh?' He handed him the sheets of paper addressed to Danny in Carter's hand. ‘Well … I'd better get back in there.'

With the unlit fag in his mouth he shambled into the house.

Later that night he went into his local church and lit a night light under the statue of St Francis of Assisi. It was the only candle lit for Carter in the darkness surrounding his death.

Danny caught sight of Carter's body just before the door closed. If he'd only come round. Had faith. Been there. He read quickly:

Danny. Why does the truth seem more true when the speaker's dead? I don't know and it seems more and more stupid to die just to be believed. But it's too late now. Not too late to make sense, I hope. It's getting dark, round the edges, like looking down a ‘what the butler saw'. What do I want to tell you? What must you believe?

I've thought about every option I have and this is the only one that makes sense. Whatever happens I'm finished, there's no future. I can't prove my innocence and whatever the law says, in this, you're guilty even if found innocent.

I believe Tom and Jenni Shackleton planted that stuff but I am too tired now to find any way to prove it.

I could cope with the doubt and whispers if it wasn't for my children. Danny, I can't have them carrying me through their lives. Is it cowardice? Maybe.

I swear I have committed no crime but I can't live like this. I won't be an unwelcome spectre in Peter's life.

Try and find out the truth, Danny, for Peter and Alex and Megan. Did you know I've got a daughter? She was premature, too small for life, but I'm told by the divorce lawyer she's a fighter. Megan Morgan.

If the truth does involve J and T would the government want to hear it? Tabloid headlines

The letter finished there. The final words thin with starving ink.

Danny wanted to go home, to get away from the sordid sadness. He went back into the house. The body was gone and Davidge was ready to leave. Upstairs were two men who didn't offer their identity or condolences.

When Danny looked he saw all Carter's personal papers had gone. The men each carried large briefcases. One of them was just packing away Carter's desk diary.

Danny waited outside the house until they were gone then let himself back in with the spare keys still kept by the neighbour, Mrs Ismay. She had been keen to talk but Danny made it plain he was on police business and not at liberty to comment, or hear comment, on the events surrounding the tragedy.

What did he expect to find? The unquiet shade wandering from room to room, unable to rest till he, Danny, had hewn the truth from the unyielding granite of lies?

Danny despised himself for being so noble now Carter was dead.

He sat on the stairs. There was a small spray of blood on the wallpaper. Pretty, like a small brown fern. He had placed just enough distance between himself and his contaminated chief to ensure his own future well-being. But at what cost of guilt?

When he left the house he was determined to clear Carter's name, and in the process his own conscience.

The ACPO autumn conference was held at Warwick University in an area cordoned off from the rest of the campus. The three days of police business finished with a formal dinner to which wives were invited.

The guest of honour was the nearly new Home Secretary, the Gnome, in glory now.

Jenni hadn't seen him since just after Carter's funeral, a bleak affair attended by no one of note and only two elderly aunts of Carter's representing the family. Danny Marshall had organised it, inviting everyone who should have been there had Carter died a hero. Most declined, some didn't reply. Eleri's solicitor sent a fax.

The Shackletons had been modest, seating themselves halfway back in the small crematorium chapel. Danny saw them and did nothing to encourage them forward. Jenni was incensed and made sure she spoke to him afterwards, outside in the windy courtyard.

‘It was tragic. We were very fond of Geoffrey. My husband worked with him closely – I don't suppose you realised that?'

The deputy was smooth, polite, impenetrable.

‘Oh yes, I knew. He was particularly touched by the visit you paid him just before he died.'

Jenni was shocked, the accusation felt so naked. For a moment she was lost for words.

‘The press were very cruel. After all it's a disease, isn't it? They can't help themselves.'

‘The only disease Geoffrey Carter suffered from was the envy of other people. That's what killed him.'

Jenni wanted to slap that look off his face.

‘Yes, yes, of course.'

She wished Tom would come and rescue her.

‘I wonder why he had that awful stuff in his house then?'