Bone and Cane (3 page)

‘Ed did A levels in prison. He’s intelligent enough to use the money well.’

‘If you say so,’ Brian replied. ‘I presume now it’s established that Clark didn’t do it, you’ll be campaigning for the police to find the real killer.’

‘That’s for the police, not me.’

‘Off the record, the police are saying they’re not looking for anyone else. You know what that means, don’t you?’

‘I really can’t comment, Brian, on or off the record. I’m sorry.’

‘Either they’re still convinced Ed did it, or they blame the wife.’

Brian left the train at Leicester. He was heading for Derbyshire, where he and his wife had a weekend cottage. But his question wouldn’t go away. A police officer and his wife were dead. They had two children and wider families, all of whom deserved answers. Ed Clark
was
a scrote, a minor villain who’d picked up a handful of burglary and violence convictions over the years. The first four had resulted in non-custodial sentences. The day after Ed was released from a six-month sentence for his fifth offence, Terry Shanks, the policeman who’d put him in prison, had been murdered. His wife, Liv, who had recently had sex, was found dead beside their bed. Both victims had been shot. Terry had also been bashed in the head, almost certainly before the shooting. The bodies were discovered when a neighbour brought the Shanks’ children home from primary school because their mother had failed to collect them.

There had been no direct evidence that Liv Shanks was raped. She had some vaginal tearing, a couple of bruises, and traces of a lubricant used on Durex. If Ed had raped Liv Shanks, he’d worn a condom. Some of Ed’s defenders suggested that Terry Shanks, the other murder victim, had raped his own wife and was also responsible for the bruises. Forensics showed that Terry had had sex within the previous twenty-four hours. In this theory, Liv knocked him out with a heavy blow to the head, then shot both him and herself with the unregistered gun Terry had recently bought for protection. According to the defence at Ed’s appeal, only a dodgy copper would keep such a gun. Liv, in the defence’s version, had killed Terry as retribution for marital rape, then killed herself rather than let the children know their mother had killed their father.

Forensics was not as exact a science as the TV shows suggested. Sarah didn’t have a theory as to who had killed the husband and wife. She only knew that the evidence against Clark, her constituent, was incredibly flimsy. DNA testing was in its infancy when the murders took place, but it was established that a used condom found in the bedroom bin contained Terry Shanks’ sperm. The prosecution had motivation, a disputed hair on the carpet and a dodgy witness – a neighbour who claimed she saw Clark leave the house half an hour before the bodies were found. In court, the defence drew out several inconsistencies in her testimony.

When Sarah first heard about the case, early in her by-election campaign, she figured that the imprisoned man was probably guilty. Ed Clark, a taxi driver, had a poor alibi. His girlfriend at the time worked as a prostitute on the Woodborough Road. She claimed Ed was watching out for her, but she had been with clients on and off that day. The Shanks lived less than two miles away, in Mapperley. Ed could have been there and back in half an hour.

By taking on Ed’s case, she turned a few friends into enemies. Some were police officers who had been colleagues during her brief stint in the force, ten years before. Privately, other officers told Sarah that they shared her doubts. The new evidence that swung the appeal was proof that the murder weapon, far from belonging to Ed, had been in Terry Shanks’ possession for several months before the murders.

If Ed didn’t do it, what had really happened? Sarah never did make up her mind. She didn’t think that Liv Shanks had killed her husband, then herself. There was no motive for that. A burglary gone wrong? Nothing had been taken. After Ed’s drunken boasts, Sarah had even less idea what to think. She only knew that the evidence against him was wafer-thin. The Law Lords agreed and he had won his appeal. Therefore Ed deserved to go free.

The appeal wouldn’t have happened but for Sarah. Most of the campaign’s supporters believed in her far more than they did in the alleged victim of injustice. If Ed committed new crimes, people would hold Sarah responsible. And rightly so.

3

Q
uaglino’s was half empty, which suited Sarah fine. She told Jasper March about Donald Dewar’s offer of the week before.

‘He gave me until yesterday. I thought of discussing it with my agent. The local party probably would have let me go, wished me well, all that. But they wouldn’t have meant it and I’d have hated myself for ever. So I called him and said that I was staying in Nottingham West.’

‘You did the right thing,’ Jasper March told Sarah, then drained his espresso. ‘I can see the decision’s starting to eat away at you. Don’t let it. Once you show the whips you’ll put ambition over everything else, they’ve got you.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ Sarah said.

They were on after-dinner brandies. March, ten years her senior, was an old fashioned Tory with old-fashioned good looks: square jaw, jet black hair, not too much tummy. Their conversation had been absorbing enough for the food to be of secondary importance. They’d had two bottles of Madiran: a complex, tannin-rich wine that complemented the game they’d eaten. Jasper had drunk more than her, but only a little. Sarah was pissed enough to be relaxed. Pissed enough to fancy him a little, even though he was too smooth to be her type. She’d been surprised when he asked her to dinner.

Jasper hadn’t given the slightest hint of flirtation all evening, so she was probably safe from making a drunken fool of herself. She could count the number of men she’d slept with after drinking too much on the fingers of one hand. All three she regretted. Jasper was a barrister, she reminded herself, searching for something to talk about.

‘Do you still practise?’

‘No need to practise. I’m pretty good at it by now.’

She forced a smile. Jasper had made it clear to her that his marriage was over, that he would divorce after the election regardless of whether he held his seat. So maybe he was flirting, in a cack-handed way.

‘I meant the law.’

‘Not since I joined the government. But I’ll keep my hand in – when – I mean
if
– we get shown the door. Politics isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. Why do you ask?’

‘Oh, nothing.’ A waiter returned with Jasper’s credit card. ‘Why did you ask . . . me out to dinner, I mean,’ Sarah said, as the minister helped her on with her coat. ‘I got the impression you had a specific thing you wanted to discuss with me.’

‘I did have an excuse worked out,’ Jasper said, with a rehearsed chuckle. ‘Do you know, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.’

It didn’t matter how pissed she was, or how long it had been since she had had a shag, Sarah would not sleep with Jasper tonight. But she decided not to rule out the possibility of sleeping with him in the future. When he put an arm around her waist as they were leaving the restaurant, she didn’t remove it. She didn’t quite reciprocate either, only leant into him enough to let him see that his attentions weren’t entirely unwelcome. Then the flashbulbs started going off.

Twenty minutes later, when she got back to her one-bedroom retreat in Parliament View, she rang Dan.

‘I thought I ought to warn you, there’ll be some press sniffing around tomorrow. They might even try to get to you at work.’

She explained what had happened with Jasper March.

‘You don’t waste much time, do you? I only moved out yesterday.’

‘He said he wanted advice, not a date. Or a beard for the tabloids.’

‘They won’t get to me, but thanks for the warning. You ought to tell Winston.’

Winston was Sarah’s electoral agent. She poured herself a pint of water before getting into bed. It was a double bed, though Dan had rarely come over from Nottingham to share it with her. His social-work job kept him there in the week and often left him drained at the weekends. They had been together for two years and could easily have drifted on for another two. Until one of them met somebody who really excited them. But Sarah was too busy to meet new people and Dan quite enjoyed having an MP as his partner. He didn’t seem to mind theirs being a weekend-only relationship. Nor did he object vociferously when Sarah suggested that he move out. Indeed, he’d managed the whole thing in less than a month.

‘At least they called you “a rising star”,’ Steve Carter told Sarah, six days later. Steve Carter was the closest friend Sarah had on the Labour benches. They were having a late lunch in Sarah’s favourite small Italian restaurant, at a table well away from the window. The purpose of the lunch was to discuss damage limitation after the Jasper March story had been splashed all over the Tory tabloids. Sarah often acted as a soundboard for Steve and he, less often, did the same for her. ‘And the serious Sundays didn’t touch it,’ he went on. ‘They could tell that the story was a crock.’

‘The
Mail On Sunday
had a nasty paragraph,’ Sarah said. She had glanced at the papers on Sunday but not really taken them in.

‘People who vote for you don’t read the
Mail On Sunday
.’

‘If I had some of their readers, I might have a chance of winning. “How did they know we were going to be there?” I asked him. “Somebody at the restaurant must have called them,” he said. No fucking way. You should have seen him grab me as we went through the door – he knew they were outside. What I don’t know is why he needed to do it.’

‘His divorce is about to hit the papers,’ Steve said. ‘He’s doing what we do every time we announce a watered-down policy –
getting his betrayal in first
.’

‘You mean he’d rather be exposed as an adulterer than a cuckold?’

‘My guess is he’s hardly a cuckold. It was always a marriage of convenience, but she’s fallen for someone else.’

‘You mean. Oh shit, I mean, I knew about . . .’ Sarah named the three most prominent gay Tory MPs, ‘but March . . .’

‘I’m pretty sure that’s it. He escaped my gaydar for a while. But here’s how I guessed: during my first few weeks here, he was quite friendly. When I came out, he became perceptibly cooler. He’s too slick to be a homophobe.
Ergo
. . .’

‘He didn’t want to be gay by association. Fuck me.’

‘You’re asking the wrong man, sweetie.’

Steve had got in at the last election, after nine years working for the Low Pay Unit. He had come out shortly after being elected, and survived a lot of stick in his constituency as a consequence. Shortly after Steve came out, the former party leader, John Smith, showing his tolerance, made him an education spokesman. More recently, Tony Blair had made Steve shadow second in Transport. As Steve’s career prospered, the local prejudice had quietened down.

‘Excuse me.’ Sarah looked round to see that she and Steve weren’t the only MPs in the restaurant. ‘I just wanted to say, treat it like water off a duck’s back. It’s the only way.’ The speaker was Gill Temperley, a Home Office minister who had prospered under the current Prime Minister. ‘Gossip’s the engine oil of politics,’ she went on. ‘If you can, best to be flattered by it, to use it.’

‘Like Jasper used me?’ Sarah asked.

‘I’m sure you’ll find a way to use him back.’ Gill gave her a wink which was almost dirty before gliding out of the room, followed at a discreet distance by a tall young man with a mop of blonde hair.

‘Didn’t know you two were friendly,’ Steve said when they’d gone.

‘That’s the first time we’ve spoken.’

‘A Compassionate Conservative. I thought they were a media myth.’

Sarah tried to work out how to phrase a delicate question. Steve was better at collecting gossip than she was. Pushing fifty, Gill was attractive, but not overwhelmingly so. In Parliament, as Sarah had found, a reasonable figure and a pretty face made any woman into an object of lust. Men had to have someone to fantasize about during long debates. She lowered her voice.

‘Do you think the dirt on her is true?’

Gill was reputed to have an open marriage. Her husband was a Euro MP who spent weekdays in Brussels. Gill certainly had a different, always handsome, male ‘researcher’ every year, but that proved little.

‘Oh yes.’

‘But the papers leave her alone.’

‘Tories are better at managing these things than we are. Gill’s discreet. Both her and her hubby are friendly with the papers’ owners. And they’re rich enough to sue. A paper that wanted to get her would need its story spot on, fully backed up.’

‘Whereas I can’t afford to sue anyone,’ Sarah pointed out.

‘There was nothing in any of the papers for you to sue over. Litigation only benefits lawyers. Anyway, I’m telling you, babe, if the punters think you’re fucking a handsome bastard it isn’t going to hurt you one little bit.’

4

S
arah’s fortnightly surgeries rotated around every ward in the constituency. The second surgery of the second month was in Stoneywood Library. Most of the cases she took on could be handled by a Citizens’ Advice Bureau but an MP carried more weight with the agencies concerned, usually branches of the Home Office or Social Security. This Saturday, her last visitor was a member of the Shanks family, the dead police officer’s younger sister, Polly Bolton. The poor cow had adopted the murdered couple’s children.

Sarah had seen to it that Polly was the last appointment. They could go on as long as necessary. However, she was already running half an hour late.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she told Polly. ‘But I can stay as long as it takes.’

‘I can’t.’ Sarah’s age, with hard, grey eyes, Polly looked nearer forty. For all that, her platinum blonde hair was professionally done and her steely, over made-up face formed a striking carapace, beneath which beauty might lurk. ‘I go on shift in half an hour,’ she continued. ‘I’ve a taxi coming in ten minutes.’

‘I do apologize.’

‘Doesn’t matter. What I have to say won’t take long. That Ed Clark was all over the paper yesterday, going on about justice and the compensation he has coming. What I want to know is, where’s justice for my brother, rotting in his grave? Where’s justice for our Liv?’