Like a Charm (14 page)

'I promise you will have Rex returned. I just need him for a few days, and I am not here about any vet fees. He wasn't given to you in this box, was he?'

'No, he was wrapped in a mucky towel. I think it's still in my toolbox. Gran was going to wash it but I used it to wipe some chain lube off my bike.'

Miles waited while Kevin fetched the towel, now streaked with oil stains as well as the dark red bloodstains that had turned rust brown.

'Thank you, I really appreciate your help.'

'There was something else,' Kevin said flushing. 'It was caught in the towel.'

Miles nodded. Kevin looked even more embarrassed.

'I gave it to my girlfriend, it was like a charm, you know, off a bracelet. It was about so big.' He indicated with his fingers how small the charm was.

'Does she still have it?' Miles asked.

'I dunno, we broke up. Is that what this is all about? I think it was quite old, like antique gold but it was very small, a little man I think, like a pixie.'

Miles hesitated; he didn't understand the significance of the charm because he had been the only one not present at the Christmas gift exchange.

At the police station, the detective in charge of Frogton's disappearance looked into the hat box with distaste.

'What is it?'

'It's a dead Jack Russell dog and its body was wrapped in this towel that belongs to the clinic. The kid also found a gold charm of a goblin, you know a charm that hangs off a bracelet. I called Hilda our other receptionist and she recalls Peter Frogton giving it to Carol last Christmas. She said it was a little goblin, not a pixie, a gold goblin sitting on a mushroom.'

'Does he still have it?'

'No, he gave it to his girlfriend but they broke up and she threw it away; well, that's what she said. It was a goblin but she couldn't remember if it was sitting on anything.'

Miles remained at the station for two hours going through all the details about how dogs were collected for the incinerator by the mortuary company. The dogs were burnt and the bones and fragments crushed so there would be no remains left. It was possible that Peter Frogton was murdered, his body taken in the place of a Great Dane and incinerated. The Jack Russell was supposed to have been incinerated that same morning but Kevin had collected it for burial in his grandmother's garden.

There was a very long pause. Miles was flushed red in the face while the police officer grew paler by the minute.

'Jesus Christ, you think she put your partner in a doggy bag?'

Before they arrested Carol, they checked her background and discovered her previous prison record. This made for a lot of embarrassment, as they should have been more thorough.

'Apparently she lied to us on her letter from her previous employers. She had only worked there for two years,' Miles said to a stunned, white-faced Hilda. 'Before that she was in prison.'

'Prison?' Hilda stuttered, hardly able to take it all in.

'She murdered her mother,' Miles said quietly.

'What, Carol did? But she couldn't have done, she was going to spend Christmas with her.'

'Well she lied, Hilda, Carol lied to all of us; she apparently hit her mother over the head with a hammer.'

'No, surely not, her own mother?'

'Yes, that's what I was told.'

'Why?' Hilda asked in a shocked gasp.

'No idea, they didn't tell me,' Miles said flatly.

Carol was arrested at the surgery at nine fifteen on May 3rd 1972 and subsequently charged with the murder of Peter Frogton. She never gave an explanation, nor did she admit her guilt or deny it; she appeared totally disinterested in the whole proceedings. Without a body and with not one witness, it was doubtful they would be able to make the charge stick. At the time DNA testing was not used and although the white towel might have Peter Frogton's bloodstains on it they could also have been the Jack Russell's.

The police had removed the gold charm bracelet as part of the evidence, noting that it was minus the goblin. They subsequently interviewed Kevin's girl-friend. She was evasive and tearful but then admitted she had lied. She hadn't thrown the goblin away; she said she had thought Kevin might ask for it back and she wasn't going to give it to him. The detective looked at the small gold charm in the palm of his hand. The little goblin sitting on a toadstool was identified as the charm given to Carol by Frogton; when shown to Hilda, she confirmed it was definitely the same one.

During Carol's final interrogation she had become increasingly abusive, often laughing at some private joke she never shared with anyone. The detective held up the charm bracelet, letting it dangle.

'Does this belong to you, Carol?'

No reply.

'This was a gift to you from Peter Frogton, wasn't it?'

No reply.

'This charm was attached to this bracelet by Peter Frogton. It was a Christmas gift to you, wasn't it?'

No reply.

'Will you look at this little charm? It was on this bracelet when you killed Peter Frogton.'

No reply.

'Carol, will you look at this charm and tell me what it is?'

At last there was a response; she looked up, her eyes like ice chips, and she let out a high pitched screech.

'It's a fucking gold Jack Russell dog, you cunt.'

Carol never admitted killing Peter Frogton. She was found mentally unfit to stand trial and sent to Broadmoor, a prison for the criminally insane. The bracelet was tagged, bagged and listed as evidence, then stored in the police station's evidence lock-up, with the goblin re-attached in case it got lost.

THE SNAKE EATER BY
THE NUMBERS
Lee Child

Numbers. Percentages, rates, averages, means, medians. Crime rate, clearance rate, clearance percentage, increase, decrease, throughput, input, output, productivity. At the end of the twentieth century, police work was about nothing but numbers.

Detective Sergeant Ken Cameron loved numbers.

I know this, because Cameron was my training officer the year he died. He told me that numbers were our salvation. They made being a copper as easy as being a financier or a salesman or a factory manager. We don't need to work the
cases,
he said. We need to work the
numbers.
If we make our numbers, we get good performance reviews. If we get good reviews, we get commendations. If we get commendations, we get promotions. And promotions mean pay and pensions. You could be comfortable your whole life, he said, because of numbers. Truly comfortable.
Doubly
comfortable, he said, because you're not tearing your hair out over vague bullshit subjective notions like safe streets and quality of life. You're dealing with numbers, and numbers never lie.

We worked in North London. Or at least he did, and I was assigned there for my probationary period. I would be moving on, but he had been there three years and would be staying. And North London was a great place for numbers. It was a big manor with a lot of crime and a population that was permanently hypersensitive to being treated less well than populations in other parts of London. The local councillors were always in an uproar. They compared their schools to other schools, their transport spurs to other transport spurs. Everything was about perceived disadvantage. If an escalator was out at West Finchley tube station for three days, then they'd better not hear that an escalator had been fixed in two days down at Tooting Bec. That kind of thing was the birth of the numbers, Cameron told me. Because stupid, dull administrators learned to counter the paranoid arguments with numbers. No, they would say, the Northern Line is actually 63 per cent on time up here, and only 61 per cent on time down there.

So, they would say, shut up.

It wasn't long before police work fell in with the trend. It was inevitable. Everything started being measured. It was an obvious defensive tactic on the part of our bosses. Average response time following a 999 call? Eleven minutes in Tottenham, Madam Councillor, versus
twelve
minutes in Kentish Town. Said proudly, with a blank-but-smug expression on our bosses' meaty faces. Of course, they were lying. The Kentish Town bosses were lying too. It was a race towards absurdity. I once joked to Cameron that pretty soon we would start to see
negative
response times. Like
yes, Madam Councillor, that 999 call was answered eleven minutes before it was made.
But Cameron just stared at me. He thought I had lost it. He was far too serious on the subject to countenance such a blatant mistake, even in jest.

But certainly he admitted that numbers could be massaged.

He collected massage examples like a connoisseur. He observed some of them from afar. The 999 stuff, for instance. He knew how the books were cooked. Switchboard operators were required to be a little inexact with their time-keeping. When it was noon out there in the real world, it was four minutes past noon inside the emergency switchboard. When a sector car was dispatched to an address, it would radio its arrival when it was still three streets away. Thus, a slow twenty-minute response time went into the books as a decent twelve minutes. Everybody won.

His approach to his own numbers was more sophisticated.

His major intellectual preoccupation was parsing the inconvenient balance between his productivity and his clearance rate. For any copper, the obvious way to enhance his clearance rate was to accept no cases at all, except the solid gold slam-dunks that had guaranteed collars at the end of them. He explained it like a Zen master: Suppose you have only one case a year. Suppose you solve it. What's your clearance rate? One hundred per cent! I knew that, of course, because I was comfortable with simple arithmetic. But just for fun I said, OK, but suppose you
don't
solve it? Then your clearance rate is zero! But he didn't get all wound up like I thought he would. Instead, he beamed at me, like I was making progress. Like I already knew the dance steps.
Exactly,
he said. You avoid the cases you know you
can't
solve, and you jump all over the cases you know you
can
solve.

I should have spotted it right then.
The cases you know you can solve.
But I didn't spot it. I was still inside the box. And he didn't give me much time to think, because he rushed straight on to the main problem, which was productivity. Certainly major points could be scored for a 75 per cent clearance rate. That was obvious. But if you achieved that mark by clearing three cases out of four, you lost major points for a lack of productivity. That was obvious, too. Four cases a year was absurdly low.
Forty
cases a year was low. In North London at that time, each detective was looking at hundreds of cases a year. That was Ken Cameron's big problem. The balance between productivity and clearance rate. Good productivity meant a bad clearance rate. A good clearance rate meant bad productivity. He said to me,
See?
Like the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Although that was a misinterpretation on my part. He was really saying:
So I'm not such a bad guy, doing what I'm doing.
I should have seen it. But I didn't.

Then, still in his Zen master mode, he told me a joke. Two guys are in the woods. They see a bear coming. 'Run!' says the first guy. 'That's ridiculous,' the second guy says. 'You can't run faster than a bear.' 'I don't need to run faster than the bear,' the first guy answers. 'I only need to run faster than you.' I had heard the joke before, many times. I suppose I paused a moment to remember who had told it to me last. So I didn't react the way Cameron wanted me to. I saw him thinking
fast track training college wanker.
Then he regrouped and explained his point. He wasn't looking for extremely high numbers in and of themselves. He was just looking to beat the guy in second place. That's all. By a point or two, which was all that was necessary. Which he could do while maintaining an entirely plausible balance between his clearance rate and his productivity.

Which he could do.
I should have asked,
how exactly?
He was probably waiting for me to ask. But I didn't.

I found out how the day I met a prostitute called Kelly Key and a madman called Mason Mason. I met them separately. Kelly Key first. It was one of those perceived disadvantage things. Truth was, North London had a lot of prostitution, but not nearly as much as the West End, for instance. It tended to be of a different nature, though. It was definitely more in-your-face. You
saw
the hookers. Up west, they were all inside, waiting by the phone. So I was never really sure exactly what the locals were up in arms about. That their hookers were cheaper? That they wanted prettier girls? Or what? But whatever, there was always some street-clearing initiative going on, usually in the northern reaches of Islington and all over Haringey. Working girls would be dragged in. They would sit in police stations, looking completely at home and completely out of place all at the same time.