The Crime Tsar (30 page)

‘Janet… could you tell the Chief I've been held up and won't be back till tomorrow? Yes … I know he's got a conference today.' I'm his wife, you stupid woman, I have his diary. ‘Just let him know, when you have a chance. Oh … and how's your mother?' Was that a ladder in her tights? Damn. Never mind, she had spares at the hotel. ‘A stroke? Oh dear, I am sorry … You're breaking up … No, I'm losing the signal …'

Jenni pressed the button and Janet was gone, still saying, ‘I can hear you, Mrs Shackleton.'

Jenni checked her scarf and sunglasses – no need to take any risks – and went into SpyMeister. The assistant was a polite young man – couldn't possibly be a Viennese, thought Jenni.

‘Do you have any VHF room transmitters, please?'

His English, like his manners, was immaculate.

‘Of course, madam.'

Simple, straightforward, as easy as buying shoes. Normally she would have expended charm on the young man but the urge to get back to the womb of her hotel was becoming too strong to ignore.
Her heart seemed to have developed an extra beat which tripped it into a disturbing flutter. It had happened occasionally in the past but since the clinic she'd noticed the irregularities becoming more frequent. Something to remember the Gnome by. She shuddered.

‘Let me see them.' She checked that they were identical to the ones she'd seen in London. She loved the feel of them, the shape, the smooth surfaces. Perfect. ‘I'll take five.'

The boy was surprised and started to question her. She snapped at him and he wrapped them up in an unmarked but elegantly designed carrier bag. She opened her shoulder bag, careful not to reveal her purchases, and paid him in cash. This, however, did not surprise him.

A man who'd come in after her waited patiently until she'd been served, busying himself looking at the miniature cameras.

By five-thirty she was back in her room, her purchases laid out on the table in front of her. Her little bottle of pills was by her glass of champagne – just a half-bottle from the minibar, to celebrate – and the cocaine ready on her make-up mirror. This time she'd do it the way they did it in the films. God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

She picked up the phone and languidly pressed Dieter's number.

‘Dieter … is that you? Now about tonight – you
are
still free, aren't you? Why don't you come here for dinner? … Good, about eight … Oh and Dieter … I
did
appreciate your sweet present. Where did you get it? I'd so like to buy some for myself … well, if you can spare it … how lovely. I'll see you at eight. Bye.'

Jenni sat back. This was happiness.

‘So you've heard the rumours then?'

Carter was smiling as he asked the question. He and Tom were standing at the improvised bar set up after the conference. Behind the white-draped trestle table comfortable middle-aged women in black-and-white served drinks while other, even more mumsy types mingled with trays of canapés. Tom was more relaxed than Geoffrey had ever seen him. Jenni had got held up in Vienna and would be away an extra night and Tom seemed like a different man. A very likeable one, too often held rigidly in control either at work or under his wife's always watchful eye.

Tom surveyed the scene with some pride. He liked hosting the occasional gathering of his peers and was proud of his force's headquarters, a building of some history. They had dealt with the thorny question of decriminalising underage prostitution and now they were relaxing, some faster than others.

Tom looked at Carter; he noticed how white his teeth were. He noticed because Jenni had mentioned them. She had something of an obsession with teeth.

‘They must be caps – or he bleaches them, yes, that must be it. He uses that stain-removing paste.'

By the time she'd finished Geoffrey Carter had had every tooth in his head out and dipped in hydrochloric acid so he could be Crime Tsar, soundbite- and photo-friendly. Anything to get one over on Tom Shackleton.

Tom looked again. They were real and they were natural. He smiled, looking out across the room, aware they were even more subjects of speculation than Carter's dental ware. His own smile was constructed to conceal his teeth, not that they were bad or misshapen,
just a little crowded at the top causing him to draw his upper lip down and turn the corners of his mouth up giving him that shy appearance when he smiled. Women found it devastatingly attractive, men just thought he wasn't much given to smiling.

‘Yes, it's me for the Met and you for the Crime Tsar, I hear.'

Carter looked at him over the rim of his glass; his eyes were sparkling with conspiracy. He raised his eyebrows.

‘Well?'

Shackleton was friendly, easy, non-competitive.

‘Well what?'

‘Happy?' Carter asked, and Shackleton saw it hadn't even occurred to him that Tom might want the Tsardom.

He saw himself as he imagined Carter saw him, someone who'd done well, risen beyond his roots, a man who'd be more than proud to achieve the position of Commissioner. A man with little imagination, a policeman's policeman. He saw in Carter's eyes he wasn't even a threat, not in the same class. It had never occurred to him, or the shadows behind him, to consider Shackleton.

Tom suddenly felt like a child who's performed his tricks and been patted on the head. Now the grown-ups would go about their business with no further thought of his precocity. And that's what really bit, that no matter how high he got he was still just Tom. Oh, Tom'll do that. Oh, give that to Tom. That's good enough for Tom. No, Tom's good enough for that.

‘What do you think?' Carter asked.

Did he want an answer? Was he asking through politeness or was this a fishing trip?

‘Well, I haven't been appointed yet. As far as I know it's just the Serious Rumour Squad working overtime.'

‘Sure. Sure,' Carter nodded, dropping peanuts into his mouth.

He had only once looked at Shackleton, the rest of the time his eyes roamed the room, benign, smiling, watching over their flock. Shackleton watched too, his midnight eyes alert, cold, the eyes of a predator.

‘What about you? The Tsardom, you've been approached?'

‘They haven't officially asked yet. Presumably they have to advertise. Go through the motions.'

Shackleton nodded, envious of Carter's smooth nonchalance. Carter didn't have to look at him for the next question, he knew Shackleton didn't have a choice.

‘Will you take the Met?'

They were aware of the other chiefs' awareness of them as thoroughbreds. But only one winner.

A waitress drifted past carrying a tray of unidentifiable mouth-fillers. Shackleton stopped her, a delaying tactic. He picked up something soft and pink on an inch of biscuit. Automatically he half smiled his thanks to her. She frowned back at him and sucked the air through her lips and teeth.

He was confused, unexpectedly off balance.

It was the big one, the voluptuous one, the one that made him feel inadequate. He involuntarily made a little giggle, incongruous in a man of his size and position, a leftover from the awkwardnesses of his adolescence.

‘Hello …' he said. He had a way of saying the word that sounded at once intimate and apologetic. Like his diffident smile it charmed women and irritated men.

It had neither effect on the waitress, she just turned her great body towards Carter and stared at him. Despite himself he was shocked by his quick response to the sheer sexuality of the woman.

‘You watch him, Geoffrey, cos for all your big brain you don't have what he's got.' She laughed loud enough for people to look round.

Two women chief constables were amused by the appearance of reverse sexual harassment. Both Carter and Shackleton looked very uncomfortable. She laughed and sashayed off with her tray. The tension between Carter and Shackleton was palpable.

Carter broke it.

‘Care in the community, eh?'

Shackleton laughed, relief making Carter's comment very funny.

‘Want another drink?'

Carter had turned to the bar; Shackleton looked at his relaxed, well-tailored back. No pearl handle there and he was surprised to find himself thinking how little he wanted to see one. He liked Carter. He recoiled from the feeling. His spotlessly empty soul was becoming cluttered.

He had once had an apartment in Los Angeles – another conference, was it armed police or zero tolerance? He couldn't remember. He'd made his way from the bedroom to the kitchen for a glass of water in the middle of the night, without turning on the lights. At
the sink he groped for the switch and pushed it. The satisfyingly clean metal surface of the sink was a moving, glittering mass of cockroaches. They scattered in the light and disappeared. He had examined his interior landscape not long before and seen only his own reflection in its stainless surface. Now? A mess of emotions, feelings, unwelcome compulsions. The pain before the birth of conscience.

‘Just a mineral water – Gordon's driving.'

Carter appreciated the joke. There was a bond between them. The two most envied men in a room full of disguised ambition and well-cultivated indifference.

‘How is Gordon?'

Shackleton was again impressed by Carter's ability to smooth over, move on, while he was still screwed on the black woman's warning.

‘Gordon? He went fishing last week and brought us some of his catch.'

Carter handed him the mineral water. His expression was encouraging, interested. Again Shackleton pulled away from liking him.

‘Good eating?'

‘They were goldfish. In a bag. From the petshop.'

Carter registered just the right amount of quizzical amusement.

‘Was it a joke?'

Shackleton laughed. It was a real laugh and he enjoyed the feel of it.

‘Geoffrey – you've met Gordon. Did you find a sense of humour?'

The chief of one of the more rural forces came towards them. He was a ‘lucky to get it' chief. The word in ACPO was Shackleton had done everything in his power to get the man a force when he was Shackleton's deputy. That he had been pulled into the Chief's office to be told what the Chief was going to do, not because he was good, as gossip never tired of telling, but because Shackleton disliked him so much and thought so little of his abilities he simply wanted him off his patch.

And Jenni hated him.

Of all the irrational dislikes she took to people her antipathy towards this man was the most implacable. Her youngest daughter – Tom's contribution was always overlooked unless as part of an accusation – the later sensible Jacinta, had been caught with an early-vintage
Ecstasy tablet in her pocket and had been taken into custody, aged sixteen. The Shackletons were at a dinner and unaccountable.

Barnard, the object of Jenni's special loathing, had been phoned. He could have let Jacinta off with a caution, used some discretion, but instead insisted on her being charged and had not contacted Tom through his pager. Jacinta had spent four hours in the cells and was hysterical by the time her screaming mother arrived. Barnard was, as always, an uninspired follower of rules and utterly unaffected by the beautiful, if highly strung, Mrs Shackleton. This stoked Jenni's hatred of the tall, grey-minded man whose vowels were as flat and unprepossessing as his policeman's feet. The girl was found to be in possession of a class A drug and Barnard's days as Shackleton's deputy were numbered in the hastily quieted flurry of press interest.

He stood in front of Carter and Shackleton, a tall man inclined to arch his back slightly, and looked down his long undistinguished face.

‘Hello, Tom, Geoffrey. I hear congratulations are in order.'

He was regarding Carter as a stork might an interesting clump of grass. Carter widened his eyes in a charming cover-all expression.

Barnard took it as confirmation.

‘Crime Tsar, eh? Good.'

He looked at Shackleton with a thin wisp of a smile.

‘Best man for the job, eh?'

His words were intended to slap like the glove that calls for a duel. Shackleton just nodded.

‘Still, no doubt you'll get the leavings. Your New Labour bone, eh? The Met, I hear. Well, you know what they say, to be a copper you only have to be able to read and write, but to be Commissioner of the Met you only have to know someone who can read and write.'

Even though all three men had known this joke since training he still had to cross every T and dot every I. Barnard never made a leap of imagination where a route march of pedantry would do. He laughed his desiccated laugh and wandered off, satisfied, looking forward to telling his wife of Shackleton's discomfiture over a medium dry sherry.

Carter remembered the stories about their enmity and thought he'd never met a man as inept at knowing who not to offend as Tom Shackleton. Amongst his peers no one really liked or trusted him; he
seemed to have no friends and was altogether too exotic for many. The expensive suits, the overly well-modulated voice, the costly home and wife, but most alien and envied was his ability to climb the greasy pole with never a glance back at those that had helped him or down at those on whose shoulders he stood.

Cold bastard, thought Carter, himself the acceptable face of blind ambition.

He was careful not to pick up on Barnard's pleasure. His innate good manners and public-school conditioning made him avoid any subject that threatened contention or unpleasantness.

‘How's Jenni?'

Safe ground. No man's land.

‘Oh, you know, too busy, too popular –'

‘Too beautiful,' broke in Carter.

Shackleton was surprised, off balance again. Did Carter find Jenni attractive? Shackleton searched for the right reaction. None came.

It was Carter's turn for confusion. He did it disarmingly.

‘Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean … I do apologise. I meant no offence.'