The Crime Tsar (10 page)

She unscrewed the top of the nail varnish and slowly drew out the encarmined brush. The laser moved on, releasing another set of thought words. Her husband was basically a kind man, a good man, but undeveloped, a blank canvas. Ambitious but not focused. His general success was due to his single-minded application to the job; his specific success was due to Jenni's vision, her ability to see into the future.

But she wasn't sure he would know how much depended on the outcome of this night. The words constructed and deconstructed
themselves as she painted a perfect line of red down the centre of the pale nail of her index finger.

Kit, seeing his grandfather on the television, jumped up and down on the cushions of the settee, screeching and laughing with the humourless overexcitement of a child. The bottle of nail varnish, as if caught in a cross wind, toppled and spilled on to Jenni's cream linen trousers.

A flaming wall of fury engulfed Jenni. She caught hold of the little boy by the shoulder. He was frozen with terror as she leaned over him. Unable to cry or even breathe, he stared up into Jenni's face. She didn't look like his granny any more – he tried to squirm away, to call his mother, but she held him tighter.

Jenni had slipped out of reality. The child on the settee was detached from her, an object held at the end of an arm in a hand that wasn't hers. She moved her hand up to his throat and held him quite lightly, her long nails barely touching his white unfinished skin. The distress the child was feeling was interesting. Would inflicting more pain on him make it more interesting? Could she go against nature? Jenni had never come so close to the thin barrier between her civilisation and the closed-off, stagnant pools of her barbarity.

She felt a power, a detached desire to see suffering, death. Her hand itched to know how it would feel to stop the life held in it. Giving life had taken control away from Jenni. She had felt herself powerless during pregnancy and birth. Used. At the mercy of a greater force as this petrified child was now.

She knew if she could squeeze the life out of him, if she could cause him more pain, there would be nothing in the future that she would stop at. To know she could torture and kill without pleasure or revulsion would release her from the restrictions of moral teaching. The future would be free of guilt or conscience.

She knew she could do it. A wave of liberation washed over her. She didn't have to go any further; it was her choice not to go on. The voice of society, the threat of retribution, didn't stop her – she stopped herself because she knew she could just as easily go on.

The phone rang. She laughed and kissed Kit, then, releasing him with a caress on his cheek, picked up the handset. The child was too frightened to call out or cry, he just cowered in the cushions unable to take his eyes off his grandmother. She smiled at him and ran the painted red nail gently down his nose. He really was a lovely-looking
boy. She could see Tom's sweet vulnerability in those great eyes. That look that at once attracted and infuriated her.

‘Hello.'

‘Jenni? It's Eleri. What on earth have our husbands got themselves into now?'

Jenni could hear the noise of the television and children in the background. She could see in her mind the domestic chaos of the house and Eleri voluptuous and unmade up, dressed in one of her husband's shirts and a pair of multi-pocketed trousers. No shoes.

‘Saving the world, no doubt.'

‘Look, Jenni, Geoffrey called me before they went – he had a feeling it might not go too smoothly. Anyway, we thought if you were on your own you might like to come over. You're very welcome. It's just me and the boys.'

Oddly, Jenni's hackles didn't rise at this cosy and utterly inappropriate suggestion. There was something so warm about Eleri and her fondness for Jenni and Tom was so transparently genuine that Jenni, despite her initial suspicion, liked her. She liked Eleri as she would have a scatty but aristocratic red setter.

‘Oh Eleri, that's such a sweet thought but I've the family here. And I really ought to be home for Tom when it finishes.'

Eleri quite understood and the two women said their goodbyes without articulating their real feelings about what was happening. Jenni put down the phone, Eleri already forgotten. The little boy was still rigid on the sofa, staring at his grandmother. Jenni smiled at him, although he had provoked her … She felt a sudden surge of affection for him. He was, after all, the next generation of the Shackletons. A dynasty she had created.

‘Tamsin,' she called. ‘Bring Kit some biscuits – I'm going to change my trousers.'

On the television an aggressive young woman was debating with an aggressive young man what the youths would do with the two chief constables.

The three women had taken off Tom's jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. He was put on a fourth chair. This one two pieces of carved wood that slotted into each other to form a low, high-backed chair. He was nervous it wouldn't take his weight but it was
surprisingly comfortable. It forced him to sit back. Relax. The sky was clear and the stars brighter than usual in England. The night was hot. Dry. Good rioting weather. His burned skin was painful now, an insistent pain that pulsed with his heartbeat.

The thin woman had gone into the flat and returned with a plastic bucket and a bulging carrier bag emblazoned with
HARRODS – THE SALE
. She put the bucket down in front of the fat woman and sat in her sagging deckchair. They were now a circle with the bucket in the centre.

The African woman, unsmiling and unblinking, reached into the carrier bag. She pulled out a bottle of oil. It had no label and when she unscrewed the top and poured a thin gold stream into the bucket it smelled of smooth Mediterranean geranium leaves. A sharp sweet smell. The desiccated woman took out a bunch of herbs and tore them roughly before dropping them into the bucket.

Tom watched, recognised the leaves as khat, a drug favoured by West Africans. Illegal. He wanted to say something but, as if from a distance, he saw himself unable to speak. With a sort of removed disapproval he watched the big woman stir the leaves into the oil with his swagger stick. Where did she get it? Where was Gordon? He should be going home – Jenni would be in one of her moods.

As the great brown hand stirred, the other two women added more things from the carrier bag. A bottle of spring water, powders and the foul-smelling contents of three small plastic syringes.

Tom knew he should get up and walk away but couldn't. He'd once been hypnotised at a club. He was a young PC and desperate to fit in; he'd volunteered. Unwilling to say it hadn't worked he went along with the mumbo jumbo and cooperated with the tatty hypnotist. Then he'd decided enough was enough and tried to leave the stage. He found he couldn't. Sitting with these three women round a plastic bucket on the edge of a restless inner-city estate, he felt the same helplessness.

The women were singing softly over the brew, which was giving off a strange attractive repellent smell. With an effort he got his brain to identify it. Tom tried to discipline his mind into creating concrete thoughts. It was the sharp clinging odour he'd smelled between women's legs. At once comforting and repulsive, it was so strong he could taste it.

The African woman moved behind him and leaned over his
shoulder to take his wrists in her long elegant fingers. He felt the skin of her cheek against his own. He was surprised at the softness of it. He couldn't stop himself – he reached up, her hand still on his arm, and touched her face. He couldn't see what he touched but it felt like the scales of dead fish. Cold and smooth one way, cutting the other. He pulled back, shocked. The women laughed.

‘Here,' said the big one, shifting her great bulk so he could see the ravine between her breasts. The top buttons of her dress had given up the struggle and the thin cotton gaped open. She scooped up a handful of the sludge from the bucket. The black hands on his wrists gripped him and held out his burned hands. He felt fear but the fear was someone else's. He watched the women apply the ointment to his skin. The relief was immediate, cool, like being wrapped in cotton sheets on a hot night.

‘Now, Thomas …'

The big woman was smiling at him, holding his hands in hers. Hers were bigger.

‘Drink this.'

The thin one dipped a royal-wedding mug into the bucket then diluted the contents with British sherry from a bottle by her chair. He didn't resist. He drank.

‘I want you to listen to us, Thomas.'

The three women were now sitting, watching him. The big one continued, still smiling, still vast with welcoming flesh.

‘You've got a big future, Thomas. You are going to get what you want.'

‘What you deserve,' added the thin one. Her voice was dry and brittle, a voice heard in bus queues.

The African woman spoke, her accent so strong he almost didn't understand what she said.

‘That is not the same thing. We are telling him about his dreams. Not his nightmares.'

‘Don't confuse him.'

The great warm brown face in front of him was kind, affectionate. She didn't want him upset. He could feel her affection for him. Her maternal care. The care he'd always longed for but learned couldn't be trusted. He wanted to ask questions. He wanted a drink of water. He wanted milk and a dash – no, cup of tea. Milk and a dash was what he'd drunk as a child in rare moments of comfort at his
mother's hands. Cup of tea was better. He wanted to leave. He couldn't.

‘Thomas, what is it you want?'

Shackleton found it difficult to formulate the words. As if in slow motion he said, ‘Commissioner. Metropolitan Police …'

He couldn't read the women's expressions. Their faces were closed as if they hadn't heard him.

‘I want … to be … the Commissioner.'

They nodded.

‘But … Carter's favourite. Geoffrey Carter …'

He didn't feel drunk, just distant, as if watching himself down the wrong end of a telescope. He knew it must be a dream because he never told anyone his wants, his needs. No one. Jenni told him what he wanted.

The blue-black face and blank eyes of the African woman came close to his.

‘Carter's story is not your story. You want what you want, he'll get what he gets.'

The other two faces crowded in on him.

‘So you be careful, Thomas, careful you stay in your story – don't you go stray into someone else's or you'll go mash up the future. You mash up the future and that will bring badness. Death in your soul. You hear me, Thomas? You hear me? The Wages Of Sin Is Death.'

Their voices were as distant as a nurse's calling from the other side of an anaesthetic but they were conjuring pictures of his future. They had made him articulate his desire and in escaping into the air his words had made that desire concrete. His ambition now roosted in the dark trees like maggotpies, choughs and rooks.

Gordon rang the doorbell. Lucy watched from the darkness of her living room. She couldn't see Shackleton in the car. She had seen the end of the siege on television. Watched Tom help his badly burned colleague through the blue-and-white tape. Listened to him talk, relieved and quietly courageous, now his car was home. But no Tom.

The front door opened and Jenni stood talking to Gordon for a moment, then the two of them went to the car, followed by Jason, Tamsin and Jacinta. Lucy watched dully as they pulled Shackleton, inert, from the back seat. They looked so close she felt excluded,
irrelevant. They carried him into the house. The security light went off. Lucy felt as though she was straining to see through black glass.

Inside the house an argument had started about what to do with Tom. Jenni was convinced he was drunk and was disgusted. Gordon tried to reassure her he was ill and exhausted. Jason seeing his burns insisted on calling a doctor.

‘God … he stinks. Where has he been?'

Gordon didn't reply. Whatever he said to Mrs Shackleton would be wrong, it always was.

‘Gordon, you weasel, why does the Chief smell like that?'

Gordon gave his impression of a deaf mute with learning difficulties.

‘All right, take him upstairs, to the guest bedroom. That stink will get into everything. Is it that stuff on his hands? Jacinta, get some water and wash your father's hands. Who put it there? Was it a doctor? Oh God, I don't know why I bother.'

Gordon watched her run up the stairs and followed, almost carrying Tom. With the Chief's head on his shoulder he tried to separate the poison from the saccharine in Mrs Shackleton's words. As usual he couldn't. As usual he kept his mouth shut.

Jenni immediately opened the windows of the slightly musty room. Gordon started to undress Shackleton, thinking he was to be put to bed.

‘Leave him alone.' Jenni realised she was too sharp. Too out of character.

‘I'm sorry, Gordon. I'll do that. You go home. Off you go. It's obviously been a long day and a hard one, eh?'

Gordon nodded and smiled, glad to be released. All he wanted was to be rid of the gun and on the outside of a modest drink. The only thing that had really frightened him all night was the Chief's wife.

Jason passed Gordon on the stairs and tried to be polite but Gordon was gone before he could make up for his mother's lack of manners.

Jenni was sitting watching Tom from a distance when Jason went into the bedroom. He was lying spread-eagled on the bed, his shirt half undone by Gordon. He was sweating and mumbling.

‘Drunk,' said Jenni.

‘No, I don't think so, Mem. Really. Look at him, he's ill. Really. Look.'

But Jenni just sat hugging herself, wanting but unwilling to touch him. The smell she could smell on him she'd come across before. It was the smell of the Gnome's breath. The smell of women.

Jason knew better than to go on. He undressed his father and pulled the duvet over him. Gently he laid the burned hands on the top; there were blisters too on the side of his face and ear. The girls fussed in carrying water and an odd selection from Jenni's first-aid box. Jason saw athlete's-foot powder and surgical spirit.