She flashed him a cold smile. ‘Well, strictly speaking, the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 allows the authorities to bring in a child-safety order and have him placed under the supervision of a social worker or a youth-offending team, even if he isn’t yet ten.’ She must have seen Shepherd’s horror because she put up her hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Mr Shepherd, I’m just explaining the law,’ she said. ‘Trust me, there’s no question of the police or social workers being involved. But carrying a weapon in school is not something we can tolerate. On the rare occasions it’s happened here, we have excluded the pupil immediately.’
‘You mean you want to throw Liam out?’
‘We have no choice, Mr Shepherd. We have a policy of zero tolerance and we must show that we act on it.’
‘He wasn’t threatening anyone with it, was he?’
‘That’s not really the point,’ said the headteacher. ‘But, no, he was just showing it to his classmates. Do you have any idea where he might have got it from?’
Shepherd took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘It’s mine,’ he said eventually. ‘Well, not mine exactly. I took it from a mugger on the Underground. I was going to destroy it but Liam must have found it. Mrs Hale-Barton, I really can’t apologise enough for this, but I’m at least partly to blame. I left it in the house – in my bathroom, actually, but he goes in there all the time. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm by bringing it in.’
The headteacher frowned. ‘You took it from a mugger? I don’t understand.’
‘I’m sorry – I thought you knew that I’m a police officer,’ said Shepherd.
‘No, I didn’t. Liam’s file has you down as being in the army.’
‘I don’t shout about it,’ said Shepherd. He took out his wallet and handed her his warrant card. ‘I left the army some time ago. I’m not a uniformed officer, I have more of an administrative role.’ He gestured at his clothing. ‘I was actually on my way back from a friend’s boat when my au pair called.’
‘You tackled a mugger?’
‘Actually, he tackled me,’ said Shepherd. ‘He didn’t know I was in the job – just wanted my watch and mobile. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘And you disarmed him?’ She handed back the warrant card and Shepherd slid it into his wallet.
‘That sounds more dramatic than it was,’ he said. ‘We grappled and I took it off him. I don’t know which of us was more scared. Look, this is absolutely my fault, Mrs Hale-Barton. I shouldn’t have had the knife in the house. I should have handed it in straight away but it slipped my mind. I’ve a lot on my plate at the moment, not that that’s any excuse. I promise Liam will never do anything like this again – he’s a good boy generally, isn’t he? He’s never been in trouble before?’
‘He works hard and behaves well,’ said the headteacher. ‘Especially when you consider what he’s been through, losing his mother.’
‘He’s a great kid,’ said Shepherd, and gestured at the knife. ‘He just made a mistake with that. And it’s not one he’ll repeat.’
The headteacher picked up the knife and grimaced. ‘What a horrible thing,’ she said. She pressed the button and flinched as the blade sprang out. ‘And the mugger was trying to stab you with this?’ she asked.
Shepherd nodded. ‘He was just a teenager. Only a few years older than Liam.’
The headteacher shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to,’ she said. ‘Violence within our school is very rare, but I wonder how well we’re preparing our pupils for life in the real world. You must see it all the time, doing what you do.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘I’m not really in the firing line,’ he lied, ‘but you’re right. Gun crime is at an all-time high. We have drive-by shootings and stabbings and all the other things we used to associate with American cities. These days there’s more violent crime in London than there is in New York.’
The headteacher pressed the blade with the palm of her hand, trying to get it back into place.
‘Let me,’ said Shepherd. He took the knife from her, depressed the chrome button and clicked the blade back into its safe position.
‘The council has a facility for disposing of knives, so perhaps I should take care of it,’ said the headteacher. She held out her hand and Shepherd gave it back to her. She put it back in the drawer. ‘As I said, we have a policy,’ she said. ‘Zero tolerance.’
‘I understand. But I don’t see that excluding Liam is going to change anything. He made a mistake. He wasn’t carrying a knife out of badness, just curiosity. And I really do blame myself for having it in the house in the first place.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. ‘Do you keep a gun at home?’
‘Generally it’s the armed-response teams of SO19 who carry weapons,’ said Shepherd, ‘and they’re locked away at the station when the men are off duty.’ It wasn’t exactly a lie, he thought. He’d just evaded the question. He did keep a gun in the house, but not anywhere that Liam would find it. Sue had always been insistent that he stored any gun under lock and key and that Liam was never to be aware of it.
‘Do you think we’ll ever get to the stage where our policemen carry guns as a matter of course?’
‘Probably,’ said Shepherd. ‘There are just too many guns in the hands of drug-dealers and the like, these days. You can’t expect unarmed policemen to give chase down a dark alley blowing their whistles as they did in the days of Dixon of Dock Green. The world has changed, and the police have to change with it. It’s like patrol cars – the villains drive faster vehicles so we have to upgrade our transport. There’s no point in ours having a top speed of a hundred if the villains are roaring along at a hundred and twenty.’
‘I suppose not,’ said the headteacher. She sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s beside the point, isn’t it? We have to decide what to do with young Liam.’
‘He’s very settled here,’ said Shepherd. ‘I really, really don’t want to have to move him. So much of his life has changed recently that he needs the stability school offers him. My wife was killed and then he stayed with his grandparents for a while. Now at least we’re a family again.’
‘I do understand, Mr Shepherd.’ She chewed her lip, then nodded slowly. ‘You’re right, of course. Excluding him will do more harm than good. I’ll speak to him and make it clear that he’s had a lucky escape. But you must talk to him too, Mr Shepherd, and there has to be some sort of punishment.’
‘His PlayStation and the television set in his room will go. And he’ll do housework until it comes out of his ears.’
The headteacher smiled. ‘That should be enough,’ she said. She stood up and offered her hand. Shepherd shook it over the desk. ‘We haven’t seen you at any of the PTA meetings, have we?’ she said.
‘I’ve been busy,’ said Shepherd, ‘but I’ll make time in future, I promise.’
‘Excellent,’ said the headteacher. ‘And perhaps one day you could come in and give a talk to our pupils – a career in the modern police force, something like that.’
‘Sure,’ agreed Shepherd, although he doubted that the headteacher would appreciate him giving her pupils a rundown on life as an undercover officer. He’d been shot at more times than he cared to remember, and he’d lied, cheated and conned his way into the lives of numerous villains so that he could put them behind bars. Shepherd loved the job and relished its challenges, but it wasn’t the sort of profession that a seventeen-year-old should be nudged towards. And the way the police were going, he wouldn’t recommend any youngster to sign up straight from school. Police pay wasn’t great, while political correctness and mounting paperwork meant that the job was as much about protecting your back as it was about putting villains away. The only way to make a decent career was to go in as a graduate on the fast-track promotion scheme, but then it was more about climbing the greasy pole than it was about fighting crime. Shepherd had always been happier at the sharp end. As a soldier he had wanted to be where the bullets were fly
ing. As a police officer, he wanted to be head-to-head with the bad guys. But explaining that to a group of impressionable schoolchildren probably wasn’t what the lovely Mrs Hale-Barton had in mind.
‘Liam’s still in class,’ she said. ‘School finishes in ten minutes. I can have him brought here or you can wait for him at the gates.’
‘No problem, I’ll wait outside,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’m really grateful for you giving Liam another chance.’
He waited at the school gates until he heard the bell ring. Thirty seconds later the doors banged open and pupils flooded out, laughing and shouting. On the road a line of four-wheel-drives stretched into the distance as far as he could see, engines running. Shepherd stood with his hands in his pockets, wondering what he should say to Liam. Discipline was the part of parenting he hated most, but kids needed boundaries: they needed to be told what their limits were and kept to them. They had to be taught the difference between right and wrong, and when they did wrong they had to be punished. Shepherd hated punishing his son. He’d never laid a finger on him. Never had and never would. He’d always left the disciplining to Sue when she was alive. Good cop, bad cop. She’d administer the punishments, and Shepherd would flash his son a sympathetic smile when she wasn’t looking. It was only after she had gone that Shepherd had understood how much she must have hated the bad-cop role.
Shepherd saw Liam among a group of youngsters, all with their ties at half-mast and their shirt collars open. A grin broke across Liam’s face, which vanished when he realised why his father was there. He slowed and stared at the ground, avoiding Shepherd’s baleful stare.
He muttered something as he got close.
‘What?’ said Shepherd.
‘I said I’m sorry,’ Liam mumbled.
‘You are in so much trouble,’ said Shepherd.
‘I know,’ said Liam. ‘They’re going to exclude me.’
‘No, they’re not,’ said Shepherd. He started walking away and Liam hurried after him. Shepherd held up his right hand, the thumb and first finger almost touching. ‘But you were this close to getting kicked out. You’re lucky the headteacher decided to give you a break. What the hell were you thinking of?’
‘I don’t know. It just looked kind of cool.’
Shepherd stopped dead. ‘Cool? There’s nothing cool about knives.’
‘I’d never seen a flick-knife for real, only on telly.’
‘Yeah? Well, the reason for that, Liam, is that they’ve been banned since 1959. Since before I was born. And since 1988 no one has been allowed to carry any knife with a blade more than three inches long unless they’ve a very good reason. And why would you even think you could go waving it around at school?’ He started walking again.
Liam followed. ‘I wasn’t waving it, Dad. I was just showing it to my friends.’
‘Well, your little show-and-tell has cost you your PlayStation. And the TV comes out of your room. And I want you to help Katra with the washing and cleaning. You’re going to be in the garden every weekend, pulling up weeds.’
‘Okay,’ said Liam.
‘You know how dangerous knives are, right?’
‘Of course.’
‘And flick-knives are just about the most dangerous of them all. You press the button and the blade is there. It serves only one purpose. It’s not like a Swiss Army knife. The only thing you can do with a flick-knife is attack someone.’
Liam said nothing.
‘Do you know where I got it from?’
Liam shook his head.
‘Someone tried to stick it into me. And they weren’t playing. The only reason you carry a weapon like that is if you want to hurt someone. And you don’t want to hurt anyone, do you?’
‘No. I just wanted to show it to my friends.’
‘Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had taken it off you and started waving it around? Someone could have been cut – or worse. And it would have been your fault. What were you doing in my bathroom anyway?’
‘I wanted some toothpaste and I saw the knife by the basin.’
‘You shouldn’t have taken it, Liam. Hell, if you’d asked me about it I could have explained what it was and why I had it. Why didn’t you ask me first?’
Liam was silent.
‘Because you knew I’d say no, right?’
‘I guess.’
‘So you knew that what you were doing was wrong, didn’t you?’
Still Liam said nothing.
‘That makes it worse. You were being sneaky.’
‘I wasn’t, Dad.’
‘You thought that if I didn’t know you had it you could take it to school. That’s being sneaky. I thought you were better than that, Liam.’
Liam muttered under his breath.
‘What?’ said Shepherd.
‘I said I’m sorry,’ said Liam.
‘Okay,’ said Shepherd. ‘And I’m sorry, too.’
‘For what?’
‘For having it in the house. For not locking it away. We both made mistakes, kid, but it’s not the end of the world.’
‘So will you have a punishment, too?’ asked Liam.
Shepherd pointed a finger at his son. ‘It’s punishment enough being your father sometimes,’ he said. ‘Don’t push your luck. And we’d better get a move on, because you’re going to be cleaning the toilet before dinner.’
Shepherd took the Central Line to Tottenham Court Road, walked down Oxford Street, checking reflections in store windows, and headed into the Virgin megastore. He spent a full fifteen minutes in the classical-music section, then wandered round hip-hop, checking faces. There was no overlap.
He took the escalator to the ground floor, then walked along Oxford Street to Borders bookstore. He took the escalator up, then went down in the lift, did a final check at Oxford Circus Underground station then left through the Regent Street south exit and walked as rapidly as the crowd of shoppers allowed to the Ritz Hotel.
He felt underdressed as soon as he entered the lobby. Even the receptionists were better dressed than he was and for a moment he regretted not putting on a suit. He’d known there would be a dress code so he’d forgone his regular jeans and put on grey flannel trousers but he’d decided to keep his leather jacket. He didn’t exactly blend in, but here it was more about having the right attitude than about the name on the label inside a suit.
He heard the sound of clinking cutlery and a piano to his left and strode confidently in that direction. Middle-aged women in Gucci and Chanel, wearing Rolex or Cartier watches, were nibbling at finger sandwiches and sipping tea from delicate china cups, trying not to disturb their perfectly applied make-up. He scanned the faces. Botoxed foreheads. Lifted brows. Collagen lips. Bleached hair. Then he saw a face that was smiling naturally, without the benefit of a surgeon’s intervention. Dark chestnut hair, brown eyes that were almost black and a well-cut dark blue jacket and skirt that suggested quiet professionalism rather than ostentatious spending. She got to her feet and flashed him a small wave. He wasn’t surprised that she had recognised him so easily. Charlotte Button would have had access to his Metropolitan Police file: she would know everything about him and would have seen every photograph, surveillance and official, that had ever been taken of him.
He went over to her and shook her hand. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said.
She glanced at the discreet Rolex on her left wrist. ‘You’re bang on time,’ she said. ‘I’ve only just got here myself.’
She sat down and smoothed her skirt. Shepherd sat opposite her. A young waiter in black hovered at her shoulder and she ordered afternoon tea for two, with English Breakfast and Blue Mountain coffee. Shepherd knew that the coffee was for him and she went up another notch in his estimation: that she had remembered he didn’t drink tea showed that she was attentive to detail.
‘I though we could have a bite as we talk,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the go all day.’
‘No problem,’ he said. There were only half a dozen men in the
room and he was the youngest by a good two decades. It wasn’t the sort of place Hargrove would have suggested as a venue.
When he looked back at Button, he was surprised to find her smiling at him. ‘I can hazard a guess as to what you’re thinking, Dan. I hope you don’t mind me being so informal, but I can hardly keep calling you Mr Shepherd.’
‘Dan’s fine.’
‘So, you’re probably thinking, tea at the Ritz, she’s a fast-track Oxbridge graduate, Cheltenham Ladies’ College perhaps, rode to hounds as a kid, father was a lawyer or maybe even a judge, mother spent her time on various charitable committees, family connections got her into Five, silver spoon, playing at a career until she finds the right man to make her happy. Am I close?’
‘Close.’ Shepherd grinned. ‘I’d have said your father was a doctor, though.’
Button smiled. ‘No, he was a lawyer,’ she said. ‘There’s the thing, Dan. I’ve been able to go through your file with a fine-tooth comb and there’s almost nothing I don’t know about you. But my working life is a closed book. Totally hidden from view to all but those with the highest security clearance.’
She stopped speaking as the waiter reappeared with a laden tray. With a minimum of fuss he put down the pot of tea and the cafetière of coffee, a selection of sandwiches and cakes, then left with a courteous half-bow. ‘Isn’t the service just out of this world?’ she said to Shepherd.
Shepherd figured that the question was rhetorical, so he shrugged. She picked up the cafetière and poured coffee into his cup, then added a splash of milk. Just as he liked it. He glanced at her left hand. No wedding ring. Her nails were short with clear varnish. And there was a faint nicotine stain between the first and second fingers of her right hand. At least she had one weakness.
‘I much prefer tea,’ said Button, ‘and the English Breakfast here is the best there is. I like the sandwiches they do too. And the cakes.’
‘So we’re at the Ritz because you like cucumber sandwiches,’ said Shepherd. ‘I get the picture.’
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