by James Craig
Wearing jeans, trainers and a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt, the boy sat at a desk, drawing on a piece of paper with a green crayon. He was concentrating hard, with his tongue poking out of one corner of his mouth. For the first time, it struck Hagger that he was a good-looking lad. Must get it from me, he thought. A teaching assistant stood at a sink in the far corner of the room, tidying away a selection of paints and brushes. She had her back to them and didn’t turn round when he entered the room.
Jake saw him and made a face. ‘What are you doing here?’
Hagger forced a small smile. ‘I’ve come to pick you up.’
Jake looked confused. ‘You never pick me up.’
‘Well, I am today,’ Hagger replied through gritted teeth.
‘Where’s Mum?’
Hagger reached over and patted him on the head.
‘I’m picking you up today,’ he repeated. ‘I thought it would be nice.’
The teaching assistant was still busy putting caps back on tubes of paint.
‘Mum always picks me up,’ the boy said stubbornly. ‘Or Amelia.’
A right pair of useless, lazy bitches, Hagger decided. ‘They said I could come and get you today.’
‘Mum says you’re a complete bastard,’ Jake said casually, lowering his gaze and pressing the crayon harder into the paper. ‘And a total cunt,’ he added, swapping his green crayon for a red one.
‘Does she now?’ Hagger bristled.
‘What is a cunt, anyway?’
‘Nothing.’
The boy looked up. ‘It’s a bad word, isn’t it?’
‘She’s only joking.’ Hagger grinned nervously. He glanced towards the back of the room but the teaching assistant clearly hadn’t heard. She had the taps running now, washing out some pots.’
‘Amelia too.’
‘They love me really. Just like you, eh?’
Jake still didn’t look up. ‘I want to wait for Mum.’
Hagger had expected this reaction from the boy. He knew that he had to be quick. He couldn’t afford a scene. Dropping a small bag of jelly babies on the desk, he whispered, ‘I thought we could go and get an ice cream.’
The boy grabbed the sweets and stood up. ‘Okay,’ he said, tearing open the packet. He looked up at his father. ‘Then can I go and see Mum?’
‘Of course.’
Happy to be on his own for once, Dominic Silver relaxed on a couch in his house on Meard Street in Soho. Gideon Spanner, his eyes and ears on the street, was out on his rounds and so Silver had the place to himself. The room was silent apart from the hum of traffic outside, interrupted by the occasional burst of a police siren. He had muted the television, on which was playing a rerun of Evander Holyfield’s 1989 fight with Michael Dokes, to focus on a report in the Evening Standard. It was the unremarkable story of two drug dealers who were due to be sent down for up to twenty-seven years after police found two holdalls containing 50 kilograms of heroin in the boot of their car. The report claimed that the ‘haul’ was worth almost £5 million ‘on the street’. I’m not sure what street you’re thinking about, mate, Dom sniffed. Off the top of his head, he estimated that anyone would do well to generate three and a half million from such a load in these straitened times. Still a tidy sum, but well below peak prices. The deepening recession was savaging all types of discretionary spending; even the drugs business, which had held up better than most for longer than most, was now seriously feeling the pinch. Austerity was the name of the game now, even when it came to getting wasted.
He turned back to the newspaper story. The dealers claimed to have been picking up leaflets that they had ordered from a printing business. According to this version of events, the leaflets were not ready for collection at the appointed hour. Meantime, the men were asked to deliver the holdalls instead in return for £250. The jury had taken less than fifteen minutes to find the cretins guilty. It was a surprise that its deliberations had taken that long. The police must have been pissing themselves.
‘Idiots!’ Silver studied the mugshots of the duo that accompanied the story and shook his head. He had mixed feelings about the police’s success in this case. The drugs had belonged to a rival dealer and someone else’s product being taken off the market was always good news. Without feeling too smug, Dominic felt that natural selection would always work to his advantage. At the same time, however, it showed that you could only push your luck so far. Disappointed customers would still want servicing and any gap in the market invited a free-for-all. There were plenty of people who would happily spill blood for the sake of market share. That was the capitalist way.
Dominic closed the paper and tossed it on the floor, thinking that it was getting ever closer to the time when he really should be calling it a day. He shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind of all its various distractions.
This, he knew, was a big test.
Could he live up to one of life’s basic rules?
Could he quit while he was ahead?
TEN
A shower and a fried-egg sandwich went a little way to easing the frustrations of the day. Alice had retired to her bedroom to do her homework, and seemed completely unfazed by recent events. Picking up the evening paper, Carlyle flopped on to the sofa beside his wife. ‘What a day!’
Helen finished sending a text message and dropped her phone on the coffee-table. ‘Well, at least there was no bomb. Apparently a couple of the older girls called it in.’
Carlyle gave her one of his many bemused looks. ‘Huh?’
‘They were due to have a test. They didn’t want to do the test, so . . .’
‘So they said that there was a bomb in the bloody school?’ he spluttered.
‘Yes.’ Helen grinned.
He half-laughed. ‘Well, I suppose that’s using your initiative, kind of.’
‘But sadly for them,’ Helen continued, ‘one of the girls used her mobile to call it in. They are soooo busted.’
‘Jesus. How do you know all this so quickly?’
Helen tapped her nose with a finger. ‘The mothers’ network is always first with the news.’
‘Very impressive.’
‘There’s more.’
‘There is?’
‘Yes.’ Helen’s face darkened. ‘The sniffer dogs didn’t find any bombs, but they did come up with eight bags containing drugs.’
‘What kind of drugs?’ Carlyle asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Dope, presumably.’
‘What about that skunk stuff?’ Helen asked. ‘Isn’t that the new super-threat to the nation’s teens?’
‘Only if you’re a neurotic middle-class parent,’ Carlyle yawned, ‘happy to throw a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc down your throat every night while lecturing your kids about how they shouldn’t even look at a spliff.’
Helen regarded him thoughtfully. Normally she was the more liberal side of the relationship. When it came to drugs, however, her husband’s laissez-faire fatalism made her more than a little uncomfortable.
‘Basically,’ Carlyle continued, on a roll now, ‘it’s all the same stuff. You either use it or you abuse it. Some people can handle it; some people can’t. I’ll ask around in the morning, see what I can find out.’
‘Okay. That would be good. One of the bags belonged to a girl in Alice’s class.’
That stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’re kidding!’
His wife shot him a look that indicated that she most definitely wasn’t. ‘I don’t think she’s one of Alice’s friends but, still, we’ll have to keep a close eye on things.’
‘Yes,’ Carlyle agreed, moving swiftly from the realms of the theoretical to the pragmatic, ‘we will.’ He leaned across and pulled Helen towards him. For a while they just lay there, each of them thinking about their daughter and about the dangers ahead; each knowing also that there wasn’t really anything that they could do about it right now. You just had to wait and see how things turned out.
Finally Helen moved things on
. ‘How was your day?’
‘Well . . .’ Carlyle sighed. He talked her through the story of Agatha and Henry Mills, or at least as much of it as he knew.
‘Will the case be closed tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘I hope so. We’ll see what Mr Mills has to say for himself in the morning.’ Henry Mills had been left to stew in the cells overnight. While Carlyle had been chasing around after his daughter, Joe had seen the man later that afternoon. Mills had stuck to his story that he had been fast asleep when someone had been practising their forehand smash with a frying pan on the back of his wife’s head. Exasperated, Carlyle had made it clear to the lawyer that they would charge him in the morning. Mills’s passivity was curious, but people reacted to stressful situations in different ways. Carlyle thought he might just be shutting down, trying to keep the outside world at bay. He decided to send in a psychologist to see what they made of the man. If nothing else, it would give a clear sign to Mills, and his lawyer, that they were curious about the state of his mental health. If the lawyer was sufficiently switched on, she would realise that the police weren’t buying her client’s story, but that they would probably be willing to do a deal on the grounds of diminished responsibility or something similar.
The inspector didn’t see the point of long sentences for domestic cases; it wasn’t as if the killers were a threat to the wider public, and it cost a fortune to keep them in jail. Far better that Mills’s lawyer got him to take a five-year deal, and the whole thing got wrapped up now. That way, he would probably be out in less than three. The alternative would be to go through the protracted, convoluted and hugely expensive legal process. If he did that, Mills would probably get eight to ten. There was a chance that he might get off on either a technicality or a jury’s sympathy vote but, if they were doing their job, the lawyer would tell him that it wasn’t worth the risk, or the hassle. Even if he won, he would still end up spending more than a year in custody, given the painfully slow speed at which the wheels of British justice manage to turn.
For Carlyle, the length of the sentence was an irrelevance. A win was a win. And a quick win was the best kind of all. Once guilt was confirmed, the case was closed. Nine times out of ten, he didn’t really care what happened beyond that.
Trying to forget about Henry Mills for a while, Carlyle returned to the evening paper. As usual, he read the sports pages first. Finding nothing of interest, he turned to the front. On page four his eye caught a story about an advert that the British Humanist Association had placed on the side of some of London’s red buses, proclaiming: There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. Carlyle, a devout atheist, immediately took offence at the word ‘probably’. ‘These bloody lentil-sucking, sandal-wearing, liberal do-gooders,’ he harrumphed to himself under his breath. ‘Why can’t they just tell it like it is? There is no bloody God. End of story. If people could just acknowledge that basic fact, everyone’s life would become a lot easier.’ Almost willing himself to get more annoyed, he read on: A spokesman said: ‘This campaign will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion.’ Bollocks it will, thought Carlyle sourly. If you are stupid enough to believe in God, what good is a bloody slogan on the side of a sodding bus?
Feeling his cheeks colouring, he looked imploringly at Helen, who was still curled up on the other end of the sofa. Well aware of the warning signs whenever her husband started winding himself up, she studiously ignored him, saying nothing and keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the television. She was watching that show where various ‘celebrities’ are dropped into the Australian jungle and made to debase themselves for a couple of weeks to no apparent purpose.
A serious woman in most other respects, Helen was addicted to junk television, and it drove Carlyle mad. This programme had to be one of the worst. He felt the urge to flee the room, but lacked the energy to haul himself off the sofa. His eyes were drawn back to the screen where a mound of bamboo worms were wriggling on a large plate which had been placed in front of one of the contestants. There was a close-up of the man’s disgusted face, as a worm was waved in front of him by one of the grinning presenters. Carlyle’s mouth fell open. ‘Christ!’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s Luke Osgood!’
‘Sir Luke Osgood,’ Helen corrected him, reminding him of the former Metropolitan Police Chief’s recent knighthood. The gong had helped to soften the blow of his very messy and very public sacking by the Mayor of London a year or so earlier.
‘What the hell’s he doing in the jungle?’ Carlyle spluttered.
‘He’s got to eat all of those worms on the plate in three minutes or no one in the competition gets anything to eat tonight.’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Carlyle, hating it when Helen tried to be funny like this, ‘but what’s he doing there in the first place?’
‘This is part of his reinvention as an all-round media performer,’ Helen said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for the man who had been Britain’s top policeman for five years to be conducting himself in such an appalling manner.
Carlyle studied the screen intently. The man currently stuffing bamboo worms into his mouth bore only a limited resemblance to the haggard bureaucrat who had been last seen leaving New Scotland Yard by the back door, hounded by journalists, with the scorn of his political masters ringing in his ears. Osgood’s previously messy hair had been cut short, bleached (to hide the grey) and spiked with gel. He sported a tan that bordered on orange and, although it was hard to tell on the television, Carlyle thought that there was a suggestion of some plastic surgery to remove the lines around his eyes and to make his lips fuller. ‘His mid-life crisis just gets worse,’ he sneered.
As Commissioner, Osgood had never impinged much on Carlyle’s working life, but his subsequent behaviour had caused some surprise. Barely two months after getting the sack, he left his wife and kids, announced that he was bisexual, and set up home with a twenty-five-year-old ballroom dancer who had arrived in London from Bergamo. Now the ‘pink policeman’ had a weekly column in a Sunday newspaper, and seized every opportunity to go on television or the radio to criticise Christian Holyrod, the Mayor who had sacked him, or else his former colleagues and his successor, Sir Chester Forsyth-Walker, a self-proclaimed ‘copper from the old school’.
Carlyle didn’t know anyone on The Job who didn’t think Osgood should have just taken his money, a pension pot of £3 million, and disappeared into the sunset with his mouth firmly shut and his newfound sexuality kept firmly hidden in the closet. How can anyone get to fifty and suddenly decide that they’re gay? For once, Carlyle found that he was in step with the majority view of the rank and file across London’s police stations, which was that Osgood could have no complaints if someone was to drag him down a dark alley and kick the living shit out of him for being such a pathetic, ego-crazed tosser.
‘They’ve got his boyfriend waiting for him at a nearby hotel,’ Helen replied. ‘He’s quite cute.’
Carlyle frowned. ‘Luke Osgood? Cute?’
‘No!’ Helen giggled. ‘The boyfriend. He’s called Gianluca.’ She arched her eyebrows theatrically. ‘Quite the Italian stallion.’
Carlyle chose to ignore his wife’s professed admiration for the hunky Gianluca, keeping his focus on Osgood, who was now well on the way to finishing his wormy snack. ‘But why is he bothering with all this?’ he asked. ‘He can’t need the money.’
‘I think he’s got a taste for it.’
Carlyle frowned again. ‘For what? Worms?’
‘No,’ Helen gave him a firm poke with her foot, ‘for being a celeb. His ego is finally being allowed to run free. He’s unleashed his frivolous side after a lifetime of being submerged in the system.’
‘I see,’ said Carlyle. He made a grab for her foot, but she pulled it away. ‘Just be happy that I manage to stay submerged in the system. Letting my ego run free wouldn’t put any bread on the table.’
‘If you could make as much money as Sir Luke,’ Helen grinned, ‘you have my pe
rmission to eat as many bugs as you like. You can even take an Italian boyfriend.’
Carlyle gave her a funny look.
‘Only joking. But there’s plenty of money in all this for Lucky Luke. Apparently, he’s getting paid a hundred and twenty thousand to do this show. With all his other work, he’s making something like three-quarters of a million a year now.’
‘Jeez.’ Carlyle let out a long, low whistle. Seven hundred and fifty thousand would be three times what Osgood was getting as Metropolitan Police Commissioner. What a world, he thought; what a fucking stupid world. You could earn £250,000 a year, be responsible for 50,000 people and a budget of £3.5 billion, not to mention having to deal with the politicians and all their crap – or, indeed, the safety of some 7 million Londoners. Alternatively, you could triple your money for sitting about talking rubbish and eating worms. He had to admit that it was not really such a difficult decision. ‘But what about his dignity?’ he asked lamely.
‘What about it?’ Helen snorted, tiring of the repeated interruptions. ‘How much did he have left when the Mayor sacked him? Anyway, how much is your dignity worth?’
Carlyle didn’t need to think about it for long to conclude that the answer was a lot less than £750,000. ‘God, all that cash! Could you imagine?’
‘Don’t feel too bad about it,’ Helen said. She gave him another poke with her toe, but this time it was gentler. ‘Osgood’s only got a limited window of opportunity.’ She disengaged her foot from his ribs and waved it at the screen. ‘How many times can he do stuff like this? It’s downhill all the way from here.’
‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Carlyle.
‘Before you know it,’ Helen said, ‘he’ll be reduced to selling security shutters on late-night TV.’
‘And opening supermarkets in Croydon,’ Carlyle laughed.
‘Do they do that sort of thing any more?’ Helen asked.