The Crime Tsar

by Nichola McAuliffe

  He watched her closely, as closely as the plain-clothes policeman in the corner was watching him.

  The interview would have been so much more stimulating had she known her subject was the object of police interest due to his enormous but mysterious funds and his close but secretive friendship with several Libyan and Saudi businessmen. Fiscal prudence made strange bedfellows.

  She asked if he would like another drink, at the same time, out of habit, being girlishly impressed with his capacity for alcohol.

  When the waiter had gone leaving them another inch closer together Jenni said, ‘Dieter – such a lovely name.’

  ‘It was my grandfather’s. He was from Munich.’

  What a surprise, thought Jenni.

  ‘And was he a contemporary of … um …?’

  ‘Adolf Hitler? More or less, yes.’

  ‘How fascinating …’

  And under her adoring and unblinking gaze he talked endlessly into her recorder. Lots of colour, lots of background, while, for his own security, the tape he wore turned silently under his shirt. He’d been misquoted and misrepresented too many times not to keep a record of every encounter.

  While he talked her mind roamed around the idea of having sex with him. There could be few women in Europe who hadn’t seen his body displayed to great advantage in at least a dozen films. His pure-lined face and lazy dark eyes were cold, a little haughty, under a disciplined wave of gold-blond hair. He was the model of Aryan perfection from art works circa 1939. It was a look he had deliberately developed with the help of cosmetic surgery and hair dye transforming the squinting, dark-haired drama student who was too plain to be a leading man. It had cost money, time and pain but he had bought perfection.

  He was a challenge. The body at all angles had looked smooth and beautifully muscled. The body of a dancer. Why not?

  ‘Of course we are operating under very bad circumstances. We are continually attacked by anarchists and communists –’

  ‘Good Lord, are there any left? I thought they’d died out with tank tops.’

  Dieter did not smile.

  Jenni left polite humour bleeding on the coffee table between them and continued.

  ‘How do you deal with them?’

  ‘By due process of democracy.’

  Touché, thought Jenni.

  She was riveted by his eyes. Dark green, flecked with tiny lines of amber. Too sharply defined to be hazel, too variegated to be brown.

  I must have drunk too much, she thought, but it felt good, warm, and made her companion all but irresistible.

  He was asking her to have dinner with him. But that wouldn’t be all, would it? For him sex came with the bill. She tilted her head back, looking at him through half-closed eyes. What would it be like to bed a legend? A man who had been consistently lusted after for twenty years. Was this the bicycle she should re-mount after her fall? She was certain of a smooth ride. His technique was widely reported in glossy kiss-and-tell magazines.

  Why, though? What was in it for her? And that was what decided her: there was nothing riding on this encounter. If she couldn’t do it, if she was repelled at the sight of his erection and ran screaming from the room, she had nothing to lose. But if she didn’t, if the next time she called upon her body to pay the way and found it unwilling or incapable there might well be a great deal at stake. So why not? He’d be doing her a favour. Another drink, a couple of pills, no problem. And he was increasingly gorgeous.

  He’d covered her hand with his. Long, slim and pale. Strangler’s hands, she thought.

  He nodded as though reading her thoughts.

  ‘You don’t mind me finding you attractive, do you?’

  What an exceptionally stupid thing to say, she thought.

  ‘But maybe you are happily married woman. You don’t need me.’

  She rather liked his humility. His lack of assumption. Of course it was an act. Did it matter? No.

  ‘My husband …’ Her luminous eyes seemed to fill with tears. He moved his hand up her arm. It felt very nice.

  ‘He is bastard, yes?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she breathed. ‘How did you know?’

  Dieter raised his eyebrow, waiting.

  ‘I’m sure he has … a mistress.’

  Jenni almost cracked at this. The idea of Tom Shackleton willingly being intimate with anyone was just funny. Hilariously funny. She started to giggle.

  ‘He finds me repulsive. He hasn’t made love to me for years. It’s awful. Sometimes he beats me …’

  The graceful arm was now round her shoulders. The hand proprietorial, protective, and, as Jenni noticed, slightly grubby.

  He was suitably but quietly outraged.

  ‘Bastard!’

  Good, that was the right effect. She looked up at him and her eyes stung with tears. To her astonishment they were genuine, as was her whispered plea.

  ‘I don’t know if I can. I… I was hurt, badly. I would need you to be patient. Gentle.’

  Nothing could have made him desire her more.

  When they got to her room the coverlet of the double bed had been turned down and the table lamps lit the room romantically. Gold-covered chocolates on the pillows.

  Dieter was convinced by her nervousness that she rarely took men to bed. Her awkward response when he had tried to kiss her in the lift. He liked that. It was nice to know she wasn’t easy. It flattered him.

  He sat down in an armchair watching her fluttering about, opening the minibar, reluctant to come back to him. She reminded him of a virgin. Good body too for her age. She handed him a brandy.

  She’d made her decision but her mind was arguing. What’s to lose? Another man, another bed. She’d been to bed with worse for less. Yes … but the Gnome. The Gnome. Fall off the bike, get back on. This was the night to get back on. But what if …? What if?

  ‘Have you got protection?’

  ‘Always.’

  He produced a neat triumvirate of condoms. Why had she asked? She had let MacIntyre – shut up, shut the fuck up. The noise in her head was deafening. She was shaking now. She felt vulnerable. She felt like the fearful girl she’d been before she invented Jenni. Scared by everything.

  He was captured.

  ‘Here, don’t be frightened. I have a little of this. And by chance I have two of these. I must have known we would be here maybe.’

  His accent and quaint constructions made him less threatening, a little comic. He put a tiny box and something that looked to Jenni like a small suppository on the low table.

  ‘You call them poppers in English. You don’t know them? Amyl nitrate, yes?’

  ‘I don’t know,

  I don’t take drugs,’ said Jenni primly. ‘And I’m surprised you’ll risk it in front of me. How do you know you can trust me?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t. But you have more to lose than me, yes?’

  She watched, fascinated, as he set out his stall and prepared what she took to be cocaine. She had only seen it done in television serials about city whiz kids and was fascinated despite herself.

  ‘I … I don’t …’

  She trailed off lamely. Inside she was screaming for another pill. Maybe this would do. Lift her away from this sordid room, sordid spreading of her legs for yet another stranger. Lift her into her dreams, to the place where success made her untouchable.

  She walked towards him. He saw in her a reluctant desire, like that of a squirrel approaching a hand outstretched with nuts. He found her enchanting. Seeing she didn’t know what to do, he placed some of the chopped and prepared white powder on the back of his right hand and reached for her with his left. She wanted to object, ask for a rolled-up twenty-pound note and the mirror. She knew the way it should be.

  He caught her gently round the back of her neck reminding her of Tom’s prelude to foreplay. She bent towards him. He placed the cocaine close under her nose. Pushed it firmly against her nostrils then closed one with his thumb.

  ‘Sniff in now. Good sniff. Big. Go
od.’ He closed her other nostril with his index finger. ‘Other side. Yes.’

  Obediently she sniffed it all up. It reminded her of when she was a child and her father had made her sniff salt water for a cold. The kindly paternal hands. He wiped the residue from her nose with the top of his index finger then lifted her upper lip and rubbed it on to her gums. She felt like a horse having its teeth examined. Nothing, nothing, was happening but a numbness in her gums. A lot of fuss over a local anaesthetic. She watched him doing the professional line-dance sniff with a rolled note. Still nothing.

  He stood up and started the sex. That was the only way she could think of it. He’d done his drugs, now he was doing his sex. Then it kicked in. She felt the mass of energy: the picture in her head was, for a second, an innocent stick of uranium, a scene from a news programme. Then she saw, heard the radiation. Had an impression of atoms colliding, splitting and exploding their energy into her head.

  And she started to talk. And she couldn’t stop. What was she talking about? Power, the power invested in her. The overwhelming confidence she felt lifted her away from everything that had dragged her down. The man busying himself with her clothes was funny. Really, really funny. Jenni couldn’t stop laughing. She had never in her life laughed like this, until the tears ran and her ribs hurt.

  He was undoing his trousers now, pulling down his Calvin Kleins, releasing the bouncing, waving resident. Then he took more white powder and rubbed it on to the ugly, shiny, expectant face below. It looked like snow on the roof of a Masai warrior’s hut. The thought of it, the sight of it, set her off again and she fell back on the bed, helpless with laughter. She couldn’t think when she’d enjoyed herself so much.

  And there was the freedom. The clarity. The release. She hardly felt the sex at all. She was still laughing, not at him but at her fear. She was free of the fear of MacIntyre. A man pumping away inside her as if reaching for a lost coin was nothing. It was just funny. Her mind was not a part of it. She was not there, she was with her ambitious dreams, barely disturbed by the rhythmic pushing against the bones of her open pelvis. The manipulation of her body had been skilful, considered, masterful and completely wasted on her. It was all a joke. A very funny joke.

  He lay on his back and pulled her on to him, astride him. She let him guide her wherever he wanted, and what he wanted was her sitting on his face. Again the bubbles of hysteria, shaking her with laughter: ‘Sit on my face and tell me that you love me, sit on my face and tell me that you care.’ How many times in the early days had she heard Tom’s cronies singing that as they brought him home too drunk to stand.

  His tongue was nothing like the Gnome’s: it was soft, gentle, not unlike water lapping against her. Very comforting. She was no closer to orgasm than when she unloaded the dishwasher. She altered her position, carefully impaling herself on him. She moved automatically, her hands on his ribs. Look at me, I’m riding Dieter Gerhardt. Look on, you harpies, and despair. She was laughing again. Threatening to expel him. Concentrate, Jenni. She frowned slightly. Eyes closed. She was enjoying herself. Yes. Not the sex, no, that was no more or less than it had always been.

  No, she was just enjoying being free. But now she was tiring. She tried a few fancy moves to bring him closer to a finish, having no idea the cocaine on his penis had numbed it more than the brandy she had been pouring into him all evening, making him able to go on and on – and on.

  She moved him on top of her, behind her; she moaned and gasped and manipulated his flaccid balls but nothing seemed to bring him closer to a climax. Now she was beginning to be bored and uncomfortable. The drug was wearing off; she clenched her inner muscles more rhythmically trying to squeeze him to an end. But nothing worked. He was in his own sexual fantasy.

  Then he gasped, ‘Talk dirty. Say dirty words. Now. Quick.’

  Jenni’s mind went blank. The only German she knew was ‘chemische Reinigung’, dry cleaner’s. In English all she could think of was an anecdote told her by a media colleague about a news reader caught in flagrante who had screamed ‘Fuck me till I fart’ at the moment of ecstasy.

  She tried it.

  It seemed to do the trick and he speeded up to a rictus of pleasure accompanied by grunts and strangled cries of, ‘Oh God, Mein Gott. Gott.’

  Then, ‘Take me now!’

  In all her sexual encounters Jenni had never heard anyone actually say that. It set her laughing again as he yelled it like Henry V on the eve of Agincourt.

  Spent, he was apologetic she hadn’t come. He insisted on manipulating her until she did. How could he know in all her life Jenni Shackleton had never had an orgasm. After a decent interval she shuddered and moaned and sighed convincingly enough for a man who’d already been there. She knew it was with some relief he kissed her and sighed into sleep with her head on his chest, his arm under her. She got up carefully and looked at him, naked and spreadeagled in the foam of sheets. He really was stunning. Every hair on his body a fine uniform gold. She appreciated how much work that must have taken. Looking down at him she thought there was nothing more satisfying than having something coveted by others.

  She went to the bathroom, showered and felt fine. She still couldn’t face the idea of a bath but it hadn’t been so bad getting back on to that bicycle after all. The poppers lay unused on the table. She put them in her bag. They might come in useful. A little more magic to help her through the mire of life. There was a little white powder left, scattered. She fingered it up and rubbed it on her gums. Nice. Very, very nice.

  Lucy had waited as long as she could for Tom to come home. Her excuse was Jenni’s request that she should look after him. But he didn’t come so she went across the road to give Gary his hot milk and biscuits before the nurses came to put him to bed.

  Since leaving hospital he hadn’t been strong enough to use his chair. Going to bed was no change of scene for him. Lucy knew he was depressed but couldn’t find the words to help him. The feelings she’d allowed to grow for Tom as a defence against what seemed the inevitable early death of Gary had got out of control. Now more real than her love for Gary.

  ‘Did you see Tom?’

  Lucy felt guilty at his question. An urge to defensiveness.

  ‘I came back as quickly as I could. Jenni’s away – she wanted me to make sure he was OK.’

  Gary’s eyes, the only part of him that still seemed fully alive, followed her movements as she fussed around tidying. Keeping her back to him. Avoiding him. He knew something had happened while he was in hospital but wanted to avoid the truth. He didn’t want to hear how often she talked about Tom. How difficult she found it to say ‘Tom’ in front of him. The way she called him the Chief, or His Nibs, or him over there, because the word ‘Tom’ had become sacred, too powerful to speak aloud.

  Gary had never felt so lonely and for the first time wanted to die. He had once been water skiing and although the ride, being dragged across the water by grimly holding on to a rope attached to a speed boat, was exhilarating, the most pleasurable part was letting go and sinking into the sea. It had been warm and welcoming, a Greek sea full of dolphins and sparkling light.

  Lucy handed him his baby cup of warm milk.

  He wanted to let go now.

  Since the ambulance had brought Gary back Shackleton had avoided Lucy. He knew she wanted to talk, women always wanted to talk, to analyse, but his instinct was to walk away. As if it had never happened. His brief addiction to Lucy’s willingness had woken in him a vicious self-dislike. For his weakness and his betrayal of Gary. He had never had friends, but in his mind Gary became a friend betrayed. Tom saw himself hanging in the ruined garden of his own pleasure. Pleasure was bad. The threat of happiness undermining. Lucy the serpent of temptation. He desperately wanted to be free again, not to feel, just to be. Not to be scalded by her gentleness or burned by his need for her.

  He came home that night to an empty house, grateful for the silence. He felt her watching from across the road as Gordon said goodnight and he unlocked
the front door. He went into the kitchen. On the table was a salad and a note from Lucy. A small chocolate egg beside the plate. He put the lot into the bin. The note unread.

  He poured himself a drink and took his briefcase into the living room. It was filled with papers that would occupy him until the early hours. An evening of their uncomplicated intimacy would be a relief. The curtains were open; he went to draw them and saw Lucy in the window opposite. He didn’t hesitate to shut her out.

  Gary saw and said nothing. There wasn’t anything to say. He turned his face to the wall and prayed like a man trusting to a note in a cracked bottle.

  A few days before Jenni straddled Dieter and Tom rejected Lucy, Geoffrey and Eleri were returning home from a reception in London. A charity bash with a discreetly A-list donor core. And at the centre of that core? Robert and Lizie MacIntyre. They had been more than friendly to the Carters. The two men had discovered they had something in common when they lunched together, though Carter had for years been at pains to hide it: they were both intellectual snobs.

  Mrs Ismay from next door had looked after the boys for them. She didn’t cause Alexander to panic so was one of the few people they could leave him with without risking the Wedgwood. When they arrived back she was sitting in the living room knitting; Alexander was curled up on the rug in front of the fire chewing a piece of coal. It was a warm night but Alex was obsessed by fires as well as liquids so, to guarantee a quiet evening, a fire had been laid and lit.

  While Eleri said goodnight to the old lady after listening to every detail of the evening’s events, including who had read the news and what the weather forecast had in store for her agapanthus, Carter carried the boy up to bed. The child was floppy and unresponsive though wide awake. Carter was glad – better this than hyperactive and the rest of the night spent following him from room to room trying to protect him from the hardness and sharpness of the furniture. He didn’t try to take the coal out of his hand: that would only bring on a screaming fit and guarantee nobody in the street would sleep.