I’ve thought about every option I have and this is the only one that makes sense. Whatever happens I’m finished, there’s no future. I can’t prove my innocence and whatever the law says, in this, you’re guilty even if found innocent.
I believe Tom and Jenni Shackleton planted that stuff but I am too tired now to find any way to prove it.
I could cope with the doubt and whispers if it wasn’t for my children. Danny, I can’t have them carrying me through their lives. Is it cowardice? Maybe.
I swear I have committed no crime but I can’t live like this. I won’t be an unwelcome spectre in Peter’s life.
Try and find out the truth, Danny, for Peter and Alex and Megan. Did you know I’ve got a daughter? She was premature, too small for life, but I’m told by the divorce lawyer she’s a fighter. Megan Morgan.
If the truth does involve J and T would the government want to hear it? Tabloid headlines
The letter finished there. The final words thin with starving ink.
Danny wanted to go home, to get away from the sordid sadness. He went back into the house. The body was gone and Davidge was ready to leave. Upstairs were two men who didn’t offer their identity or condolences.
When Danny looked he saw all Carter’s personal papers had gone. The men each carried large briefcases. One of them was just packing away Carter’s desk diary.
Danny waited outside the house until they were gone then let himself back in with the spare keys still kept by the neighbour, Mrs Ismay. She had been keen to talk but Danny made it plain he was on police business and not at liberty to comment, or hear comment, on the events surrounding the tragedy.
What did he expect to find? The unquiet shade wandering from room to room, unable to rest till he, Danny, had hewn the truth from the unyielding granite of lies?
Danny despised himself for being so noble now Carter was dead.
He sat on the stairs. There was a small spray of blood on the wallpaper. Pretty, like a small brown fern. He had placed just enough distance between himself and his contaminated chief to ensure his own future well-being. But at what cost of guilt?
When he left the house he was determined to clear Carter’s name, and in the process his own conscience.
Part Five
The ACPO autumn conference was held at Warwick University in an area cordoned off from the rest of the campus. The three days of police business finished with a formal dinner to which wives were invited.
The guest of honour was the nearly new Home Secretary, the Gnome, in glory now.
Jenni hadn’t seen him since just after Carter’s funeral, a bleak affair attended by no one of note and only two elderly aunts of Carter’s representing the family. Danny Marshall had organised it, inviting everyone who should have been there had Carter died a hero. Most declined, some didn’t reply. Eleri’s solicitor sent a fax.
The Shackletons had been modest, seating themselves halfway back in the small crematorium chapel. Danny saw them and did nothing to encourage them forward. Jenni was incensed and made sure she spoke to him afterwards, outside in the windy courtyard.
‘It was tragic. We were very fond of Geoffrey. My husband worked with him closely – I don’t suppose you realised that?’
The deputy was smooth, polite, impenetrable.
‘Oh yes, I knew. He was particularly touched by the visit you paid him just before he died.’
Jenni was shocked, the accusation felt so naked. For a moment she was lost for words.
‘The press were very cruel. After all it’s a disease, isn’t it? They can’t help themselves.’
‘The only disease Geoffrey Carter suffered from was the envy of other people. That’s what killed him.’
Jenni wanted to slap that look off his face.
‘Yes, yes, of course.’
She wished Tom would come and rescue her.
‘I wonder why he had that awful stuff in his house then?’
Her transparent peridot eyes met the undisguised hatred of the deputy.
‘He had that stuff in his house because someone put it there. Someone who wanted to destroy him. To stop him going any further.’
‘Oh God … Who?’
She knew she should stop this and walk away but she couldn’t.
‘Watch the Internet, Jenni. Conspiracy websites are very popular. And anyone can put any crackpot theory on them.’
‘Conspiracy, Danny?’ She laughed. ‘What conspiracy? He died in a horrible accident. Isn’t that the official line? You’re being ridiculously overdramatic.’
Shackleton joined them.
‘Tom, Danny’s just saying he thinks Carter was, oh what’s the term, framed, is it? Yes, that’s right, framed.’
‘I didn’t say that, Mrs Shackleton. But Geoffrey mentioned you at length in a letter to me. Sorry, that was a non sequitur. Forgive me, I’m very upset.’
‘Of course.’
Shackleton was now standing beside her but he said nothing.
‘Excuse me,’ said Danny. ‘I must go and look after his aunts.’ He dropped his head in a sort of bow. ‘Mr Shackleton.’
As soon as he was out of earshot Jenni rounded on her husband but something had happened. He was different. She was like rain on a windowpane to him now. Since Carter’s death he’d hardly been home and when there he’d hardly spoken. The children, now encouraged to fill the house with company and noise to insulate Jenni from rollercoaster feelings of paranoia, were worried about him. But whenever they tried to talk about anything more than family trivia he withdrew behind that shy smile they knew was as impenetrable as a thorn forest.
The day after the funeral Tom had been summoned to London, to an audience with the Gnome, a government adviser, and the PM’s representative on earth, the real thing being somewhere in Italy having a people’s holiday in a people’s palace, closed to the public.
Jenni had been excited, more excited than she’d been at the deluge of filth proven and unproven printed about Carter since his death. His personal life, sexuality, history and family were discussed and dissected in everything from the News of the World to the Financial Times. Pictures of his wife and sons, snatched images of Eleri carrying the premature baby home from the hospital. The contradictions in evidence against him turned over and over like well-mulched manure. Jenni had hoarded every article, every picture.
If Tom had had fear left in him he would have feared for her sanity. But there was a part of him that was dead now too. The man lying at the foot of his stairs with a pen sticking out of his eye socket had been the spectre that woke Shackleton’s humanity. But the pain of that, the vicious agony of guilt and conscience, was incomprehensible in a life hitherto so protected, lived with such a lack of self-searching rigour. Shackleton felt a new emptiness, not the clean minimalist lines of his life before Carter’s death. He felt guilt and could taste ashes, as if the ghost of Carter’s despair had found a home in him.
He allowed himself no thoughts other than those concerned with work. His mind was a blank in which pain and pleasure were equally meaningless. Jenni could no longer reach him and the small happiness he’d felt with Lucy seemed never to have happened. It was a story told about another Tom Shackleton, a man he now despised.
He’d seen her with Gary in the street, pushing him to the park in a parody of a proud young mum with her first baby.
Shackleton found himself envying the clean inevitability of Gary’s disease. The one eating him seemed even more insidious than MS, and more profoundly incurable. There was nothing to alleviate his symptoms.
And Jenni? She had thought once Carter was out of the way they would be strong, invulnerable, bound together. But now he couldn’t look at her, couldn’t touch her, hear her. She screamed, cried, attacked him, but he wasn’t there. And he saw she was more frightened than she’d ever been. At night he heard her crying, talking, shouting out, but he never went to her. She was on her own. And so was he. Now he was part of the hell he’d seen in his dreams.
The wages
of sin is Death.
That’s what he was learning. He was being paid in absolute nothingness. For him there was no life after death. And still he didn’t have the courage to say, It was me. It was my wife and me. Never having found catharsis through confession he couldn’t see the blessed relief of honest culpability. So he felt the weight of the sin grow, like a rotting living thing on his neck.
At the meeting they had talked with restrained regret of the waste, the sadness, the loss, then they moved effortlessly on to asking whether Shackleton would mind giving up thoughts of the Met to become the first Crime Tsar. Over the weeks of the investigation he had been sounded out, advised not to make any announcements about his future even though it had seemed sealed. But this was the official proposal, the ring was in the bridegroom’s pocket.
Tom was suitably modest, properly reluctant and finally persuaded. The greatest moment of his life was within his grasp and it meant nothing. He tasted ashes. The ashes of Geoffrey Carter. He said nothing to Jenni. She would find out when it was announced.
But the Gnome had already told her. He seemed keen for her to express her thanks when the dust had settled. Again under the pretext of her writing a piece on him she’d made her way to his flat, but this time he made her tea and sat across the table from her, talking.
He had looked at her with some distaste. She had lost weight and was suddenly old and stringy. The bones, so delicate and fine when covered with firm flesh, were sharp and hard under the thin stretched yellow skin. The great eyes now burned too deep, too desperate. And her beautiful hair. Still her crowning glory but incongruously young now around her ageing face.
Then there was the sniff, the constant sniffing.
She sat talking small talk, waiting for the move he’d make, planning the revenge she’d take on him when her husband was Crime Tsar. When all the computers, all the lists, all the information in the country would be at his service. Then she’d see. There would be some financial irregularity, some youthful indiscretion – there had been rumours of a hushed-up rape in his past. She’d find it all and then, in time, no hurry, the Gnome would fall on his rod.
His bleeper chirruped, he read its message, then with a perfect show of regret he said, ‘Jenni, my darling – it’s been glorious to see you but I have an emergency meeting. I have no choice, I have to go. Will you forgive me? Another time perhaps?’
Jenni was ushered out by him without once realising she was dismissed and that the interruption had been caused by MacIntyre discreetly pressing the button on the side of the pager.
All she took away with her were the words: ‘Ah, Jenni, how is my little Tsarina? Think you’ll be up to the role? Tom Shackleton’s such a lucky man. Dead men’s shoes, eh?’
That’s how she found out. Before Tom knew, as was only right.
Briefly she was elated, beyond the reach of Carter’s dead hands in her nightmares. Every night he came to her, sometimes as a dead and rotting lover, at other times naked and accusing in a restaurant or supermarket. Jenni tried to talk to Tom about it but he was haunted by his own devils.
At night she walked around the house, endlessly padding up and down the stairs, round and round the hall.
Sometimes Jacinta came to the house and held her, forcing her to be still.
Then Jenni sobbed, but never told her daughter why.
In the weeks before the ACPO conference, Shackleton was inducted into the mysteries of Whitehall. In his absence Jenni felt herself slipping away from reality into a grave of depression at the bottom of which was the body of Geoffrey Carter.
She went to her beloved hairdresser, thinking the mercenary caress of his hands and those of the masseuse and manicurist would bring some warmth into her. She sat in front of the mirror. An old woman looked back at her, the glory of her hair undimmed.
Clyde, luckily, had seen her come in and registered no surprise at her appearance when he kissed and greeted her. He pampered her and offered her tea or coffee.
‘Oh Clyde, I need something more. Much, much more.’
He looked conspiratorial.
‘I’m sure we can find you something.’
Jenni was pathetically grateful.
‘Oh Clyde could you? Just for today, you understand … I’m just feeling a bit low.’
‘I’ll see what we can do. Have you an appointment downstairs after?’
She nodded.
‘Good,’ he said and made as if to widen his eyes but the Botox toxin he’d had injected into his forehead to remove the lines had paralysed his face into a glassy, expressionless cartoon.
When Jenni walked into the subterranean treatment room there was a girl in a gleaming white beautician’s uniform and Nayman, the eccentric Malay stylist who worked at the next stall to Clyde.
He was exceptionally tall with his hair worn in a queue. He was twenty-eight and lived his life in a confusion of spiritual prêt-à-porter, anything that fitted his mood and provided no challenge to his hedonism or varying sexuality. He was, as always, overwhelming in his certainties.
‘Jenni, my darling. You are Leo, yes? Of course. You need royal treatment. You’re a queen. My dear, you look ghastly, tired, I give you something. You feel frightened of the world, don’t tell me, I know. I am Leo too. Difficult to be in a world of ugliness for us. This makes the world look better and the people in it a lot more pretty. We hate ugliness, don’t we, Jenni darling?’
The girl had gone quietly, and while he spoke Nayman had created a strange new sight for her. He took some foil and moved his fingers over it, dropping something on to it. Jenni couldn’t really see.
‘Oh darling, let’s put some music on. We can’t chase even the tiniest dragon listening to pneumatic drills digging up the Northern Line.’
His voice was high and queeny. The type that made S sound like a slow puncture. Jenni pressed the button on the CD. Music filled the room that only those who went to the right clubs would have a name for.
‘You want an E, darling? It’s just the best as a little taster.’
Jenni shook her head.
‘No, Nayman, really. I don’t want anything too strong. I just need’ – she corrected herself – ‘want something to help me relax now and again.’
‘Oh … darling,’ he shrieked. ‘You’re so coy! I love it. Tell you what, take a couple for later. It’s so nice to have when you’re coming down. God, you’re so beautiful. You could be a drag queen, you’re that perfect.’
Then he passed her a kind of straw. She didn’t know what to do with it.
‘You’re such a diva, darling,’ he said and demonstrated the best and most fashionable way of smoking heroin.
Jenni copied him carefully, anxious to get it right for her teacher. He was so pleased with her. Again she breathed in the smoke. Perfection. Life became perfection and Jenni a living embodiment of that flawless state. She had never felt a happiness so complete. This, she knew, she must do again. Soon. And although it was naughty, it wasn’t bad. After all she could control what she took; she wasn’t lying in a gutter like a drug addict. She didn’t need anything more than her prescription tranquillisers, no, anything else was just, well, just for relaxation.
From a distance Jenni heard Nayman talking about the inadvisability of injecting heroin. From the insulated distance of Jenni’s mind the idea of injecting was silly. Ludicrous. Why would anyone but the dregs of society do that? She had her white powder and now this glorious smoke, an enveloping mist of reassurance and happiness. Recreational drugs, no worse than tobacco or alcohol. It was glorious to feel so in control. Who could want for anything more?
Lucy had kept her word to Gary and their life had become a strange Indian summer of love. The MS, though not fully in remission, had loosened its grip enough for him to spend some time in his wheelchair.
Tom and Jenni had become distant and unreal, ghosts who came and went silently from their now discreetly guarded house. Pulled further away by unstoppable success. Lucy still cleaned but there was little to do. Th
ey were never there and when they were Jenni tended to call on the children to provide white noise against the silence that had settled on their lives. As the weeks passed and the furore over Carter’s death gave way to other news and scandals Lucy found herself in a pleasant purgatory at one remove from the hell of obsessive love.
She still thought about Shackleton, spoke his name, doodled his initials twined with her own, but it was becoming habit now. She felt like someone recovering from a serious disease, weak, yes, but with a new inner strength and determination to enjoy life.
Gary had sensed the difference in her and one evening suggested splashing out on a bottle of wine and a Chinese takeaway. Lucy found herself getting quite excited at the idea. She locked herself away in the bathroom, making sure the mirror was steamed up before she undressed. As she sat on the edge of the bath passing the razor carefully from ankle to knee she felt a vague anticipation of sex. Could she enjoy Gary touching her again? Distracted by the thought, she cut herself. Maybe they should get two bottles of wine then she wouldn’t care who it was.
No. That was cruel. She knew, given her present state of physical frustration, it would take very little to satisfy her, but how could she stop herself seeing and feeling Tom? She couldn’t and she knew she wouldn’t try. She shrugged. It really didn’t matter, did it? If it made Gary happy and it made her happy what was the point in honesty. The truth was not something to be used carelessly. She stuck a piece of tissue paper on her bloody shin.
Gary didn’t take his painkillers that day. He wasn’t really supposed to take more than four Coproximal in twenty-four hours but he’d recently been swallowing twelve, though he never drank with them. So today was worth the pain, the payment for an evening as a normal man. Just Gary. Not Gary with MS and a secondary spinal tumour. For one night he’d put the disease down with the pills.
At first they were shy with each other. He complimented her on her perfume. She said how much he made her laugh. He didn’t see her catch herself as she heard herself saying what she’d said to Tom. But had she originally said it to Gary and it was second-hand for Tom? Who knew? And after another glass of Pinot Grigio, who cared?
The Crime Tsar Page 33