The Crime Tsar Read Free

Gary and Lucy were trying to ‘keep in’ with the Shackletons, as if they might use Tom’s rapid elevations to advance their social standing. It was beyond Jenni’s comprehension that Gary, and so Lucy, wanted nothing more than easy-going friendship or that Gary’s standing in education was on a par with Tom’s in the police. In Jenni’s experience everybody was after something. Lucy had learned how important it was to Jenni to keep her in her place when Jenni had once heard her sing. ‘I heard you screeching,’ she laughed. Lucy had been hurt, but that wasn’t the intention – Jenni simply needed to maintain her position and Lucy’s … But now there were the £10 notes popped into her jacket pocket. Slipped into her pinny. Jenni could give and generously – she just couldn’t share. And now Lucy was no competition, it was safe to like her.
    â€˜Oh Lucy darling … would you mind? Could you just wipe out the cutlery drawer? Run a duster along the dado rail? I got you a little something in Harrods. I thought you might like this La Prairie moisturiser.’
    Always in that tone, the one reserved for ‘poor Lucy’.
    Lucy sat in her living room on a once fine sofa, now, like everything else, in need of care and attention, thinking about her father and Tom Shackleton. She would have walked on water for her father, but if she had he’d only have accused her of showing off. She’d always wanted him to hold her safe, fold her up and put her in his pocket but he’d never really liked her. Her arrival had been an unwelcome intrusion in an ordered life. Perhaps if she’d been a boy. Maybe if she’d been as pretty as Jenni he’d have liked her more. But Shackleton had found comfort in Lucy, or had he just taken advantage of herneediness, her craving for affection? She knew she was still chasing the smile of a man who’d been dead ten years.
    It got dark. She didn’t turn the lights on. She looked across at Jenni and Tom’s house with its gravel drive and wrought-iron gates: ‘We had to have them, Lucy – for security. The Chief is vulnerable to attack, you know.’
    Not least from sexually frustrated neighbours in fluffy panda slippers.
    She sat eating rice pudding out of the tin.
    Putting Gary to bed always exhausted her, even though she was little more than a spectator to the changing of the catheter, the washing, the hoist. The invasive smell of talcum powder. When she allowed herself to think about Gary’s dying, one of the things she looked forward to was throwing away the medicated talc. And the incontinence pads, the plastic apron, the latex gloves.
    She remembered Gary at Labour Party conferences, passionate about the care of the less fortunate, those who had no place in a Britain led by a mad woman.
    The four of them so sure the revolution would come, not seeing how far they had moved from their old ideals. How contaminated they had been. They had become defined by their jobs, their cars, their ambitions.
    Now Lucy and Gary were the less fortunate and the books they’d read, the music he’d played on the boudoir grand, now silent and covered in the contents of a chemist’s pharmacy, the things they still had inside them counted for nothing. They had crossed into the vacuum.
    The Chief’s dark-blue Jaguar stopped in front of the gates. Gordon, his driver, a dull man who didn’t read for pleasure and only rarely for information, pressed the buttons and eased the car close to the front door. Lucy watched Jenni’s husband get out and felt that internal pancake throw of excitement.
    His suit was expensive, his shoes very nearly Gucci. She could feel his breath on her neck again, the softness of his lips. His eyelashes on her cheek.
    The security light went out. He was inside with Jenni. She wondered if he’d have a whisky and soda. If Jenni would scream at him for putting the glass