The Crime Tsar Read Free Page A

in the dishwasher. Lucy wondered if tonight she was ‘doing a Diana’, as her eldest daughter, Tamsin, hadonce described it. If the mood swings made famous in the legend of the Princess of Wales were condemning Shackleton to an evening of appeasement.
    Gary’s bell was ringing. She went in to see him. The remains of their dining room framed the ripple bed, the wheelchair, the debris of slow dying. Gary’s spine was hurting.
    â€˜Lucy, will you give me a pull? Sorry.’
    â€˜Will you stop apologising? Ready?’
    She got him under the armpits. The idea was to pull him so his back would realign itself more comfortably. When the pain was really bad she’d get him into the wheelchair, put him in the van and drive over speed bumps. Gary would yell out the Dam Busters march with tears of pain running down his face, till the thumping up and down shifted something in his vertebrae. But this was a different principle – she had to stretch him slowly. Sudden movement could put him into spasm.
    â€˜What is it he’s got?’ asked Jenni after he’d fallen over at school again.
    â€˜Multiple sclerosis.’
    â€˜Oh, my uncle had that.’ She always pulled the focus back to herself. ‘I found him a diet, you know, no refined sugar, no caffeine or oranges – don’t know why oranges – and he was fine for years. You’ll have to put Gary on one, oh and I’ll get you a healing crystal, they are fantastic. In fact, I’ve heard there’s a new tantric meditation which does wonders for MS patients. I’ll have a word with my paradiviner, she knows all about these things. And of course cannabis, but don’t say I said so.’
    â€˜Yes … yes,’ Lucy remembered saying blankly, too numb to be hurt by Jenni’s casual packaging up of Gary’s death sentence into a New Age bundle of hope.
    Lucy thought vaguely about no good marriage having a happy ending. But that was before she knew release could promise a kind of happiness. Before she gave up work, before she had to be grateful to Jenni. Before Tom had touched her, kissed her, quivered inside her.
    â€˜Here goes, then.’ She pulled, leaning her whole body back. Gary was gasping for her effort and his pain.
    â€˜That’s it. Yes, I think that’s it.’
    She released him and waited a moment in silence to see what his back would do. The crumbling of the bones in his spine was foundafter the MS. A little bonus, a little addition of pain to sharpen his appreciation of loss of feeling elsewhere.
    She filled the time by pulling his anti-clot socks further over his feet, swollen and smelly, the skin stretched so much sometimes she imagined popping them with a pin. Those feet that had searched for hers in bed. So they wouldn’t be lonely.
    â€˜Better?’
    â€˜Perfect.’
    He smiled. No shadow of self-pity, no whiff of the pathetic. The (then) shadow Education Secretary had called him a remarkable man but he had no idea how remarkable. There was no one who met Gary who didn’t feel happier for the encounter. She looked down at him and wondered how she could still think him handsome. Ridiculous in red pyjamas with blue piping. The man who never wore anything in bed. Who was so proud of his long, lithe body. His chest now a sort of medieval soup bowl, an old man’s turkey neck growing out of it. The flesh of his face unable to cling to the bones, falling away to gather round his ears. The once blond hair brittle, colourless, thin as a chemo patient’s, even though that was one treatment he had not yet been subjected to.
    His eyes were fixed on the ceiling rose, listening to the pain. Still smiling. Staring out a cruel God. He let his breath go, sure it was quiet. Relaxed. She leaned over and kissed him. Lucy had married him before she’d learned gratitude for affection wasn’t love. It had taken time to put aside fear of rejection, and learn she