‘Ed did A levels in prison. He’s intelligent enough to use the money well.’
‘If you say so,’ Brian replied. ‘I presume now it’s established that Clark didn’t do it, you’ll be campaigning for the police to find the real killer.’
‘That’s for the police, not me.’
‘Off the record, the police are saying they’re not looking for anyone else. You know what that means, don’t you?’
‘I really can’t comment, Brian, on or off the record. I’m sorry.’
‘Either they’re still convinced Ed did it, or they blame the wife.’
Brian left the train at Leicester. He was heading for Derbyshire, where he and his wife had a weekend cottage. But his question wouldn’t go away. A police officer and his wife were dead. They had two children and wider families, all of whom deserved answers. Ed Clark was a scrote, a minor villain who’d picked up a handful of burglary and violence convictions over the years. The first four had resulted in non-custodial sentences. The day after Ed was released from a six-month sentence for his fifth offence, Terry Shanks, the policeman who’d put him in prison, had been murdered. His wife, Liv, who had recently had sex, was found dead beside their bed. Both victims had been shot. Terry had also been bashed in the head, almost certainly before the shooting. The bodies were discovered when a neighbour brought the Shanks’ children home from primary school because their mother had failed to collect them.
There had been no direct evidence that Liv Shanks was raped. She had some vaginal tearing, a couple of bruises, and traces of a lubricant used on Durex. If Ed had raped Liv Shanks, he’d worn a condom. Some of Ed’s defenders suggested that Terry Shanks, the other murder victim, had raped his own wife and was also responsible for the bruises. Forensics showed that Terry had had sex within the previous twenty-four hours. In this theory, Liv knocked him out with a heavy blow to the head, then shot both him and herself with the unregistered gun Terry had recently bought for protection. According to the defence at Ed’s appeal, only a dodgy copper would keep such a gun. Liv, in the defence’s version, had killed Terry as retribution for marital rape, then killed herself rather than let the children know their mother had killed their father.
Forensics was not as exact a science as the TV shows suggested. Sarah didn’t have a theory as to who had killed the husband and wife. She only knew that the evidence against Clark, her constituent, was incredibly flimsy. DNA testing was in its infancy when the murders took place, but it was established that a used condom found in the bedroom bin contained Terry Shanks’ sperm. The prosecution had motivation, a disputed hair on the carpet and a dodgy witness – a neighbour who claimed she saw Clark leave the house half an hour before the bodies were found. In court, the defence drew out several inconsistencies in her testimony.
When Sarah first heard about the case, early in her by-election campaign, she figured that the imprisoned man was probably guilty. Ed Clark, a taxi driver, had a poor alibi. His girlfriend at the time worked as a prostitute on the Woodborough Road. She claimed Ed was watching out for her, but she had been with clients on and off that day. The Shanks lived less than two miles away, in Mapperley. Ed could have been there and back in half an hour.
By taking on Ed’s case, she turned a few friends into enemies. Some were police officers who had been colleagues during her brief stint in the force, ten years before. Privately, other officers told Sarah that they shared her doubts. The new evidence that swung the appeal was proof that the murder weapon, far from belonging to Ed, had been in Terry Shanks’ possession for several months before the murders.
If Ed didn’t do it, what had really happened? Sarah never did make up her mind. She didn’t think that Liv Shanks had killed her husband, then herself. There was no motive for that. A burglary gone wrong? Nothing had been taken. After Ed’s drunken boasts, Sarah had even less idea what to think. She only knew that the evidence against him was wafer-thin. The Law Lords agreed and he had won his appeal. Therefore Ed deserved to go free.
The appeal wouldn’t have happened but for Sarah. Most of the campaign’s supporters believed in her far more than they did in the alleged victim of injustice. If Ed committed new crimes, people would hold Sarah responsible. And rightly so.
3
Quaglino’s was half empty, which suited Sarah fine. She told Jasper March about Donald Dewar’s offer of the week before.
‘He gave me until yesterday. I thought of discussing it with my agent. The local party probably would have let me go, wished me well, all that. But they wouldn’t have meant it and I’d have hated myself for ever. So I called him and said that I was staying in Nottingham West.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Jasper March told Sarah, then drained his espresso. ‘I can see the decision’s starting to eat away at you. Don’t let it. Once you show the whips you’ll put ambition over everything else, they’ve got you.’
‘That’s reassuring,’ Sarah said.
They were on after-dinner brandies. March, ten years her senior, was an old fashioned Tory with old-fashioned good looks: square jaw, jet black hair, not too much tummy. Their conversation had been absorbing enough for the food to be of secondary importance. They’d had two bottles of Madiran: a complex, tannin-rich wine that complemented the game they’d eaten. Jasper had drunk more than her, but only a little. Sarah was pissed enough to be relaxed. Pissed enough to fancy him a little, even though he was too smooth to be her type. She’d been surprised when he asked her to dinner.
Jasper hadn’t given the slightest hint of flirtation all evening, so she was probably safe from making a drunken fool of herself. She could count the number of men she’d slept with after drinking too much on the fingers of one hand. All three she regretted. Jasper was a barrister, she reminded herself, searching for something to talk about.
‘Do you still practise?’
‘No need to practise. I’m pretty good at it by now.’
She forced a smile. Jasper had made it clear to her that his marriage was over, that he would divorce after the election regardless of whether he held his seat. So maybe he was flirting, in a cack-handed way.
‘I meant the law.’
‘Not since I joined the government. But I’ll keep my hand in – when – I mean if – we get shown the door. Politics isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ A waiter returned with Jasper’s credit card. ‘Why did you ask . . . me out to dinner, I mean,’ Sarah said, as the minister helped her on with her coat. ‘I got the impression you had a specific thing you wanted to discuss with me.’
‘I did have an excuse worked out,’ Jasper said, with a rehearsed chuckle. ‘Do you know, I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.’
It didn’t matter how pissed she was, or how long it had been since she had had a shag, Sarah would not sleep with Jasper tonight. But she decided not to rule out the possibility of sleeping with him in the future. When he put an arm around her waist as they were leaving the restaurant, she didn’t remove it. She didn’t quite reciprocate either, only leant into him enough to let him see that his attentions weren’t entirely unwelcome. Then the flashbulbs started going off.
Twenty minutes later, when she got back to her one-bedroom retreat in Parliament View, she rang Dan.
‘I thought I ought to warn you, there’ll be some press sniffing around tomorrow. They might even try to get to you at work.’
She explained what had happened with Jasper March.
‘You don’t waste much time, do you? I only moved out yesterday.’