Like A Charm

'The ninety quid and the bracelet. If I'm saying he stole them from me, then they were mine to begin with, weren't they? So I should get them back.'

'Jesus Christ,' Cameron said.

'It's only fair.'

'The bracelet is imaginary. How the hell can you get it back?'

'It can't be imaginary. There's got to be evidence.'

Cameron's eyes went blank again. The channel changed. He told Kelly to stay where she was and pulled me back across the room, to the corner.

'We can't just manufacture a case,' I said.

He looked at me, exasperated. Like the idiot child.

'We're not manufacturing a case,' he said. 'We're manufacturing a number. There's a big difference.'

'How is there? Mason will still go to jail. That's not a number.'

'Mason will be better off,' he said. 'I'm not totally heartless. Ninety quid and a bracelet from a whore, he'll get three months, tops. They'll give him psychiatric treatment. He doesn't get any on the outside. They'll put him back on his meds. He'll come out a new man. It's like putting him in a clinic. A rest home. At public expense. It's doing him a favour.'

I said nothing.

'Everyone's a winner,' he said.

I said nothing.

'Don't rock the boat, kid,' he said.

I didn't rock the boat. I should have, but I didn't.

He led me back to where Mason Mason was sitting. He told Mason to hand over his new earring. Mason unhooked it from his earlobe without a word and gave it to Cameron. Cameron gave it to me. The little snake was surprisingly heavy in the palm of my hand, and warm.

Then Cameron led me downstairs to the evidence lock-up. Public whining had created a lot of things, he said, as far as police work went. It had created the numbers, and the numbers had been used to get budgets, and the budgets were huge. No politician could resist padding police budgets. Not local, not national. So most of the time we were flush with money. The problem was, how to spend it? They could have put more woollies on the street, or they could have doubled the number of CID thief-takers, but bureaucrats like monuments, so mostly they spent it on building new police stations. North London was full of them. There were big concrete bunkers all over the place. Manors had been split and amalgamated and HQs had been shifted around. The result was that evidence lock-ups all over North London were full of old stuff that had been dragged in from elsewhere. Stuff that was historic. Stuff that nobody tracked anymore.

Cameron sent the desk sergeant out for lunch and started looking for the pre-film record books. He told me that extremely recent stuff was logged on the computers, and slightly older stuff was recorded on microfilm, and the stuff from twenty or thirty years ago was still in the original handwritten log books. That was the stuff to steal, he said, because you could just tear out the relevant page. No way to take a page off a microfilm, without taking a hundred other pages with it. And he had heard that deleting stuff from computer files left telltale traces, even when it shouldn't.

So we split up the pile of dusty old log books and started trawling through them, looking for charm bracelets lost or recovered years ago in the past. Cameron told me we were certain to find one. He claimed there was at least one of everything in a big police evidence lock-up like this one. Artificial limbs, oil paintings, guns, clocks, heroin, watches, umbrellas, shoes, wedding rings, anything you needed. And he was right. The books I looked at told me there was a Santa's grotto behind the door behind the desk.

It was me who found the bracelet. It was right there in the third book I went through. I should have kept quiet and just turned the page. But I was new and I was keen, and I suppose to some extent I was under Cameron's spell. And I didn't want to rock the boat. I had a career ahead of me, and I knew what would help it and what would hurt it. So I didn't turn the page. Instead, I called out.

'Got one,' I said.

Cameron closed his own book and came over and took a look at mine. The listing read Charm Bracelet, female, one, gold, some charms attached. The details related to some ancient long-forgotten case from the 1970s.

'Excellent,' Cameron said.

The lock-up itself was what I supposed the back room of an Argos looked like. There was all kinds of stuff in boxes, stacked all over shelves that were ten feet high. There was a comprehensive numbering system with everything stacked in order, but it all got a little haphazard with the really old stuff. It took us a minute or two to find the right section. Then Cameron slid a small cardboard box off a shelf and opened it.

'Bingo,' he said.

It wasn't a jeweller's box. It was just something from an old office supplier. There was no cotton wool inside. Just the charm bracelet itself. It was a hand-some thing, quite heavy, very gold. There were charms on it. I saw a key, and a cross, and a little tiger. Plus some other small items I couldn't identify.

'Put the snake on it,' Cameron said. 'It's got to look right.'

There were closed loops on the circumference of the bracelet that matched the closed loop on the top of Mason's snake. I found an empty one. But having two closed loops didn't help me.

'I need gold wire,' I said.

'Back to the books,' Cameron said.

We put his one of everything claim to the test. And sure enough, we came up with Gold Wire, jeweller's, one coil. Lost property, from 1969. Cameron cut a half-inch length with his pocket knife.

'I need pliers,' I said.

'Use your fingernails,' he said.

It was difficult work, but I got it secure enough. Then the whole thing disappeared into Cameron's pocket.

'Go tear out the page,' he said.

I shouldn't have, but I did.

I got a major conscience attack four days later. Mason Mason had been arrested. He pleaded not guilty in front of the magistrates, and they remanded him for trial and set bail at five thousand pounds. I think Cameron had colluded with the prosecution service to set the figure high enough to keep Mason off the street, because he was a little worried about him. Mason was a big guy, and he had been very angry about the fit-up. Very angry. He said he knew the filth had to make their numbers. He was OK with that. But he said nobody should accuse a Marine of dishonour. Not ever. So he stewed for a couple of days. And then he surprised everyone by making bail. He came up with the money and walked. Everyone speculated but nobody knew where the cash came from. Cameron was nervous for a day, but he got over it. Cameron was a big guy too, and a copper.

Then the next day I saw Cameron with the bracelet. It was late in the afternoon. He had it out on his desk. He slipped it into his pocket when he noticed me.

'That should be back in the lock-up,' I said. 'With a new case number. Or it should be on Kelly Key's wrist.'

'I gave her the ninety quid,' he said. 'I decided I'm keeping the bracelet.'

'Why?'

'Because I like it.'

'No, why?' I said.

'Because there's a pawn shop I know in Muswell Hill.'

'You're going to sell it?'

He said nothing.

'I thought this was about the numbers,' I said.

'There's more than one kind of numbers,' he said. 'There's pounds in my pocket. That's a number too.'

'When are you going to sell it?'

'Now.'

'Before the trial? Don't we need to produce it for evidence?'

'You're not thinking, kid. The bracelet's gone. He fenced it already. How do you think he came up with the bail money? Juries like nice little consistencies like that.'

Then he left me alone at my desk. That's when the conscience attack kicked in. I started thinking about Mason Mason. I wanted to make sure he wasn't going to suffer for our numbers. If he was going to get medical treatment in jail, well, fine. I could live with that. It was wrong, but maybe it was right, too. But how could we guarantee it? I supposed it would depend on his record. If there was previous psychiatric treatment, maybe it would be continued as a matter of routine. But what if there wasn't? What if there had been a previous determination that he was just a sane-but-bad guy? Right then and there I decided I would go along to get along only if Mason was going to make out OK. If he wasn't, then I would torpedo the whole thing. Including my own career. That was my pact with the devil. That's the only thing I can offer in my defence.