Crystal put a hand on his arm and said calmly, ‘Don’t bother, Vince. He’s gone.’ She took a final long drag on her cigarette and threw the stub into the pool.
Gone? What had happened here? ‘What’s going on, Crystal?’
‘Just cleaning up a bit, Vince. How about you?’
Don’t Just Fly
The water looked so inviting, but she wasn’t here to swim, attractive though that idea seemed.
She had knocked on the door of the study when she heard the filing cabinet being moved and said in an urgent voice, ‘Tommy, you need to come and see this, babe. Down at the pool. There’s something wrong. Can you hurry up?’ And then she’d parked Candy in front of the TV with her little pink headphones on and run down to the echoing chamber that contained the pool. The artificial daylight was reflecting off the blue water and the gold mosaic. She inhaled the smell of chlorine. She loved it here.
By the time Tommy got there, Crystal was standing at the edge of the pool. ‘Here, over here,’ she said, gesturing to him. ‘Stand next to me and then you’ll be able to see it.’
‘See what? Where? I don’t see—’
She slipped swiftly behind him and gave him an almighty push that left him thrashing around in panic in the water. He made a grab for the side of the pool, he could easily haul himself out, but that was something Crystal had already considered and so she jumped in beside Tommy, getting behind him and holding him up in the water as if she was performing a lifesaving manoeuvre. He said something to her, but he was choking on water and it was hard to decipher the words. It could have been ‘Thanks’ or ‘Help’ or ‘What the fuck, Crystal?’ for all she knew. Instead of helping him to the side, she towed him further out, into the deep end, and then she swam swiftly away, carving her efficient breaststroke through the water. By the time she was out of the pool he had slipped beneath the water.
‘Just cleaning up a bit, Vince,’ she said when she saw him. ‘How about you?’
‘Yeah,’ Vince said as they watched Tommy’s body drifting towards them like a lilo on a current. ‘The same.’
‘Give you a lift somewhere, Vince?’
Just the Facts, Ma’am
Words never actually spoken by Joe Friday in Dragnet, as any girl who knows everything knows. ‘You know too much,’ Ronnie said.
‘No, I don’t know enough,’ Reggie said.
The third man, as he was known – although there were actually several ‘third men’ – was finally unmasked, thanks to Operation Villette.
Nicholas Sawyer’s Christmas card to colleagues and friends was a family portrait that featured his wife Susan, sons Tom and Robert, and grandchildren George, Lily, Nelly Isabella and Alfie. His daughters-in-law were absent from the photograph, as if perhaps only his direct bloodline was of any importance. Or perhaps they were just busy that day. Or camera shy. The photograph was unseasonable, taken in summer, in an unnamed field that Nicholas claimed was in his old rural constituency although it could have been anywhere.
The photograph had the cheerful, casual feel of a family snap but had been taken by a professional photographer as Nicholas Sawyer was a man who liked to control his image. He liked to control everything. He was seventy-five and had been an MP for forty years in the same constituency in Kent, a Cabinet minister, in and out of government for twenty, finishing in Defence, and ten years ago had been elevated to the House of Lords, where he had chosen to sit on the cross benches. He still introduced himself and his wife as ‘Nick and Susie’, although Susie herself was more inclined to use ‘Lady Sawyer’. Nicholas consulted with several of the FT’s UK 500, defence contractors being his speciality, and Susie was on the board of many charities, the majority of which favoured the arts rather than social justice.
The couple had an apartment in Chelsea, a maison de maître in Languedoc, as well as the constituency home, Roselea, in Kent, which they had kept after Nicholas left the House of Commons and where nowadays they spent most weekends. Roselea was a picture-book thatched cottage in a covetable village and had, over the years, been featured in several lifestyle articles in the broadsheets. It was where they were when the police came and asked Nicholas to accompany them to the nearest police station, where he was interviewed under caution. Three weeks