James Craig: Buckingham Palace Blues

Joe was, as far as Carlyle knew, the only Polish sergeant working in the Metropolitan Police. At least, Joseph Leon Gorka Szyszkowski was second-generation Polish, having been born in the UK. Brought up in Portsmouth, he came to London to study geophysics at Imperial College. For reasons Carlyle didn’t understand, he decided to join the Met after graduating with a good 2:1 degree. More British than Carlyle was (or, at least, felt), Joe had an Indian wife, Anita, and a couple of quintessentially English kids, William and Sarah. However, despite all of this, there was still a strand of the sergeant’s DNA that was deeply, irredeemably Polish i.e. dark, pessimistic and Catholic. This contributed to a sense of detachment, irony and, perhaps just as important, fatalism, which for Carlyle made Joe a perfect colleague.

Joe picked up after four or five rings. ‘Boss. .’ he began warily.

‘Joe,’ Carlyle replied, ‘sorry to disturb you on a Sunday.’

‘No worries.’ Joe lowered his voice. ‘We’ve got the in-laws round, so disturb away.’

‘Do you know anyone working in Vice at the moment?’

There was a dramatic pause. ‘You haven’t been caught with your pants down, have you?’

‘Seriously. .’

‘One or two,’ Joe laughed. ‘Why?’

Carlyle outlined the situation. There was another pause.

Like Carlyle, Joe was a family man. He knew how seriously his boss would take this case. ‘Let me make a few calls.’

‘Thanks, Joe. I appreciate it.’

‘Do you want me to come in?’

‘Maybe later. At the moment, I’m just trying to work out a plan of action.’

‘Sounds like it will end up on Vice’s desk, anyway,’ Joe mused.

‘I don’t care whose fucking desk it ends up on,’ Carlyle said firmly. ‘I will see this one through to the bitter end.’

A couple of minutes later, Carlyle’s mobile started vibrating in his hand. ‘That was quick!’ he said.

‘Eh?’ It was Helen.

‘Sorry,’ Carlyle said quickly. ‘I thought you were Joe.’

‘Sorry to disappoint.’ Her voice was tart.

‘N-no, it’s not like that,’ he stammered, trying to keep the irritation from his voice. ‘It’s just that it was a difficult night.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said, adopting a more conciliatory tone. ‘You can tell me about it tonight. I’ll make us a family dinner once we get home. Alice fancies pancakes.’

‘Nice!’ Carlyle smiled. He always fancied pancakes.

‘I just wanted to tell you that we are going to stay out for a while longer,’ Helen continued, ‘seeing as it’s such a nice afternoon.’

‘It is?’ All Carlyle could see out through his window was a sooty brick wall.

‘Yes, it is,’ she laughed. ‘You should get out more.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I should.’

His wife sighed. ‘Whatever you’re up to, don’t overdo it, John.’

‘Me? Never.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Yes, yes. Don’t worry. I’m fine.’

‘Good. We’ll see you later.’

Carole Simpson walked out through the gates of Opel Open Prison and gazed in the general direction of the sea, breathing in deeply. The sea air outside the prison fence was just the same as that on the inside, but somehow it felt better. . much better. Another visit over, she could get back to the ‘normal’ part of her life. The routine of visiting her husband was now well ingrained but it still made her feel uncomfortable. Every second Sunday, she would make the trek down from London to the South Downs to spend a couple of hours walking around the prison grounds with Joshua, talking about their respective jobs — hers running a pool of seventy detectives for the Metropolitan Police, his teaching fellow inmates mathematics — and their plans for rebuilding their life together once he got out.

Release for Joshua Hunt — aka Mr Carole Simpson — was still quite a way off. He was almost eighteen months into a seven-year stretch for fraud, conspiracy to defraud and embezzlement. Even with time off for good behaviour, it would be at least another year, more likely two, before he could begin to think about parole. However long it was, she could wait. Alone in the outside world, Simpson was surviving perfectly well — far better than she might have imagined back when Joshua’s investment firm had collapsed and he was arrested.

When they’d seized his assets and hit him with a?15 million fine, she had been forced to radically downsize, moving from an elegant house in Highgate to a modest two-bedroom flat in Hammersmith. The fancy restaurants, the charity dinners and the celebrity ‘friends’ were a thing of the past as well, along with the expensive holidays in the Caribbean, Italy and South Africa. But the new reduced lifestyle didn’t bother her in the least. The most important thing was that she was still working; she had kept her rank and most of her responsibilities. As a commander, she was still one of the thirty or so most senior women on the Force. There would be no more promotions — the dream of making deputy commissioner was over — but she hadn’t been kicked out.

That had been a major surprise. On the one hand, she had not been involved in any of her husband’s financial misdeeds. On the other hand, she had become a major embarrassment to the Met. As such, she had been expecting the boot. But they had bottled it, and Simpson had gruffly declined to fall on her sword.

Walking away with her tail between her legs would have been seen as an admission of guilt. More importantly, it would have left her with nothing to do. Simpson knew that retirement would have bored her out of her skull. Barely into her fifties, she had a good decade of productive working life left in the tank. By standing her ground, she would at least be allowed to retire at a time of her own choosing, which would be as late as possible.

Even the annoyance of being dubbed ‘the clueless copper wife of Britain’s biggest conman’, as one tabloid newspaper so elegantly put it, had dissipated over time. The world still kept turning. The thing was, Simpson realised, that she still didn’t really know if Joshua was a fraudster or not. As far as she could make out, he had been doing the same things all through the good years, when he was hailed as a hero and a genius, as he had when things went south. It was just that the market had gone bad. No one had cared what he had been up to when he was making them money.

When the market crashed, however, the hunt was on for someone to blame. What was the saying? When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked. Well, Joshua, it seemed, was wearing not a stitch. But then neither were plenty of other people. Now the whole world had seen his hairy arse. Well, so be it. He was her husband. She was sticking with him the same way she was sticking with the job; she had too much of her life invested in their marriage — almost twenty-five years — to cut and run now.

Reaching the car park, Simpson pulled out her keys and watched the other prison WAGs as they headed for their cars. She hadn’t spoken to a single one of them in all the time she had been coming here. Most of the other wives and girlfriends were much younger than her. They looked harder, but at the same time seemed relaxed about their fate.

A couple of them — all blonde hair, high heels and short skirts — were laughing and joking as they headed for their cars, casually going about their business here as if they were simply visiting the supermarket or the hairdresser’s. What were their husbands in for? Nothing too terrible, Simpson supposed, if they were in an open prison. Nothing too terrible? She laughed at herself: what a thing for a copper to think!

She reached her car and opened the driver’s door. On the seat lay her mobile phone. It must have fallen out of her pocket when she was getting out. Cursing her absentmindedness, she picked it up. Immediately, the phone started vibrating in her hand.