Like A Charm

'And you prevented this from happening?'

'Me and my men, sir. We mounted a standard fire-and-manoeuvre encirclement of a simple dwelling and took down the aggressors. It was a modest household, sir. The woman owned just a single pair of earrings.'

'And she gave them to you.'

'Just one, sir. She kept the other one.'

'She gave you an earring?'

'In gratitude, sir. Her husband's life was saved.'

'When was this?'

'Sir, our operational log records the engagement at 0400 last Thursday.'

Cameron nodded. He left Mason Mason at the desk and pulled me away into the corner. We competed for a minute or two with all the one-sandwich-short-of-a-picnic metaphors we knew. One brick shy of a load, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, that kind of thing. I felt bad about it later. I should have seen what was coming.

But Cameron was already into another long and complicated calculation. It was almost metaphysical in its complexity. If we logged another case today, our productivity number would rise. Obviously. If we broke it, our clearance rate would rise. Obviously. Question was, would our clearance rate rise faster than our productivity number? Basically, was it worth it? The equation seemed to me to require some arcane calculus, which was beyond me, and I was a fast track training college wanker. But Cameron seemed to have a handy rule of thumb. He seemed to suggest that it's always worth logging a case if you know you're going to break it. At the time I suspected that was a non-mathematical superstition, but I couldn't prove it. Still can't, actually, without going to night school. But back then I didn't argue the arithmetic. I argued the facts instead.

'Do we even have a case?' I asked.

'Let's find out,' he said.

I imagined he would send me out for an Evening Standard, so we could check the greyhound results from Harringay. Or he would send me to wade through incident reports, looking for a stolen snake earring from last Thursday night. But he did neither thing. He walked me back to Kelly Key instead.

'You work hard for your money, right?' he said to her.

I could see that Kelly didn't know where that question was going. Was she being sympathized with, or propositioned? She didn't know. She was in the dark. But like all good whores everywhere, she came up with a neutral answer.

'It can be fun,' she said. 'With some men.'

She didn't add men like you. That would have been too blatant. Cameron might have been setting a trap. But the way she smiled and touched his forearm with her fingertips left the words It can be fun with men like you hanging right there in the air. Certainly Cameron heard them, loud and clear. But he just shook his head, impatiently.

'I'm not asking for a date,' he said.

'Oh,' she said.

'I'm just saying, you work hard for your money.'

She nodded. The smile disappeared and I saw reality flood her face. She worked very hard for her money. That message was unmistakable.

'Doing all kinds of distasteful things,' Cameron said.

'Sometimes,' she said.

'How much do you charge?'

'Two hundred for the hour.'

'Liar,' Cameron said. 'The twenty-two-year-olds up west charge two hundred for the hour.'

Kelly nodded.

'Fifty for a quickie,' she said.

'How about thirty?'

'I could do that.'

'How would you feel if a punter ripped you off?'

'Like he didn't pay?'

'Like he stole ninety quid from you. That's like not paying four times. You end up doing him for nothing, and you end up doing the previous three guys for nothing too, because now that money's gone.'

'I wouldn't like it,' she said.

'Suppose he stole your earring, as well?'

'My what?'

'Your earring.'

'Who?'

Cameron looked across the room at Mason. Kelly Key followed his gaze.

'Him?' she said. 'I wouldn't do him. He's mad.'

'Suppose you did.'

'I wouldn't.'

'We're playing let's-pretend here,' Cameron said. 'Suppose you did him, and he stole your money and your earring.'

'That's not even a real earring.'

'Isn't it?'

Kelly shook her head. 'It's a charm from a charm bracelet. You guys are hopeless. Can't you see that? It's supposed to be fastened on to a bracelet. Through that little hoop at the top? You can see the wire doesn't match.'

We all stared at Mason Mason's ear. Then I looked at Cameron. I saw his eyes do the blank thing again. The cha

'I could arrest you, Kelly Key,' he said.

'But?'

'But I won't, if you play ball.'

'Play ball how?'

'Swear out a statement that Mason Mason stole ninety quid and a charm bracelet from you.'

'But he didn't.'

'What part of let's-pretend don't you understand?'

Kelly Key said nothing.

'You could leave out your professional background,' Cameron said. 'If you want to. Just say he broke into your house. While you were in bed asleep. The home-owner being in bed asleep always goes down well.'

Kelly Key took her gaze off Mason. Turned back to Cameron.

'Would I get my stuff back afterwards?' she asked.

'What stuff?'

'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 cha

'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 wi

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.