Free The Crime Tsar by Nichola McAuliffe Page B

out. One of them, a ringleted individual with sunglasses wrapped over the bandanna obscuring his face, casually took out a cigarette and lit it. Shackleton watched him.
    Then, after taking a deep drag, as if in slow motion, he took thelighted cigarette between his thumb and forefinger and flicked it towards Geoffrey Carter, who was leaning over to shake hands with Grandfather Joseph. It described an arc and connected with Carter’s petrol-sodden trousers.
    Immediately, with an audible sound, like a dog’s half-bark, Carter was in flames. As quickly as this happened, in uncanny silence, Shackleton grabbed him in a weird caricature of a hug, trying to cover his burning clothes with pressure from his own body. Both men fell to the ground attempting to put out the flames. After the stunned stillness of the first seconds of the drama people started to shout and throw jackets, shawls and even a rug from the floor on to the two burning men. The television crew filmed it all.
    From beneath the comical pile of clothes seeped smoke and a muffled moaning. Gordon pulled the coverings off the two men. Shackleton was wrapped closely, tightly, round Carter in a parody of a sexual embrace. The stink of burned skin and hair rose from them. Gordon thought of roast pork.
    â€˜We’ll have to call an ambulance in,’ he said in his flat Yorkshire voice.
    â€˜No.’ Shackleton’s tone was still quiet. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary, do you, Geoffrey?’
    Carter, in obvious pain, tried to sit up.
    â€˜No … No.’
    Shackleton grasped Carter under one arm, Gordon took the other. They pulled him to his feet.
    â€˜I think,’ said Shackleton looking round the room, defying them to stop him, ‘it’s time we left. And it’s time you all went home. Quietly. Peacefully.’
    There was a silence, so solid with renewed hatred they couldn’t move. For the first time Shackleton was unsure, close to fear. He had calculated that their injuries and vulnerability would be their passport out, the natural defusing of the situation. He knew that two burned but brave policemen walking out of a now peaceful estate would be a coup. He knew these things not with calculation and objectivity but in the way an animal knows there’s rain coming after heavy heat. But the weather wasn’t breaking. The atmosphere seemed heavier.
    Sammi’s mother, silent and immobile until now, broke the tension.
    â€˜Go. Please go.’
    Carter murmured, ‘Thank you.’
    But her biblical face offered no comfort.
    â€˜Go and don’t come back. We will deal with our young men. You go and deal with yours.’
    Dismissed.
    The two men, their fine uniforms torn and burned, led the way out of the community centre. Gordon and the television crew followed. They walked back towards the blue-and-white tape.
    Bright spotlights were blindingly trained on them. Shackleton knew his snipers would be watching. They saw the lines of riot police, more now than when they arrived. The news teams and fearful senior officers.
    Randall, unable to act while the chiefs were inside, was seething with anger at what might have been: two dead police chiefs and an entire estate out of control. Then a nation out of control. Race riots in every town and lynchings of rural newsagents. He couldn’t blame these kids for their expressions of unhappiness and frustration but he could and did blame these two arrogant buffoons for the worst few hours of his life. If it was cretins like these who were in charge of policing in the twenty-first century then he’d be gone by the year’s end. Better to be a security guard than answerable to such self-obsessed egomaniacs.
    Shackleton and Carter walked steadily, calmly, not looking back. Behind them what had so recently been a murderous mob broke up into dribs and drabs of shamefaced young men skulking into the shadows. Feeling foolish, most had taken off their scarves.