Shepherd told them who he was and that he was there to see the headteacher. He couldn’t remember her name but as he waited to be called through he scrutinised a noticeboard and eventually found a memo that told him she was Mrs Lucinda Hale-Barton. Shepherd pictured a woman in her fifties with permed hair and a tweed suit, but the woman who shook his hand and ushered him into her office was barely out of her twenties, with shoulder-length red hair, a low-cut top and a figure-hugging skirt. Liam had never mentioned what an attractive headteacher he had, but then he rarely spoke to Shepherd about school.
Suddenly Shepherd realised he was wearing his sea-going gear, that his hands were stained with oil from the outboard engine and that it had been twenty-four hours since he had showered or shaved. He ran a hand through his unkempt hair and opened his mouth to apologise for his dishevelled appearance but the headteacher had already started to speak.
‘I’m so sorry to have called you in like this, Mr Shepherd,’ she said, as she dropped down on to a high-backed leather swivel chair behind a chrome and glass desk, ‘but we have a problem and I wanted to let you know face to face, as it were.’ She opened a drawer and took out a flick-knife. Shepherd recognised it immediately. ‘Liam had this with him today,’ she said and placed it in front of him. ‘It’s what they call a flick-knife.’
‘He brought it to school?’
‘Yes, he did,’ said the headteacher, ‘and mere possession of a knife like this is a criminal offence.’
‘Actually, he’s below the age of criminal responsibility,’ said Shepherd. ‘He isn’t ten for another month.’
She flashed him a cold smile. ‘Well, strictly speaking, the Crime and Disorder Act of 1998 allows the authorities to bring in a child-safety order and have him placed under the supervision of a social worker or a youth- offending team, even if he isn’t yet ten.’ She must have seen Shepherd’s horror because she put up her hands in a placatory gesture. ‘Mr Shepherd, I’m just explaining the law,’ she said. ‘Trust me, there’s no question of the police or social workers being involved. But carrying a weapon in school is not something we can tolerate. On the rare occasions it’s happened here, we have excluded the pupil immediately.’
‘You mean you want to throw Liam out?’
‘We have no choice, Mr Shepherd. We have a policy of zero tolerance and we must show that we act on it.’
‘He wasn’t threatening anyone with it, was he?’
‘That’s not really the point,’ said the headteacher. ‘But, no, he was just showing it to his classmates. Do you have any idea where he might have got it from?’
Shepherd took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. ‘It’s mine,’ he said eventually. ‘Well, not mine exactly. I took it from a mugger on the Underground. I was going to destroy it but Liam must have found it. Mrs Hale-Barton, I really can’t apologise enough for this, but I’m at least partly to blame. I left it in the house – in my bathroom, actually, but he goes in there all the time. I’m sure he didn’t mean any harm by bringing it in.’
The headteacher frowned. ‘You took it from a mugger? I don’t understand.’
‘I’m sorry – I thought you knew that I’m a police officer,’ said Shepherd.
‘No, I didn’t. Liam’s file has you down as being in the army.’
‘I don’t shout about it,’ said Shepherd. He took out his wallet and handed her his warrant card. ‘I left the army some time ago. I’m not a uniformed officer, I have more of an administrative role.’ He gestured at his clothing. ‘I was actually on my way back from a friend’s boat when my au pair called.’
‘You tackled a mugger?’
‘Actually, he tackled me,’ said Shepherd. ‘He didn’t know I was in the job – just wanted my watch and mobile. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘And you disarmed him?’ She handed back the warrant card and Shepherd slid it into his wallet.
‘That sounds more dramatic than it was,’ he said. ‘We grappled and I took it off him. I don’t know which of us was more scared. Look, this is absolutely my fault, Mrs Hale-Barton. I shouldn’t have had the knife in the house. I should have handed it in straight away but it slipped my mind. I’ve a lot on my plate at the moment, not that that’s any excuse. I promise Liam will never do anything like this again – he’s a good boy generally, isn’t he? He’s never been in trouble before?’
‘He works hard and behaves well,’ said the headteacher. ‘Especially when you consider what he’s been through, losing his mother.’
‘He’s a great kid,’ said Shepherd, and gestured at the knife. ‘He just made a mistake with that. And it’s not one he’ll repeat.’
The headteacher picked up the knife and grimaced. ‘What a horrible thing,’ she said. She pressed the button and flinched as the blade sprang out. ‘And the mugger was trying to stab you with this?’ she asked.
Shepherd nodded. ‘He was just a teenager. Only a few years older than Liam.’
The headteacher shook her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to,’ she said. ‘Violence within our school is very rare, but I wonder how well we’re preparing our pupils for life in the real world. You must see it all the time, doing what you do.’
Shepherd smiled. ‘I’m not really in the firing line,’ he lied, ‘but you’re right. Gun crime is at an all-time high. We have drive-by shootings and stabbings and all the other things we used to associate with American cities. These days there’s more violent crime in London than there is in New York.’
The headteacher pressed the blade with the palm of her hand, trying to get it back into place.
‘Let me,’ said Shepherd. He took the knife from her, depressed the chrome button and clicked the blade back into its safe position.
‘The council has a facility for disposing of knives, so perhaps I should take care of it,’ said the headteacher. She held out her hand and Shepherd gave it back to her. She put it back in the drawer. ‘As I said, we have a policy,’ she said. ‘Zero tolerance.’
‘I understand. But I don’t see that excluding Liam is going to change anything. He made a mistake. He wasn’t carrying a knife out of badness, just curiosity. And I really do blame myself for having it in the house in the first place.’
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said. ‘Do you keep a gun at home?’
‘Generally it’s the armed-response teams of SO19 who carry weapons,’ said Shepherd, ‘and they’re locked away at the station when the men are off duty.’ It wasn’t exactly a lie, he thought. He’d just evaded the question. He did keep a gun in the house, but not anywhere that Liam would find it. Sue had always been insistent that he stored any gun under lock and key and that Liam was never to be aware of it.
‘Do you think we’ll ever get to the stage where our policemen carry guns as a matter of course?’
‘Probably,’ said Shepherd. ‘There are just too many guns in the hands of drug-dealers and the like, these days. You can’t expect unarmed policemen to give chase down a dark alley blowing their whistles as they did in the days of Dixon of Dock Green. The world has changed, and the police have to change with it. It’s like patrol cars – the villains drive faster vehicles so we have to upgrade our transport. There’s no point in ours having a top speed of a hundred if the villains are roaring along at a hundred and twenty.’
‘I suppose not,’ said the headteacher. She sighed. ‘Anyway, that’s beside the point, isn’t it? We have to decide what to do with young Liam.’
‘He’s very settled here,’ said Shepherd. ‘I really, really don’t want to have to move him. So much of his life has changed recently that he needs the stability school offers him. My wife was killed and then he stayed with his grandparents for a while. Now at least we’re a family again.’
‘I do understand, Mr Shepherd.’ She chewed her lip, then nodded slowly. ‘You’re right, of course. Excluding him will do more harm than good. I’ll speak to him and make it clear that he’s had a lucky escape. But you must talk to him too, Mr Shepherd, and there has to be some sort of punishment.’
‘His PlayStation and the television set in his room will go. And he’ll do housework until it comes out of his ears.’
The headteacher smiled. ‘That should be enough,’ she said. She stood up and offered her hand. Shepherd shook it over the desk. ‘We haven’t seen you at any of the PTA meetings, have we?’ she said.
‘I’ve been busy,’ said Shepherd, ‘but I’ll make time in future, I promise.’
‘Excellent,’ said the headteacher. ‘And perhaps one day you could come in and give a talk to our pupils – a career in the modern police force, something like that.’
‘Sure,’ agreed Shepherd, although he doubted that the headteacher would appreciate him giving her pupils a rundown on life as an undercover officer. He’d been shot at more times than he cared to remember, and he’d lied, cheated and conned his way into the lives of numerous villains so that he could put them behind bars. Shepherd
