Naked Ambition by Robert Gott

Author:Robert Gott [Gott, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC016000, FIC037000, HUM000000, HUM006000
Published: 2023-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

When Carol left the Buchanan house, the first thing she did, after making her date with Sally, was ring the CIB and ask to be put through to Detective Sergeant Jack Craig. She disliked Jack Craig, and she now disliked Gregory Buchanan, so bringing them together seemed like a good idea. Her feelings about Jack Craig had something to do with an entirely unreasonable distrust of people whose first name and last name were interchangeable. She thought this could only be the result of generational laziness and lack of imagination. Surely at some point, someone in the family would have recognised the confusion that might arise from having a surname that was also a first name, and done something about it.

It wasn’t just his name, though. Jack Craig was an oaf. He wasn’t big-bellied or poorly shaven or red in the face, but Carol thought that this version of Jack Craig was inside him, struggling to get out. She’d worked with him, briefly, so she knew that there was a long list of things he despised. At the top of this list were left-leaning politicians and arty wankers. He’d hate Gregory Buchanan on sight, and hate even more the awful obligation to behave professionally. He was an oaf, but he wasn’t a moron. Getting on the wrong side of a minister in government might, at some later date, scupper his ambition to be the police commissioner — an ambition he’d drunkenly expressed to a gobsmacked Carol after work one day. She’d been gobsmacked because the distance between his abilities and his self-belief was vast.

It was serendipitous that the Buchanan house was within Jack Craig’s investigative bailiwick, and the value of the missing painting meant that the investigation fell to the plain-clothes boys and girls, rather than uniform.

‘Jack,’ she said, ‘I’ve got a job that requires sensitive handling, so naturally I thought of you.’

Craig was never sure when Carol was taking the piss. No one had ever accused him of being sensitive before, and it wasn’t a quality he particularly admired. Still, women were suckers for sensitive men, apparently, so perhaps Carol was responding to a quality he wasn’t aware he had — and that had to be flattering, right?

‘Fill me in, Caz.’

Carol loathed being called Caz, and it sounded especially revolting coming out of Craig’s mouth. She outlined the details of the case but withheld the crucial nugget that the missing painting wasn’t just a portrait, but a nude portrait. She wanted Jack to discover that for himself, in front of the family. She stressed that Gregory Buchanan was a minister on the rise, knowing that this would discourage Craig from handballing the case to another officer.

‘The thing is, Jack, this will require a little discretion. When a painting of a pollie goes missing, there might be more to it than meets the eye.’

Craig wasn’t sure what this might mean, but he was sufficiently intrigued to decide on the spot that he’d make the initial visit to the Buchanans alone. If there were any kudos to be had in the solving of this case, he didn’t want to share them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.