East of Innocence Read online

  I’ll give him that, he has. And his manner doesn’t ruffle me; I look at my eyes in the rear view and allow myself a smile. This sounds interesting. ‘Congratulations on finding the telephone, officer,’ I say. ‘Now, what can you tell me?’

  ‘What I can tell you I’ll tell you in your office,’ says the man. ‘When are you –’ imitating the manner of a sycophantic menial ‘– available for visits?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ I say. I am a lawyer. Here is a policeman looking to get under my skin, putting on voices, looking for a rise. I have to ask: why? ‘I’ll have to check my diary. Got a number?’

  I pick up a pad and pen, phone clamped under my jaw.

  ‘I’ll see you at midday tomorrow,’ says the man. ‘Your office. Be there.’

  ‘Got a name?’

  ‘Baldwin.’ He waits. I can hear him breathing, waiting for a reaction.

  ‘Look forward to it,’ I say.

  *

  My radio is on, the traffic gridlocked, the news fixed on the missing girl, Rosie O’Shaughnessy, unseen now for ten days. The breaking story is that her boyfriend, who witnesses claim had had a violent argument with her just before she disappeared, is about to be arrested. In an eerie demonstration of synchronicity I see that the traffic I am in is being held up by a policeman, behind him a battery of cars with flashing blue lights surrounding a building which I realise is the home of the under-suspicion boyfriend.

  Rosie’s mother’s voice fills my car as I watch an indifferent policeman hold up his hand to a passer-by. ‘Just, she wouldn’t, she’d never just disappear,’ the word spoken with a puzzled mystery as if she suspects her daughter has been magicked into another world, rather than that which everybody is merely waiting to have confirmed: that she’s had her life prosaically taken away from her by a man who wanted something from her she was not prepared to give. For the first time, I feel the weight of her vanishing; I have to blink to blot away the mental image of her tearful mother talking inexpertly into a microphone at a press conference she never imagined she’d have to attend, a shot of her daughter’s face behind her. Poor blameless woman.

  I look out of my windscreen at the blank red-brick repetition of the block where Rosie’s boyfriend lives. Can evil fester in a place so utterly ordinary, so unremarkable? I turn off the radio, spooked, even in the heat hunching my shoulders against a shiver. I have been exposed to too much death for one day.

  Still trapped in the traffic, I call Terry’s number, not expecting him to answer but intrigued by the call from Baldwin and not convinced Terry has been completely open with me. From what he’s told me, I can’t see an Alpha-male like Baldwin knocking on doors for the likes of Billy Morrison. He picks up on the second ring.

  ‘Hello?’ He sounds as if he’s in a bar, noise in the background and a lazy imprecision in his speech.

  ‘Terry? It’s Daniel.’

  ‘Danny, mate, yeah, fuckin’, as it happens you’ve, yeah…’ He fades out, a hacking laugh in the background, a shout of ‘Oi-oi’. ‘Just it’s… not a good time.’ Underneath the boozy wandering of his speech, I can tell he is cagy, on his guard.

  ‘Anything you need to tell me?’

  ‘Tell you? Yeah, tell you, the weather’s fuckin’ blinding, it’s three o’clock and I’m half-cut in my mate’s bar, and, Danny, son, listen to me you should check out the fanny, I ain’t being funny but it’s shooting fuckin’ fish in a tin can. Awesome.’

  This is not the Terry I spoke to in my office, scared yet still righteously outraged by Baldwin’s betrayal of their, the police’s, collective moral values. I have cut my teeth at the top tables of dispute resolution; I can pick up on bluster like a doorman can spot a drunk.

  ‘Just got a call from Baldwin. So how about you sober up for a second and tell me something I don’t know?’

  There’s a long silence and then Terry is back, bluster replaced with apprehension. ‘What’s he want?’

  ‘Didn’t say. He’s coming to see me. So, again. Anything you need to tell me?’

  What Terry hadn’t told me and what he now admits as emotion shakes his voice and, towards the end, causes him to weep unashamedly, is that while Baldwin’s knuckles were violating his sister another man compelled her to tell them Terry’s number. Her head still covered and a phone pushing the rough material of the sack against her cheek, she begged him in her own private darkness, her voice rising to muffled panicked shrieks, to tell Baldwin where the discs with the copied footage from the station were. Which Terry did, he tells me through his tears, and I cannot blame him for it.

  ‘You should have heard her, Danny. You imagine? My own sister, she’s, she’s not like us. Not… She works at a fucking dentist. So yeah I told them, Christ, Danny I’m sorry it’s not like I thought… You’re a lawyer, you’ll be all right.’

  The traffic starts to move, the policeman waving cars, vans through. Terry stops, steadies himself, I hear him take a drink. ‘Just, be careful. Cunt’s not fucking human.’ Click. Terry’s gone, and my guess is that he’ll be too busy with the bottle to be accepting my calls for a while.

  Rachael, Rosie, Terry and his sister; it has been a day of troubled souls. It is dark when I finish at the office and pull up on the gravel driveway outside Gabe’s house, unannounced because I crave the bright warmth of a spontaneous welcome. Gabe lives in a brick-and-timber house, which must be worth nearly a million, its architecture a haphazard collection of sloping tiled roofs and chimneys and gables and small square-paned windows, an inheritance from his old-money parents, an oddity in this area of nouveau-riche criminality where most houses are bought or built on the proceeds of dubious property dealings and the trade in controlled substances. Lights are on downstairs as I knock; I have to wait some time before Gabe comes to the door. His eyes, normally so focused, drift across me and down, snap back, fall away. I have never before seen Gabe slump but now his forearm is taking his weight against the doorframe, chin dropping to his shoulder. The diffuse light coming from the room behind him blurs his edges, softens him; this is the first time it has ever occurred to me that Gabe could be vulnerable.

  ‘Daniel.’ He talks clumsily like his mouth is full of dry rags. ‘Wasn’t expecting you.’

  I look past him into the house, smell the marijuana. ‘Having a party?’

  ‘Just me.’ He smiles stupidly. ‘Neil Young night.’ In the background I can hear Harvest playing, Young’s melancholy voice. I look down, see that Gabe is holding a gun limply in the hand not propped against the doorframe, its black barrel reflecting dimly in the light. This is not what I came for.

  ‘You all right?’

  ‘Brilliant. Fucking top drawer. Why wouldn’t I be?’ He dares me to respond, straightens up, sways belligerently. Fuck sake, Gabe.

  ‘Yeah, no reason. Want company?’

  Gabe looks at me for the first time with precision. Underneath his uncoordinated and hostile gaze, I believe I can see sadness. He shakes his head. ‘Not tonight.’

  I nod, turn away, conscious that I am leaving a friend in need but unsure what I can offer, suddenly aware that the scars he brought back with him from Afghanistan may run deeper than I had imagined. I drive away, Gabe still standing in his doorway. My thoughts are confused by the shock of being confronted by a man I believed I knew completely, behaving like an irrational stranger. He holds his hand up in a swaying farewell and as I turn into the street I can see the silhouette of his gun pointing up into the night sky.

  7

  BY MIDDAY, MY hangover has abated, three cans of Coke undoing the ill effects of the bottle of Burgundy and three glasses of rum I’d emptied the night before after getting back from Gabe’s, soothing my murderous and culpable mood in front of banal late-night television. I am ready for Baldwin’s visit now, infused with that warm, charged, delicious anticipation I always feel before the threat of confrontation and violence; it is the feeling I imagine an addict experiences walking home to his flat with his score in his pocket, about to sate an urge that can
never be fully mastered.

  Baldwin keeps me waiting, but I would not have expected anything less. Twenty minutes late, I hear the bell ring and walk to my small lobby, let him in. He walks past me without a word, looking at the tiny entranceway with the deliberately unimpressed air of a man taking a look about a vacant house he knows he can well afford. Although I have to admit that what he sees is not in the least impressive: two metres of mismatched floor tiles and a bulb that wants a lightshade.

  ‘Through here?’ he asks, opening the only door, into my office. I do not bother to reply, follow him in, already furious that he has taken control of my space. If he sits behind my desk, I promise myself emptily, I will break his jaw. All policemen are the same, I know, years of state-backed authority washing out any vestiges of human manners; they no longer have any need of them, do not have to ask permission to act as they please. Yet Baldwin takes this arrogance and somehow makes it personal; I feel as if he has my arm up behind my back. I push past him, get behind my desk, stake my claim. He looks at me, amused, and lowers himself into the chair facing the desk. I am surprised it is big enough for his bulk. Baldwin is massive; perhaps eighteen stone, perhaps forty-five years old, his face loose and pouchy but beneath the soft exterior he gives the impression of immense solidity, uncooked pastry draped over granite. He has grey hair cut short and flat on top like a marine sergeant’s and flat incurious eyes which regard the world as a dentist would a loose tooth. Just as, by outraged consent, we will no longer suffer predatory paedophiles to act as priests, so too I believe we should not allow violent sadists to join the police force. His presence makes me want to take a shower.

  ‘Sit down,’ he says. He is in my place of work, giving me orders. It is as if, as I step into the ring for a much awaited title fight, my opponent attacks me from behind with a baseball bat. How can I have been psychologically ambushed in my own office?

  ‘You want to talk about Billy Morrison,’ I say, my voice level, trying to regain the initiative. Baldwin pats his jacket, retrieves a notepad from his inside pocket, takes his time.

  ‘I’ll ask the fucking questions,’ he says calmly. ‘If you don’t mind.’ He looks down at his notepad then looks up, smiles at me. But his eyes remain flat and expressionless; he has the unassailable air of a predator who long ago took his place at the top of the food chain for granted. I am not easily intimidated but Baldwin makes me wish we had an ocean between us. ‘Francis Connell, that’s your old man. Right?’

  ‘That has nothing to do with the investigation at hand,’ I say. ‘Let’s keep to the script, shall we?’

  ‘Just saying,’ he says. ‘You in the law, him the wrong side of it. Wonder what he thinks. Of all this.’ He gestures with his hand at my little office. ‘All this,’ he repeats, allowing himself a soft wet chuckle.

  ‘Billy Morrison,’ I say. ‘We discuss him or this conversation is over.’

  ‘Right. Down to business. I’ve got some information on young William Morrison, something you might find useful. Save you some of your no doubt valuable time.’ He looks around, looks at me.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Don’t fucking go on me, pal,’ he says. ‘First things first. I help you, I’m going to need something from you.’

  ‘As an officer of the law, any information you might have pertinent to my client’s case, you are obliged to share with me,’ I say. ‘You know that.’

  Baldwin closes his notepad, pokes it back in his jacket pocket. He leans forward, the chair creaks ominously. ‘See that? That’s me going off the record. Right?’

  ‘Not right,’ I say. ‘This meeting is finished.’

  ‘Hold up,’ says Baldwin. ‘Let’s see if we can’t help each other. Now, I’ve got a confession to make. I made my mistakes, with Terry. Used the stick, not the carrot. Bad psychology. Didn’t work.’

  ‘Who’s Terry?’

  ‘Right, yeah. Nice try. Fucker’s skipped off, someone tells me he’s in Spain but nothing I can do about that now. He did pass on some useful information though. See, I want what he gave you. You give it to me, I’ll help you out with Billy Morrison. The carrot.’ He looks at me, head to one side as if he’s inspecting a suspect mole. ‘I think I’d need a bigger stick for you.’

  ‘So tell me what you know about Billy Morrison’s case,’ I say. ‘It’d better be some carrot.’

  ‘And you’ll hand over the discs?’

  ‘What would I want with them?’ I say.

  It turns out Billy, as Baldwin explains it, doesn’t quite fit the role of innocent victim he has been playing in his hospital bed. Ten nights ago, he and three friends piled into a Transit van, drove up an isolated farm track five miles from junction 28 of the M25 and cut their way through a link of quarter-inch chain securing the gates of a wire fence that ringed a corrugated iron-sided barn. They used an angle grinder to cut through the lock on the barn door and loaded up twenty thousand pounds’ worth of Japanese stereo equipment, which, in turn, had vanished from a shipping container in Tilbury Docks a week earlier.

  In Billy’s world, the perfect crime constitutes one you are not caught at the scene of, and Billy made it back to his house unscathed. As far as he was concerned, he had got away with it; having got away with it, he could not help but boast of it. And this boasting inevitably reached the ears of the aggrieved party, in this case, Baldwin told me, his jowls wobbling with spiteful mirth, a serious character called Vincent Halliday, a local underworld name I am familiar with myself and who had arranged the initial robbery from Tilbury Docks. I can easily imagine his reaction on being informed that not only had he been ripped off by Billy bloody Morrison, but also that Billy was telling anybody who would listen about what a piece of piss it had been.

  Billy’s hit and run was no accident. The hit that Halliday put out on him in retribution, Baldwin tells me, is the worst-kept secret since Prince Harry was born with ginger hair. He doesn’t know who drove the car, doesn’t particularly care; this is one investigation that’s going nowhere fast.

  ‘Spare you the trouble,’ he says. ‘Fuck that Billy Morrison off, he’s a mug and he’s a fucking dead man. Yes?’

  Oh, Billy. I busy myself with arranging the pens on my desk, unwilling to meet Baldwin’s eyes, which I know will be relishing this moment. Knowledge is power, and right now Baldwin is making me look like a primary-school child playing at lawyers.

  ‘So, quid pro whatever. The discs, sunshine. Now would be good.’

  ‘I don’t know what I can do with that information,’ I say, looking up at him. ‘Do you have any evidence?’

  ‘Very funny. The discs.’

  ‘Because, this is my problem. If what you say is true, and if there is no evidence of this crime, then how am I going to prosecute this Halliday and get significant criminal damages for my client? And if I can’t get him damages, then how am I going to get paid?’ I frown at Baldwin, an expression of bafflement. ‘I thought you were going to help me?’

  Baldwin looks at me in surprise. The penny is dropping; he begins to understand that I’m not going to hand over those discs. Even if it wasn’t for Terry and his sister, I would keep them on principle; anybody who comes to my territory and acts in the manner he has acted will get nothing from me.

  ‘Oh,’ says Baldwin. ‘You’re going to make me fetch my big stick.’

  ‘You found the door all on your own on the way in,’ I say. He doesn’t reply. I meet his eyes, regard him coolly. ‘So go on,’ I say. ‘Fuck off.’

  Visiting hours start at four o’clock, and the two-hour wait to see Billy feels like an age, which I try to occupy with casework but cannot concentrate. The electric buzz from my meeting with Baldwin has me wired like a come down from a night out clubbing. Despite winning the closing round, I cannot shake the feeling that from the bell Baldwin had the upper hand; I replay the moment he walked into my office obsessively, trying different tactics, taking different shots, trying to work out how I could have taken him on points.

  At five minutes pas
t four, I walk up to Billy’s bed where he is talking on his mobile, laughing the exaggerated bark of an Essex wide boy on the make. I would like to force his phone into his mouth, down his throat, the thought of his strangled surprise making my hands become fists. I stand over his bed and he looks up at me, sees something in my face; I have never been adept at hiding my feelings. He says a quick ‘Ta-da,’ hangs up.

  ‘All right, Danny son?’ he says.

  ‘If your legs weren’t already broken,’ I say, ‘I’d be doing them now.’

  As far as Billy is concerned, the crime that put him in his hospital bed is an event as distant as his own birth; he is intellectually incapable of making the link between his petty criminality and his present situation. But my gloves are off; I will not pull my punches.

  ‘Heard of a man named Vincent Halliday?’ I ask him. Billy’s eyes glance guiltily across the room, down, anywhere but at me, like a dog that’s been caught eating the Sunday joint. ‘Because he knows all about you. And while I’m making a mug of myself calling the police five times a day, he’s drinking fucking Martinis in his swimming pool wishing whoever it was he paid to have you offed did a better fucking job of it.’

  But I am not a cruel man; my words have hit home and I have no interest in punishing Billy unnecessarily. I stop, watch him process what I have told him.

  ‘Halliday?’

  ‘Remember those stereos you stole? They were his.’ Of course, this isn’t entirely accurate; but Halliday did steal them first, which, in the criminal world I have more than a passing acquaintance with, does confer some extra-legal rights. ‘He had you taken out, Billy. I’m sorry.’

  Billy may be simple, but he too has an instinctive knowledge of the rules his world is governed by and he immediately knows, with a sudden clarity he is unused to, that by crossing a man like Halliday his life is now forfeit; that this temporary sanctuary in a hospital ward is as transient as a summer’s day. Quietly he begins to weep. Again, oh, Billy. He looks up at me like a baby looks up at a bottle of milk.