East of Innocence (5 page)

I spend the rest of the day in a pointless chase, trying to speak to somebody in a uniform who can tell me of any progress in Billy Morrison’s case, but after being shunted from desk to indifferent desk I succeed only in persuading somebody to leave a message for somebody else who is nominally in charge of the investigation, such as it is. Billy’s Blu-ray wonderland is looking farther away with each passing day.

6

IT FEELS STRANGE
, attending a funeral in glorious sunlight, a further fuck you to the dear departed consigned to the damp sod. Shouldn’t we be pondering the measure of our loss under cold dark blustery skies filled with the threat of rain? The cemetery is as flat as a snooker table, green baize punctured by gravestones and the gaggle of stooped figures surrounding Rachael’s grave, trees billowing with leaves the backdrop under an enormous, indifferent blue sky. I stand on the periphery of the crowd around the grave, that should-I-be-here feeling of the loosely connected, unsure whether my presence is appropriate or merely an intrusion, making me unwilling to meet the eyes of those surely experiencing grief far keener than mine. As soon as people start turning to one another, the coffin descended and commiserations being gently offered, I turn to leave. Five steps away and I hear my name.

‘Danny.’

I turn. ‘Hi. Sue. I’m, yeah.’ Sue’s nodding at me, smiling, sparing me the empty words. From where does she, a recent
widow to breast cancer who should be pitying herself, find kindness for me? ‘Nice weather for it,’ my attempt at levity.

‘She’d have been glad you came. Really.’

‘I hope so. She was a bit special, Rachael. Drove me mental to be fair, but I loved her.’

‘She’d have said the same about you. I’d say don’t be a stranger, but…’ She shrugs, knowing me, knowing our different worlds, accepting the inevitability of our diverging orbits. Another thing I thank her for, her lack-of-fuss honesty. I am sweating underneath my black suit, part heat, part discomfort.

‘Thanks for taking the time. To talk to me. Makes me glad I came. Less… awkward.’

‘She’d hate you to think that. She talked about you a lot.’

I know she probably did.

‘But you’re okay?’ In her eyes I can see the same concern Rachael used to show for me.

I smile as warmly, as confidently, as I can. ‘Yes. Absolutely blinding.’

I knew Rachael a quarter of a decade ago as Ms Dawson, my English teacher, a tough woman who children with their surgeon’s eye for abnormality singled out for ridicule for the fact that she habitually wore trousers and could be seen on weekends selling a left-wing newspaper on the High Street. She noticed with a far more generous eye that I was brighter than my combative exterior suggested. She encouraged me to apply for a scholarship, not because she was an advocate of private education but because she didn’t see why the privileged should be born to advantage and
wanted me to even up the balance. I sailed through the entrance exam and, almost before I had considered the implications, found myself in a revered Regency institution surrounded by strangely uniformed children of an entirely different class from my own.

Needless to say, my clothes, accent and origins were ridiculed with delighted fascination, a wild beast in a cultivated cage. Soon, however, and this is a gift I think only children truly have, I entirely reinvented myself in the image of my peers. I learned how to speak differently, my diction based on how I believed an over-privileged and brilliant child should sound. It worked, and at the same time it didn’t; I was young enough to convince other children that I was one of them; it was a trick I never managed to pull on myself.

I know, though she never told me, that Rachael felt ambivalent about her decision to help me better myself; that she often wondered what she had helped create. I had had a first-class education, earned a distinguished degree, found a job at the pinnacle of the legal profession. But there is an expression I once heard, I cannot recall where, that you cannot put lipstick on a pig. I am an articulate savage, a gentleman thug. A sociological experiment gone dangerously awry.

As I’m about to drive away, my mobile rings.

‘Connell.’

‘Daniel Connell?’

‘Help you?’

‘I’m investigating the hit and run incident involving an,
ah…’ I hear the flipping of pages ‘…William Morrison. Night of the seventeenth of July. I understand you’re acting on his behalf and want an update. With me?’

I’m with him. ‘Yeah. Be nice. To know you’re doing something to apprehend the driver responsible for my client’s injuries. Anything at all.’

He’s sharp, the officer on the other end, a man not accustomed to letting barbs sink in unchallenged. ‘Anything at all, right. Well, Mr Connell… Daniel… I’ve fucking picked up the phone and called you, haven’t I?’

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