East of Innocence
Authors: David Thorne
EAST OF INNOCENCE
First published in trade paperback in Great Britain in 2014 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © David Cadji-Newby, 2014
The moral right of David Cadji-Newby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 220 0
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 221 7
Printed in Great Britain.
Corvus
An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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For Emmanuelle
Contents
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to my agent, Tina, and editor, Sara, for all their support, guidance and belief. Thanks also to my family, for being there. I am grateful to Nick and Ligeia for their help along the way, and to Sue Fry and John Hibbs for their early inspiration.
1
IT’S AN OLD
joke, well-worn. What’s the difference between God and a lawyer? The man sitting across the desk from me, eyes fixed on my face, doesn’t look like he’d appreciate the punch line. God doesn’t think he’s a lawyer? No, that’s not the problem right now. The problem, at this moment, is that this man seems to think I’m his salvation, some kind of avenging, all-powerful deity backed up by, and hence rendered invincible by, the full weight of the law. When the reality is I have no idea what the fuck he expects me to do.
His name is Terry Campion, someone I have known casually from school upwards. His father was TJ Campion, a volatile, troubled man who ran a used-car business on the north side of the Southend Arterial Road before bad luck or, more plausibly, a well-placed match burned it to the ground. The aftermath of the fire was fed by rumours that he’d sold a portion of his business off to some local hard cases who weren’t impressed by the returns, which were on the very low side of TJ’s promises. These stories were no more than playground gossip when I was a child, given extra colour by the sight of Terry, a lonely, solitary but
defiant boy who quickly dealt with other children’s jibes with his fists. I recall him once defending his family’s reputation with his teeth, leaving a much bigger boy in tears, bite marks on the boy’s stomach weeping blood. The son of his father, everybody said. He at least proved them wrong on that score.
‘You always looked out for me,’ Terry says. He sounds desperate. I looked out for him? The Terry I remember was two years below me and at the very periphery of my consciousness. More likely it’s wishful thinking, some subliminal emotional persuasion to try to up my enthusiasm for his case. Because right now, I’m looking anything but enthusiastic.
‘I don’t know where else to go,’ Terry says. ‘There’s nowhere.’
He’s got a point. After all, he can’t go to the police. He
is
the police, a career choice that always surprised me but, I suppose, was as good a way as any of escaping the shadow of his father’s misdeeds. I, as much as anybody, can appreciate that.
‘I’d like to help,’ I say. And it’s true, I would. I really would. ‘But this…’ I gesture at the discs he’s placed on the desk. ‘It’s not anything I do.’
What Terry has brought with him, and what I’ve just watched, is footage from the CCTV of Gaynes Park police station, dated five nights previously. He’d called in a favour, got a duty sergeant from that nick to get hold of them for him, someone who owed him one, Terry didn’t say what for. Copied, not stolen, he was quick to assure me, perhaps worried that I’d refuse to view them on some
petty legal point. He really doesn’t know me as well as he claims.
Considering the upbringing he’s had, the story he’s just told me seems all the more unfair. Are some people simply born with bad luck hiding behind every coming hour, always minutes away from some unjust catastrophe?
Terry described to me his time as a policeman with the disillusioned, disbelieving air of a man who has recently escaped the clutches of a cult and cannot understand how he could have been so deceived in the first place. But after such an uncertain and confused early life, perhaps it’s not surprising that he threw himself into the police force with such unquestioning vigour and abandonment; in its unambiguous righteousness and arrogant, self-assured camaraderie, he found a moral certainty he had never previously imagined existed. His guileless enthusiasm and uncomplaining conformism didn’t go unnoticed; over the years, he was continually handed the assignments nobody else would touch. Policing sink estates where feral children spat and urinated on you from third-floor walkways, raiding crack houses filled with the odour of human faeces left in rooms where people with ruined lives slept; the jobs that only the truly fervent would take on without complaint. Back then, he accepted this work without question, seeing it as an opportunity to prove his commitment. Now, he told me, he saw it for what it was: the exploitation of a naive fool.
Whatever the truth of the matter, this willingness to go where nobody else would explains how Terry found himself one warm night on a ‘prime’ assignment, but one for which
he was completely, crazily out of his depth: working under-cover, sourcing and then buying a quantity of marijuana from a Turkish man with terrible burn marks on the backs of both hands who ran a network of cannabis factories across Essex, mostly in the attics of rented properties.
The man was busted by the local drugs squad at the precise moment Terry was loading five kilos of the man’s product into the back of his unmarked police car, a case of wrong place, wrong time that would make anyone question just what terrible crimes they’d committed in a previous incarnation. Unwilling to compromise his cover, Terry held up his hands, allowed himself to be arrested, cuffed, bundled through the frantic blue lights into the back of the waiting van.
‘The problem began,’ Terry told me, ‘when we got back to the station. One of the officers, Baldwin, turns out he’s some kind of zealot. Like, a real fucking headcase. We park up and I’m pulled out of the van, I’ve been sat next to this Turkish nightmare who keeps fucking spitting, he’s been looking at me like I’m the reason he’s here, right? Like I set him up or something. So I think, I need to prove my credentials, show I’ve got nothing to do with the police, so I give Baldwin a bit of lip. Nothing major, just tell him I want my brief, call him a cunt, like, what copper doesn’t get that kind of shit all the time, right? Next thing I know, he’s put his elbow in my throat.’
Baldwin struck Terry with the practised casualness of a man pushing a dog’s snout away from the dinner table. Choking, hands cuffed in front of him, Terry staggered back against the van in the police station’s car park. He
tried to say something, tried to say Baldwin wasn’t allowed to do that, ready to come out of character if this was the way things were going to go down. Baldwin gave one of his colleagues an aggrieved look and that man, clearly well used to unquestioningly following the whims of his superior, took out his baton, took a step back and hit Terry in the kidneys, twice, then across his knees, beating Terry to the tarmac.
Terry may be twenty years from those defiant days defending himself in the playground, but his instincts for self-preservation, so long honed and if anything enhanced by the dangers of police work, remain sharp. He waited for his head to clear then raised himself up on one arm, kicked out at the policemen surrounding him, made contact. There was a collective intake of breath from them, amused rather than shocked, tickled that this little man on the floor felt he could go toe-to-toe with their undisputed might, thought he could compete. Somebody sang the
Rocky
theme, chuckling. They were as relaxed, as at ease, as if they were watching the game in their own home.
Then Terry, coughing out the blow to his throat, rocked back on his heels and punched Baldwin in the balls with both hands.
What followed Terry described to me as ‘a fucking good old-school working over’. Having watched the footage, I can’t help but think he’s being deliberately glib. He was kicked back to the ground, helped up and punched, dropped and stamped on, battered with batons, the Turkish dealer all the while watching on, quietly thankful it wasn’t him at the receiving end. The footage I watched was dark and hard
to make out properly, the assault a flurry of action with only the occasional blow caught in detail as one of the car park’s lights caught a raised hand or the gleam from a polished baton. But it gave a good idea of what happened. Terry’s face across the desk from me, purple and cut and stitched and swollen, gave an even better one.
‘So what?’ I said. ‘Report them, get them thrown out of the force. You’ve got the evidence, right? Good riddance.’
Lying on a cell floor bleeding, Terry told me, that had been exactly his plan. But then later, could have been ten minutes, could have been hours, he can’t really remember, Sergeant Baldwin came back in with two colleagues; the same two, he believes, who’d inflicted the damage in the first place. Baldwin explained that they’d confirmed who Terry had eventually told them he was, a brother officer, and hey, listen, no hard feelings, right?
‘No hard feelings?’ said Terry. ‘You’ve broken my fucking nose.’