East of Innocence (16 page)

Gary’s been leaning against a chest of drawers but he straightens up, slowly, reluctantly interested. ‘Yeah? How’s that?’

‘I’ve got a case. Pending. Need it looked at. Charges are going to be brought.’ I take a deep breath, sigh. ‘I hit someone. Driving. I was pissed.’

Gary frowns, confused. ‘That’s it? You’ve, you’ve…’ He runs out of words, pauses, lost. ‘Why didn’t you say that before? You know, before Baldwin cut your fucking finger off?’

‘Because I don’t like Baldwin. But I can do business with you.’

Gary pushes himself off the chest of drawers, walks towards me. Here you come. He stays out of range. I have pulled myself towards the lathe. There is slack in the chain of the handcuffs, though Gary cannot see that.

‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry, I can make a DUI disappear like –’ he clicks his fingers weakly, nothing compared to Baldwin’s authoritative snap ‘– that.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

‘And I can trust you why?’

Gary’s face has been open and inviting but it closes suddenly at my question. Policemen don’t like being challenged. I retreat.

‘Okay, fine,’ I say. ‘You can sort me out, okay, I get it. I’ll tell you. Fuck.’ I take a deep breath and it catches and becomes a retch, a sequence of liquid bubbling heaves that make my eyes roll up and then close and my legs twitch as if I am being electrocuted. I thrash and throw myself up against the lathe and crack my head against one of its huge metal legs, the world shuttering as my eyes close. I lie still, unmoving, my breaths coming irregularly.

I watch the bricks of the curved roof through the veil of my eyelashes. Concentrate on my erratic breathing. It seems an age I lie there. Breathe. Breathe. Where is he? Eventually, I see a dark shape, Gary, corner of my eye. He’s getting closer. He approaches slowly, looks worried, doesn’t want me to die. Doesn’t want me to take my secret, the whereabouts of the discs, to my grave. Closer still. Peering down at me. Doesn’t know how to play this. I wait. Breathe raggedly. He bends his knees to get a better look, reaches out a hand, slowly. So close now. I open my eyes. See his eyes widen in shock. I sit upright and take him by the throat and squeeze and there is no way in the world that he is going to wriggle away. His neck feels like I am holding a
closed umbrella, he is so insubstantial. His eyes widen further still as he suddenly understands that his strength is nothing compared to mine and that it is no use; he might as well be an eleven-year-old boy again, so weak is he.

I have been at the mercy of these men for hours; I have never before, apart from at the hands of my father, been at the mercy of anyone for so much as a minute. I am angry, furious, livid; no words can adequately describe the feelings I am experiencing, which make my enraged body vibrate like a just-plucked guitar string. Still, I do not believe that my feelings excuse what I do next; explain them, perhaps, but nobody deserves what I next visit on Gary.

He is now lying on his back on the floor where I have forced him down. I am squatting above him, hampered by having one hand still latched to the lathe. I let go of his neck, quickly punch him as hard as I can in the throat. He gasps for breath, struggles to fill his lungs. I worry I have broken his windpipe and he will die. Eventually, he gets his breathing under control, to the point where he can hear what I say.

‘Keys,’ I say and I put my index finger into Gary’s eye and scrape across it as hard as I can. His eyeball gives and I am surprised that it does not burst. It has the texture and firmness of a pickled onion. He screams and his legs kick wildly. I wait for him to calm down, ask him again.

‘Here, here in my fucking pocket,’ he shouts. His world is upside down and he has no idea what I am capable of. He is in pain, hysterical. He starts to sob.

‘Take them out then,’ I say. He reaches spastically into his pocket, jerkily pulls out coins, a screwed-up receipt, a
key. I take it and reach over and unlock the handcuffs. I stand up and feel the pain in my knees from crouching too long, which makes me think about my finger that has been cut off and I feel like a shark finning through dark water. I crouch back down again and hit Gary in the side of his head where his jaw meets, once, twice, three times until I feel it break under my knuckles like a bigger piece of wood in a bag of kindling. The feeling sickens me suddenly and makes me stop; I may be enraged but I am not a murderer.

As I stand up, I worry that already I may have gone too far; Gary is quiet and still but he is breathing and I again think about my finger and decide he can take his own chances. I walk towards the door that Baldwin left by, passing the ranged tools on the walls along the way, and as I reach the door I feel as if I am passing from some dark fantasyland of pain and torture and monsters back into the real world. I see orange streetlights and breathe the clean night air deeply and close the door gently behind me.

18

MAJOR BUTLER TELLS
me that my finger is nothing, that he once tried to resuscitate a corporal who had had an arm blown off by an IED, performing CPR in a chopper flying away from Basra chased by tracer-fire. He tells me that they took a round in the tail rotor and the pilot nearly lost it, the chopper rocking crazily as, in the back, he worked away trying to get the corporal’s heart started again, his hands slipping on the corporal’s chest as he pushed down, fingers made greasy from all the blood. Despite his best efforts, the corporal’s heart stopped and he was about to give him up for dead when the chopper crashed on landing, throwing Butler out of the door and on to the dusty ground of the British Army base. By the time he crawled back to the helicopter, the corporal was sitting up; the impact of the crash had brought him back to life and he wanted to know what had happened to his rifle, he couldn’t be without his rifle.

He laughs softly as he tells me this but I know it is only a strategy to take my mind off the fact that he has just brushed the top of what is left of my finger vigorously
because, he explained, it’s no good splashing on antiseptic to clean a wound, you need soap and abrasion just like you’re washing dishes. He has injected me with anaesthetic and I cannot really feel it; but in some strange way the sight of my red-raw stump being torn open again by the brush makes my brain imagine the pain anyway.

I am in Gabe’s kitchen; I headed for his house when I left the workshop underneath the arches, recognised that I was close enough to stumble there, took back streets in case Baldwin came out looking for me. Gabe opened the door and I was relieved to see that he was not drunk or stoned; he saw my finger and pushed the door wide and watched me in. I told him I had nowhere else to go, that I was paranoid enough that I did not want to visit a hospital, worried that Baldwin might find me out. He poured me a Scotch and told me to keep calm, sit tight, said he knew someone who could sort me out. He made a phone call and left, and half an hour later he came back with Major Butler. The man was carrying a bag and his introductions were brief; he obviously did not want to tell me his first name and, anyway, I suspected that he wasn’t really called Butler and that his rank was higher than major. He was a tall man with grey hair and a pair of half-moon glasses; he could have been the owner of a rare book shop except for his eyes, which seemed to be constantly evaluating, assessing, making decisions.

He worked with Gabe to sterilise the kitchen table, laid a green sheet over it, set up an Anglepoise light that Gabe had brought down from his study and told me that this might hurt a little, and that it might not be something I wanted to watch. He said this in the offhand way of a man well used to
performing unpleasant operations in difficult settings and his unflappable manner set me at some kind of ease. He did not ask me what had happened, except to ask how clean the blade had been and how long it was since the finger had been cut off. He did not bother asking whether I had the rest of my finger; battlefield surgeons, I suspect, aren’t very interested in reattaching fingertips. In any case, I hadn’t got it; it was back in that workshop and I did not wish to go looking for it. I had been refilling my Scotch glass while I waited for Gabe to come back and by the time Major Butler was ready to work on me I was half-cut, giving me a feeling of giddy detachment. Fuck it, I said. Just do what you have to do.

As he tells me about the corporal’s miraculous recovery in the back of the downed chopper, he cuts the skin into four triangles around and down from the tip of the stump and pulls the flaps over to seal the end. He is wearing glasses with magnifying lenses and he stitches with a finesse that astounds me. The reason he is doing this, he tells me, is so that the tip retains sensation when it is healed.

‘Five-star treatment, this,’ he says. ‘Usually, I’d give you a couple of Aspirin and tell you to stop your moaning. Now your thumb, that would be a different matter. The British Army takes thumbs seriously. Thumbs and trigger fingers. There.’ He puts down his needle, takes off his glasses and stands up.

‘Thank you, sir,’ says Gabe. ‘I owe you.’

‘No drama,’ says Major Butler or whatever his real name is. ‘How’s the leg?’

‘Spot on.’

‘Still doing the physio?’

‘Yep.’

‘Any depression?’

‘Please.’

‘Suicidal thoughts?’

‘As if.’

Major Butler examines Gabe with those see-all eyes of his. ‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘Remember, get some help before you do anything stupid. Psychs don’t do their best work at funerals.’ He turns to me. ‘Keep it bandaged and keep it clean,’ he says. ‘Try not to lose any more.’ He packs up his bag quickly and nods at Gabe and leaves without saying goodbye. His efficiency and composure are truly impressive; as with Gabe, he gives off the air of a man who, regardless of what problem you bring to him, will have seen far worse. We hear the front door close and his exit leaves an awkward silence; I have a strange sensation, with Gabe leaning against the kitchen counter watching me, as if I am a child and now at last is the dreaded time when I have to explain myself.

‘Got any more Scotch?’ I say. Gabe brings the bottle over to me and I pour another shot. ‘Thanks. Was he in Afghanistan?’

‘Not with me,’ says Gabe. ‘I know him from Iraq. That corporal? He was in my company. Lucky little fucker.’ Gabe sits down next to me at the kitchen table. ‘Want to tell me what happened?’

‘Baldwin. His men jumped me, knocked me out. Next thing I know, I’m chained to a workbench under some arches.’

‘The policeman?’

‘Yeah. Fucking policeman. He cut my finger off.’

‘Only your little one. And only a bit of it.’

I give Gabe a look that would make most men bow their heads and try to pretend they weren’t really there but he doesn’t care, just smiles. But his pale eyes are not amused. ‘Why? Why the fuck is a policeman torturing you?’

‘He wanted those discs. The footage, you know? When he beat up Terry.’

Gabe frowns, looks sceptical. He shakes his head. ‘Nah. Sorry, no, I’m not having that.’

I nod. ‘I know. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘Kidnap a civilian, torture him, cut off his finger, all because he beat up one of his colleagues? What’s the worst’s going to happen to him? The police are a closed shop, they look after their own, right? He’ll get a warning, might even lose his job, but you can bet your bollocks he’ll keep his pension and it’ll be hushed up.’ Gabe picks up my glass, swirls the Scotch around, thinking. ‘No. Doesn’t make sense.’

‘You want to ask him what it’s all about? Be my guest.’

Gabe ignores me, still thinking. ‘And why, right, Danny…’ He looks at me closely. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you just tell him where they were? What’s it to you?’

‘Didn’t like the way he asked,’ I say.

Gabe laughs, stops himself, looks back at me and laughs hard, laughs for a long time. He shakes his head. ‘Danny, Danny, you’re not a normal man, you know that?’

Later we are watching
Scarface
on the television and I am drunk and soon fall asleep. I dream of a wolf snapping at my fingers and keep jerking them away, imagining I am up a tree and it is leaping at me. When I wake up, it is light and I am on the sofa and Gabe has put a blanket over
me. I must stop sleeping on sofas, I think to myself, then remember my finger and look at the bandage, the events of last night slowly separating from the fears of my dreams until I recognise that it really happened, men really cut off my finger. Last night I was concussed and in pain and part of me had felt fortunate to be alive. Today is a different story. Today I feel cold and murderous and the loss of my finger prompts me to form curious rationalisations; I tell myself that, since I have lost it, I have generally less to lose and hence should go gunning for Baldwin with even less caution.

But after talking to Gabe last night, there is a mystery lying at the heart of last night’s events that gives me pause. Gabe was right; Baldwin’s actions make no sense. He is risking everything, his career, prison, to get back footage of what is, essentially, a minor crime. The violence he has visited on me, on my father, on Terry’s sister; he has left a trail of brutality that seems way out of proportion to the situation he is faced with. And my impression of Baldwin is not that of a man lacking in control or judgement; he is a professional bent copper, probably has been for years, and he must have his reasons. But what are they? Confronting Baldwin makes little sense; he is not a man it will be easy to threaten. If I want to get to the truth, I will have to find another way.