East of Innocence (2 page)

‘See, thing is,’ said Baldwin, standing over Terry, ‘thing is, I thought you were trying it on. Why I put you down.’ He spoke with the slow assurance of a man who believes his place in the world is safe, inviolate. ‘A mistake. We’ve all made them.’

Terry watched Baldwin through one eye, the other already closed, noted his lack of remorse, his unshakable self-belief, and knew that here was a very dangerous man. But years of looking out for himself had left him intrinsically disinclined to forgive and forget.

‘We’ll see what a tribunal thinks about that, shall we, dickhead?’ said Terry.

Baldwin took a deep breath, fixed Terry with a stare that didn’t know how to flinch.

‘Let’s not,’ he said.

He’d done his homework, Baldwin, while Terry was on the cell floor, done some digging into Terry’s private life, turned up a sister, a mother, the only family Terry had alive and all the leverage Baldwin needed.

‘Say anything, word one, and I’ll burn their fucking houses down, I’ll have your sister raped. Understand?’

Terry, defiant and punchy as he was, knew when the game was up, knew when to wind his neck in. He lay back in his own blood, closed his good eye, sighed, said, ‘Just fuck off, all right?’

‘What is it you want me to do?’ I ask Terry now. His family have been threatened with violence, he has had violence visited upon him by a team of policemen who think nothing of beating suspects into submission, who place their own moral authority above the law. This is not my territory; as I told him, this is not anything I do.

Terry swallows, shakes his head. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he’s doing here. He’s desperate, at the end of his tether and thinks, because I’m a lawyer, I’ll have the answers. When, as far as I can see, there’s only one.

‘Let it go, that’d be my advice. Drop it. You took a beating. Big deal.’ I look up at Terry, raise my eyebrows, best I can do. ‘You’ll live.’ But looking at him, at the set of his body, rigid in his seat and fists clenched, I just know that’s advice he can’t take.

‘Either that or lodge a complaint, get the internal people on to it.’

‘Baldwin and his mates’ll be suspended. It’ll go to a tribunal. Everyone’ll know I grassed, end of career, and Baldwin, know what he’ll do to me, to my family, before it even goes anywhere near a trial?’

‘So, what...?’

I let it hang; Terry sighs, his shoulders drop. Whatever magical solution he was hoping for in the dilapidated office of Daniel Connell & Nobody, Solicitor, he now knows it isn’t going to materialise. No protection, no huge media exposé, no glory. No gung-ho lawyer willing to assume the risk, go gunning for the bad guys. You’re on your own, son, just like you’ve always been. There’s a brief silence, then a passing bus makes my window shudder.

‘Just keep hold of them. Look after them.’ He nods at the discs. ‘Anything happens to me, you’ll do the right thing.’

Do the right thing? The truth is, I don’t even want to be in the same time zone as these discs. I don’t want anything to do with them, with this case, with Sergeant Baldwin and his out-of-control colleagues, with fucking Terry Hard-Luck Campion and his poor, blighted life. But looking at him, I can’t help but see again that bewildered, frightened but ultimately brave little boy in the playground, fighting his corner against all comers, however much bigger and stronger they were. So I nod, meet his eye, try to give him something, some sense that there’s somebody in this life who gives a fraction of a damn about his plight.

‘Okay. Leave them with me. But, Terry, seriously? Fucking drop this, yes?’

Terry looks at me. ‘Yes,’ he says. And I know he doesn’t mean it.

*

I leave the office early, my mind taken up with how a father’s influence can shape our lives for decades even after they stop being a real, tangible threat to our day-to-day existence. My premises are on a tired parade of shops, pizza delivery and letting agents and cheap furniture stores, outside the tangle of commuter towns of Chadwell Heath, Collier Row, Seven Kings, Romford; outside London, outside civilised society, an almost laughable climb down from my previous office in the heart of the City, sixteen floors up. Terry, I think, we’ve all got problems. I lock the door, check my watch and figure it’s about time I went to see my father.

2

I FIND HIM
in his garden, already half-drunk, no doubt just back from the pub. He is garrulous, good-humoured in his usual unpleasant way, stretched out on a lounger, drink on the tidy grass of the lawn.

‘Oh look, it’s Perry fucking Mason,’ he says, waving a hand at the garden table, which holds a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic. ‘Help yourself.’ He holds up his glass. ‘And help your old man too.’

I take his glass, pour, not as generously as he would have judging by the look he gives me as he takes a drink. ‘Forgot the fucking gin, son,’ he says.

‘Garden’s looking good.’

My father grunts, doesn’t answer. Incongruously, for a man to whom sentiment is an aberration, he has a passion for flowers, for chrysanthemums and gerberas and roses, so many roses, neatly cut back every winter, proudly displayed every summer. Ornaments are scattered everywhere, faux-stone windmills, a hedgehog pushing a wheelbarrow from which bursts a spray of peonies. The garden has a sense of peace, or would have if my father
wasn’t in the middle of it. Relaxing on the lounger, he looks like a burglar taking five on his victim’s lawn before going back inside to finish the job.

My father lives in a drab house, the same small place I grew up in, pebble-dashed and crazy-paved and unchanged since the seventies. It is on the outskirts of town, lonely, isolated, surrounded by fly-tipped washing machines and failing farmland, a twenty-minute walk to the centre. It is a walk I know well as my father is a far more diligent gardener than he was a parent, and a lift in to school was out of the question. Don’t even think about money for school uniform. Keep out of the way, especially during drinking hours. Disappear.

‘You remember TJ Campion?’ I say.

‘Who?’ He remembers, but you don’t get anything easily from my father, he’d make you grovel for the time of day.

‘TJ Campion, sold cars. His place burned down, everybody said it was an insurance job.’

‘Short little prick, had a heart attack, couldn’t keep off the booze? Yeah, I remember. You making any money?’

‘Met his son today. Know he’s a copper?’

‘Fuck me, is he now? That what gave his old man the heart attack?’ He laughs, a hacking cough, feet jerking up from the lounger with each exhalation, gin and tonic slopping over his open shirt, over his belly. My father is not a tall man but, if he’d been a boxer, would have made cruiserweight comfortably. His forearms are massive, something I have inherited from him, tattoo-covered hams, you’d need two hands to encircle each one. I’ve seen him laugh a lot, a head-back full-throated malicious bark, but I’ve never in
all my life seen his eyes smile. I’ve seen people leave pubs as he walks in.

‘Anyway, what about him?’

‘Nothing. Just a face from the past.’ I look over the garden, my father’s downed tools. ‘Do anything for you?’

‘Dressed like that?’

‘What do you want?’

He nods across the garden, to a stump, a spade next to it.

‘Wasn’t that the willow?’

‘Diseased. Got to come out.’

I cross the lawn, pick up the spade, start digging around the roots. My father watches me as I work, bleak and unblinking, like an overseer debating when to start flogging. The roots are deep and I know that I will not get it all out today, that I have been set an impossible task; I work for forty-five minutes until I can feel blisters forming on the fleshy bottom of my thumbs and the stump is beginning to rock, the roots on one side excavated and broken, showing bright white where the spade has cut through them. It needs a digger but my father would not spend the money, or let its tracks cut up his lawn. I know that he will not be satisfied, that he will have some comment to make, but I am accustomed to these hopeless situations; heads I win, tails you lose is a game my father has been playing with me ever since I was a child. In trouble at school, I was warned he didn’t want me turning out like him. When I graduated with a degree in law, he supposed I was something special, too good for him. When I lost my job in the City, narrowly escaping being struck off, he couldn’t believe I’d thrown it all away, what was wrong with me, after all he’d given me?

I put the spade down and cross the lawn to get a glass of water; I think my father is asleep but as I pass him he grunts out, ‘Giving up, are you? Lazy cunt.’

I sit back down next to him, sweat dripping off my forehead. My shirt is stuck to my back and the muscles in my shoulders and arms are humming. I press the glass to my face. My father belches loudly, a growling, meaty sound, teeth bared like a baboon, then levers himself up on to his elbows and looks at me. Here it comes.

‘Got any money?’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Fucking never have enough, so whatever you can spare I’ll take.’

I knew that he would ask, and I know he’ll take whatever I have whether it’s offered or not, so I pass him my wallet, which I filled with exactly what I can spare before I left to see him, a sum that won’t be anywhere near as much as he’ll want. I have never properly known how my father made what little money he has; but I do know that there are limited opportunities for stertorous sixty-five-year-old ex-wannabe gangsters, and that he would never demean himself by working a regular job. He takes out the £200, looks at me, sneers.

‘And there I was, thinking the legal profession was a licence to print money. The fuck’s wrong with you, son?’

I do not answer, there is no point; as far as he is concerned, being born was my one unforgivable sin, the wrong that can never be righted. It was my father’s misfortune, and of course mine, that my mother disappeared days after she gave birth to me. I often wonder what our life
would have been like, had she stayed around. It could hardly have been worse.

We sit in silence, listening to the buzz of insects, my father slurping occasionally. I can hear his breathing; it is heavy, and I wonder about his health, his heart, wonder if there is any force on earth that could kill him.

‘Talking to you.’

I shake myself out of my thoughts. ‘What?’

‘Derek’s granddaughter. Been missing nearly a week.’

‘Yeah. I heard.’

‘D’you know her?’

‘Not really. To speak to. No news?’

‘Not even eighteen.’

I know her by sight, a small girl, dark hair, quick words and a disarming smile, somebody I instinctively liked the few times I met her. Derek is a drinking friend of my father’s, someone to share war stories with from the days when they were, if not respected, at least feared.

‘Fucking nonces. Only got to open the paper. Know what we used to do with them?’

I tune out, not keen on hearing my father’s creative methods for dealing with sexual deviants, a subject he’s made very much his own in recent years. So much unrealised violence lives within him, continually on the lookout for a suitable outlet. His reserves astonish me; would impress me, probably, if I hadn’t lived with them for so long.

‘Be seeing you, Dad.’

‘Stump’s still in the ground.’

‘Call me if you can’t manage it.’

‘Saying I can’t manage it?’

I do not answer, know from experience which questions to avoid. I walk into the house, through the patio doors, pull them closed after me. I stand at the window watching my father, the back of his head, his tanned body lying on the lounger, old blue tattoos showing through the bronze. He’s still got all his hair, stiff grey brushed back in rigid waxy waves, a vain man underneath the careless exterior. Lost in my thoughts, I don’t notice him turn in the lounger, struggle around and look back over his shoulder at the house, the patio doors, at me. Some strange sixth sense, the predator’s instinct. He arcs his glass at me and it smashes against the window, liquid streaming down and making my father’s face, seen through it, unreadable. Why would any father react like that, at the sight of his own son?

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