East of Innocence (4 page)

‘Right,’ says the man. He turns to his friends. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Christ’s sake, Danny,’ says Gabe, watching them walk away, their backs a little less straight, their strides a little more diffident. ‘This is a tennis club, not a nightclub. Behave yourself.’

‘You think a man like that would take a medal home from war?’ I ask. ‘Fuck him.’

Gabe laughs softly. ‘He’ll be looking in the rear view of his Merc all the way home. You’ve done enough.’

We sit in silence, watching bats flutter like tossed scraps of black cloth through the glare of the court floodlights, the soft murmur of members on the veranda around the corner. Peace is something I have known little of, but, whenever I do imagine it, this is where I place myself, always with Gabe opposite me.

*

My mobile has been vibrating and I’ve been ignoring it, unwilling to let the real world intrude into this temporary oasis. Eventually, though, I pick it up and call through to my voicemail, aware that it could be urgent, though why someone would be calling me in an emergency I can’t imagine.

‘Danny, it’s Terry. Just wanted to say, look, I know what you’re saying, I hear you, but I’m not going to let this go. I can’t. I…’ His voice pauses, comes back louder, outraged. ‘You saw my face, what they did to me. I’ll call you.’

Terry Campion, undiluted piss and vinegar even after all these years. I couldn’t blame him, knew that if I were in the same situation I’d want to exact my revenge, too. I am enough of a hypocrite, though, to still curse him for not taking my advice and leaving it alone.

‘Problem?’ says Gabe.

‘Work.’ I explain to him about Terry, somebody Gabe won’t know; when we were young, we moved in two very separate worlds. I am aware that it is a disgraceful breach of client confidentiality to discuss Terry’s case but the normal rules have never applied in my friendship with Gabe.

‘Police,’ he says contemptuously. ‘Let them shake hands and make up, promise to play nicely. Storm in a bloody teacup.’

I describe Terry’s face, the stitches, the bruising, and can see Gabe’s eyes slide away, uninterested in the detail. I imagine Gabe in Afghanistan, hauling screaming drip-fed
soldiers into helicopters, watching them take off and clatter away, leaving him with another man’s blood clotting on his dusty battledress; I stop talking. Perhaps he has a point. I decide I’ll wait until tomorrow to call Terry back.

‘Been upsetting our esteemed members again?’ asks George, seventy-three but you’d be lucky to return his forehand unless you hit your approach within a foot of the baseline, and hard at that. He leans over our table, shakes my hand. ‘Hello, Danny, how’ve you been?’ George is one of the original members to have seen my potential, both on and off court, and is a man to whom I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude. ‘Hear about that young girl?’

I nod, don’t answer. It is hard to avoid the story, a media sensation mostly due, I suspect, to the fact that she is white and comes from a respectable background. I do not wish to sound uncharitable but, if she had been black, or impoverished, her disappearance would be as unremarkable to most people as a lost cat.

‘Bar’s closing, might not have noticed but every other bugger’s fucked off,’ George tells us. ‘Haven’t you got homes to go to?’

Now there’s a good question.

When I get back to my house, it is empty and I am surprised by just how much of its warmth had been provided by Sophie and her possessions, how little of me there is to fill the space. She has left no note. I promise myself that I will forget about her entirely within a month.

5

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD HAS
begun to wither under the heat we’ve had over the past two weeks, dry yellow grass rising in motes as it’s scuffed by feet, days only coming alive after four o’clock when the temperature starts to dip under thirty. But the sun is working its tonic on me, Sophie behind me and a case I stand a chance of winning waiting, possibilities opening up like a parched flower after watering. Looking up at the blue sky, I can appreciate its warmth, any clouds for the moment vanished.

My office doesn’t have air conditioning; no great surprise, neither does it have a carpet, windows that open or a photocopier. I spent money on the exterior, a painted sign the width of the building bearing my name and occupation, Solicitor, in a script that I was assured by a lady named Tanya with a Y looked both modern and traditional, appealing to all. It wasn’t cheap, but after the sudden ejection from my previous job I did not lack for money, at least not immediately. From outside my office on a clear day, you can just make out the tops of the City’s tallest buildings, but where I am now feels infinitely far from the office I
occupied at my last place of work. There, on the sixteenth floor of an imperious glass building on Bishopsgate, I looked down on streets and people from a panelled room with a desk and two easy chairs designed by a Dutchman in the twenties whose name I forget; I am not a proud person but it is no boast to say that I was close to the top and ascending rapidly, to the point where I had already earmarked my potential future office up on the eighteenth, the partners’, floor.

I open the mail myself; I am a thirty-seven-year-old lawyer and cannot afford a secretary and, in any case, I have no space for one. Back in the City I had my own PA, a pretty lady called Allie who was permanently amazed, and often scandalised, by everything she read, heard or watched on the television. Indirectly, it was Allie who caused my steep decline, although that does her an injustice; as so often with open, kind and trusting people, she was an unwitting pawn in a much larger and more sinister game.

The firm I worked for, and which I was expected to count myself lucky to belong to, was one of the City’s major players, experts in dispute resolution in the fields of construction, engineering and real estate, and past masters at wielding intellectual superiority like others would a rubber hose. I suspect that, as well as my outstanding degree and track record, the board members who lobbied for me to join secretly enjoyed the notion that I would add a rougher texture to their customary silk.

My father is a bully, but he is also a man who is honest about his motivations, which are, generally, money, women
and drink. Nor is he unrealistic; he has always accepted that, just as he metes out violence, sooner or later he’ll have the same indignity visited on him, something that has happened on far more than one occasion. In the haughty marble corridors of Steinman Hall, the firm I worked for, bullying was a strictly one-way transaction, and it was carried out on a daily basis without mercy or second thought. The victims were the weak in general and women in particular; the board was a boys’ club in which sexual equality was considered a delightful joke. I would not join in this bullying, but people’s perception of me as some kind of dormant brute meant that it wasn’t remarked upon; they all assumed I’d do something heinous sooner or later. And in a way, I suppose, they were right.

Asking a harassed PA with three children waiting at home to pick a pen up from the floor so that a millionaire partner can steal a glance at the top of her G-string is one thing; morally unacceptable but not something I felt strongly enough about to risk a six-figure salary by confronting. That was my feeling at the time, shameful though it is. But then one day Martin Andersen, a slope-shouldered specialist in commercial real estate and also the intimidation of women, asked Allie if she wouldn’t mind tucking his shirt into his trousers for him as his hands were still wet from when he’d washed them after urinating. I do not think he knew I was in my office; perhaps he assumed that, as the door was open, I had left. Allie, a bubbly personality with people she knew but a tongue-tied wallflower in the company of strangers and those she regarded as her social betters, did not know how to respond.

‘I don’t want to, thank you,’ she said, her voice cracking with uncertainty.

‘I mustn’t get these trousers wet, you see,’ said Andersen stridently. ‘Any idea how much they cost?’

‘I could fetch you a serviette.’

‘Serviette? Oh, you mean a hand towel. Well, if it’s all the same to you, just hurry on and do what I asked, could you? Come on.’

There was a pause during which, behind my desk but already beginning to rise, I could almost hear Allie swallowing back her shame and discomfort.

‘I really don’t want to,’ she said. ‘Please?’

It was that ‘please’ that did it for me, plaintive and followed by an exasperated grunt from Andersen. In dispute resolution, because it was business and conducted on at least a notionally level playing field, I never lost my temper. But right then, listening to Andersen’s petulant voice, I experienced the tunnel vision that is always the precursor to something dramatic and regrettable. I left my office, picked him up by his shirtfront and laid him on Allie’s desk, Allie scurrying away as if she’d just discovered a mouse. Andersen didn’t fight back, wore a shocked half smile like he thought this was probably just rough play and he’d soon understand the joke. I pulled down his trousers and underpants and walked him, holding him by the collar, into the area that held the secretaries, ten of them listening to Dictaphones through earphones, typing letters. They looked up at the sight of one of the senior partners waddling along, expensive trousers and striped boxer shorts bunched around his ankles, wide eyes taking a
second or two to process the surreality of the scene. I then, and I do not pretend that this does me any credit, whispered in Andersen’s ear that if he didn’t lift his shirt to expose whatever he was hiding to the nice ladies then I’d snap his fucking spine.

Ultimately, I suspect I’m not really cut out for the corporate world; at least that is what I’ve told myself in my subsequent darker moments as I realised word of mouth had made me all but unemployable in the higher echelons of the London legal profession. But there is some truth to it; I often feel that I am somebody who has had education and refinement poured into a body entirely unsuited to the task. As I think about this inherent contradiction, I thumb in Terry’s number again. Since I ignored his call three days ago, I have tried him continually but he has never picked up, something which is beginning to cause me worry. This time, though, he answers.

‘Hello?’

‘Terry.’

‘Who’s this?’

‘Daniel. Danny.’

‘Oh, right, Danny? How you doing?’

His innocent bonhomie is about as convincing as a wet Rembrandt; underneath the bluster there’s an edge of anxiety, maybe fear. Over the phone in the background I can hear an indistinct burst of Tannoy, a terse announcement.

‘Where are you?’

‘Yeah, I’m… Look, I’m at the airport, Danny. I’m getting the fuck out of this country.’

Terry tells me that he is on his way to Spain where he knows ‘a couple of faces’ who’ll look after him until things have quietened down, letting me into half the story without explaining what has prompted this flight, a desperate one judging by the catch in his voice. I tell him to calm down, tell him that, as his lawyer, I am going to need a little more information than he’s giving me, what’s going on?

‘I told him. Baldwin. Told him I’d copied the CCTV, told him I’d take it up high if he didn’t put his hand up. He’s a fucking animal, Danny, he’s off the scale.’

‘Yeah, take a breath. You, what, you expected Baldwin to turn himself in?’

‘I told him, you tell the brass what you did, say it was a fuck up. I ain’t gonna make a fuss, press for any disciplinary action, all you’ll get’s a rap on the knuckles. I said I’ll even say I provoked you if you want. But you need to put your hand up.’

‘You thought he’d take that?’

Terry doesn’t say anything. Thinking about his naivety causes me to close my eyes, breathe deeply to centre myself. Terry.

‘What did Baldwin do?’

What Baldwin did, Terry tells me as emotion gradually tightens his vocal cords and reduces his voice to an indignant whine, was to gather up his complicit colleagues and follow Terry’s sister’s car from her place of work, a dental clinic I know on a busy crossroads, back to her home. As she put her key in her door, one of them, she doesn’t know who, doesn’t know how many there were, put a sack over her head and pushed her through into her living room. Men
held her down, while one, he told her that Terry would know who he was, put his hand into her knickers and roughly abused her with his knuckles. She said that she could smell stagnant breath through the sack as he did it, told Terry that it was like being electrocuted, the point of contact devastating her entire body. The man told her to give Terry a message, to tell him that he was to drop it or he was dead. And then they left, leaving his sister in a state so traumatised that she had not spoken a word since, had not moved from the foetal position Terry had found her in.

And now Terry is leaving the country, with no plans to return as long as Baldwin remains a policeman.

There’s little for me to say. I tell Terry that I am sorry, that if he or his sister wishes to report the crime then I will do anything I can to lend support and credence. But the fight has left Terry and all he wants to do is get angrily drunk on a beach in Marbella. He chokes out a ‘Bye, Danny’ and hangs up.