East of Innocence (17 page)

Gabe is still asleep so I scribble a note of thanks and leave quietly. He has his own problems; I will take care of mine alone.

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AS FAR AS
I am aware, the safest place in Essex to stash those discs is in Gabe’s house. Breaking into his home would be as suicidal as burning the Koran at Mecca. He has an arsenal of weapons that would shame an African despot and he knows how to use them; worse, he is prepared to use them, which is far more important. I remember reading that in World War One eighty per cent of shots were aimed high because soldiers did not want to take another man’s life. Gabe would never aim high. In many ways, my life has been a journey from savagery to civilisation; the course of Gabe’s life has been the perfect opposite. As a child, he was a bright, kind and thoughtful middle-class boy. The Gabe I know today is a haunted killer, all traces of liberal angst drilled out of him, replaced by a cold steel I do not think I have ever possessed. It is as if his years in the Army gradually distilled his personality, his softness evaporating away until only a hard centre remained. Though I do not love him any less for it.

I am back in my office and I have the discs on the desk in front of me; I took them with me when I left Gabe’s. I do
not know what I expect to find but I feel a little like a physicist who has a theory and now has to put it to the test. Intellectually I feel sure there must be something more on these discs than footage of one policeman fighting another. My missing finger tells me that. But I will not know until I have watched them. I have three discs to watch; Terry kept his reasons for wanting the footage to himself, asked his contact at the police station to copy everything from that night, not just the car park. So I have one disc of the station’s secure car park, which I have already watched with Terry, seen him getting beaten up. The second contains footage from a camera outside the front of the station looking into the street; the third is from a camera aimed down at the main desk.

I start with the footage of the street, insert it into my DVD player. There is a date and time code at the bottom of the screen and the footage begins at four p.m., in bright daylight. The police station faces a park, with a street between the station and the park’s iron railings, cars parked along the kerb on the park side of the street. The camera covers the road outside, perhaps ten metres of pavement as well as the door to the station itself. There are ten steps leading up to the entrance of the station, which is a three-storey Victorian red-brick building. Because of the camera’s height it is hard to make out faces, only the tops of heads. The footage is in colour but the colours do not seem true, the reds too red, the blues too garish, standing out from the pavement, which, because of the bright sunlight, looks white. It reminds me of a twenty-year-old holiday video, over-saturated and hard to watch.

The station is not busy, with perhaps fifteen people arriving and leaving each hour, a mix of civilians and uniformed police. I try to count them in and count them out but I soon give up; some of the civilians could be plain-clothes policemen walking into the station for the evening shift. Do they have their own entrance, around the back? I don’t know. I watch for half an hour before the pointlessness of the task hits me, watching a procession of faceless people arrive and leave. What can this tell me? I fast forward up until the time of Terry’s arrival in the car park at 10.28, the time I remember from the time code of the footage I watched with him when he was here in my office, battered and bruised and angry. But the exterior of the police station is quiet for the ten minutes before and after this time and there is nothing to see. He must have been dragged into the station by a back entrance; makes sense, given the state he must have been in. I sigh, eject the disc. Two hours and I have found nothing.

I am about to put in the disc I watched with Terry, when my phone rings. I pick it up and my bandaged finger brushes the desk, making me wince. Before I can say anything, Eddie’s voice cuts in.

‘Missed you yesterday.’

‘I was out,’ I say. ‘Business.’

‘Mr Halliday wants a progress report.’

There is no progress, has been no forward movement. I have not even looked through the paperwork Eddie left with me. After what Xynthia told me, the only thing I want to do for Halliday is break him. But I do not think that is what Eddie wants to hear.

‘Just going through the papers now,’ I say. ‘I’m waiting on some land searches. I’ll chase them up today, get back to you.’

‘So, what shall I tell him?’ Eddie sounds anxious; he isn’t enjoying his role of overseeing my work. He can see trouble ahead, and he’s not sure he wants it. Good.

‘Tell him what you want,’ I say. ‘Tell him these things take time. Tell him to get off my case and it’ll get done. That do you?’

‘Just…’ Eddie does not know what to say; he is out of his depth. He has just realised that I hold all of the power in this exchange; he doesn’t know how conveyancing works, how much paperwork, chasing, waiting on other people is involved. I almost feel sorry for him, stuck as he is between the unreason of Halliday and my indifference. ‘Just pull your fucking finger out,’ Eddie says. ‘Mr Halliday ain’t what you’d call a patient man.’ Is he trying for my sympathy? Eddie, please.

‘I’ll call when I’ve got more to tell you,’ I say. ‘Now, want to leave me to it, or keep wasting my time?’

‘Call me tomorrow,’ says Eddie, and hangs up. He can’t get off the phone fast enough. I smile to myself. That round definitely went my way.

I leave my office to pick up a coffee from the Italian café three doors down, come back and put in the disc covering the car park, which contains the footage of Terry being beaten up. I cue it forward to just before Terry arrives in the van, then sit back to watch.

The footage doesn’t get any better second time around; Baldwin’s casual elbow in Terry’s throat, the other policeman
beating him to the ground, Terry’s defiant lashing out and their collective, frenzied onslaught. They drag him off into the station and I continue watching for ten minutes, but they do not reappear. I take it out and insert the last disc, from the main desk of the police station. Again, I start at the beginning, at four o’clock, though this time I put it on fast forward and watch people walking at high speed in and out of the station, the sergeant behind the desk disappearing into the back office and coming back out like a cuckoo in a clock. Terry was taken, or rather dragged, away at 10.37 p.m. Baldwin and his colleagues re-emerge into the main area of the police station at 10.51, meaning that they had been alone with Terry for almost a quarter of an hour. I remember Terry’s battered face, the bruises and stitching; these people are sadists, of that I have no doubt, men who have developed a taste for causing others pain, for demonstrating their power in savage and bestial ways. I slow the footage down to normal speed. Baldwin is now in shirtsleeves and he is gesticulating, his colleagues following him like dogs around a shepherd. I cannot tell whether he is angry or amused, whether his gestures are of triumph or annoyance. But then, I don’t believe that it is possible to ever work out what Baldwin is thinking. His thought processes have nothing in common with normal people’s.

Baldwin reaches over the desk and takes a tissue, wipes his hands. He gestures to his colleagues and they go to leave but before Baldwin can get to the front door of the station he stops and backs up, as if confronted by a man even bigger than himself. He walks back into the middle of
the shot and I sit forward, examine the screen. Baldwin has opened his mouth; he is speaking to somebody out of shot. He presses his hands to his chest in a ‘Who, me?’ gesture, and shakes his head. The other policemen with him do not react; they look like a bunch of schoolkids caught smoking, heads down, hands in pockets. Baldwin takes a look behind him at the main desk but there is nobody there. Suddenly a figure enters the shot, the unseen person he has been talking to. It is not a big man, it looks like a teenager wearing a hood and he is holding something in his hand, holding it up and in front of him as if it is a crucifix and he is warding off some dark satanic force. Baldwin tries to snatch it but the teenager is too quick and puts it into the pocket of his hooded top. The angle of the camera doesn’t let me see the teenager’s face but he seems agitated, a dark blur of gesticulating arms, a hand pointing, both hands held out in a questioning gesture. He tries to push past Baldwin but Baldwin stops him, both hands on the figure’s shoulders as if he is trying to prevent him from seeing some terrible sight. The figure struggles and Baldwin turns him and this is the first time I can see his face and I realise that the teenager isn’t a boy at all, and then I realise that it is Rosie O’Shaughnessy.

Baldwin manhandles Rosie out of the police station and I eject the disc and put back in the disc covering the outside of the police station. I am in a hurry and my hands are clumsy; as if, should I not get the disc into the machine quickly enough, something dire will happen. I fast forward up to 10.45 then slow it down. The street is very dark, vague shapes in the blackness and three streetlights that
are white areas of brilliance. I see a figure walking along the street, up the steps and into the station, purposeful strides as if the figure is on some kind of mission. Rosie disappears from view and I watch the screen; she can only have been inside for a minute at most. One minute and thirteen seconds pass by and she comes back out, Baldwin’s arm draped around her shoulders, and in the darkness it almost looks like she is supporting his weight, as if he is a drunk she is helping home. You cannot tell it is Rosie; you cannot even see that it is Baldwin next to her. They walk clumsily down the stairs outside the station, turn right and disappear. She has not been on the screen more than a few seconds and already she has gone and I sit there watching the view of the deserted street outside the police station, and I wonder what mystery awaited her off-screen.

I pick up my telephone and call the local paper; I know one of the reporters on it, a man named Jack who was a gifted student and debater at my school and who was on course for an illustrious career in journalism until Fleet Street’s wine bars became more important to him than the news floor. After drying out, he took a job closer to home, perhaps comforted by the familiarity of the stories he now covered. I have noticed his by-line on the paper’s coverage of Rosie’s disappearance; he has more experience than anybody else on the staff, even if his career has taken a drink-fuelled nose-dive, and he still gets the juicy stories. The receptionist transfers me and Jack picks up immediately; he sounds happy to hear from me.

‘Danny! The only person I know who can throw a career better than me.’

‘Hi, Jack. How are you?’

‘Yeah, good. Working on a story about a twenty-one-year-old dog. Know how old that makes him in human years?’ He does not wait for me to answer. ‘Hundred and forty-seven. Hang on.’ I hear silence for a few moments. Jack comes back on. ‘You hear that?’

‘No.’

‘Sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped, Daniel. Long and hard.’

‘Listen, Jack, I need a favour.’

‘I’m skint, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

‘No, no it’s about Rosie O’Shaughnessy.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘What date did she go missing?’

‘Twenty-seventh July. Poor fucking kid.’

‘And, if you know, what was the last time she was seen? Exactly?’

Jack’s been a newsman for enough years to catch the scent of a story pretty quickly. ‘You got something?’ he asks, his version of humour put to one side for now.

‘Don’t know. Just, do you know the time?’

‘Tick.’ I hear papers rustling and Jack comes back on the line. ‘Yep. Ten-sixteen. Got the time from CCTV when she walked into the park. Never to be seen again,’ he adds in a cartoon-scary voice. ‘What have you got?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got to go,’ I say.

‘Come on. Top line?’

‘Call you back.’

‘You better.’

I hang up on Jack and look at my screen. I rewind the footage to the point where Rosie is hustled down the steps. The date stamped at the bottom reads 27.07, and the time is 10.55. Thirty-nine minutes after Rosie O’Shaughnessy was officially last seen alive.

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