East of Innocence (20 page)

‘Mr Conneely?’

‘And who the fuck would want to know that?’

I push open the green peeling metal gate and walk into his front garden. He is wearing a brown suit that is heavily stained and he does not have any shoes on. He is smoking a cigarette and on his head is a trilby. As he talks, I can see that he is missing several teeth and he is thin, haggard even, the skin on his throat hanging down like pale curtains of flesh and he has big saggy bags under his watery eyes. His legs are crossed and the cloth of his trousers looks like it is draped over tent poles, so thin is he. He does not look like a trafficker of women who was once connected to the Provisional IRA; but then, he must be knocking eighty.

‘My name is Daniel Connell,’ I say. ‘I was hoping we could have a chat.’

‘A chat he says.’ He looks around at some imaginary person over his right shoulder and leers at them. His accent is pure Ulster, as thick as stout. ‘Well why the fuck not? Sit yourself down.’ There is nowhere to sit, so I remain
standing. He does not seem to notice. ‘Now, why would a brute like you want to visit a man like me?’

‘I’m looking for my mother,’ I say. ‘I wondered if you might know what happened to her.’

‘And how,’ Conneely says as he takes his cigarette out of his mouth and bends forward and carefully stubs it out on the ground, ‘would I happen to know anything about your fucking mother?’

He says this without a trace of the madness with which he’d greeted my earlier questions and I am suddenly sure that it was an act and that Sean Conneely is very much in control of his faculties, despite the fact that he is quite clearly dying. Cancer of some sort, I imagine. I wonder how long he has got.

‘She worked for you,’ I say evenly. I swallow after I speak; it is hard for me to say, to normalise in words, the hell he must have put her through, to call it something as anodyne as ‘work’. But I want answers and until I get them I am prepared to mind my temper.

‘She worked for me?’ he says in surprise and touches both his shoulders with his fingertips. ‘And tell me, Mr I’ve-never-fucking-met-you-before-in-my-fucking-life, what is it this mother of yours did for me?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘A man called Vincent Halliday sold her to you. You tell me.’

‘Halliday.’ Conneely fishes around in his inside pocket and comes up with a pack of cigarettes. He offers the pack to me, eyebrows raised. I shake my head. He takes one out and lights it. I believe that Sean Conneely was a wicked man, but he does not seem wicked now, merely rascally. Can
evil, I wonder, become attenuated with age, lose its cutting edge? ‘I knew a man called Halliday,’ Conneely says. ‘A boxing fella. From down south there.’

‘Vincent Halliday. Essex.’

‘Essex.’ Conneely tuts to himself. ‘Halliday. That’s your man.’

‘My mother’s name was Marcela. Marcela Cosma. Here.’ I take out a photo of my mother and walk towards Conneely. He looks up at me, eyes wide in mock fear, and snatches it out of my hand, examines it carefully.

‘Marcela. Christ and I haven’t seen her face for a while. Marcela? Now what did we call her?’ He closes his eyes and looks upwards as if he has smelled something, trying to think back over the years for the whore’s name he had given my mother as if he is trying to catch a scent. He is so atrophied I imagine I could literally tear him apart. He opens his eyes again and says, ‘No fucking idea!’

‘You recognise her?’

‘I believe I do.’

‘She’s my mother.’

‘She do much mothering?’

‘No. Because Halliday sold her to you, and you fucking destroyed her life by pimping her out, you skinny little Irish prick.’

‘Ah,’ says Conneely, wagging a finger at me. He does not appear to have much to lose. ‘Now. And I was supposed to know she was your mother, was I?’

‘Just tell me what happened to her. Is she alive?’

‘And how the fucking hell would I know the answer to that?’ Conneely says in an indignant squeal. ‘She’s not my fucking wife. Or mother.’

I look at Conneely in exasperation. He is a man in the latter stages of some nasty terminal illness and I doubt that snapping one of his fingers will have much effect. If I am to be honest, he does not excite much violent feeling in me at all; he is simply too pitiful. Yet this is the man who took away my mother. This visit is not working out as I had hoped.

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Ah. Ah, now. Let me think.’ He closes his eyes and takes five or six rapid puffs on his cigarette, eyebrows jumping up and down in time, and I know that he is mocking me. But when he opens his eyes he does not look quite so manic. ‘She was your mother, you say?’

‘She left when I was born. I never knew her.’

‘So what in fucking hell are you doing looking for her now?’

‘She’s my mother.’

‘’Course she is. If you say.’ He closes his eyes again, takes more crazy pulls on his cigarette, looks at me. ‘I would say, it would have been nineteen eighty-one. Around that time. Your mother, she wasn’t like the other girls. No drugs, no drinking. A fucking lady, she was. Had to get rid of her. She…’ Conneely’s eyes lose their focus as he looks back into his past. ‘She was too good for all that,’ he says quietly.

‘What did she do after? After you got rid of her?’

‘Haven’t a fucking clue,’ says Conneely. ‘Went back to wherever she came from?’

‘Romania.’

‘Was it? Well fuck me.’

‘Who the fuck are you?’

I turn around and see a young man in a white wife-beater vest and low-slung jeans and Reebok trainers. He has gold hoops in his ears and tattoos on his arms and he has that kind of trapped energy that manifests itself in uncontrolled twitches and a too-fast walk and suggests that pointless violence can be unleashed at any time, for any provocation. He looks like the kind of person who will be in prison, not within years but within months or very possibly weeks.

‘Ah, now then, Daniel, this here is my grandson Brendon. Brendon, this gentleman is after asking me questions about things that happened, oh, fucking years ago.’

You old cunt, I think. Drop me right in it, will you? The young man snorts and spits on to the path, an act I can only imagine he conceives as threatening. Anyone can spit, I want to tell him. Wow-wee. But instead I keep my mouth shut. I still want more information from Conneely, if he has it.

‘Want me to get rid of him?’ Brendon asks. He has a nasal Mancunian accent and for some reason I find it extremely irritating, so much so that I forget my good intentions and without reflection imitate him like a child would in a playground:
‘Want me to get rid of him?’
So much for keeping my mouth shut.

Conneely cackles and slaps the arm of his chair but Brendon does not see the funny side. He walks towards me and pushes me. It has little effect; I weigh at least half as much again as him and, anyway, what is the point of pushing somebody? Hit them or don’t has always been my view. I smile and punch him in the face. I don’t hit him hard
but he still staggers backwards. He puts his hand to his nose and when he takes it away it has blood on it. I turn back to Conneely and do not notice Brendon take a knife out of his pocket. I sense rather than see movement and turn back to him but it is too late. He stabs me in the outside of the thigh, but because I was turning it does not penetrate deeply. He takes the knife out. It is a lock knife, black handle, four-inch blade. Blood begins to seep through my jeans. This person, this boy, has stabbed me? I am almost too surprised to be angry.

Brendon is coming back to stab me again. He has a manic hatred in his eyes. As his hand arcs over to cut me, I catch it. My hand engulfs his. I hold his knife hand up high and with my other hand punch him in the armpit. I punch upwards, so hard that his feet leave the ground and the blood leaves his face. Already the fight has left him but he stabbed me, so I punch him again, this time in the face. I hit him hard and feel the crunch of the cartilage in his nose. He sits down heavily on the path just inside the gate and looks stupidly around him, as if he has dropped money in the dark. It is all I can do to not move in, hit him again, humiliate him, really hurt him. How dare he? The leg of my jeans is soaked with blood. They will have to go in the bin.

Conneely looks at me with a newfound respect. ‘Well now, that was nicely done,’ he says, but he is interrupted by a woman who runs out of the open front door. She is perhaps sixty-five and wearing a dressing gown. Conneely cackles again. This is turning out to be some morning for him. The lady runs down the path and bends down and puts her arms around Brendon whose chin is resting on his chest,
blood staining his wife-beater, his legs straight out in front of him. She looks up at me in fury.

‘What have you done?’

I can do nothing but shrug. Brendon attacked me; not only that, he stabbed me. And this is my fault? But sometimes there is nothing to say.

‘He’s after looking for his mother,’ Conneely says, wheezing. ‘Marcela. Show her the photo.’

‘I don’t want to see any photo,’ the lady says, dabbing at Brendon’s nose with a handkerchief. ‘Just take yourself away.’

‘Take a look,’ Conneely says, and there is a snap to his voice that I have not heard before. The lady clearly has though; she reacts as if struck, turns, looks at me.

I take out the photo and show it to her. ‘She’s my mother.’

She reaches up for the photo from where she is crouching next to Brendon, takes it, looks at it carefully. ‘Your mother?’ she says incredulously.

‘You know her?’

‘I did. I recognise her. Of course I recognise her.’

‘Do you know where she is?’

‘No. No, I don’t. I don’t.’ Who is this woman, I wonder. If she is married to Conneely, I have only sympathy for her. I take out a business card with my name and number on it.

‘If you know anything, anything at all. I do really want to find her. Very much.’

She takes the card from me, then looks back at Brendon who is showing signs of life. ‘Go on,’ she says, handing back the photograph. ‘Go. Go.’

I look at Conneely but he just raises a hand in friendly farewell. I am too confused by the events of the last few
minutes to feel disappointed that I have not come away with more than I have. I walk out of Conneely’s front garden and down the street, looking back when I reach the end and I see that Brendon is now standing up and being fussed over by the woman. Conneely is lighting another cigarette and when it is lit he shakes his fists at the sky, for what reason I cannot guess.

I have to walk a long way until I find a minicab firm that can take me back to my hotel; this area of town appears to be about as affluent as Mogadishu. The driver looks doubtfully at the blood on my jeans; he looks more approvingly at the fistful of money I wave at him. On the way back, I reflect on the little I have learned from Conneely. My mother worked for him for only a handful of years before she got out; that in itself is better news than I had expected. That he did not know what happened to her afterwards, though, is devastating. Apart from a measure of peace of mind, I have discovered nothing from my strange experience with Conneely. Right now, my mother seems as far away as she has ever been.

Back at the hotel and faced with the silent reproach of my empty suite, I realise that I have no reason to stay in Manchester, no leads left to follow. I do not wish to return to Essex; I have told what clients I have that I will be away for a week and figure that I might as well stay away for that long at least. But for a man with some financial resources and five days to kill, the choice of where to go is bewilderingly wide, nowhere on the planet out of his reach.
I do not have any family except for the father I do not want to see and, possibly, the mother I can’t find. I do not have any close friends living overseas who are due a visit. However, my conscience is nagging away at me and I realise that I can kill two birds with one stone.

Terry Campion is still, as far as I know, hiding away in Marbella but he does not yet know what I do, that Baldwin wanted the footage back for darker reasons than a mere case of police brutality. Terry needs to know that, rather than blow over, this problem will never go away and that perhaps he might want to consider staying in Spain until Baldwin ceases to pose a threat. I have tried his mobile again and it is disconnected; I have called his sister who claims not to know where he is. The only lead I have is that he told me when I called him that he was in his mate’s bar; Marbella is not a small place but, still, I should be able to find it.

I head down for reception, to check out and call a cab for the airport. I have never been to Spain before and what self-respecting Essex man makes it to the age of forty without having visited the Costa Del Crime?

23

I BELIEVED THAT
in England we were suffering from a heat wave of unparalleled intensity but in Spain the air is so hot that breathing in feels like a hairdryer is blowing down my throat. As I leave the plane, it is as if the air has been replaced by something denser so that walking through it feels like a struggle. It seems impossible that life can survive in such a hostile atmosphere, that plants can grow, that people can function. The sun is so bright that I cannot look at the tarmac of the airport runway without my eyes squinting and pricking with tears. The baggage reclaim area is half-heartedly air-conditioned and already I can hear the English muttering to themselves that it’s hot, too hot, how can people stand it? The security staff and customs officers look at us with unconcealed contempt, as if we are a fresh batch of prisoners being shipped into a third-world prison. I find my bag and head outside to get a taxi.