Nothing Sacred

by David Thorne

I sat gazing at Blake’s box for I do not know how long and eventually my phone rang again. I picked it up slowly and brought it to my ear as if any sudden movement and it might blow.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Connell?’ The voice was high-pitched and one I recognised.

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Got a message from Connor.’ The voice had a quaver to it, a just-suppressed excitement.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He wants to see you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And he wants you to bring him something.’

  I picked up a pen. ‘Go on.’

  Magnus told me what Blake wanted me to bring him, said it with relish. He was enjoying this, enjoying intimidating a man over twice the size of him. It could not be a feeling he had had often in his life.

  ‘Are you insane?’ I said.

  ‘He wants you to do it.’

  ‘And if I get caught?’

  ‘Aren’t you a lawyer? You won’t get caught.’ He laughed, a soprano giggle. ‘Probably.’

  ‘You’re asking me to bring drugs into a prison.’

  ‘Not asking. Connor isn’t asking. Connor’s telling.’

  ‘He must know I can’t do it.’

  Magnus was silent for a moment. ‘See the photograph of your girlfriend?’ he said.

  ‘No, you—’ I begin.

  ‘Should see who was holding the screwdriver. Supposed to have deported him.’ Again, that excitement in his voice.

  ‘Listen—’ I said, but he interrupted again.

  ‘Even I’m scared of him. You don’t want him anywhere near.’

  I looked out of my office window. Just beyond the glass people were getting on with their lives, going into shops, buying groceries, placing bets, talking, laughing. Beyond the glass felt like another world.

  ‘Connell? You need to do this.’

  ‘Tell Blake I’ll see him,’ I said, and I put the phone down before I had to hear Magnus’s voice again. There was something in his childlike depravity that made me want to wash myself clean, as if it outraged my very skin.

  Billy Morrison was sitting on the one swing that wasn’t broken in the children’s play area of The Angel, a pub on the outskirts of town opposite a sprawling and neglected housing estate. I had helped Billy in the past, saved him from a local gangster he had found himself on the wrong side of. I had hoped that perhaps that experience would have forced him to grow up, get his life together; but Billy was one of those people to whom the future was as far off as another planet, and could only see as far as the next deal, the next score, the next hit.

  But I knew about Billy’s upbringing and the misery he had been surrounded with since birth: the ‘uncles’ and strangers who had haunted his childhood with their mysterious appearances and vanishings, who had caused it to be full of uncertainty, fear and the daily expectation of abuse. Could I be surprised if the future held no special allure for him? I looked down at him where he swung gently on the swings and could still see the lost child in him, though he was now nearly thirty.

  ‘How many?’ he said.

  I wished I did not have to ask him this, for both of our sakes.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Four?’ he said. ‘No worries.’

  ‘Got them on you?’

  ‘Yep.’ Billy was wearing a puffa jacket and he unzipped a pocket halfway up, pulled out a plastic bag full of wraps.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘For you, Danny, hundred and sixty. Can’t say fairer. Fucking pure as you like.’

  A cold wind blew across the playground and Billy shivered.

  ‘You doing okay?’ I said softly.

  ‘Me?’ He smiled up at me. ‘Blinding, Danny. On the up.’

  I doubted that, doubted it very much. I handed him notes, took the drugs from him. ‘Thanks, Billy.’

  ‘No bother.’ I turned to go and Billy said, ‘Danny?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ain’t like you. All this. Drugs.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to be careful. Don’t want to get into all that.’

  He looked at me with frank concern, as if it had not been him who had, only seconds ago, willingly supplied me with drugs, as if it was not him £160 better off for something which he had likely cut so heavily he was clearing a 70 per cent margin. Morality was something missing from Billy’s life like other people lacked sight. I raised a hand and left him rocking on his run-down swing, surrounded by broken glass and weed-cracked tarmac and suburban deprivation, convinced that he was doing well despite all appearances to the contrary.

  It is my turn in the line of visitors. I put my briefcase on a metal table and open it. A prison guard in latex gloves goes through it, opens files, picks them up by the spine and shakes them. He is being more thorough than the guard last time I was here. I have more in my briefcase this time but still I am worried. The cocaine in my mouth feels big and I am sure that I will not be able to talk. Across the room from me, a young woman in a short denim skirt is being patted down by a female guard. The guard takes a torch from her pocket, asks the young woman to open her mouth and shines her torch into it. I have not seen this happen before either.

  I look back at the guard going through my briefcase. He has seen me looking at the young woman and is now looking at me curiously. I raise my eyebrows – Will that be all? – and he pushes my still open briefcase across the table towards me. I close it and he holds an arm out, showing me to another guard at a further table. This other guard is a middle-aged man, short and overweight with a scrubby beard. He too has latex gloves on. He puts his hands up under my armpits and I lift my arms to accommodate him. He squats down, runs his hands up and down my legs. He steps back and asks me to empty my pockets. He is irritated. I should have done it before. I nod, look apologetic.

  He looks at me suspiciously and I say, ‘No problem,’ and I think it sounds normal. I wonder, if I do everything slowly, if he will be in more of a hurry to search me and get onto the next person. But slowing down might make him suspicious. He holds a grey plastic tray out and I put coins on it. He puts it on the table beside him and squats back down, goes over my pockets and trouser legs more thoroughly.

  ‘Shoes off,’ he says.

  I frown. ‘This necessary?’ I regret saying it as soon as it has come out of my mouth. It sounds thick and wet, not like me. I untie my laces, take my shoes off and he picks each shoe up in turn, examines it. He looks at me.

  ‘You’re a lawyer?’

  I nod.

  ‘There a problem?’

  I shake my head. He frowns. ‘No. None at all.’ The drugs in my cheeks make me sound as if I have a lisp, as if I have never mastered speech.

  He nods over to the guard with the spaniel and the spaniel comes over, tail wagging, and puts its nose into my shoes. I try to look nonchalant but my pulse is hammering and I can feel my heart against my chest.

  The dog does not seem interested and the overweight guard looks at me, up and down, gives me back my shoes. I bend to tie them and when I stand up he is looking at somebody behind me. Some colleague, back-up. This is it. I’m going to be pulled.

  He looks back at me, frowns. I don’t move, do not dare.

  ‘You’re done. Move along.’

  I look down, do not look at him. I walk towards the end of the security hall and am nearly at the door, which a woman prison guard is opening like a beautiful invitation to a magical kingdom, when I hear his voice say, ‘Wait.’

  I turn around and he is holding the grey tray with my coins in it. ‘Always said you lawyers are paid too much,’ he says.

  If I am honest, Connor Blake is so handsome that it seems like a miracle. I have never seen anybody who has such perfect features. But underneath that external beauty, I cannot help but imagine a different visage, something rotten and ugly and deformed writhing just beneath the flesh. Perhaps that is why he surrounds himself with freaks; perhaps, despite his good looks, he identifies only with the blighted and grotesque.

&
nbsp; But amateur psychology will get me nowhere. I can only deal with the man across the table from me, and right now he is looking at me with amusement lighting up his startlingly blue eyes, a smile on his lips.

  ‘You got the stuff?’ he hisses, a parody of a juvenile drug deal.

  The guards have left us alone in the same room as before. I dig with my forefinger, tease the tiny packages out from behind my back teeth.

  ‘What the fuck was all that about?’ Now that I have run the gauntlet of the prison security I am no longer nervous, only angry.

  ‘Ah,’ says Blake, nudging the wet packets with his index finger where I have put them on the table. ‘A little initiation.’

  ‘If I’d been caught,’ I say, ‘you’d be looking for another lawyer.’

  ‘They don’t search lawyers, Daniel,’ says Blake. ‘Calm down.’

  ‘They had my shoes off,’ I say. ‘Went through my brief-case.’

  Blake looks surprised, then laughs. ‘Joking.’

  ‘Do I look like it?’

  Blake scoops up the packages with one of his cuffed hands, pushes his chair back and bends down in his seat, tucks them into his sock.

  ‘It’s what we do,’ he says. ‘Test people out, to see how… obedient they’ll be.’

  ‘That fucked-up little goblin of yours threatened Maria.’

  ‘Ace up our sleeve,’ says Blake, unmoved by my quiet fury. ‘She’s safe for now. After all’ – he straightens up, smiles at me – ‘we’ve got four grams of cocaine covered in your DNA.’

  It is like chess, dealing with Blake, only he has all the pieces and he is casually blocking off escape routes one by one, zeroing in on mate. I do not have the ammunition to do anything about it.

  ‘So,’ I say. ‘What is it you want?’

  ‘I want out of here,’ says Blake. He takes a deep breath, looks about him, the small painted brick cell that we are in. ‘They feed on each other in here. You know that?’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Eat each other’s spirit. Yesterday a kid hanged himself, some pretty little slim-hipped boy, had victim written all over him. Couldn’t take it any more. They’d been taking turns with him.’

  ‘And that bothers you?’

  ‘No,’ says Blake. ‘No, Daniel, I like it. I like to eat people’s spirits. I ate Ryan’s. I ate his brain.’

  ‘He killed himself.’

  ‘He did. My fault.’ He nods in reluctant acknowledgement. ‘Definitely my fault.’ He grins suddenly. ‘Should have seen his face, when I showed him the photographs of his kids.’ He lets his face fall loose, mouth working like a fish. ‘My children. My babies.’

  I look at my briefcase because it belongs to me and I know it and it is familiar, some touchstone of normality, sanity. I will not allow this man to get inside my head, to sink his teeth into my brain.

  ‘Still want out,’ says Blake. ‘They can’t keep me here. Not me.’

  ‘How’d you do it?’ I say. ‘Moving the furniture? Hurting those kids?’

  Blake smiles, the smile of a parent whose child has won a sporting event – complacent and satisfied. ‘My boys. Might as well have moved in to her house. Set of keys and a cylinder of dentist’s gas. In and out like it was their local.’ He laughs, a sound that is as mechanical and devoid of humour as an unwilling car starting.

  ‘The birds?’

  ‘The what?’ He frowns, then smiles. ‘Magnus. He thinks it’ll freak people out. You’ve met him. He’s a sick little puppy.’

  I take care not to show any reaction but I cannot help but think of Magnus and other men, cruel and damaged and barely human, walking through Maria’s home, placing a mask over her mouth as she sleeps, holding in their hands instruments of pain and disfigurement.

  ‘All right,’ says Blake, and he takes a deep breath: back to business, enough small talk. He clasps his cuffed hands together, places them on the table. ‘As you know, they have accused me of murder.’

  I do not say anything, just watch him.

  ‘Isn’t this when you ask me if I did it?’ he says.

  ‘I’m sure you did,’ I say. ‘You malicious little fuck.’

  Blake smiles. ‘Course I did. He had it coming.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘Laughed at my shirt.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘It was the way he did it,’ says Blake. ‘As if he didn’t know who I was.’

  ‘He probably didn’t.’

  ‘Could be right.’ Blake shrugs. ‘Whatever. Still couldn’t let him get away with it.’ He closes his eyes again. ‘His neck went like it was nothing. Like a rotten stick.’

  He seems to be enjoying the memory, lingering over it like some would a hat trick scored on a Sunday morning. ‘The problem is, Daniel, there’s a witness.’

  ‘Must have been a lot of witnesses,’ I say.

  ‘Most of them knew not to say anything. Only one person’s talking.’ He stops. ‘You haven’t read the files?’

  ‘I was getting to it,’ I say. ‘Wanted to speak to you first. Get your side.’

  ‘My side,’ says Connor Blake, and he gazes at me with those bluer than blue eyes. They lack focus and I do not feel that he is looking at me, but rather at some distant, unknowable place. ‘My side is anyone laughs at a Blake, on his manor, they’re going to get killed. It’s the way it is.’ He says this last almost wistfully, as if it is not he who is responsible for this immutable law.

  I nod. ‘I’m happy to take that to the judge.’

  Blake ignores me. ‘The reason I want you as a lawyer is you’re going to tell me who that witness is.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘But you don’t need me. Any lawyer would tell you that.’

  ‘That last one I had said he couldn’t.’

  ‘He say why not?’

  ‘No. Said it was impossible.’

  I stop, think. Normally a witness’s name is disclosed to the defence team. It gives them a chance to check the witness’s background, whether they’ve got any reason to lie, any axe to grind against the accused. No reason why Blake shouldn’t know the name of the witness against him: it’s his right under law. Unless his or her identity was protected.

  ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘I’ll look into it.’

  ‘You’ll do more than that,’ says Blake. ‘You’ll find that name, then tell me what cunt thinks he can testify against me.’

  ‘Let’s be clear,’ I say to Blake. I take a deep breath. ‘If I suspect that you will use this information to harm the witness, I cannot give it to you.’

  Blake looks at me for a long time and a smile spreads across his handsome face and into his eyes. He just looks at me, does not need to say anything, and I understand. Protesting is pointless. This man, this depraved poster boy, can ask of me anything he wants.

  23

  I AM GOING through Blake’s files the next morning when my mobile rings. I look at the number and see that it is Gabe. I pick up. I have just read the coroner’s report of Karl Reece’s death and already I have no wish to read any more, to delve any deeper into this awful story.

  ‘Gabe.’

  ‘Morning, Danny. You all right?’

  I lie. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I need a lawyer.’

  ‘What’ve you done?’

  Gabe laughs. ‘No, not like that. I’ve found him. Petroski. Says he’s willing to talk.’ He sounds energised, excited. A new Gabe. Or back to the old Gabe I once knew.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It’s excellent. Need to get something official.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Do you do affidavits?’

  ‘For you, I’ll even cut you a deal.’

  *

  We drive out in Major Strauss’s car through a cold, spiteful rain, under low, ragged dirty-white clouds hurrying across the sullen slate sky. In the front, Gabe and Major Strauss swap stories and I sit in the back, try not to think about Blake and what he has asked me to do. As a lawyer, much of the work I do is good and useful; I
am about to swear an affidavit from this man Gabe has found, use his testimony to force the army to reopen Lance Corporal Creek’s inquest. But what Blake has asked me to do – supply him with the name of a hostile witness so that he can intimidate him or her, or worse – is unethical at best, probably illegal and certainly morally abhorrent. If I do what he asks, I do not believe that I will be able to look in the mirror again. If I refuse, then I expose Maria to the sick acts of Connor Blake’s entourage. I do not know how many men he has to do his bidding, no idea of the depth of his resources.

  Maria. Her name alone is ineffably precious. Maria. I cannot let anything happen to you. I will not let anything happen to you.

  I sit back and watch as we hiss past articulated lorries on the two-laner, their huge wheels churning dirty spray, black water cascading in filthy ribbons off their bellies. There is a killed deer at the side of the road, lying forlornly on its side in the rain. My internal debate is pointless. The reality is that I have no choice. I cannot defy the Blakes. If I do, they will crush me and everybody I love like roadkill beneath a sixteen wheeler.

  *

  James Petroski lives in an isolated farmhouse on the north Essex coast, a flat region of long grass, marshland and very little else. The only sound is the reluctant suck and sigh of the ocean coming from beyond where the land drops off. The only sign of civilisation, apart from Petroski’s farmhouse, are massive wind turbines out at sea like some forgotten alien artefact, their blades pearlescent and indistinct in the afternoon’s shabby light.

  Gabe leads the way, but before he can knock the door to the farmhouse opens and James Petroski is in the doorway, backlit by his home’s interior lighting. The gloom outside means that he is almost in silhouette, but even in the indistinct light I can see that there is something terribly wrong with him. He steps out and I see that his face is badly burned, so much so that one ear is completely gone, melted away; one eye is sightless and the skin on the damaged side of his face is ridged and shiny, like a red plastic bag that has been screwed up and hastily smoothed. He is bald apart from some ragged clumps of hair and his lips are shrunken, exposing his teeth and gums.

  ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘You found me.’ From something so damaged, I hardly expect human sounds to emerge, but James Petroski sounds as genial as if he is welcoming friends round to watch the game. The contrast is so unexpected that I half expect him to pull off his mask, reveal a normal-looking man with a winning smile underneath. ‘No problems?’