by David Thorne
As I stand up, I worry that already I may have gone too far; Gary is quiet and still but he is breathing and I again think about my finger and decide he can take his own chances. I walk towards the door that Baldwin left by, passing the ranged tools on the walls along the way, and as I reach the door I feel as if I am passing from some dark fantasyland of pain and torture and monsters back into the real world. I see orange streetlights and breathe the clean night air deeply and close the door gently behind me.
18
MAJOR BUTLER TELLS me that my finger is nothing, that he once tried to resuscitate a corporal who had had an arm blown off by an IED, performing CPR in a chopper flying away from Basra chased by tracer-fire. He tells me that they took a round in the tail rotor and the pilot nearly lost it, the chopper rocking crazily as, in the back, he worked away trying to get the corporal’s heart started again, his hands slipping on the corporal’s chest as he pushed down, fingers made greasy from all the blood. Despite his best efforts, the corporal’s heart stopped and he was about to give him up for dead when the chopper crashed on landing, throwing Butler out of the door and on to the dusty ground of the British Army base. By the time he crawled back to the helicopter, the corporal was sitting up; the impact of the crash had brought him back to life and he wanted to know what had happened to his rifle, he couldn’t be without his rifle.
He laughs softly as he tells me this but I know it is only a strategy to take my mind off the fact that he has just brushed the top of what is left of my finger vigorously because, he explained, it’s no good splashing on antiseptic to clean a wound, you need soap and abrasion just like you’re washing dishes. He has injected me with anaesthetic and I cannot really feel it; but in some strange way the sight of my red-raw stump being torn open again by the brush makes my brain imagine the pain anyway.
I am in Gabe’s kitchen; I headed for his house when I left the workshop underneath the arches, recognised that I was close enough to stumble there, took back streets in case Baldwin came out looking for me. Gabe opened the door and I was relieved to see that he was not drunk or stoned; he saw my finger and pushed the door wide and watched me in. I told him I had nowhere else to go, that I was paranoid enough that I did not want to visit a hospital, worried that Baldwin might find me out. He poured me a Scotch and told me to keep calm, sit tight, said he knew someone who could sort me out. He made a phone call and left, and half an hour later he came back with Major Butler. The man was carrying a bag and his introductions were brief; he obviously did not want to tell me his first name and, anyway, I suspected that he wasn’t really called Butler and that his rank was higher than major. He was a tall man with grey hair and a pair of half-moon glasses; he could have been the owner of a rare book shop except for his eyes, which seemed to be constantly evaluating, assessing, making decisions.
He worked with Gabe to sterilise the kitchen table, laid a green sheet over it, set up an Anglepoise light that Gabe had brought down from his study and told me that this might hurt a little, and that it might not be something I wanted to watch. He said this in the offhand way of a man well used to performing unpleasant operations in difficult settings and his unflappable manner set me at some kind of ease. He did not ask me what had happened, except to ask how clean the blade had been and how long it was since the finger had been cut off. He did not bother asking whether I had the rest of my finger; battlefield surgeons, I suspect, aren’t very interested in reattaching fingertips. In any case, I hadn’t got it; it was back in that workshop and I did not wish to go looking for it. I had been refilling my Scotch glass while I waited for Gabe to come back and by the time Major Butler was ready to work on me I was half-cut, giving me a feeling of giddy detachment. Fuck it, I said. Just do what you have to do.
As he tells me about the corporal’s miraculous recovery in the back of the downed chopper, he cuts the skin into four triangles around and down from the tip of the stump and pulls the flaps over to seal the end. He is wearing glasses with magnifying lenses and he stitches with a finesse that astounds me. The reason he is doing this, he tells me, is so that the tip retains sensation when it is healed.
‘Five-star treatment, this,’ he says. ‘Usually, I’d give you a couple of Aspirin and tell you to stop your moaning. Now your thumb, that would be a different matter. The British Army takes thumbs seriously. Thumbs and trigger fingers. There.’ He puts down his needle, takes off his glasses and stands up.
‘Thank you, sir,’ says Gabe. ‘I owe you.’
‘No drama,’ says Major Butler or whatever his real name is. ‘How’s the leg?’
‘Spot on.’
‘Still doing the physio?’
‘Yep.’
‘Any depression?’
‘Please.’
‘Suicidal thoughts?’
‘As if.’
Major Butler examines Gabe with those see-all eyes of his. ‘Bollocks,’ he says. ‘Remember, get some help before you do anything stupid. Psychs don’t do their best work at funerals.’ He turns to me. ‘Keep it bandaged and keep it clean,’ he says. ‘Try not to lose any more.’ He packs up his bag quickly and nods at Gabe and leaves without saying goodbye. His efficiency and composure are truly impressive; as with Gabe, he gives off the air of a man who, regardless of what problem you bring to him, will have seen far worse. We hear the front door close and his exit leaves an awkward silence; I have a strange sensation, with Gabe leaning against the kitchen counter watching me, as if I am a child and now at last is the dreaded time when I have to explain myself.
‘Got any more Scotch?’ I say. Gabe brings the bottle over to me and I pour another shot. ‘Thanks. Was he in Afghanistan?’
‘Not with me,’ says Gabe. ‘I know him from Iraq. That corporal? He was in my company. Lucky little fucker.’ Gabe sits down next to me at the kitchen table. ‘Want to tell me what happened?’
‘Baldwin. His men jumped me, knocked me out. Next thing I know, I’m chained to a workbench under some arches.’
‘The policeman?’
‘Yeah. Fucking policeman. He cut my finger off.’
‘Only your little one. And only a bit of it.’
I give Gabe a look that would make most men bow their heads and try to pretend they weren’t really there but he doesn’t care, just smiles. But his pale eyes are not amused. ‘Why? Why the fuck is a policeman torturing you?’
‘He wanted those discs. The footage, you know? When he beat up Terry.’
Gabe frowns, looks sceptical. He shakes his head. ‘Nah. Sorry, no, I’m not having that.’
I nod. ‘I know. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’
‘Kidnap a civilian, torture him, cut off his finger, all because he beat up one of his colleagues? What’s the worst’s going to happen to him? The police are a closed shop, they look after their own, right? He’ll get a warning, might even lose his job, but you can bet your bollocks he’ll keep his pension and it’ll be hushed up.’ Gabe picks up my glass, swirls the Scotch around, thinking. ‘No. Doesn’t make sense.’
‘You want to ask him what it’s all about? Be my guest.’
Gabe ignores me, still thinking. ‘And why, right, Danny…’ He looks at me closely. ‘Why the fuck didn’t you just tell him where they were? What’s it to you?’
‘Didn’t like the way he asked,’ I say.
Gabe laughs, stops himself, looks back at me and laughs hard, laughs for a long time. He shakes his head. ‘Danny, Danny, you’re not a normal man, you know that?’
Later we are watching Scarface on the television and I am drunk and soon fall asleep. I dream of a wolf snapping at my fingers and keep jerking them away, imagining I am up a tree and it is leaping at me. When I wake up, it is light and I am on the sofa and Gabe has put a blanket over me. I must stop sleeping on sofas, I think to myself, then remember my finger and look at the bandage, the events of last night slowly separating from the fears of my dreams until I recognise that it really happened, men really cut off my finger. Last night I was concussed and in p
ain and part of me had felt fortunate to be alive. Today is a different story. Today I feel cold and murderous and the loss of my finger prompts me to form curious rationalisations; I tell myself that, since I have lost it, I have generally less to lose and hence should go gunning for Baldwin with even less caution.
But after talking to Gabe last night, there is a mystery lying at the heart of last night’s events that gives me pause. Gabe was right; Baldwin’s actions make no sense. He is risking everything, his career, prison, to get back footage of what is, essentially, a minor crime. The violence he has visited on me, on my father, on Terry’s sister; he has left a trail of brutality that seems way out of proportion to the situation he is faced with. And my impression of Baldwin is not that of a man lacking in control or judgement; he is a professional bent copper, probably has been for years, and he must have his reasons. But what are they? Confronting Baldwin makes little sense; he is not a man it will be easy to threaten. If I want to get to the truth, I will have to find another way.
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.
19
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 thinki
ng. 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.