East of Innocence (15 page)

THE WOODCUTTER WILL
come. The woodcutter will come and he will slay the wolf. He is approaching, stealthily. He makes no sound. The wolf will not hear, he is too intent on eating, his head is buried in Red Riding Hood’s stomach, nosing through her entrails, snuffling at her innards. The woodcutter must come. I believe I can smell him. I know I can smell him. The wolf raises his face and looks at me and his jaws drip blood that has the texture of treacle falling in long unctuous lines from his teeth. He tilts his head to one side and regards me. I do not see him speak but I can hear his voice.

‘You’re awake, I know you’re awake.’

I cannot open my eyes but I know that the woodcutter is coming. I know that Red Riding Hood has a face like a dead girl I have seen, and I know that the woodcutter is coming and I know that he will slaughter the wolf with his axe and that I will be safe, that I will no longer have to watch the wolf snapping at a poor dead girl’s guts.

‘You’re awake, cunt. Open your eyes.’

I inhale the smell of the woodcutter but his image is fading from my mind and I can see light. I open my eyes
and the glare is too bright and I close them again but the light has extinguished my dream and, although I try to fight it, I cannot escape reality taking my dream’s place and I know that I am somewhere every bit as bad as that of my dream.

‘Cunt’s awake. All right, lift him up, lock him to that.’

I feel hands gripping me and pulling one of my arms and a noise like the snapping of a lock and now my arm will not drop back down, something is holding it up. I open my eyes and see my wrist is handcuffed to the handle of a lathe. My head is in a pile of sawdust and small offcuts of wood. I lift my head and see three men standing above me. One of them is Baldwin. He is gazing down at me with a look of petulant annoyance on his massive, sagging face. The other two I do not know; I assume that they are policemen, though this does not give me any reassurance. I do not know how I got here or even where this is apart from it looks like a carpenter’s workshop. There is a workbench next to me, the lathe and a bandsaw next to that. The ceiling is made of brick and is curved and I suspect that this workshop is underneath railway arches. It is brightly lit with fluorescent strips and the walls are hung with tools.

‘Back with us? Wakey-wakey, rise and shine.’ I have closed my eyes and drifted away again and Baldwin’s voice sounds as if he is speaking to me from within a box, muffled and distant. Somebody kicks me in the ribs making me wince, and I am back in the here and now and the workshop I am in comes into sharp focus as if the lens on a camera has been tightened, the sounds clearer as if I have surfaced from underwater. Baldwin is leaning close
enough to my face that I can smell his breath, the sharp tang of a recently smoked cigarette. I look at him and will myself not to show fear.

‘Now I’m going to ask you again, and this time why don’t you make it easy on yourself?’ He stands tall and sighs as if I am a recalcitrant schoolboy who is wasting nobody’s time but my own. ‘You’ve only got so many fingers, son.’

I feel a quick stab of panic in my chest, the feeling you get when you are walking blithely along the street and remember something dreadful, like you have forgotten you should be at a job interview, or left a gas hob burning. I hardly dare to look at the hand that is still lying in the pile of sawdust. But even as I summon the courage the memories come back and all of a sudden I know where I am, I know how I got here, and I know what has happened in the time since I arrived. I dare not look. I must look. Like a mother asked to identify her child I will myself to look, to look down at my hand.

It is missing its little finger. They have cut it off. These men have cut off my finger and now I am scared, more scared than I have ever felt before. Because I know that this is just the start. They will not finish here. They can never let me go, not now.

After I left Xynthia’s, I had gone back to my office to finish the clear-up from my break-in, needing something to keep my mind from obsessing over what I had just learned. She had tried to comfort me, to describe to me my mother’s character and how much she had looked forward to having a child, how she would have loved me given the chance. But
Xynthia knew even as she said the words how inadequate they were. In the end, she begged me not to do anything stupid, to leave Halliday alone, telling me that he was evil and that my mother would not have wanted me to put myself in danger. I could not help but notice how Xynthia always referred to my mother in the past tense. Despite her reassurances that my mother had been sold rather than killed, if she held out so little hope for her life, what did I have to cling to?

By the time I left my office, it was growing dark. I got into my car and headed for home, agitated and driving with a murderous recklessness. So I was not surprised when I saw flashing blue lights in my rear-view mirror and I pulled over immediately. Perhaps I should have been surprised that the officers who approached my car and requested that I turn off my engine were in plain clothes, but I turned the key and got out without a second thought. There were two of them and they told me that I had been speeding, that I had been doing forty in a thirty zone. I did not argue but they asked that I join them in their car so that I could review the footage of my driving that they had recorded on their camera. I asked them if it was necessary and they said no but by then I had walked with them to their car. One of them was behind me and as I stopped and reconsidered he must have hit me with a baton because that was the last thing I remember, before waking up in the workshop underneath the arches.

I have been knocked unconscious before, though not recently; my father once hit me with his fist after I had taken £10 from his pocket to take a girl to the cinema and
when I came to on the kitchen floor he had left for the pub and taken the money with him. I recognised the headache and disorientation and the nausea when I woke up, instinctively going to rub the back of my head and being brought up short, my hands shackled in front of me around the leg of a workbench. I was sitting on a chair, my head resting on the top of the workbench as if I was snatching a quick nap in a quiet library. I lifted my head and saw Baldwin and the other two policemen who had stopped me in my car standing at the other end of the bench; they weren’t paying any attention to me, engrossed in a game where they tried to knock a nail into a piece of wood in one hammer stroke. One of them, a short man with a moustache and the puffed face of a drinker, missed the nail and the wood jumped and skittered across the floor next to me. They followed its progress, laughing and calling him a cunt, and noticed me watching them.

‘Oh look, Sleeping Beauty’s woken up,’ said Baldwin. ‘Let’s get this over with, shall we?’ The other men leered, wolf-like.

‘Fuck’s going on?’ I said, trying to put some force into my voice. Trying not to show fear.

‘We asked you, didn’t we? Nicely. But you wouldn’t play ball, so now here we are.’ Baldwin indicated the workshop around him as if he was showing me his own private kingdom. ‘So I’m going to ask you one last time. Where are those discs?’

He approached me, the other two men slightly behind. The short man with the moustache was one side. On the other was a tall balding man with a pinched face that
made him look like he was sucking something bitter. They were men you could meet anywhere, unremarkable in every regard. I would never have believed I could be afraid of men like this.

‘I’m not going to tell you where they are,’ I told Baldwin. ‘You must be out of your fucking mind.’

Baldwin smiled reasonably. ‘If you don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘I’m going to cut your finger off.’ He raised his eyebrows, as if a thought had just struck him. ‘On that bandsaw.’ He nodded over at a large, green machine made of metal, hunched over like a robot praying mantis with a thin blade pointing down like a steel tongue.

‘How you going to manage that?’ I asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Cut my finger off, dickhead.’

‘Turn on the saw, run your finger through it. What do you think?’ said the man with the moustache as if explaining it to a child.

‘Undo those handcuffs and I’ll tear your fucking ears off,’ I said.

Baldwin chuckled. ‘Probably would, too,’ he said. ‘You must’ve had one fucked-up childhood. Keep you in a kennel, your old man, did he? How is he, by the way? Heart, wasn’t it?’

I thought of a response, but looking up at Baldwin’s blank eyes I felt my bravado leave me. I was powerless, utterly at the mercy of these men. Fear took over. Fear of what they could do. How they could hurt me. My muscles were tensed, ready to flinch away from the first punch, the first kick. I had a fleeting, shameful impulse to capitulate.
Say please. Please don’t, it’s okay. I’ll give you what you want. Offer my hand, all a misunderstanding. Anything to get out of this terrible place. He must have seen the shame in my eyes because he smiled, nodded. Like he understood.

‘So, you got something to tell us?’

But no. Not yet. I had survived my upbringing. My father had not broken me. I had reserves of strength, deposited over many years. I was not beaten yet. I took a deep breath. Coughed to test my voice. Looked him in the eyes. Tried to speak firmly.

‘No. Nothing.’

He held my gaze, sighed. ‘Get the bottle,’ he said to the balding man. He shook his head at me, disappointed. ‘Fuck’s the matter with you?’

The balding man crossed the room to a sports bag, kneeled and unzipped it and took out a clear glass bottle with a pharmaceutical label on it.

‘Should be a flannel in the bag too,’ Baldwin called. The man came back holding the bottle and a rag, handed it to him. Baldwin unscrewed the bottle, inhaled from a distance and made a pantomime woozy face. He upturned the bottle into the rag in his palm, soaking it. Handed the rag to the balding man.

‘I’ll hold his head,’ said Baldwin. ‘Might be too much for you.’ He walked behind me and put one arm round my neck, the other crossing my forehead. He was so strong, stronger than I would have believed. A Frankenstein’s monster, a freak, not of this world. I felt the fingers of the hand that held my forehead caress the side of my face, the skin around my eyes. I could hear my breath coming out in fast
ragged pitiful snorts. While he held me firm, the balding man pressed the rag up to my mouth and I breathed in a smell like paint thinner, which made my eyes tear. The balding man’s eyes were focused and intent on keeping the rag covering my mouth and nose, and those eyes were the last thing I remembered.

Now Baldwin’s phone rings and he takes it out of his trouser pocket, looks at it in irritation. He walks away and hits a button.

‘Yes? Yes I’m on duty… No, I don’t… Well for fuck’s sake can’t somebody else do it?’ He paces up and down the workshop. ‘He still there? Yeah I’ll come in… Is he off his head? No? That’s something I suppose… Don’t let him see his brief ’til I get there. Yeah. ’Bye.’ Baldwin walks back to us. ‘They’ve picked up Francesco.’

‘Fucking Francesco,’ says the thin-faced man.

‘Stupid prick. Who’s he stabbed this time?’

‘They’ve got him back at the nick. Guv’nor wants me to have a crack at him.’ Baldwin pauses, frustrated. He looks at me with dislike and exasperation, as if I’m a kid who has vomited in the back seat. He has put his phone away and he pulls it out again, in two minds, not sure what to do.

‘Gary, you stay here with this fucking… We’ll be back. See if you can’t get something out of him.’ Baldwin snaps his fingers like he’s calling a dog and the puffy-faced man with the moustache obediently follows. They walk out of the workshop through a small door in a bigger set of double doors and the silence they leave is like that silence you remember as a child when your father switches off the
ignition of the car and just sits there, you don’t know why. I realise that I am trembling and I cannot stop. The workshop is still and the tools are arranged neatly on pegs on the walls, saws and vices and chisels and planes all hanging innocently. But I know what Baldwin is capable of and I fear his return; all of these tools can easily be used against me and one of them could be responsible for my death. I am aware of a pain in my finger, or what is left of it; it is a throb with a sharp undercurrent, a rough edge which makes me think of a saw’s teeth and which I suspect is going to get worse and worse.

But now that Baldwin has gone, the menace of my situation seems less. I can think straight, or at least without panic. Gary does not seem keen on torturing me on his own; he has casually worked his way to the other side of the workshop where he is fiddling intently with his mobile. He looks like a middle-aged dad worrying about where his daughter is and when she’s getting home. But I’d like him closer because I want to lay my hands on him, or at least the hand which isn’t shackled to the handle of the lathe. And I know policemen; they do not respond well to insults and taunts, inculcated as they are with a sense of institutional omniscience.

‘Pussy. Reading text messages from your boyfriend?’

Gary looks up at me amused; he’s heard it all before from behind the doors of the cells, or from piss heads banged up in the back of the van.

‘You’re supposed to be finding out where those discs are. Right? But instead you’re reading text messages from your fucking boyfriend. And when your daddy comes back, that’s
what I’m going to tell him. Sorry, Baldwin, I haven’t spilled my guts yet because your little streak of piss, your little drink of water here didn’t want to ask me because…’ I look Gary in the eyes, across the workshop; he shouldn’t be looking back at me, not if he knows what’s good for him. ‘Because, Baldwin, your little boy is fucking scared of me.’

‘Keep talking,’ says Gary but he’s got a quaver in his voice. He quickly clears his throat, betrayed by his vocal cords.

‘Scared of me because I’m a big macho man even though I’m chained to a piece of heavy machinery.’ I laugh. ‘Hey!’ I call, a note of hysteria in my voice. I want to wrongfoot him so that he doesn’t know whether I’m angry, compliant or simply unhinged. ‘I do know where those discs are. And I’ll tell you where, if you make it worth my while. You think I want another finger cut off?’