Nothing Sacred (22 page)

EVERYTHING SEEMS TO
be happening very quickly. I feel as if I should say something, ask everybody to slow it down. Take five. Give me time to think, to try to come to terms with what is going on, accept this new reality. But the judge clearly has better things to do. Perhaps he is wanted on the golf course, or this procedure is eating into an expensive lunch. Blake's previous solicitors cannot get out of this courtroom fast enough. They have not looked at me once. Only Blake seems to be enjoying himself, standing and smiling broadly as if it is his birthday and we are all here for his benefit. We are nearly done and I am not prepared for this, nowhere near ready.

‘One last time, Mr Blake,' says the judge, an old man with red-veined cheeks and clear grey eyes. ‘You are absolutely sure that you would like to change your solicitor?'

‘Sure.' He winks at me. I watch him with no expression.

‘Mr Connell. You are happy to take Mr Blake on as a client?'

Happy? Nothing like it. Not even close. But I nod, say, ‘Yes, Your Honour.'

‘All right. We're done. But Mr Blake' – the judge lifts a hand, points at Blake – ‘I do not want this to happen again. You cannot simply change solicitors as if you are changing cars. Understood?'

Blake nods happily and the judge gets up, sighs and shakes his head at us: myself, Blake's previous solicitors and Blake, who is flanked by two prison guards. The judge turns and leaves by a door behind his high desk. As soon as the door closes behind him, the guards take Blake away. He looks back, gives me one last wink before he is led through another door. I turn to Blake's previous defence team but they are already halfway out of a third exit and have still not looked at me or acknowledged my presence. They have washed their hands of Blake, citing ‘irrevocable differences', dropped him like a hot coal.

All that is left in this courtroom is me and a box containing all of Blake's notes, evidence, disclosure – everything needed to defend a case. It is on the table where his previous defence team were guiltily sitting. It is not a big box; I can easily carry it. But I do not want to touch it, want nothing to do with it. I look at it, cardboard, unremarkable, and cannot help but think of Pandora's box, waiting to spill out all the evils of the world. How is it that I have become its custodian?

I finally pick it up, put it under one arm and head out of the court. I have just picked up a high-profile client, am working on a case that will attract national headlines. I walk down the steps outside the courts and a man I know walks towards me. There. It has started.

‘Heard you were going to be here,' he says.

‘Jack.' Once Jack had been a star reporter on Fleet Street, an Essex boy done good, mixing it in the serious world of journalism. But his need for a stiff drink soon eclipsed his eye for a good lead. He had come back to Essex to dry out and now wrote for the local paper, a hard-luck tale writing second-division stories. But I knew him of old and liked him; he never complained about his downward trajectory, faced the world with a cynic's wry smile.

‘You're representing Connor Blake?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Not your usual area.'

‘Pays to diversify.'

I continue walking. I do not want to talk about it. But Jack keeps pace, knows me well enough to know that there's got to be more to the story.

‘Know about the Blakes?' he says.

‘Some.'

‘Course you do.' He is familiar with my background. ‘How's the old man?'

‘He's all right.'

‘Danny.' He puts a hand on my arm and I stop, look at him. He is studying me, his eyes concerned, and I am reminded of how much I like this damaged but ultimately honest and good man. ‘They're bad news, the Blakes. And Connor Blake, he's the worst of the lot. Well,' he says. ‘Apart from his father.'

‘Heard that before.'

‘You know what you're doing?'

‘I'm a big boy,' I say.

‘Yeah. Yeah, Danny, you are.' Jack does not smile. ‘But no matter how big you are, there's always somebody bigger.'

Later that day, Gabe called me from his car as he drove back from the hospital where the movements of Petroski, James, Private Infantryman, had last been recorded by the bureaucracy of the British Army.

St Luke's Military Hospital was not officially a hospital for convalescents, which had not existed for decades, becoming relics from the First World War. But the number of soldiers surviving wounds that until recently would have been fatal meant that many hospitals were practically indistinguishable. St Luke's looked after soldiers who, thanks to body armour and battlefield surgeons, had suffered terrible wounds but had made it back home alive. There were men walking on prosthetics or pushing themselves in wheelchairs, burn victims and men in plastic masks and wrapped in soft bandages. Some of them would never leave.

Gabe had come in person to try to achieve what he had failed over the phone: to find out where James Petroski was now living. But he had met another dead end here. The man in charge of records had refused Gabe access to Petroski's details with the smug satisfaction of the irrevocably institutionalised – he wasn't family, nothing to be done, out of the question, end of, move along, next.

Back in the car park, he was about to get into his car and head home when he had heard a voice call out, ‘Sir?'

Gabe turned around and saw a man he recognised. He thought for a second, placed him, said, ‘Robbie?'

Robbie Jackson was in a wheelchair but he had seen Gabe arrive as he looked out of the windows of the hospital's sunroom – something, he told Gabe, he spent a lot of time doing now that he could no longer walk. He had been injured in an explosion while driving a Land Rover without armour, although the last time that Gabe had seen him, he had been an active sergeant.

‘Beat you,' said Jackson. ‘You only lost one.'

Gabe looked down at Jackson, at his cut-off tracksuit bottoms which revealed the stumps of his legs. ‘Christ, I'm sorry, Robbie.'

Jackson smiled up at Gabe. ‘Makes two of us. You looking for someone?'

‘Petroski. James Petroski.' Gabe's pulse spiked with hope. ‘You know him?'

‘Before my time,' said Jackson. ‘Sorry, sir. Listen, you want to join us up there? Got a card game starting.'

Gabe hesitated. He had seen enough of hospitals in recent years, did not wish to revisit their sharp smell and quiet, subdued atmosphere only broken sporadically by pain-filled or simply enraged patients. But he saw a flicker of desperation and anticipated disappointment in Jackson's eyes; realised that a visitor from outside was an infrequent and longed-for event.

‘What are you playing?'

‘Texas Hold 'Em.'

‘Play for money?'

‘Sometimes.'

‘Hope you've got deep pockets.'

*

Looking at the men sitting about the table out in the hospital's long sunroom, they seemed works in progress, unfinished projects of some modern-day, cowboy Frankenstein. There were men missing hands, legs, eyes, arms, and men with burns who lacked hair – a workshop's worth of prosthetics awkwardly wielded. Yet there was also an air of mordant humour, jokes about players losing hands, laughter. After two decades in the army, Gabe felt as if he had returned home.

Two decades in the army had also taught him how to play poker, but it was not long before he had lost all of his money and was offering his adapted Nike trainers to a man who shared the same prosthetic.

‘So you left, sir,' said Jackson.

‘Didn't fancy a desk job.'

‘You miss it?'

The suddenness of the question, and the atmosphere of camaraderie around the table that Gabe cherished like long-lost family, caught him unprepared. The thought of just how much he missed army life, and the grief he endured away from it, brought a sharp lump to his throat. He tried to cough it away but Jackson noticed.

‘It's hard, sir.'

‘Don't need to call me sir,' said Gabe. ‘I'm a civilian.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Gabe could not help but smile at this. He threw in his hand. ‘I'm done.'

A man with a prosthetic arm and a pile of other men's money in front of him laughed. ‘Officers. Never could play poker.'

‘Hey, Diggs,' said Jackson casually. ‘You knew James Petroski, didn't you?'

‘Yep,' he said. ‘Poor fucker.'

‘Know where he is now?' Gabe said.

Diggs was raking in money but at this he stopped, looked at Gabe with suspicion. ‘Why?'

‘Want to find him.'

‘Why?'

The other players were still, aware of the change in Diggs's attitude, his sudden hostility.

‘A man under my command, something happened. I'm looking to put it right.'

‘That right.'

‘Yes.'

Diggs began raking the money in again, stacking coins. ‘Got a number?'

Gabe took out a piece of paper, pen, wrote down his mobile number, his home number, slid it across to Diggs. Diggs took it. ‘Captain…?'

‘McBride. Captain Gabriel McBride. Ex-captain.'

‘I'll try and get in touch with him.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Not promising anything.'

‘Thanks anyway.'

‘Yes, sir.'

*

Driving back, Gabe told me what had happened, what he had discovered. There was an edge to his voice, a purpose and energy; the mission was back on and he could see an end to this, a possibility of justice for Lance Corporal Creek. I could tell that, for the first time in many months, Gabe realised the future may hold something for him; that his existence was not unequivocally damned by the loss of his leg. Driving back to Essex, the sun dipping behind him and the wounded soldiers still at their game of poker, perhaps he came to realise that of all the soldiers left on the battlefield or flown home from war zones hooked up to morphine and life-supporting machines, he was one of the luckier ones.

22

I KNOW A
man who smuggled a bar of gold into Thailand by inserting it into his anus. When he got to Thailand he must have aroused suspicion and the Thai border police made him strip off his clothes, then told him to stand on a table and jump off it. The impact on landing caused the bar of gold to drop from his rectum and fall onto the floor with a guilty clank. He told me this story after serving fifteen years in a Thai prison, which he described as inhuman – filthy and diseased and worse than footage he'd seen of battery farming.

I am thinking of that man, trying to remember his name, as I pass through the security of Galley Wood prison on my way to see Connor Blake. I am trying not to think about exactly what I am doing. I do not want to arouse suspicions as that man had done. I hope that the breath mint that I have just sucked on will mask any smell for the spaniel that is sniffing about visitors' ankles. I am concentrating on swallowing carefully, and praying that nobody tries to engage me in conversation. Because in my mouth, between my upper back molars and my cheek, I have four grams of cocaine, and if I am caught with them I am going down: game over.

*

The morning after taking over Connor Blake's case, I left home early and drove to my office. I told myself that it was because I had a backlog of work to catch up on, which I had been neglecting recently. But the truth is that I also did not want to speak to Maria, did not want to feel her reproachful, hurt gaze.

I turned on the office lights. It was dark outside, street-lights still on. As the tubes flickered on, the first thing I saw on my desk was the box containing Blake's case documents that I had not opened yet. Within it was the story of Blake's crime and it was not one that I wished to know about, even though I knew that I must. I had no choice.

I worked for an hour until the post arrived, walked out to pick it up and make coffee. While I was pouring my coffee the office phone rang. I considered ignoring it. If it was Blake, I did not want to speak to him. But I walked through to my office and picked up.

‘Hello?'

‘Daniel?'

It was Aatif, the Pakistani national whose visa I was supposed to be sorting out. I had done nothing to make that happen, nothing at all.

‘Yes, Aatif.'

‘Danny, those bastards… What have you heard? They have said yes, no? They bloody better have.'

‘Nothing yet,' I said. ‘I'll be honest, Aatif – it's not looking good.'

‘Bloody shits,' he said. He worked at his cousin's builder's merchants and had picked up the vocabulary like a natural. If the visa requirements were as simple as the ability to swear like a scaffolder, Aatif would have little to worry about.

‘It's this Somali stamp, Aatif. They don't like it. And your explanation, why you were there… They're not having it.'

His claim that he had been visiting relatives in Somalia would not wash; he could not supply names and addresses or, crucially, an exit date. Now I knew that the Home Office suspected he had been there for political reasons, connecting with jihadists. If I was honest with myself, theirs was the more likely explanation, although I found it hard to accept that Aatif, a short plump man with a big moustache and deep brown doleful eyes, was capable of waging serious holy war.