Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (21 page)

Danny leapt to his feet, ran up the stairs, barged through the door of the room the party had disappeared into. He didn't take any time to register the occupants – who were smoking opium, contorted by the sloping ceiling of the attic room into various cramped postures – he merely picked out the fat ponce and gave him a smack in the mouth. Then it was back down the stairs and straight out the front door, to where Vince, the Chinaman's Maltese minder, who had witnessed Danny's sudden departure, was waiting.

Vince delivered a deft karate chop to the back of Danny's neck which felled him instantly. Crack had winnowed away the muscle that Danny had put on in the army – the huge Maltese could lift him by the scruff of his jacket using only one hand. Vince carried Danny as if he were a kitten, down the area steps. At the bottom he pressed him up against the wall, and when Danny began to come round – his flickering eyes providing him a view of Vince's repugnant nose, which had been sliced in two during a knife fight and crudely sewn back together again – Vince began, almost tenderly, to press down on his cartoid artery.

Two minicabs pulled up to the kerb and the West End slummers emerged from the house. The party got in to the cars and they drove off. Shortly afterwards a vomit-coloured Austin Maxi pulled up and Gerald and his boy got out. Gerald was about to go up the short flight of steps to the front door when he saw Vince and his unconscious kitten in the basement area. Gerald jerked his head significantly in Danny's direction, and Vince, enjoying the conspiratorial silence of the very ugly, wordlessly did his bidding. By the time he'd carried Danny back up to the street, the rear door of the Maxi was open. Vince slid the body on to the seat and without even giving Gerald so much as a backward glance, reentered the house.

Gerald and the boy got into the Maxi. The boy was driving. They drove off to the north, heading for Clapton.

Sixteen hours later, at around three in the afternoon, Danny regained consciousness. He was lying on dirty linoleum. The first sensations he had on awakening were the smell of the stuff, and the thrumming weight of his head, mashing his cold cheek into the floor. Danny groaned, coughed, spat and sat up. The room he was in might once have been an office – there were a couple of cheap wooden kneehole desks set against one wall, a battered filing cabinet against the other. The office must have also been a shop of some kind, because there was a large front window. However, this had been completely boarded up on the inside and the only light in the place came from the chinks between the planks.

Following one of these wavering beams to its destination on the back wall, Danny saw that this was entirely covered with a papering of posters. He squinted at them through the gloom. They all featured photographs of children. The photos were obviously family snaps that had been blown up and reproduced in black-and-white – Danny could see the individual dots composing the images. Then he read the lettering and realised, with an access of dread, what they were. They were posters appealing for help in the search for missing children.

Danny scrambled to his feet. He felt an awful thickening and distortion in the already unpleasant atmosphere of the room. He could smell something sickly, yet faecal. A dollop of vomit came into the back of his mouth. He could see a tartan blanket thrown over something in the dark corner, only three paces away. Danny knew what the thing was before he lifted the blanket – and then he knew for sure.

It was the mutilated corpse of a six-year-old white boy. Danny registered blond hair, pulped features, cut throat. There was a lot of blood. The child's hands and feet had been severed and left beside the corpse, which was naked from the waist down. The last thing Danny took in before he began, simultaneously, to puke and scream, was that the little boy was wearing a bright sweatshirt, featuring a decal of the character Buzz Lightyear from the film
Toy Story.

Yes, Gerald, who by this time was heading west, to Bristol, was no ordinary enforcer, as the Chinaman well knew. Just as his accompanying boy – whose name was Shaun Withers – was not really a boy at all, but a twenty-year-old violent retard. Gerald and Shaun had met each other on the treatment course for sexual offenders at HMP Grenville. Day after day they had sat together in group-therapy sessions where sincere psychiatrists urged them to give voice to their most keenly desired fantasies of rape, abuse, torture and murder, in the hope that this would enable them to gain the merest sliver of objectivity about their conditions.

Gerald and Shaun managed to achieve very considerable objectivity about their favourite shared fantasy – the abduction, buggering, torture, mutilation and eventual murder of a young boy, the younger the better. They resolved to join forces and make it a reality as soon as they were released. Gerald got out first – he had been serving a two-year stretch for indecent assault – and went back to his home town of Bournemouth. But the local paper there had already published a picture of him the day before, and printed the address of his house. Gerald found that the constant posses of vigilantes screaming abuse outside, and the flaming, petrol-soaked rags shoved through his letterbox, rather cramped his style.

Gerald left Bournemouth and headed for London where he lost himself in the immemorial city's stygian underworld. He worked sporadically for the Sparks family in Finsbury Park, collecting debts for them and when necessary inflicting a beating. But generally he kept quiet, moved his digs every month, and bided his time. Six months passed before Shaun was released after completing his three-year stretch for rape. In London he joined Gerald, who already had the elements of a plan in place.

Shaun had spent the last year of his sentence, at Gerald's behest, cheerfully allowing himself to be buggered by the ex-cop who was the boss of the nonce wing. The ex-cop had gone down for corruption and was desperate not to be sussed as a queer. Shaun guaranteed to keep this information to himself in return for a little assistance with getting back on his feet once he got out. The assistance he most required was a reasonably roomy set of premises where he and his good buddy Gerald could resume their activities. The ex-cop had to oblige. It transpired that he had the lease on the offices of a defunct minicab firm on the Lower Clapton Road. The place was boarded up and had no electricity or water, but it had several rooms, and most importantly a back entrance that wasn't overlooked. Gerald and Shaun took the keys while making sincere expressions of gratitude.

They found the boy in a playground a mile away in Stoke Newington; his name was Gary. It took only minutes for the two men to persuade the six year old to accompany them to their house for some sweets and videos. He got into the Maxi almost gaily and chattered away as they drove carefully back to the cab office. For Gary was not simply neglected and unwanted – he was also being abused already. Shaun and Gerald found this out when they got him inside and took his clothes off – his little arse was cratered with cigarette burns. The burns were the work of his mother's sadistic boyfriend. The same boyfriend who had bought him the
Toy Story
top.

Still, despite this, Gary was blond and slim and almost pretty. Gerald and Shaun managed to have plenty of fun with him over the next ten days or so, but then he became a bit of a drag. He was incontinent, he wouldn't eat, he'd lost his freshness, and the two men began to argue about who should have the task of washing him in between sessions. And Gary didn't even struggle satisfactorily any more, he just whimpered. Worse than that, Gerald had already clocked the profusion of missing-child posters that had gone up in the area, and he'd read in the local paper that the police were conducting exhaustive house-to-house questioning. It could only be a matter of time before the knock on the door came.

Gerald decided that what they needed was another body, someone to take the rap. Then, through the Sparks, he heard about a Chinaman in Limehouse who had a contract that needed enforcing. ‘Just the ticket,’ Gerald said to Shaun. Gerald never spoke much, but when he did he invariably retailed such hackneyed turns of phrase. When the two men came to heaving Danny's unconscious body into the office, and stuffing the downers down his throat, and removing the semen from his seminal vesicles with a long hypodermic, Gerald referred insistently to him as the ‘thingummyjig’.

And that's how the thingummyjig came to be in the boarded-up cab office in Lower Clapton Road, screaming and puking on a cold November afternoon. But he didn't have to suffer his terror and revulsion alone for long. Gerald and Shaun had thoughtfully phoned the local constabulary, shortly after quitting the premises.

Three months later, and ensconced on the nonce wing of Wandsworth Prison, Danny had plenty of leisure with which to reflect on the awesome apathy that had gripped him during those few minutes in which he waited with dead Gary for the door to the cab office to be kicked in by the police. Granted, he still had enough downers in his system to make a polar bear sluggish; and granted he had the smack withdrawal and the crack come-down underlying this fateful torpor, but even so there was a genuine acceptance of his fate – or rather his Fates.

They thronged the corners of the dark room, their gloomy robes brushing against the missing-children posters, their grimy turbans scratching the polystyrene ceiling tiles. The Fates muttered and chuckled over the child's corpse, and for the first time since they emerged from the cracks in the corners of the world to keep him company, Danny could clearly understand what they were saying. The words ‘low profile’ and ‘Maltese’ and ‘set-up’ and ‘Skank’ were there; along with ‘fool’ and ‘crack-head’. And in the dark room, perfumed by psychopathy, Danny acknowledged that his nemesis had come back to haunt him.

It was just too smooth – and too inexplicable otherwise. Bruno offering to front him an evening's rocking in the East End. The big, ugly Maltese who had given him a careful twice-over when they arrived at Milligan Street, and then the same fucker, choking the sense out of him after Danny had given that lairy git a smack. Now he was here, obviously many hours later, and there was blood on his hands. Danny, unlike anything else graphic in the room, had been neatly framed.

For, there was not only blood on his hands, it was under his nails and in his hair as well. Some of it was his own – some was Gary's. This, when it was also neatly catalogued at the trial, was damning enough; as were Danny's dabs on assorted implements: knives, hacksaw blades, screwdrivers etc., revolting etc . . . . But ‘worse, far worse, was Danny's semen in the little boy's anus, Danny's semen in the little boy's throat. These were facts that thankfully weren't published in the newspapers, although they remained in Danny's deposition papers, when the corridor was frozen and he was hurried down it on his way to the nonce wing.

The police were amazed by Danny's quietism when they arrested him. Since he put up hardly any resistance, they administered a minimal beating. It was the same as he was shuffled from one nick to the next over the next nine weeks. It didn't matter what they screamed at him, or how they slapped him – he wouldn't rise to it. Eventually they gave up – it was no fun punching a bag.

Danny's lawyer, a young white woman, was perfectly prepared to attempt a proper defence of her client. She may have been inexperienced, and have had as little knowledge of Danny's world as she did of the dark side of the moon, but she could see that none of it added up. Danny had no form as a sex offender, and was too old to have suddenly blossomed into such an evil flower. He might have no alibi, and no willingness to go in search of one, but there was no effective circumstantial evidence against him either. This was an organised killing, but the police could find no signs, other than forensic, that it had been Danny who'd organised it. And anyway, why organise a murder so comprehensively, then fail to remove yourself from the crime scene in time?

None of this mattered though. None of this could fly in the face of that semen, which Gerald had so artfully extracted, then inserted. And none of it could be challenged if Danny remained, as he did, listless, silent, surly, showing no indication that he wanted to substantiate his – purely formal – plea of not guilty.

For Danny the trial was a series of unconnected, almost absurd, impressions. At the Crown Court in Kingston, the police who had arrested him stood about in the lobby, smoking heavily in their short hair and C&A suits. Danny mused on how peculiar it was that they always looked more uniformed when they weren't. The gold-painted mouldings of fruit bordering the ceiling of the large hall jibed with the freestanding, cannister-shaped ashtrays that pinioned its floor. The court usher was black, and had more than a passing resemblance to the late Aunt Hattie. The prosecuting QC was white; he affected a large signet ring, a watch chain and a clip-on bow tie. He reminded Danny of one of the punters he used to serve in the City. As he waited each morning with the Securicor guards for the expensive charade to begin, Danny would look for sympathy in the eyes of a large portrait of Queen Caroline – and find none.

Sitting in the dock for day after day, Danny was acutely conscious of the need not to look at anyone. The jury were ordinary people, who, in the struggle to appear mature at all times, ended up seeming far more childish. Especially childish in the way that they beamed hatred at Danny given half a chance. The public gallery was, of course, out of the question. Instead Danny concentrated on the peculiar, double-jointed ratchets that were used to open the high windows in the courtroom. And for hours he would lose himself in the texture of the vertical louvres that covered those windows.

Danny came to during the judge's summing up: It was for the jury to decide what they believed; it was up to them to assess whether the witnesses were telling the truth; it was important that they accepted the judge's direction in matters of law, but it was for them to decide in matters of fact. The judge was careful to acknowledge that they might decide to believe
this;
but on the whole he thought it far more likely that they would prefer to accept
that.
So he cut up the cake of justice and handed out a slice to everyone saving Danny.