East of Innocence by David Thorne

Author:David Thorne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782392217
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

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

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