East of Innocence by David Thorne Page A

is often slandered by people and it is true that there are plenty of lawyers who will cut corners; but it is not easy to find a lawyer who will willingly act as an accessory to major-league money laundering, which I suspect is the case here. I look at Halliday. His suit isexpensive, probably cost him close to a thousand pounds, he drives a Bentley, he lives in a twelve-bedroom mansion. For a criminal with few visible means of support, this is a perennial problem: how to explain away your manifest wealth when the tax office comes knocking. One answer is to buy a string of properties, fill them with fictitious tenants and use your own illegal profits as rent. Your bank account fills up with money that looks whiter than white, washed through your property; all you need is a lawyer to give it the appearance of legitimacy. For Halliday, I am a gift from heaven.
    Halliday stands up. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
    ‘Hold on, I’ve got something to say.’
    Halliday raises his eyebrows patronisingly. ‘Yes?’
    ‘Nothing happens to Billy Morrison. You leave him alone. He’s not a bad kid, just, what was it? A bit of a mug.’
    ‘I don’t know who you’re talking about.’
    ‘I’m sure you don’t. I’d still like your assurance.’
    I meet his eye with a direct stare. Now I know that he needs something from me I feel less fear. Halliday stares back, eyes flickering over my face, then shakes his head, amused. ‘Christ, you’re like your mother, d’you know that?’
    ‘My mother? You knew my mother?’ I cannot stop my words; I have said it before I realise I am going to, a shameful display of weakness. But Halliday’s reaction is curious; he looks away from me, busies himself with his phone, turns to the door. His manner is suddenly as furtive as a guilty child distancing itself from a broken vase.
    ‘Not really, son, no. Can’t say I did.’ He nods to his men and, without waiting for them, abruptly leaves; they peelaway from the wall and follow him, fighters in formation. After they have gone I stand behind my desk and wonder about what just happened. How did Halliday know my mother? And why did he all but run away when I asked him about her?
     
    Forgiveness comes at a price from men like Halliday; I accept that I have, compared to some other men who have crossed him, got off lightly. What he has asked me to do I will deal with; what he has asked me to do is not my first concern right now. I sit down, pick up a pen from my desk, click it open, closed. Events and revelations have occurred too quickly for the implications to coalesce and make sense in my mind and I need to take some time to work things through. I am thirty-seven years old. In all of my life I have never been able, though I have tried and cajoled and demanded, to persuade my father to discuss my mother; worse, to even acknowledge her as more than a bitter accusation. She went. She left us. She didn’t care. She was nobody. A bitch. Now a man I barely know has looked me in the eye and seen something in me that reminded him of her. For the first time, I sense my mother as more than simply an absence, an untraceable, foreign name on a birth certificate; for the first time, she is a person who contributed some genetic substance to my existence, who, according to Halliday, I am ‘just like’. Just like a disbeliever who discovers faith in God, I suddenly see my mother as more than a mundane act of betrayal; she is a person and a part of me. I cannot let this go. I will find out the truth, though I know that delving into the secrets of the past rarely unearths answers that we like.

 
     
     
     
     
    12

    EVERY SATURDAY MORNING , I coach juniors in tennis, at the same club I was coached at myself nearly thirty years ago. My mind will not stop worrying at what Halliday said, and I know that to get to the truth I must visit my father, today. But Saturday mornings are untouchable, the one part of my week I will not allow to be tainted by the tawdry events of