Father Confessor (J McNee series) (3 page)

He took the hint, polite and formal as it was. Stood up. Said, “If you change your mind, feel free to call me. Any time. I think you know the number.”

When he left, I waited until I was sure he was gone from the reception area. Then I grabbed a mug from next to the kettle and threw it at the wall.

###

He had me.

The old tosspot, for all that I tried to deny it, had a way of getting right in my head. Knew how to push my buttons. And as much as I was aware of it, I still fell for the trick every time.

He’d talked about being the client for a gig I’d just as easily do for free.

He had my number down cold. I wouldn’t sit by and wait for the coppers to get results. I’d be forced to look into this by my own nature. Pragmatism would suggest that if someone was willing to pay me for what I would do regardless, then I should take the bloody money. Even if it did come from the proceeds of criminal activity.

Ernie had been my mentor and, no matter what had happened between us, that counted for something. His murder felt like a personal attack.

Not just against me.

But against Susan.

###

Three months earlier, in the days waiting to hear the initial assessment from the Investigative Committee who were looking into Susan’s actions during the Mary Furst case, specifically her connection to the death of the psychopathic arsehole called Wickes.

Susan sat with her legs curled up beneath her on the sofa that faced towards the bay windows. She was blowing onto the surface of her coffee, a gesture that was as much habit as it was necessity. The coffee had already cooled.

She was dressed down in blue jeans and a white T-shirt. Every day, I thought her gaze looked more distant. We hadn’t talked about her lying to her superiors in order to protect a young girl who made a bad choice.

And, even more damningly, her lying to protect me.

What was there that we could say?

It was what had finally pulled us together.

And threatened to tear us further apart.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think about telling them what I know... what you told me… about my dad.”

I thought about her father in the interrogation room, telling me that I need to look at the bigger picture, that I didn’t understand what was really going on. I remembered the pained look on his face, the way his eyes had become glassy with tears he hoped to hide, when I confirmed that Susan knew what I’d seen.

He’d looked as though he’d been betrayed. And yet he was the one who had betrayed her.

When it comes to family, things are never simple.

“But when it comes down to it,” Susan continued, “And I’m sitting in that room looking across at the arseholes in the suits, all of them searching for any excuse to find me guilty of some bloody infraction, I think, sod it. His own dirt’ll come out one day.” She blew on the coffee again. Never once looked at me, even though I was sitting in a chair directly across from her, the heat of the mid-morning sun warming the back of my neck as it came through the window. “And he’s my dad. That’s the worst part. He’s my dad and I looked up to him, respected him. Thought he was a decent man. He was the reason I became a bloody copper, you know that, right? Because it seemed noble. It seemed right. It seemed good.”

She had told me before that she couldn’t believe what I told her, that there must have been some deeper reason for her father’s close relationship with Burns. And once that might have been true, in the days when the Force tried to work with organised crime gangs rather than against them. When they still retained the feeble and naïve hope that they might be doing something proactive and preventative instead of making costly deals with the devil that would never pay out.

Ernie had been part of those deals, once.

Now his friendship with Burns – and I had been there, witnessed for what it was – was crossing a line unacceptable on any level for a professional copper, especially with a reputation like DCI Ernie Bright.

“There has to be something,” she said. “Something we don’t know. An angle. A play. Anything.”

But back then I believed that she was fishing in empty waters.

And I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

It was late afternoon when Susan called, asked me to meet her at a coffee shop on the Perth Road. One of those places that did fair-trade coffee and home-baking.

When I arrived she was sat at the window, looking out.

She tried for a smile when she saw me walk in. Failed. I guess you could say, miserably.

I sat beside her. She inched a black coffee over to me. I took it, letting my hand brush against hers as I did so. A small gesture. Nowhere near enough. Like anything I could do would have been.

I said, “Tell me.”

And she did.

###

The story that Lindsay told her was much the same as the one he’d given me.

However, Susan was sure that the DI left out certain details, And it wasn’t to spare her feelings; that wasn’t Lindsay’s style. No, when it came to other folk’s feelings he was subtle as a shotgun blast to the groin. And, I sometimes thought, proud of it, too.

“He asked a lot of questions,” Susan said. “Like how much I saw my father outside of work, how close we were, whether he’d been acting different lately, all that shite.”

I wondered what her reaction had been. She’d talked about his secrets catching up with him, and I knew that Ernie’s colleagues – Lindsay in particular – weren’t dumb. They had to have known something was up with their boss.

Or maybe they’d put any recent behaviour down to the fact of his wife leaving; an event that had been a blow for Susan as much as her father. Even when you’re an adult, there’s still a small part of the child inside you that wonders if, in some tacit way, you are to blame for the erosion. If only you had behaved differently they would still be together.

I wondered how Susan really felt about Lindsay’s questions. Whether she’d seen them as purely professional, or if she had sensed some personal jab behind them. As though her superior officer was trying to find some way to blame her for what had happened to Ernie.

But Susan was smart enough to know when she was being played. She’d worked alongside Lindsay for a year, had known him longer than that, knew his style when it came to an investigation. He was always one for looking at relatives first, of methodically following procedure and protocol.

Even when his gut might be telling him something else.

I looked at Susan’s face. Her eyes were puffed, bloodshot. Her forehead was creased. Feeling the strain. I wanted to hold her. Just hold her and tell her that everything would be alright.

But instead, I pulled back and said, “What did you tell Lindsay?”

She reacted to that by straightening her back. Looking at me with a strange expression. One I couldn’t read.

“I told him what I could. Which wasn’t much. That we haven’t been talking as much since the Furst incident. That he didn’t know what to make of what happened between you and me.”

Aye, there was another subject I’d been avoiding of late. We’d fallen into the rhythm of a relationship without thinking about it, without knowing the boundaries or the strengths of what was between us.

But together, I sometimes felt that we were further apart than we had ever been before.

The strain of a secret.

The tension of a lie.

Susan said, “He asked about you, as well. About you and Dad. How you felt about being the Golden Boy and then
just another
piece of shite investigator getting up everybody’s arsehole
, to quote the man himself.” She smiled, the way everyone did when talking about Lindsay’s own peculiar turns of phrase, but it was weary and more out of habit than anything else.

The words started to bounce around my head. I should have known Lindsay would try and make this personal. Ever since I broke his nose – right before I quit the force – he’d gone out of his way to prove that I was a fuck-up, a gobshite, whatever.

Some days, I believed he was right.

Susan sipped at her tea. She said, “I need to go home, Steed. Need to sleep.”

I said, “I’ll see you later.”

She kissed me on the lips. Fleeting, so fast I almost couldn’t feel it. Then she got up. Paused, as though thinking about something. “Do I have to say it?”

“What?”

“Leave this to the people who know what they’re doing?”

I shot her my best smile, reached and touched her hand.

It seemed to be answer enough for her.

###

The work of an investigator is rarely black and white. Unlike the coppers, you don’t have the same moral and legal high ground to dig into people’s lives. The various Freedom of Information Acts that arrived with the dawn of the digital age have served to make our jobs more difficult, despite the clear advantages the digital age has brought to the profession.

Which means that sometimes you have to make friends off the grid.

Like Bobby Soren. The Grinch, as he liked to be known.

He was the one who hacked Tayside Police’s website and replaced the homepage with an animation of a pig humping a rat. As he said later, it was computer code and not artistic subtlety that was his strong point.

The Grinch considered himself a political radical. “I don’t harm anyone,” he told me once. “I’m like the Banksy of the online world, ken?”

His grandparents had been German, but The Grinch was Dundee through and through. Born in the city, grew up here. He’d run with the last of the Dundee gangs during his youth, and had some scars to show for it. He’d only received, though. The Grinch, as he would tell anyone who’d listen, was “a lover not a fighter”. Aye, and he said that in his best Michael Jackson impression, too.

So, The Grinch acted like a dumb prick, but he was always on the ball. The fact that he knew he was smarter than anyone he knew was probably what led to his little stunts. Boredom and frustration can do more to form habitual criminals than any other factor you care to mention.

He met me at a café in the east end of the city. The kind of place where people didn’t pay attention to you and where no-one wanted to be noticed.

I grabbed a weak coffee and managed to resist the bacon rolls sitting under the warmer. The fat oozed off the meat, white and thick.

It was hard not to stare.

The Grinch himself was wearing a DUFC baseball cap and a dark tracksuit that hung loosely from his skeletal frame. He grinned as I came over. Half his teeth looked black and rotten. He spent so much time behind a computer screen these days, he’d forgotten how to spell personal hygiene.

“Awright, buddy?”

“You said you owed me a favour.”

“More than one.”

I sipped at the coffee. Tried not to make a face. “How do you feel about data protection?”

“Depends whose data needs protecting.”

I told him what I wanted. He snorted. “Piece of piss. Could do that in my sleep.”

I didn’t care if he was wired or snoring, just as long as he got me results.

“Aren’t there, ken, official channels for that kind of shite?”

I said, “You know I never ask you questions?”

He tapped his nose. Winked. “Gotcha,” he said. Like we were partners. Old friends. Comrades in arms.

###

The drug squad have a motto:
Follow the money
.

As in, you don’t go for the street level dealers, you follow the money as far up the chain as you can and then that’s the guy you take down.

I figured if Ernie was fiddling his morals, he would be fiddling his cash, too.

Follow the money
.

The Grinch had asked if there weren’t official channels I could go through to get my hands on Ernie’s statements. And maybe there were, but I didn’t have time to waste and more importantly I didn’t want to leave a public trail. Not just because I knew Lindsay would be doing exactly the same thing I was. And I knew he wouldn’t be too happy to have me pissing on his shoes. Again.

The statements the Grinch pulled – he sent an intermediary to the office with hard copies – went back years.

I spent the afternoon locked in the office, looking at numbers, figures, account details, names. Trying to find patterns, repetitions.

After a while, my vision was beginning to blur. My brain was pushing out against my skull, begging for release from this task. I thought maybe a walk would do me good, but I couldn’t leave the room.

I had to keep trying.

Because something in those numbers was going to make sense.

At five, Dot chapped on the office door, told me she was heading home. Asked if there was anything else I needed. I mumbled thanks, told her I’d lock up, let her go.

Too wrapped up in my own head for civility. Even if I knew I’d end up paying for that later on.

It was past six, and I had sheets full of names and patterns. I’d tried drawing connections, spider-diagrams, notes of all kinds, anything to make sense of what I had.

One name had leaped out.

Mulvaney Wholesale had been paying a regular sum into Ernie’s accounts for the last year. They were a front, of course. Mulvaney Wholesale had gone under years ago. Old competitors of David Burns, they’d been subject to what many would euphemistically term a “hostile takeover”.

Before Mulvaney, a whole raft of payments came on a regular basis from names I recognised and others I didn’t. All companies with dodgy pedigree, but I’d bet you couldn’t trace that pedigree in a straight line back to the one man I knew was behind them all.

He was too careful for that. There would be buffers in place. Enough to protect him. The words,
not proven
were a mantra to Burns and his kind.

I didn’t bother tracing the payments all the way, although I was sure The Grinch would have given me enough that if I wanted to, I could. Most of those payments could have been refunds or payouts for moonlighting gigs, and none of them tied back explicitly to Burns. Nothing screamed complicity on the part of a dead DI. Unless that’s what you were looking for. And even then, they only whispered surreptitiously.

With malicious intent.

I had to wonder, when did it start?