Father Confessor (J McNee series) (7 page)

Paranoia?

Was I looking for vindication?

Or merely praying?

Rain spattered down. Dundee weather: temperamental at best. Sometimes I thought the city could shift the atmosphere on its own; as though they were indicative of a shifting mood. Which made Dundee as close as you could get to being a depressive; periods of unrivalled sunshine followed by unexpected and sudden bouts of downpour and dull.

The rhythm soothed me.

I had my hand on the keys, but I wasn’t turning.

Who had got to Grant before us?

What were they hiding?

Was I so wrong about Ernie?

I closed my eyes, let my head fall back against the rest.

Who had got to Grant before us?

If they had got to Grant, then who else – ?

Sodit
. We’d just walked away, like good coppers, because we knew we were beaten, that our rules prevented us from doing what had to be done.

But I’d seen the way that Grant looked at me. Edgy and uncertain. Not sure who I was. Certain I wasn’t a copper like Lindsay.

Wondering if I had to play by the same rules.

I dialled in a number on the phone.

“What?”

“Give me ten minutes,” I said. “Then I want you back at Grant’s place.”

“Christ, McNee, leave this shite to the professionals.”

“You want him to talk as much as I do,” I said. “You’re the one who said you’d rather have me working with you. And you know I can do things you can’t, walk places you’re shut out from.”

“You can’t touch him,” Lindsay said. “You even give the bastard a scratch, I’ll have you down for assault before you take another breath.”

I said, “Just trust me.”

Lindsay didn’t say anything. Just killed the call. I took that to be a “yes”.

###

Briefing room.

Early morning.

Years ago.

Seeing the memory from a distance. As though it belongs to someone else.

Maybe twenty of us, wired on early morning caffeine and lack of sleep. A few hangovers. Easy to tell who was a candidate for hard-core alcoholism.

I was in the third row, still a plod, maybe six months away from transfer and hopefully promotion. CID was the goal. The dream. The ideal. The reason I’d joined up in the first place. It was ten months before Elaine’s death. A year and one month before I’d break DI Lindsay’s nose and finally quit the force.

Looking back, I realise how unlikely it seemed, how no-one could predict any of what happened.

The world only ever makes sense in hindsight.

In my memories, I am young. Little more than a kid, really. If you ask me what I look like, I’d say I look the same as I did at nineteen. I think I’m grown up. Back then, I knew nothing about the world. I just thought I did.

Ernie Bright was up front. Standing before a projection screen.

Talking Serious and Organised.

Talking witnesses.

Talking David Burns.

“The problem is not that we don’t know what he’s doing, it’s that we can’t link him to any of the shite that happens in his name.”

Beside me, a guy who wears glasses and looks out of place in uniform makes copious notes. I don’t know his name, but figure he’s shooting for promotion and desk.

There are two types of coppers, or so I believed.

Those who want to get their hands dirty.

And those who want to let others do the hard graft.

Glasses was one of the latter.

And that was fine. Every organisation needs someone standing back from the field, directing the plays. As long as they can appreciate the realities of what that means for the front line grafters.

“The few witnesses we’ve ever had have failed to provide conviction. For a variety of reasons.” Ernie clicked through to an image of an older man wearing Mr Magoo frames. He was frail, as though he’d get blown away by an early morning breeze. “This man came forward with a promise to link Burns to drug trades out in the Lochee area, and a whole network linking back to Eastern Europe. At the last moment, he had a change of heart, said he’d made a mistake. He was willing to serve time for perjury. Nothing we did could make him change his mind.” Ernie stopped there. He looked at each one of us, as though we could answer the question he was about to ask. “What happened?” Another pause. We all knew the answer, but we let Ernie say it out loud. “He was more scared of what Burns and his boys would do than he was of jail time. Because he knew that we operate within certain guidelines. We can only intimidate up to a point. And while we hear stories about coppers crossing the line every time we open a newspaper, the truth is that most criminals – and most members of the public – know such instances are rare.”

Another click. Another image. A woman, mid-forties with fair hair and the kind of eyes you’d call piercing. Like a bayonet. She had a proud bearing, held her head high and stared right at the camera as though daring it to make something of her.

“Kate Fairweather. She came forward after one of her sons was killed. The lad worked for Burns – off the books, away from his legitimate public work – and wound up dead for his trouble. Part of a little gang trouble we had in the late nineties, a skirmish that cemented Burns’s dominance in the city. The lad was killed, execution style, a clear message. His mother took it hard, decided that enough was enough. The worst problem with men like Burns – the manipulators, the liars, the users – is that ordinary people don’t see the pain these men cause until it’s too late. Ms Fairweather couldn’t save her son, but she was determined she could save someone else’s. Or at the very least take revenge by helping put the man she held responsible behind bars.”

Glasses scribbled furiously.

Anecdotal detail adds flavour to procedural notes, but you rarely need it. Even then I knew the lad didn’t have the chops for street work. His attitude screamed,
Facilitator
. Of course, he’d probably go far. Further than me, at any rate.

“There are some witnesses who cannot be intimidated. Ms Fairweather was one of them. She kept in close contact with the investigating officers. Told us of several attempts that were made to buy her silence. And then she disappeared.” Ernie was trying to keep his tone authoritative, but if you knew the man, you could hear the stresses and cracks in his voice. He’d been one of the investigating officers. A lifetime spent trying to put men like Burns away, and this had brought him so close.

Was that what sent him over the edge?

Was there something in my memories of him that I had overlooked? Were there signs that he was not the man I thought he was?

It’s easy to rewrite memories.

Refocus them.

Remember what you want. Add retrospective details. Make sense of your past, even if it is a kind of lie.

Another click. Crime scene photographs. Stark. Sharp.

Brutal.

Check the reactions around.

From stoic to steeled to stunned.

A couple even leaning forward, like they needed to see.

Go into this line of work, there are always ghouls.

I looked at Glasses. He’d quit scribbling, couldn’t look away.

Ernie clicked through:

Another angle.

Click

Another.

Even the ghouls shifted uncomfortably. All of this become real to them. More than just the kind of horrific pictures young men laugh at to prove their masculinity.

“No-one was ever arrested. Lines of enquiry were followed, but petered out. Men like David Burns pride themselves on working without a trace. They also pride themselves on their ability to bully and intimidate. People are scared of them because they work outside of the law, outside of the rules that ground the police and the authorities. The biggest threat men like David Burns face is from witnesses, from those who trust in the system. Testimony is key if we are to take men like this down. We cannot allow –”
click
“these –”
click
“atrocities –”
click
“to continue.”

Click.

Click.

Click.

###

In my head, I clicked through images. Same way Ernie had done with the overheads so many years ago to reinforce the power and emotional effect of what none of us had been there to witness.

My mind filled in the details. Created images I had not seen.

Click

Overhead, Ernie on the floor of the warehouse, his body twisted.

Click

His eyes. Glassed over.

Click

Blood pooling on the concrete floor.

Click.

Click.

Click.

I knocked hard on the door.

“Open up, you bastard!”

Hammering.

To wake the dead.

When the door cracked an inch, I followed through with a shoulder shove, the door swinging hard on its hinges and knocking Raymond Grant off his feet. I stormed inside, pulled him up on to his feet and threw him into the living room.

He stumbled, crashed over the tiny coffee table hidden under a pile of sheets. Maybe they cushioned his fall.

Pity.

“What the fuck, man?” His voice was broken, pathetic. He trembled when he spoke.

I noticed the works near the window. Fresh used. Our visit had rattled him enough he probably didn’t even wait until we’d closed the door behind us to dig out the stash.

I walked past him, picked up what was left. “Naughty boy, Raymond.”

“Personal use.” His voice was shaking, the tremor of fear clear and unmistakable.

I picked up Grant’s works, threw them at him.

He cowered.

“You can’t do this. There are rules.” But he didn’t sound sure. I was an unknown quantity to Raymond Grant. That gave me the advantage.

One I intended to exploit.

“Aye,” I said. “Last time I was here with a copper. Now, it’s just you and me, you prick.”

He was crouched on the floor. Like a parody of the Igor character in the old black and white Frankenstein movies; a pathetic, half-formed man cowering in terror and fear.

Did I feel sorry for him?

Knowing the things he had done?

I looked at him cowering.

Thought about Ernie Bright bleeding out, alone, in a warehouse.

His life and reputation destroyed.

And this man knew why.

This man who had screwed his life every step of the way. Who had thrown himself into the deep end of life and never tried to swim back to the surface.

I said, “There were others here before us.”

He nodded.

“They scared you. Threatened your life.”

He nodded again.

I said, “They didn’t lose a friend the other day.”

Let him think on that.

He was crying, now. Trying to hold it in. Shivering all over. Hard to tell if it was guilt, fear, or the need for another fix.

Maybe all three. Like I gave a toss. All I wanted from him was answers.

Telling myself I wanted them for Susan.

That I was doing this because it was the only thing I could do to help her, now.

Aye, check the hero complex. Threatening a pathetic old prick who’s been paying for stupid mistakes his whole life, who must have thought every day about welcoming death. Why else would he be sticking shite in his veins if not to welcome the embrace of the eternal high? Close to death as you can get without actually toppling over the side.

Some people numb the pain with chemicals.

Others with anger.

He stuck a needle in his veins.

I lashed out.

Make your choice.

Looking at him, I suddenly felt a wave of nausea. Not at him, but at myself. For thinking I could come in here and beat the truth out of someone like this.

No better than the people who’d told him not to talk to the coppers.

Grant looked up at me. Trembling.

I said, “Fuck it,” and stepped past him, out into the hall. Opened the front door, found I was blinded by the light outside.

Heard a voice say, “Wait. You fucking prick, hold it. I’ll tell you about Ernie. About the other bastards. Whatever. The fuck does it matter, anyway? I’m going to die one of these days. Maybe they’d be doing me a bastarding favour.”

I stopped.

Turned back from the light outside.

To talk to the dying man who lived in the dark.

Raymond Grant just wanted to be left alone.

After his dismissal from the force, he existed on anger. At himself. At the force, who tossed him aside like an unwanted tissue. At the world which he felt owed him
something
for the sacrifices he had made.

But he had no focus.

No drive.

“Where did I go from there? Christ, how do you pull your life back together after they tell you you’re a disgrace to society? How do you pull yourself up and become a human again when no-one’s willing to give you a bloody chance?”

He found he had no contacts in the straight world who would speak to him. At least when I left, I did so in a tide of anger, but not of shame. Grant had nothing from his old life that he could turn to.

And his reputation – a crooked copper – followed him into the jails and beyond.

He served his sentence, isolated from other prisoners after an incident that resulted in damaged kidneys and hours of emergency surgery just to keep him breathing.

In prison he learned despair and hopelessness.

Applied those lessons to the world outside.

Applied them well.

Lived his life in the flat. The walls were the boundaries to his world. He never wanted to venture outside.

“Used to keep the place clean, you know? Like I still had a life?”

But he didn’t have one. He couldn’t have one.

While he was inside, his wife filed for divorce. The one person he thought would never abandon him, “But I was being a fucking eejit. I would have dragged her down with me.” And his daughter, too. “She’ll be twenty-six years old, now. Last time I saw her, she was this tiny wee thing. Big eyes. Big brown eyes that looked up at you and said, ‘Protect me from all the bad people in this world.’”

I let him talk at his own pace.

No more threats.

No more fear.

Sometimes in this job, you’re less an investigator and more of a psychiatrist. Or a priest. Go about your job the right way, people want to talk to you. Like somehow you’ll be able to forgive them for the things they’ve done.