The Good Son (17 page)

“They came to me,” I said. “Told me that I was to find you. If I didn't, they'd kill me.” I didn't tell him about Bill. He didn't need to know.

He said, “I didn't ask for this.”

“No one does.”

When I walked away from Lindsay, I had done so for reasons that had seemed transparent at the time. An unidentifiable anger had been enough, it seemed.
But I realised now that I had walked away because I knew he could help me.

When all's said and done, you have to help yourself.

They were after me as much as Robertson, these bastards. It would have been easy to place the responsibility onto his shoulders. Say that this was his problem. His brother. His family.

His problem.

Not mine.

It would have been easy.

And it would have been wrong.

“We don't have Gordon Egg's money,” I told him. Deliberately using the word, “we”. Unsure whether it was for his benefit or mine. “That's the problem here. If we did, we'd just hand it over, watch them walk away.”

Was it really that simple? Or was I just giving him reassurances?

Whatever, I can't say that the platitudes took much of the burden from his shoulders.

“Aye,” he said. “Although… I've no been exactly honest with you. And maybe I should…” He ran his hands across his bald head, as though trying to smooth down the hair he once had. “Jesus… I know where it is. The money.” He turned away again, looked at the water. His hands clasped together in front of his expansive stomach, his fingers intertwining like fleshy worms. “I didn't tell you the truth. About Daniel. When I said I hadn't seen him until I found his body, that wasn't true. He came to see me earlier that night. I didn't realise it then, but I think he was trying to say goodbye. And I should have said something, but…”

Robertson's gaze remained fixed on the river,
despite the blinding sunlight that bounced back off the silver of the water.

He took a deep breath. As he told me about the night his brother came back into his life, appearing on the doorstep like an apparition from the past, crows cried out as they circled in the sky above. Their song sounded like mocking laughter.

Robertson told me the story slowly. Stumbling over words. Reluctant to let the truth out.

He said that he'd come to me, not out of idle curiosity, but out of fear. Knowing his brother was into something bad and wanting someone who could give him more information. Help him understand not only who his brother had been but why he had to take his own life.

Robertson had held back before. Not wanting to admit the truth because it scared him. Because he was afraid that somehow, just by seeing his brother for those last moments, he was responsible.

That's what he said.

On the afternoon his brother came home, James Robertson had been in his front room, drinking a large Glenfiddich. He'd attended a hunt earlier in the day, tramping through undergrowth in the countryside surrounding Perth. His companions a mix of lawyers and landowners.

The whisky was opened as soon as he arrived back home. He drank alone in a house that had never felt
so empty in all the fifty-seven years of his life.

When the knock came, it toppled Robertson from his chair. He'd been slipping into sleep and the sudden noise woke him. He steadied himself and grabbed the glass from where it lay on the floor. He walked through the kitchen and out to the front door.

“To see him standing there,” Robertson told me, “even after all these years, and looking so different from me, it was a shock. Like looking into one of those funny mirrors you get at the Lammas Market. Seeing yourself, only something's not quite right. I didn't know what to say. And I don't know that he did either. We just stood there. Like bloody lemons.”

Daniel was the one who finally broke the stand-off, pushing past his brother and into the house with a brusqueness that verged on violence. Robertson followed the other man into the living room. But he almost turned and ran when he saw Daniel's coattails lift, revealing a momentary glimpse of a hunting knife tucked in his belt.

Daniel didn't bother with any of the reunion talk. He placed the briefcase he was carrying onto the coffee table and opened it.

The contents of the case made Robertson think he was having a drunk dream. Bundles of money sat snugly bunched together. There was more cash in the case than he would ever have hoped to see in his lifetime.

Robertson's heart hammered against his rib cage so hard he thought it would burst. The sweat poured off him and soaked into his shirt. He flopped into a chair and sat there, staring at his brother and the briefcase.

“I want you to have it,” Daniel said. His Scots
accent had been corrupted by his years in London. “The money. All of it.”

“And if I don't?”

Daniel shrugged. No big deal. As though, in his world, people got offered cases of cash in their front rooms every day. “Then get rid of it.”

It was that matter-of-fact dismissal that hit Robertson hard. There had been so much he wanted to say, so many things he could have asked. They could have talked about their father, about the years growing up together that they had lost. They could have drunk a glass of whisky in their mother's memory.

But they did none of that.

Because Robertson found himself frightened by the money and the knife and what kind of man his brother must have become to enter his house with these things.

The way Robertson told the story, Daniel had left with barely another word. Gone like a ghost. Robertson would have been tempted to put the whole thing down to some kind of drunken hallucination, if not for the evidence left behind.

The money.

The case.

Robertson looked close to tears. He took off his bunnet and scrunched it up in his hands. Refusing to look me in the eye, he said, “I knew that the money was tainted when I saw it. Just knew. Right here.” He thumped his chest. His eyes were tearing up. He blinked a few times. “He was like those villains you see on the TV, the ones who'd kill you as soon as look
at you. And I thought… if this is how he turned out…The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, right? We shared something, Daniel and me. I just couldn't believe that he'd turn out…”

His fists clenched tight. His knuckles went white with the strain.

“I lied to you,” he said. “The police, too. Do you know how that felt? When I've never done anything like that in my life? No until he showed up on my doorstep. Aye, but what else could I do? I should have given them the money, everything. When they asked… If I'd done that…” He laughed. It was bitter and forced; anything to stop those tears flowing.

I wanted to ask why he didn't. But I didn't.

I felt nauseous, hoped it didn't show in my expression. I waited a few seconds and said, “Your brother wasn't a bad apple. But landing where he did, the rot set in. I don't think it was all his fault. Maybe he could have chosen to walk away from all the bad shit that finally killed him, I don't know. Sometimes we don't have a choice in these things. But I think all that he wanted was a life that was worth more than the farm could ever be. He wanted to be something else. And he got that dream. But at a price.”

“Aye,” said Robertson. “Maybe, when he was hanging from that tree, feeling the rope cut into his neck, he finally understood that.” He had an odd look to his face: a cold expression that dried up the moistness of his eyes. His features set themselves in a way that made me think of his brother's mugshot: that same pride and intensity.

I tried not to shiver.

“Sure,” I said, agreeing more out of habit than anything else. “But I want you to understand something. I don't care whether you lied to protect your
brother's name or whether there's something else going on here. You've landed us both in the shit. I get it, why you didn't go back to the police when I asked you to the first time. Still afraid they'd see through your lie. They'd question your motives. They wouldn't believe anything as simple as a fraternal bond. I can't think of anyone who would be comfortable with the police sniffing around their life looking for something that wasn't there. Because we're all guilty.” I let it hang too long. Added, lamely, “Of something.”

He looked at me for a moment and then said, “So tell me, McNee, why haven't you gone to the police? You could have gone at any time. Washed your hands of me and my brother and this whole mess.”

“What happened to the money?” I asked, avoiding his question.

“I kept it. Thought maybe he'd come back.” Whether that was delusion or a lie, I wasn't sure.

“But he never did. Were you planning on using it?” I asked.

“I hadn't thought about… Christ, what a question to ask.” He bit his bottom lip and lowered his eyes so that he didn't have to look at me.

I felt a chill in the air. No wind, no clear sign of the temperature dropping, but it was there nonetheless. And I knew, watching his face, that Robertson felt it, too.

“We don't have a choice, do we?” Robertson said. “We have to give them what they want.”

I kept my gaze fixed on the placid surface of the Tay and the splintered sunlight that reflected off the water. Jesus, what was I doing?

“If we give them the money, they'll leave us alone.” A hint of desperation in his voice.

I turned to face him. “Do you really believe that?”

“What else can we do?”

I struggled to find a response. Thinking about Rachel telling me how selfish I was.

Susan, in my office, telling me I was stubborn and foolish not to trust Lindsay.

Andy turning his back on me when I tried to talk to him about Bill.

Elaine's father, his voice on the other end of the phone, tight and controlled as he told me I was a murderer and he would see me in jail if it killed him too.

And rage.

Rage that had been waiting so long to find a release.

“We can still go to the police,” I said. “We don't have to do this.”

“If you believe that, then why haven't you gone to them?”

I'd avoided his question once. I wanted to tell him that I had gone to the police. But the truth was that my conversation with Lindsay had been a smokescreen; a way of making myself feel as though I had at least tried to do the right thing.

“We give these thugs their money,” I said. “We tell them to leave. And that's the end to it. They have nothing to fear from us.”

“Aye,” said Robertson. “After all, who are we to them?”

But I saw it in his face. He knew I was lying. Even if he had believed me, I knew the shame that gathered like rocks in my stomach would still have weighed me down as I realised that this could only end badly.

Driving back across the bridge, I was still thinking about Robertson's question: “If you believe that, then why haven't you gone to them?”

Lindsay had said I was pissing on someone else's territory, that I did this kind of thing because I was a selfish prick. Could he have a point? Part of me was beginning to question my own motives, as though I couldn't even trust myself any more.

Not that it mattered. Over the last few days, I'd regressed to where I'd been after the accident: retreating inwards. Seeking solace with grim reflections on the violence and suffering that I had encountered. The difference was that now I could
definitively deal with these feelings. I had someone to blame.

Real.

Tangible.

I could hurt them.

Again, I imagined the life fading from their eyes. Their blood on the ground.

Knowing that no one would regret their deaths. Not after everything they had done.

As I drove across the bridge, the heat of the late afternoon sun warmed my skin. I thought about the fire that had burned Robertson's house to the ground. The smoke that had choked up the sky.

When I was a copper, I arrested a fifteen year old boy who liked to set fire to things. He'd started out small, with insects, but quickly graduated onto abandoned buildings. I caught him trying to burn an abandoned mill on Guthrie Street. He had later responded well in the interview, but what I remembered most was when he said, “I love fire. Flames. They get me hard.”