Father Confessor (J McNee series) (17 page)

It wasn’t what you’d call a glowing encounter. But I figured I’d done well by not telling him to fuck off. Or even lamping him one.

It was only one of several encounters that evening, and to be honest most of them hadn’t gone as well as I or my mentor had hoped. Schmoozing, it seemed, wasn’t my style. So I’d pretty much pushed my meeting with Wood to the back of my mind. Just one more arsehole among an evening’s worth.

No-one worth bothering about.

###

“Dad always said to watch out for Wood. Never went into specifics, though. Just always said that he didn’t trust the man. Felt Wood was up to something. He could just never say what.”

The way Ernie operated was simple; he never advanced an idea without proof. While he believed in his gut, he knew that he always needed to back it up with proof. He had to know absolutely that he was right before he made a move. Which explained the filing system I’d found in his office; he’d been gathering evidence. I wished I’d had more time to go through them, but by now I knew the three men who’d arrived after me would have cleared – destroyed, more than likely – anything incriminating.

I said, “Your dad was building a case against Wood.”

“Working with D&C?”

I didn’t know for sure. “It’s possible. Or else he was getting ready to approach them.” I was reluctant to offer any definitive suggestions. Feeling confused, wondering how well I’d ever really known Ernie Bright.

People are complex. Sometimes those we think we know best are the ones we know least. We have trouble talking about motivation because no matter what we tell ourselves, we never knew anything about the way they thought, how they viewed the world.

I had believed Ernie was the perfect copper.

Then I had been convinced that he was a turncoat.

And now David Burns – a man I had vowed never to trust – was telling me that Ernie had merely been conflicted, caught between personal feelings and professional obligations.

Like I said:
complex
.

I stood up and walked to the window. Looked out at the rain. Something about rain on glass, the way it slides down, splintering your view of the world outside, has always been strangely comforting to me. “I told you about your dad, about seeing him at David Burns’s house.”

“I couldn’t talk to him about it. I wanted to. But then everything went to hell… and now…” She didn’t finish the sentence. She couldn’t.

Susan Bright was tough. Always had been. Had a reputation as a terror in the interview room. Hard men broke down when she turned her anger on them. She could walk into a room and people would think:
This is not a person I want to mess with
.

She was confident. In control.

Always.

Even over the last few days, despite a few wobbles, she had been holding it together. But her confidence couldn’t last forever under the strain of the last few months. The last few days in particular. Sooner or later something would have to give.

Grief affects people in different ways. After Elaine’s death the force asked me to see a psychologist. I refused, until they made me go following the incident with Lindsay. I lasted only a few sessions before walking out. But some moments stuck with me.

He had talked to me about grieving. How some people lash out. Some people internalise. And some people do both.

When it comes out – and, he told me, it always does – sometimes the people closest to you are the most surprised by the form it takes. You can’t predict how anyone is going to grieve. Can’t put a timescale on it. You can only watch and do your best to accommodate the person, try and help them move through what they need to do to get past the trauma.

I had no idea what to expect from Susan. She was always in control. What happened when she lost that?

I said, “Let’s say he found enough that he was taking his evidence forward. Let’s say that he was using his connection with Burns to try and gain more evidence. Burns keeps saying that he and Ernie were friends, that Ernie was conflicted. What if that wasn’t true? What if your dad was just doing what any good investigator would do, using contacts to get at the truth?”

Susan nodded.

Not sure if she was buying.

Not sure if I was buying it.

But it was what we had to go on. And it made me feel easier about the past few years. Made me feel as though I wasn’t so wrong about everything I had ever believed.

###

Two months after Susan admitted to killing the psychopath Wickes in self-defence, I popped into the Phoenix for a quick pint after the office was closed up. Figured I deserved it. Something to wind down after a long day crunching data and getting nowhere fast on an inheritance gig that looked like a dead end.

Ernie was there. At the far end of the bar.

The end-of-work crowd had finished their pints, and the bar was in the lull that comes just before the early evening rush. It was a time of evening I loved. Quiet enough that you could drink in peace, alone with your thoughts, if you wanted to.

The lad with long hair pulled my pint with some chat about how he enjoyed this time of night, before it got too mental. I paid up and then slid down the bar.

Ernie said, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“Because of Susan? Or because of what I know?”

He shook his head. “You’re a smart lad. Always have been. But this time you’re seeing things that aren’t there.”

He stared hard at his pint. “Not looking hard enough.”

“So tell me,” I said, “what it is I’m not seeing.”

He tried to ignore me.

At the other end of the bar, the young lad looked at us as he cleaned glasses. Sensing the tension. Maybe trying to figure if we were going to make trouble. The Phoenix wasn’t the kind of pub you found trouble. Any hint, the staff were quick on the alert.

I said, “You were at his house. You were drinking his wine. A guest, Ernie. Like the two of you were old friends. And, you know, I get it that you were his liaison in the bad old days when the brass thought they could make nice with the major players. Maybe during that time some lines got blurred, but you have to know –”

“I don’t have to know anything, McNee. And neither do you. For God’s sake, just leave me alone. You’re a good man, and I used to have hopes for where you’d be going. But now… now, all I want is that you take care of my daughter. Not just because she sees something in you, but because I know this investigation into her conduct has something to do with you. More than either of you are saying.”

I couldn’t hit back at that.

Susan had lied to cover for me.

And every day, that was the first thing to hit me when I woke up. This strange feeling that I was a coward for hiding behind Susan’s lies. But if I’d stepped forward, I suspect things would have been worse.

Her lie wasn’t to protect me. It was to protect an innocent girl. We’d agreed that I should be the one to take the fall. And then Susan made her “confession”. Knocked me off guard.

We still hadn’t talked about it. Sex had become something that stopped us from thinking about consequences. It had always been between us, and now it was driving us further apart than we’d been before.

I said, “She knows about you and Burns.”

“You told her?”

“She worked it out.”

He nodded. Smiling? His head was half-turned away so he didn’t have to look at me and so that I couldn’t look at him. “Smart lassie, my girl. Never could hide much from her. Takes after her mother.”

Did his wife know?

I said, “You know you can’t be friends with a man like that. Even if you like him, Ernie, it’s a professional –”

“Don’t talk to me about professional, McNee,” he said, keeping his voice calm. Knowing that people had noticed us. “Don’t say a bloody word about it. Because if anyone here’s a screw-up, it’s you. Assaulting a senior officer like that? Christ sakes, he was trying to help you too. And we all had sympathy for you then, but look at what you became. Look at the chaos that always follows in your wake.” He shook his head.

I thought about saying something else.

Realised I’d said too much.

Slipped off the barstool and walked away. Leaving my pint untouched.

A moment of self-control. But I never felt much pride about it.

###

Had Ernie Bright been trying to tell me something? Sounding conflicted because he couldn’t tell me that the real reason he was getting close to Burns was so that he could get more information on Kevin Wood?

He had said it outright: I wasn’t looking at things the right way. That there were aspects I couldn’t see to the situation.

Months later, I had a kind of clarity. But it was too late to do anything about it.

Ernie was dead. And his own colleagues suspected – whether they voiced it or not – that he’d been dirty. They were the same fears I’d been harbouring for months. For the same reasons: they didn’t have access to all the facts.

Sure, I could go forward, same way Ernie had been planning to. But given my reception at the hospital the previous evening, I doubted whether I could really convince anyone of anything. Ernie had been my cheerleader on the force following my exit from the Job, and now he was gone. Even Lindsay, who might have stood up for me in this case, was at death’s door himself.

Unlike Ernie, I didn’t have any concrete evidence and anything I had hoped to find would be long gone by now. It would be my word against those of fellow boys in blue.

Tell me who you’d believe.

And I couldn’t help but think about Ernie accusing me in a moment of uncharacteristic anger of all the shite that follows in my wake.

He’d been right, of course.

It was my own form of self-delusion, this idea that I was doing the right thing when in fact what I did more often than not was fuck everything up. Maybe not a conscious decision, but unconsciously you’d think I could see the consequences of my own actions.

I was thinking about this when Susan said, “Wood knew that my father was getting close to him. Dad didn’t think anyone would take his side if he went public with what he knew. So who’s going to believe us?”

I didn’t know. I walked over to her, put my arms around her. She pressed against me, raised her head so that her lips were at my ear. “I want him dead,” she said.

I held her tighter.

They were just words. Uttered in a moment of despair.

Just words.

We couldn’t just accuse Wood of corruption. It would become a game of his word against ours. And he would win. He hadn’t played the game so long to suddenly get sloppy. We couldn’t just rush in, metaphorical guns blazing.

In the back of my mind, I rolled Susan’s words over and over.

I want him dead.

It was the kind of thing someone says without thinking. A moment of anger that would pass and give way to rationality.

This was Susan, after all.

How many times had she pulled me back from the brink?

What we needed was evidence. Or a reliable witness. The sheets of paper I had grabbed from Ernie’s place had one key name mentioned over and over again. A name I was convinced would be the weak link in Wood’s chain.

Susan said she would stay out of it. Any action she took in the matter could affect the outcome of her hearing. She was already in enough trouble.

I said, “I’m sorry I thought that Ernie was– ”

She shook her head, kissed me on the lips. It was fleeting and felt cold, oddly distant. When she pulled back, I had to suppress a shiver. This sensation, the one my gran used to describe as “someone dancing on my grave”.

She said, “It’s okay. He was my dad, but he was only human. And one thing you learn fast in the police is that anyone’s capable of anything.” She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ll be fine. I just can’t take any stupid risks.”

I nodded.

She said, “And neither can you.”

“I’m just going to talk to him,” I said. “Persuade him to do the right thing.”

As I walked out the flat, I found myself shivering again. Something was gnawing at the back of my skull; a half-formed idea or suspicion. A notion that something was very wrong, and that I was an idiot if I couldn’t work out what it was.

###

My head was becoming increasingly fuzzy. The shakes were coming on: my left leg seizing up. My right hand was numb. I had to keep stretching my fingers out in order to get any feeling back.

What the hell was I thinking? These last few days I’d been pushing the limits. Which would have been fine if I was an action hero in a Hollywood movie. But in real life when you get battered about, it tends to have consequences.

And not all of them are immediately obvious.

I drove carefully, sitting forward, forcing my eyes open. I could feel the car slipping along the road, this terrible sensation that I was about to lose control. One moment of distraction, I’d hit something or just plough onto the pavement. Blame it on the lack of sleep. And maybe too many pills. Self-medication is a tricky business. A friend of mine, his brother had started medicating with over-the-counter painkillers, wound up just as fucked as any dope addict.

Maybe worse.

I figured I was on the right side. That this was an unusual situation. All the same, part of me was panicking, struggling to stay sharp.

I forced myself to keep awake more through sheer willpower than anything else. Focussing on the goal, the end game. Knowing that once I was finished, I could let myself go. But I couldn’t stop before I was finished. I knew that much.

The rain was heavy again. The windscreen was streaked. The lights outside became trails of orange and white that fritzed and sparked.

I kept my mind focussed.

On the road.

On the goal.

On the man I needed to talk to.

The man who would give me what I needed.

My eyes flicked between the road and the dashboard.

The digital clock read-out:

03:37

03:38

03:39

###

Peter Keller.

Tory candidate, Dundee East. An influential man.

Sure, the Tories rarely got a look-in when it came to Dundee – we’re a city of workers, traditionally Labour voters, even during the 2010 elections when people had lost faith in the “worker’s party” that had so long ago discarded its own roots and ideals – but Keller was a man of wealth and property who still had a strong voice in local Government. He could easily bend the ear of the right people if there was something he really wanted.