Father Confessor (J McNee series) (8 page)

For some things, however, I’ve come to realise, there can be no forgiveness. Not from an outside party. The only person who can forgive you, the only person you should confess to is yourself.

All the bad people in this world.

Grant was one of those bad people. Or he had become one.

Maybe he even realised that back then.

His public fall from grace, when you looked at the facts, was instigated through a series of mistakes that became more and more blatant.

Like he wanted to be caught.

Like he wanted to be stopped.

Guilt is a strange thing. An emotion we don’t always recognise straight away.

He told me about his fall from grace.

I listened.

How his life crumbled.

I listened.

He told me how he was not alone, but he was one of the officers targeted because his behaviour was noticed. “Policing changed. Aye, maybe for the better. And you either went with it or you got your bollocks ripped off by the new Disciplines and Complaints bastards.”

Did he think he could continue to get away with his behaviour?

“I don’t know, son. I don’t fucking know. Ken, now we’d say it was a mental problem, that I just couldn’t stop the same old fucking behaviour. But I dunno. I dunno.”

Like I said, some folks thought he wanted to be caught.

Guilt.

Fucks us all up in ways we don’t expect.

I asked him who else was involved. Anyone who was never caught.

“Y’mean Ernie?”

“Tell me about him.”

Grant, his body hunched, his voice stammering, his mind finding it hard to focus for so long, shook his head. “You don’t want to know. I saw what happened earlier when – ”

“Tell me.”

“He moved with the times.”

“And before the times moved?”

“There was a period where we wound up on the same squad, attached to Serious and Organised.”

“Targeting David Burns.”

“Know how we used to deal with the big boys? We let them break the law within limits. Because here’s the truth that this brave, new, politically correct world can’t handle: we’re better off knowing who the criminals are and what they’re doing than letting them slip underground and off the radar. Human nature is fucked, son. Bad people will do bad things. We can’t stop it.”

I said, “But you can control it.”

“Aye,” he said. “That’s what we tried to do. On fucking orders, too.”

I thought about what Ernie had told me about the bad old days when the brass tried to strike deals with men like Burns. How the line had started to blur between copper and criminal, and when the whole operation fell apart, how everything turned to chaos.

I remembered him telling me how hard it had been to approach Burns as an equal, how it had been equally hard to overturn a carefully nurtured relationship.

Aye, maybe too hard?

Grant wasn’t telling me anything about Ernie.

Like he was afraid it would somehow hurt me.

As he talked, he periodically pawed at his face with the backs of his hands. His eyes were roadmap-red, and he was having difficulty breathing. Sounding like an asthmatic. In the stifling atmosphere of his flat, I had to wonder about his health, how he kept on going like he did.

I said, “Tell me about the money. Tell me about why Ernie was diverting money from his accounts to you.”

He lowered his head. Body trembling. I expected him to start rocking back and forward. Maybe throw in some drool for effect.

But the trembling was as far as he got before, “Isn’t this cosy?”

Lindsay.

Later than expected. I’d been thinking maybe he’d decided to walk away. Either thinking I was full of bluster or thinking I wouldn’t get anywhere coming back to see Grant.

But I didn’t register my surprise. I didn’t move except to turn my head, see him in the door.

He stood casual. Screaming smug in his posture and expression. Those lips twisted. He couldn’t smile properly, not something that came naturally to him, but he did a fair enough smirk when he wanted to.

I said, “Just having a wee chat.”

“Right,” said Lindsay. He came in, stood beside me. Calm and smiling, his gaze focussed on Grant. “Thing is about my eejit of a friend here,” talking about me, “he forgets the arrangement we made this morning. You know we just want to get to the bottom of what happened to your old partner, aye?”

Grant was still, now. Transfixed by the DI. A mongoose confronted with a snake.

Lindsay had something under his arm. He threw it on the coffee table.

An envelope.

“Raymond,” he said, “I want you to look at these. Tell me if you recognise anyone.”

He’d clearly had his own ideas after our chat with Raymond earlier. I wondered where he’d been, what was in the envelope.

Grant didn’t move. Refused to look at what was in front of him.

“Raymond,” Lindsay said, in soothingly soft tones, as though talking to a nervous child, “If you don’t look at these photographs in the next thirty seconds, I’ll rip your fucking arms off and beat you to death with them.”

Raymond got the hint.

Emptied out the glossies. Looked at them carefully.

Laid out three so that we could see them.

“They were the ones came to see me.”

Lindsay gathered up the images. “I were you, Raymond, I’d maybe think about moving.”

He touched my shoulder.

I took the hint. Had seen the photographs and realised their significance. Realised Grant had given us all he could.

The poor, washed-up old bastard.

Down the road, we walked into a public park. Sat on a bench that was shaded by a pathetic old tree whose branches were bare, skeletal.

The wind came in from the Tay.

Cold.

Made me shiver.

I spoke first. “They’re coppers.”

Lindsay said, “You recognise any of them?”

“Seen at least one of them around FHQ,” I said. “Not enough to speak to. They’re all young. Joined after I left, maybe.”

“This whole case is a fucking disaster. I had a feeling about it since this morning. When there’s one rotten apple, it usually spreads through the barrel.”

“We don’t know –”

“We know that someone’s rotten, McNee. I know you think me and Ernie didn’t get on well, that I’d be fucking happy to see the pain-in-the-arse get posthumously sent down for shite he might have tried to hide in real life. But the fact is I really don’t want him to be dirty.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s face it, though: some fucker’s bent. Someone set him up at the very least, and to do that they need connections on the force.”

I was feeling tired. Limbs heavy. Just wanted to go home, hide under the sheets and forget everything.

But it was too late. I couldn’t back out. For my own sanity as much as anything.

“I’m not a paranoid prick like you,” Lindsay said. “I don’t see conspiracies around every corner. But this morning, we both knew that Grant was scared of someone, that we weren’t the first bastards to approach him about Ernie. Maybe he’s been scared for a long time. Whatever story he had ready for us about how Ernie gave him that money, I think it was bollocks. I think someone’s been setting this up for a long time and they knew we’d follow the trail, make the connection between Ernie the veteran bastard detective found with all that cocaine and his doped-up junkie tosspot ex-colleague.”

I was thinking,
Burns
.

Lindsay told me what he’d figured, “You were going back to talk to him. Fine, gave me a chance to do some thinking. One of my instructors at the college works for Discipline and Complaints. Owes me a favour or two.”

“That’s where you got the pictures?”

“I won’t tell you what the bloody price was.”

“I won’t ask.”

“Thing is, McNee, this is going to get big. If Ernie was mixed up with those bastards, this is serious shite. There’s a major investigation in the works. One of the reasons the old man gave me access to those files. If we can bring one of these boys in, maybe D&C can squeeze them. Make a deal.” He made a face, then, and spat on the ground. “The squirmy cunts they are.”

###

Grant had picked out three faces from the array. Constables. None of them veterans. Which was why they stood out. I’d been expecting long-serving officers, but what I got were fresh faces.

They were nothing more than foot-soldiers. Errand boys.

But they were a start.

The first looked like he could barely shave; a roundfaced lad named Cal Anderson. Anderson had already been marked as a potential trouble-maker. Despite that smooth skin and baby-round face, he had been cited several times for excessive force and for the sloppy, inconsistent quality of his arrest sheets.

The second was the spit of the Pillsbury Dough-Boy. Robin Reed didn’t have as thick as a jacket as Anderson, but he was being looked at for social connections. He’d grown up in one of the city’s more colourful areas, and most of his schoolyard contemporaries had gone on to work for the likes of David Burns. Reed had kept his nose clean, but there were questions being raised concerning his arrest rate and the number of convictions that had fallen through in his name.

Contestant number three was the senior of the group. At forty-one, Daniel Hayes was married, with two children. A career copper. With a career that had gone nowhere.

Read:

Malcontent.

Cynic.

Whatever.

Somewhere along the line, his record had gone sour. But it was his bank account and lifestyle that became of interest to Discipline and Complaints. Hayes was living the life of a man whose career was going places, not stagnating among the rank and file.

All three men were under covert investigation. Along with twelve other officers Lindsay’s contact had given him. But these were the three that Raymond Grant picked out.

Our first lead. The loose threads we could tug on.

We
.

Lindsay was troubled by that word, too. I could see it in his face. He’d barely tolerated working with me when I was on the force. Now that I was an outsider, the idea went against every instinct he had.

And yet here we were.

Like he said, he’d rather have me where he could keep an eye on me. And in a way I thought he might be right in that regard.

###

“You’re not worried about your reputation?”

“Like any prick in the station house liked me to begin with?”

“Some people respect you.”

Lindsay nodded, but I’m not sure he really agreed. It was just a way to get me to shut up. “And what I’m doing is –”

“Investigating your own.”

“Christsakes, what, you think the thin blue line really matters? That all boys in blue stick together no matter what? Discipline and Complaints are a necessary evil. Most bastards just like to moan about them because they’re a pain in the arse. Not because they break the bloody brotherhood.”

Did he sound convinced of his own argument?

I couldn’t be sure.

Hard to think of Lindsay as a human being sometimes. I had my set ideas about him. Who he was. What he represented.

I always approached my work thinking that the truth was never what my clients expected, that there was always more to people than what one person could see.

Never really applied that yardstick to myself.

I saw Lindsay as an obstacle. An enemy. A one-note, sweary bastard. A throwback to the Neanderthal copper from the bad old days.

I knew he was a father. Didn’t matter to me, didn’t register, because somehow the kid didn’t feel real. As though in my heart I believed Lindsay had invented a family just to fit in with the rest of the human race. Yet I was watching him as he talked about investigating fellow coppers, and despite his constant mantra, that it was
all part of the job
, I could sense the conflict that manifested in the involuntary muscle twitches around his eyes and the way his breath caught momentarily at odd moments.

And what I had begun to realise was this: He’d gone out of his way to help me. Where I might have thought all he would want to do was hinder.

I said, “So tell me what we do.”

“You,” he said, “you bloody well go home to that girlfriend of yours. Be a man about it, too, show her you’re not a complete prick.”

I could hear something of the father in his voice, suddenly, the way he might speak to his young son. Beneath the bluster, all he wanted was for people to see the world as he did, because if we did, maybe we’d do the right thing.

I realised he cared for Susan. Not in a romantic way. But I knew they’d worked together on more than a few investigations. Susan had always tried to convince me Lindsay wasn’t the bad guy I took him for.

Maybe he really had been the good guy all along. Maybe I’d been looking for my heroes in all the wrong places. Or maybe I was just too tired to think straight.

I stood up.

He said, “Grant won’t talk to anyone about what you did. He’s too much of a cowardy cock.”

I didn’t say a word.

After all this time,
thank-you
would ring hollow between us.

When I got back to the flat, Susan was looking through old photograph albums. Had them spread out on the living room table. Leaning forward, looking at grainy images from the past.

I sat beside her. She didn’t look up.

She pointed to one image. A young-looking Ernie – he’d been a handsome chap back then, with dark, wavy hair and a clean-shaven, angular face that accentuated those sharp eyes his daughter had inherited – with his wife and daughter, sitting on a wall, rolling countryside stretching out behind them. Susan was somewhere around five years old, with an insane bowl haircut and the mischievous look of a child who was going to break all the rules she could get away with.

She said, “That’s how I think of him. Even when he got old, when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, I’d always be surprised for a moment when he didn’t look how I expected.”

I reached over and touched her hand.

She used her free hand to turn the page.

More images. Family holidays. Smiles. That grainy quality of the cheap, 1970’s camera.

Memories.

Everyone had them.