Father Confessor (J McNee series) (9 page)

I kept mine locked away. For reasons of my own.

Susan said, “You ever think about your parents?”

I studied the photographs intensely. “How’s your mother doing?”

She smiled, somewhat sadly, as though at a distant disappointment. “Well as can be expected. Surrounded by sisters and nieces.”

“You’re not with them?”

“I stayed a while. Needed to get away.”

“Do you want me to – ?”

She said, “Stay,” and turned her hand so she could grip mine. We stayed like that a long time.

She told me about each photograph. Every memory it evoked. She spoke slowly, as much for herself as for me. Sometimes she’d get this smile playing about her lips, but it would fall away fast as though in deference to the present.

Only later would I realise that she didn’t cry.

###

The night was drawing in. I had ordered Chinese from the
Mandarin Garden
on South Tay Street. Gave me an excuse to take a drive and collect.

I needed to sort my head. Figure where I was. The last two days beginning to blur.

I left the radio off.

Drove in silence.

Like there was something more I could have done.

But even if I got to the truth, maybe Lindsay had a point when he said what I really needed to do was be there for Susan.

Our relationship was still tentative; each of us dancing around the other, as though worried about certain truths we’d hidden for years.

The first time we’d slept together was shortly after Elaine’s death. Something we both regarded as a mistake.

The counsellor I’d gone to see after the accident might have said that I was looking for some form of comfort, that our reaction had been almost healthy. Or maybe I was putting words into his mouth as an excuse for my behaviour.

It had been years now, since then. Susan and I had drifted apart, and then come back together; victims of circumstance.

Circumstance.

Coincidence.

It had been events that pulled us together. Terrible events. Grief always seemed to bring us closer.

After Elaine’s death, we had slept together. More out of need for comfort than anything; an expression of something we couldn’t put into words.

But that had, in the end, only lasted for a moment before we found ourselves pushed further apart than we had ever been. We stopped talking. Started avoiding each other. As though the idea of what we had was something to hide from, to be ashamed of. Until a suicide that forced us to work together.

And then the missing girl.

Mary Furst. Fourteen years old. Taken by her birth mother in a misguided attempt to save her from a psychopath. I’d been looking into the girl’s disappearance as a favour for a friend. Susan had been part of the police investigation. Our paths crossed. Both of us witnessed a tragic end to events, as a young girl did something she would regret forever.

A moment of rage.

A bad choice.

One made in a moment of grief and horror.

I had been ready to lie on behalf of the girl. Until Susan beat me to it.

I still didn’t know why.

That was the catalyst, bringing us together again in a way that seemed inevitable; a natural act neither of us could deny. There was no point I could say where we entered a relationship. It just happened. Neither of us realising.

A shared trauma?

Or something else?

But sometimes the physical aspect of our relationship felt more like a barrier than anything else. As though somehow it pushed us further apart than we had ever been. And neither of us knew how to get past that. Or else we were scared to.

###

Back at the flat, we ate in silence, the TV providing background noise.

Soaps. Local news. Didn’t matter. I don’t think either of us were really paying attention, welcoming the excuse to become lost in our own thoughts.

At some point, after we’d cleared away the leftovers, Susan kissed me. When I pulled away, she pushed in.

Putting her fingers through my belt loops and pulling me against her. I gave in. We both welcomed the moment.

Lost ourselves in it.

Together.

And yet apart.

###

Susan slept on her side, facing the window. She had most of the sheets. Bunched them up around her, gripping tight as though afraid someone would steal them away. I didn’t mind, I tended to get too warm at night. I liked the coolness of sleeping above sheets.

Not that I slept easily.

It had to come at some point, but most nights were spent staring at the ceiling, trying to force myself to relax.

I turned my head and looked at the bedside clock.

LED numbers burned. 2:30am

Another light exploded in the dark. A buzzing noise. The thump of a vibrating phone. I reached out, grabbed the offending device.

Not mine.

Susan’s.

Display said:
Lindsay (Home)

I nudged her. “For you.”

She reached up, slow and sluggish. Answered the phone with a mumbled hello, not quite able to form the words.

But then she was sitting up, feet over the edge of the bed, sheet falling away from her, revealing the curve of her back facing me. Her hair fell loose down the nape of her neck.

“Aye? … What? Slow down… Jesus, Annie, what do…? Okay, okay… I’ll be there.”

She hung up. Put the phone down next to her. Put her head in both hands, let out a long, slow, sigh.

I stayed where I was. Wanting to reach out. But doing nothing.

“What’s wrong?”

“DI Lindsay… George…” She stood up, moved to where her clothes had been thrown onto a chair by the window. She started to dress, slowly. “He’s been attacked. I don’t know the details… he’s in the hospital. That was his wife. She says… a coma, Steed. She says he’s in a bloody coma.”

DI George Lindsay.

Rumour was they used to call him “Curious” George due to his simian features. Fair enough. It was kinder than what the coppers who came up through my generation called him.

Some days you can’t remember why you started a spat with someone. It’s just a fact of life. Me and Lindsay had been at each other’s throats for years. More or less since I started on the job. Call it a clash of personalities. Some people even implied we were similar.

Both of us called bollocks on that.

I remember when they told me that he was the lead officer in the investigation into what happened to Elaine. That he was the one charged with finding the bastard who’d knocked us off the road. I felt as if I’d been betrayed in some way. And Lindsay did nothing to try and dissuade me of that belief.

I thought that he hated me. A true loathing. And why wouldn’t I? A lot of shite had gone down between us. Our professional relationship was best described as blunt. Personally, we were antagonistic, if you wanted to downplay it.

I didn’t think Lindsay was the right man for the job. I honestly believed he’d see the assignment as one more chance to fuck me over. It was a melodramatic reaction, perhaps. I can’t claim that I was thinking or acting rationally back then.

People talk about how grief can be like a temporary insanity. Which was how I wound up breaking Lindsay’s nose. Ostensibly, I had other reasons for striking him, but mostly I did it because I was convinced he’d done nothing but sit on his arse and let the trail go cold, leaving me with no clue as to who had run the car off the road, killed my fiancée and left my life shattered.

I had convinced myself that Lindsay had allowed Elaine’s killer to disappear out of spite, some held-over grudge that I couldn’t pinpoint but still knew existed between us. Nothing dissuaded me of that idea for a long time.

But in the last few years, as much as I tried not to notice, I’d seen another side to the DI. Perhaps it was Susan’s influence. After all, following her transfer to CID, she’d wound up working closely with the man. She tried to repair our relationship, tell me the truth as she saw it; that George Lindsay was a dogged, determined professional who, as it happened, just didn’t have time for the niceties of everyday life. According to Susan, Lindsay took his professional life absolutely seriously. Prided himself on results. And even if he had personal feelings, he didn’t let them interfere with a case. An assignment. A duty.

Maybe she was right. Didn’t mean I liked him any more, though.

In his younger days, Lindsay had been in the army.

I don’t know much about it, but it was the talk around the force. Rumours persisted he’d been a candidate for the Special Forces, but had walked away for reasons no-one seemed too sure about. Difficult to tell by looking at him whether these rumours were true. He seemed too small and scrawny to have had SAS potential. But then you saw him work on an interrogation and you realised how he was hiding something underneath that frame. A power and anger you didn’t expect.

I’d once described him as simian. Meaning it as an insult. The way he carried himself and that high forehead made him look like the missing link resurrected.

I forgot to remember that a monkey can rip your arm off if the mood takes him.

It was strange to think of him in hospital. Lying there. Still. Silent. Broken. I’d become used to the idea of Lindsay being around. Not that I’d started to consider him a friend. But he’d become a familiar obstacle. An expected opponent.

A sparring partner.

Which might explain why my stomach was churning as Susan and I walked through the main doors at Ninewells.

This time of the morning, the reception area was quiet. Walking past the shuttered clothes stores and the darkened WHSmith, I felt as though I was trespassing. Hospitals are odd enough places during the day, but at night there is a strange expectancy in the air, as though everyone has gone home to avoid whatever stalks the corridors in the dark.

The woman on the front desk was pale, a walking cliché of the night shift. Slightly overweight, with the years showing on her face, and grey hair that might have been curly if she let it grow out. She looked at us with undisguised disdain, and asked why we were here.

The only visitors at this time of night came with the worst news.

Who could blame this woman for being a cynic?

Susan asked after George Lindsay, and the woman’s face softened suddenly. As though she saw something in Susan that told her we weren’t ghouls from the clean-up crew.

It was just as well the woman didn’t give me a second glance.

I don’t know what she would have seen.

We turned off, grabbed a lift. Inside, the space felt too large. Designed to move patient beds around with ease.

Susan grabbed my hand. And squeezed.

Yet kept her distance.

Let go when the doors slid open.

We walked down the corridor. A nurse stopped us.

Susan said, “I work with George Lindsay.”

The nurse – mid-thirties, a tough face and tired eyes – said, “You and a hundred other bloody police.” She jerked her head down the corridor, “We’ve got a special room set aside. Incident room.” Those last two words just the right side of sarcasm.

Walking down the hall, I heard the voices low and angry.

Didn’t recognise anyone right off.

How long since I’d socialised with the boys and girls in blue?

Most of them would cross the street rather than say hello. Some sense of betrayal over my departure. Like I’d broken more than just one man’s nose.

In the first few months going private, maybe I’d burned more bridges than I thought. But I’d been full of anger, past caring about such things. Not seeing the road ahead.

Maybe this evening would salve some bruises. Heal some rifts.

Or maybe not.

I was barely in the room when a bullish man whose name I couldn’t recall looked at me, and said to Susan, “Not your boyfriend.”

“I just want to know –”

Sooty was there in the room. Still the same intimidating presence I remembered, his hair shaved down to the bone. He stepped forward, gently nudging the bull to one side, and said, “He’s still breathing, McNee. Your wish didn’t come true.”

Sooty and I used to drink together on Friday nights. We hadn’t talked since I left. Except that one time in the interrogation room. My fault more than his, of course. I take responsibility for my own behaviour, the way I treated people.

Like I said, I hadn’t smelled the burning wood of those bridges at the time. Or hadn’t given a shite if I did. And there was nothing I could do to change any of that.

I said, “I’m not here to cause trouble. Lindsay and I had been working on –”

Sooty always had a temper, a violence that raged just beneath his skin. This evening, he couldn’t hold it back. He roared as he stepped towards me.

We embraced violently as he rushed me out into the corridor.

I tried to push him away.

My feet went off the ground.

I cracked back against a wall, my spine twisting.

Muscles spasmed.

I beat down on the back of his head. Fists bouncing off the flesh of his neck.

Heavy fists pounded my sides. Aiming for the kidneys.

For whatever they could slam.

The world broke into areas of dark and light.

Shapes lost cohesion.

There was a rush of sound, like a violent sea trapped in a shell, echoed in my skull.

I was aware of other people around us. Some of them were yelling. I couldn’t make out the words.

The pounding stopped. It was sudden and unexpected.

I tried to remain on my feet. Wound up slipping down the wall, my legs folding, concertina style.

I took deep breaths.

Sooty was crouched next to me. Holding up fingers.

“How many?”

I turned my head away.

He said. “Maybe its best if you go outside for a smoke, huh?”

I said, “We should grab a pint sometime. For old time’s sakes.”

He said nothing. Just stood up.

I saw Susan standing a few feet away. Her eyes met mine and I tried to figure her expression, but she turned away too fast, her arms folded.

Hurt worse than ten-pound punches to the kidneys.

###

The thing with giving up smoking is that sometimes without it, you’re left at a dead end. It’s a great time killer.