Father Confessor (J McNee series) (18 page)

What you’d call a good man to have on your side.

Look at what Ernie had gathered, you had Keller approving so many projects and initiatives that benefited Wood and his various fronts, that you’d have to be missing your eyes and at least half your brain to not think Keller had been bought in some fashion. And was being kept. A good little pet.

When I pulled up outside Keller’s house – a Victorian structure set back from the main road behind a walled garden and large trees – I noticed another car parked there.

Looked familiar. It had only been a few hours since I’d been sitting in the back, passing crumpled papers to the man in the passenger seat and feeling like I was crossing a personal line, hoping it was for all the right reasons.

I walked through the iron gate set in the boundary wall. Simple lock, no need for a key. The stone steps that led to the front garden were uneven with age; original features, probably something he was proud of.

The front garden was mostly grass. There a few neatly trimmed bushes and flowers arranged in a deliberate fashion. It wasn’t a garden you took pride in looking after yourself. It was a garden you paid for.

I followed the path that bisected the lawn. Flat paving stones, evenly laid. The covered porch in front looked new. Probably called it a conservatory and paid three times the price. Double-glazed and so clean inside you had to wonder if anyone ever used it. Even the furniture facing out towards the garden didn’t look as though anyone had ever actually sat on it.

There were lights on inside.

This early in the morning? Confirmed my suspicions about the car up front. Made me wonder if I was too late.

I rang the doorbell. Waited.

I wasn’t surprised by the man who answered the door.

Simply said, “Let me talk to him.”

The thug – still awkward in the suit that Burns insisted he wore – stepped aside.

I think maybe he was smiling. But I couldn’t really be sure.

###

Keller was on the sofa, his head tilted back, hankie pressed against his nose to stem the gush of blood. He looked out of shape; the kind of man who doesn’t exercise, doesn’t realise his lifestyle’s catching up on him until he hits middle age and that spread just happens.

Burns sat in a comfortable armchair across from the politician. He’d helped himself to a glass of whisky. Or maybe he’d brought more of his own. Either way, he wasn’t drinking so much as just sloshing the liquid around in the heavy crystal glass.

I stood in the doorway for a while. Taking in the details.

Two ways in and out. Conventionally speaking, of course. In desperate times you could probably pull open those thick curtains and dive out the large French windows. Not that it would be my first choice. Diving through glass isn’t like in the films. You get cut bad. You get hurt.

The television and stereo were tucked away in a corner that didn’t dominate the room. Unusual in a modern home. The size of the screen was modest, too. I remembered Keller quoted in
The Dundee Herald
as talking about how multimedia ruined culture, so it figured he wouldn’t give much prominence to flatscreen HD.

The sofa he was sitting on was a wine red. Looked like you could just sink into it after a hard day taking backhanders from crooked coppers and other assorted arseholes. Maybe he would have been relaxing on it now if he didn’t have guests.

Then again, it was past three in the morning.

Burns said, “McNee, do come in. Peter’s already got guests. The more the merrier.”

Keller looked at me as best he could in his position. Trying to work out who I was. The same look I’d seen earlier that week from a junkie ex-cop. But Keller’s eyes had more clarity than those of ex-cop and current junkie Raymond Grant. The question in them was the same though:
Who is this man?

Burns said, to me, “Why don’t you tell our host why you’re here?”

I remained standing. Said simply, “Ernie Bright.”

Got an immediate reaction from Keller. As though someone had run a current through that wine-red sofa. He didn’t loosen the grip on that blood-stained hankie, but he came close.

I said, “What happened to your nose anyway? You have an accident?”

Burns looked at me. A warning in his expression. Some people, when they want you to play along, they have this begging look about them. Burns didn’t have such a look. If I didn’t do as he wanted, I’d be as much in the shite as Keller. Maybe more.

Burns said, “These things happen. Later at night. Maybe after a couple of glasses. He’ll be fine. Nothing important, eh?” This last question directed at Keller.

I said, “Give me five minutes.”

Burns looked at me again. Eyebrows raised. Unguarded surprise.

I hoped that might appeal to his vanity, the idea that someone could still surprise him. Especially someone in whom he believed he saw something of himself. “Five minutes?”

I said, “I know what you want. I can get it from him.”

Keller let loose a strangled whimper. Of course he was scared. He didn’t know who I was. He’d heard my name, but clearly didn’t recognise it. To him I was just another associate of David Burns. Another man who wanted information.

Another thug who would be prepared to hurt Keller to get what I wanted.

All of which worked to my advantage.

When Keller looked at me, he saw the bruises, probably figured I looked this way all the time. If he asked what happened, he would imagine me coming out with some line like, “You should see the other guy.”

Which was why he didn’t ask the question. Didn’t put on any false bravado.

He just made this pathetic little noise. A balloon with the final puff of air making its escape.

I said again to Burns, “Five minutes.”

Burns said, “I could do with a cigarette,” as he stood up.

The old man gave me the warning look again as he left the room. Don’t screw with me. Aye, I had a certain amount of trust banked with the man but if I went over the score, he’d deal with me like anyone else. Burns was enough of a sociopath to turn off his empathy at will.

When we were alone and the door was shut, I sat down in the seat that Burns had vacated and leaned forward so that I was looking directly at Peter Keller.

The politician finally removed the hankie from his nose in a tender, careful movement. The flow of blood had slowed to a trickle. He sat very still, as though afraid any sudden movement might set it off again.

As though any sudden movement might set me off.

I said, “We have five minutes. So you’re going to tell me about Ernie Bright and Kevin Wood. You’re going to give me everything I ask for. That way, we both might make it to the morning alive.”

1973.

Peter Keller graduated from St Andrews University. PhD in political science and a plan to “change this country for the better.” In his case, “for the better” meant actively campaigning for a Conservative government. Even decades after the Thatcher administration he’d be one of those who cried out the “more good than harm” line as everyone with half a brain remembered “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher” and other, worse slogans that came to epitomise the perceived idiocy and greed of the Tory administration. Keller got involved in local level politics after he moved to Dundee with his fiancée, the two of them sharing a small flat in the city’s West End. She helped support the move by finding a job teaching English at a local secondary. They were a young couple on the up.

Keller became involved in the local council later that year. Campaigned long and hard in his ward, promising more than he could ever hope to deliver. But he found that it wasn’t the voters who made his life better. Rather, it was those individuals for whom he could do small favours; nothing more than turning a blind eye here or making a subtle recommendation there. Okay, you needed a degree of amorality to do it, but Keller found that came naturally, especially when the price was right.

It was a good life.

Until the police came knocking on his door.

In 1975, Kevin Wood was a beat copper. A uniform, but with a future. Not because of his work – although everyone would say that he was a fine copper – but because he was kissing all the right arses, whispering all the right seductions in all the right ears.

But what no-one in the chain of command suspected was that he was also playing the streets. How else do you explain his showing up at the door armed with hard evidence of Keller’s complicity in some of the shadier development deals of the last few years?

“When I opened the door to him,” Keller said, “he was smiling. You’d think he was bloody Dixon of Dock Green popping in for tea and crumpets. What I remember was that he smiled. And it should have been warm and reassuring, but it made me want to turn and run. And not just because he was an ugly sod.”

Wood had documents that proved beyond a doubt the facts of Keller’s corruption: under-the-table deals, development opportunities he’d passed through against formal recommendations, motions he’d carried on behalf of others, records obtained for the wrong people. Minor league stuff, but enough to get Keller in trouble if it ever fell in front of the right people.

“People like me don’t go to prison,” Keller told me, over thirty years later, his voice shaking. His idea of prison probably came from popular rumours and tales of hell that circulate like a game of Chinese whispers until the thought of prison becomes, in its own way, worse than the reality. “We’re not made for it. Not brought up for it. We can’t survive.”

I wanted to reach out and smack him. The presumed arrogance. The idea that “people like him” don’t go to prison. Twenty-first century arseholes like Keller still cling desperately to Victorian ideas of class. For a supposedly classless and modern society, we still breed morons who presume privilege and right above others just because of the family and wealth they were born to.

I said, “So you went along with what he wanted because he had dirt on you?”

Keller said, “Yes.”

All it took was the threat of violence to get a man like this to do whatever you want. I’d read the interviews in the papers, seen him sometimes on the TV, and he always spoke with such presumed authority about the moral backbone of society. When Cameron proposed “the big society” after his Conservative/Liberal coalition took power, Keller had been omnipresent across the local media saying that, finally, we had a Government who would “give responsibility back to the people.” I’d not been convinced then. Liked what he stood for even less now.

Ernie used to tell me, “the only thing worse than a criminal of any kind is a hypocrite.”

He was right. Looking at the prime example sitting across from me, I wanted to grab Keller, tell him how he was a fucking disgrace. His spineless fear and lack of anything approaching dignity had cost so many lives. And that one in particular mattered to me. Directly or not, he was responsible for the death of a man I had respected.

And loved.

But I held in the anger. Squashed it. Sat there silently.

Not moving a muscle. Because, unlike Keller, I had principles.

Of morality.

Of professionalism.

And even if this case was purely personal, something that wasn’t going to wind up pleasing my bank manager or gaining me any kind of reference, I had to treat it like any other. Because hypocrisy would not be tolerated.

So I forced myself to sit back. I was going to let the facts deal with themselves. I was going to remain detached.

Like the good,
professional
investigator I’d always claimed to be.

The truth takes care of itself. In the job, you just have to accept that and deal with whatever ugliness emerges in the fallout.

I said, “You were scared? Wood’s threats got to you?”

“I thought about standing up to him,” Keller said.

“Before you think the worst of me. I did. Truly. The things he asked me to do, I realised most of them were fronts or covers for other activities. While I wasn’t doing anything worse than showing unexpected favouritism or perhaps occasionally pushing for one sponsor over another, that kind of thing, I realised I was contributing to some terrible things. Worse than anything I’d done before.”

I resisted the urge to make some kind of accusation.

“But these things never affected people you knew personally.”

He tried to hide it. But I saw the twitch. He had to have accused himself of all these things and worse over the years. Here, away from TV cameras and press junkets, he was a man who had made bad choices. Maybe he felt the relief of not having to hide what he’d done. I was giving him the chance to unload all his guilt on someone who wanted to listen.

A priest. Or a psychiatrist. Whichever, sometimes the investigator has to play both roles. Aye, pick your poison.

But his confession wouldn’t be about absolution. He knew that. I couldn’t forgive him. I don’t know that there’s anyone who could. But by unloading his guilty secrets, he might be able to find some peace when he was alone with nothing but his memories.

He said, “I did think about it. I had it all planned out what I was going to say. I was going to come home, call him and arrange a meeting. I had the location all planned out. I had a script. I’d spend most of my day locked in the office at HQ, ostensibly working on campaign funding but what I’d been doing was finding the words, the threats, I wanted to make. It would have been good, too.” He smiled; an oddly gentle smile, like a person might find flickering across their faces when they remember a particularly stupid incident from their childhood. One that, at the time, had been mortifying, but now seemed like the gentle folly of youth.

Because in the end, he did nothing. His grand gesture to escape from the mire of corruption never materialised.

The way Keller told it, he’d been getting antsy for months about some of the things he was doing for his new friend. All the same, he admitted to me that he’d forced himself to remained wilfully ignorant of what was the obvious truth. “But who wouldn’t? We were all in it, to one degree or another.”

He dropped the name of another politician, this one a little older, who’d gone on to the national stage, become something of a personality in the world of politics. Told me about some of the man’s dodgy deals, how nothing had ever really stuck to him. “The world of MPs’ expenses,” Keller said, and if he hadn’t been so nervous, he might even have laughed, “is that storm in the teacup you keep hearing about. I mean, it’s the equivalent of bloody Al Capone being taken down for tax evasion.”