Father Confessor (J McNee series) (2 page)

I waited. Watched. Stewed.

When DS Ewan “Sooty” Soutar finally entered the room, I figured they’d either got bored or they’d seen something they thought to be a crack in my armour. Sooty was a big guy. Shaven head. Goatee beard. Used to work as a bouncer before he joined the force. Looked like a rent-a-thug, but was smarter than most people gave him credit for. Used his appearance to his advantage.

He couldn’t play that game with me, of course.

He sat at the other side of the table, folded his arms and stayed silent.

I said, “You going to ask any questions?”

He shrugged.

I said, “DCI Bright’s watching us.”

He shrugged again.

“He shouldn’t be watching. He can’t be involved in this case. Conflict of interest.”

Sooty shook his head and stood up.

I looked at the cameras.

The lights were off.

Maybe the idea was to intimidate me. There wasn’t any kind of beating coming my way. I’d worked with these guys for years, and that wasn’t their style.

But Sooty had been put in the room to remind me that they could do what they wanted to me. If the fancy took them.

Because I knew as well as anyone that all the regulations in the world wouldn’t stop some coppers doing whatever the hell it took to get the results they wanted. It wasn’t about good cops and bad cops. It wasn’t about right or wrong. It was about getting the job done. And no well-intentioned bureaucratic procedure was ever going to change that.

Sooty left, and Ernie slipped in the door.

We’d spoken briefly earlier that evening. He’d been the one Susan had confessed to.

Her own father.

Read into that what you will.

Now Ernie was looking as though he’d aged years in just a few hours. The lines on his face seemed somehow to have ingrained themselves deeper into his skin, and there was a stoop to his posture that I didn’t recognise. He was carrying a weight around his neck.

He looked at me, his eyes hard and accusatory.

I said, “They’re off?” and jerked my head at the cameras.

“We’re alone. Say what you like.”

I had a lot to say. Settled on, “You have to believe her. She’s your daughter.”

“And she’s always been sweet on you, McNee, in spite of everything.”

I took a deep breath before jabbing back: “Afraid she won’t forgive you for your faults?”

He smiled, looked ready to break down with laughter. But he composed himself and pulled up a chair at the other side of the table.

“You want to talk about that?”

“You don’t know anything, McNee. You’re blinded by your own anger. Always been your problem. You get so wound up, you stop looking at the bigger picture.”

“There is no bigger picture,” I said.

“Have you told her?”

“She knows.”

He shrunk away from that. “She hasn’t said anything?”

“What do you expect her to say?”

“I brought her up to be honest. To be straightforward.”

“Even with you?”

“Especially with me.”

We were both silent for a moment. He was the one who broke it. Repeating himself. “You don’t know anything, McNee.”

“Then tell me.”

He shook his head. “Just leave it alone. Give me some time.”

“For what?”

“Just leave it alone, McNee.”

“What about your daughter?”

He was at the door, and he stopped, his hand stretched out, like someone had just hit the pause button on a remote control.

When he turned back to me, I could see he was fighting to keep calm. There was a slight tremor around his arms, his muscles tensed up. It wasn’t a conscious thing. He was trying to force back the reaction. But it was tough.

I wondered if he wanted to take a swing at me.

Maybe it would make him feel better about things.

It had worked for me. The day I lashed out at a superior officer. For a moment – and it had only been a moment – I’d felt as though I’d reached a breakthrough with my own worries, as though that one simple act had somehow set me free.

I waited for Ernie to lash out.

Expected it.

But instead, he turned and left the room.

When Sooty came back in, he acted like nothing had happened.

I noticed that was when the camera turned back on.

###

That had been over a year earlier. Now Ernie was dead and I was driving his daughter to the cop shop where she’d have to deal with the sympathy of those who’d worked beside her and her father. Worse still, she’d have to face colleagues who didn’t know or understand the situation surrounding her suspension.

Susan was silent as the car slipped through the city. Looking out of the passenger-side window, no expression on her face.

The radio was dialled low.

Maybe she understood that. Knew that any words would be pointless, now.

As we drove past the Tay Hotel – long ago abandoned, now an empty shell – she looked up at the grand old building and said, “Before they moved to Dundee, my mum and dad stayed there a few times. He said that was when he fell in love with the city.”

I concentrated on the road ahead, for lack of anything to say.

She said, “They don’t know who killed him, do they?”

I said, “No.”

She was silent again for a few seconds. “You find out, Steed, you tell me. Alright?”

“Sure.”

Blinked a few times. To clear my vision.

###

I parked at Marketgait, outside FHQ. Walked Susan to the main doors. Outside, the wind blew strong. The skies were grey. The city had undergone a severe winter, was only just beginning to come out the other side. During the last months of the previous year, it had been as though civilisation was coming to an end; snow piled deep on the streets and shops unable to open in the centre.

The worst was behind us, but the temperatures were still low.

A headache burned right behind my temples.

Susan told me I didn’t have to come in with her. That she would prefer to do this on her own. I offered to wait, but she shook her head. I watched her walk across to the main building, using the doors that were locked to the public. Still acting as though the place was her own.

Someone was waiting to meet her.

Sooty.

I don’t think he looked my way.

When Susan was gone from sight, swallowed up by the forbidding, grey 1960’s architecture of FHQ, I looked at my watch. Still morning.

There was no-one there to say, so I told myself: this wasn’t my case. I had no reason to get involved. Except the worst kind.

And I had a business to run.

Such as it was.

Third floor, One Courthouse Square. New building, the sandstone still fresh. On the lower floors, there’s a building society. To get to my offices you come through a side door, climb an interminable number of steps and bang hard on the door.

I used to have a guy did the admin, but he suffered a work-related injury. Since then it’s been a rolling series of temps who never quite have the staying power. Enough of a turnover I was starting to wonder if it was personal.

The latest was a woman in her fifties by the name of Dot. Her husband was retired. Her son, so she said, was a “perpetual student”, the description a mix of love and exasperation. No doubt the same tone she used with him. She struck me as the kind of woman who didn’t hide the truth.

Reminded me of my own mother.

As I came through the door, Dot handed me a letter.

“You’ll like this one.”

I did.

The letter was from a local woman whose daughter had run out on her fifteen years earlier. I’d managed to track the girl down to a small English village where she’d changed her name and moved in with a man ten years her senior. The daughter had got herself into some trouble at school which was why she had left in the first place. I sympathised. And, in a way, so did her mother, despite her daughter’s disappearance putting such a strain on the woman’s marriage that she had eventually split from her husband.

The daughter’s own life story was extraordinary, and when she came clean to her husband about who she really was, what had really happened to her, I could have wept with him. As it was I felt like an interloper as I stood in their front room, watching the scene.

You never get used to being around people during moments that many believe should be private. The girl had never contacted her mother because she’d been so ashamed at taking what she called the coward’s way out.

But, according to the letter from the mother, they had a dialogue now. Things were moving forward. It felt good to know that in this world where everything can seem so bleak, there are the occasional happy endings.

After I was done with the letter, I logged on to my email, checked my calendar.

I was working another missing person. There’d been an upturn in such inquiries following media coverage of the Furst case the year before. I turned away most of them, especially while police investigations were still active, but a DS I knew from the old days had sent this particular client in my direction. So far I had turned up nothing on the husband who had slipped out in the middle of the night, but a history of undisclosed gambling debts to local sharks made the reasons clear to me.

Dot buzzed through from reception. “There’s a gentleman here to see you.”

“Make an appointment,” I said. “But make it clear that business is currently backed up and – ”

“I think you’ll want to speak to this one,” she said. “It’s David Burns.”

Guess I should have expected the cockroaches to come out of the woodwork sooner or later.

###

“You’ve had the place done up?” Burns said as he walked through into my office. His tone was upbeat and cheery, like we were old friends. Like this was a social call.

I tried to mirror the façade. It didn’t work. So I said, “You know about Ernie.” It wasn’t a question.

His mood darkened. I took that as a minor victory. He took a seat. Uninvited. “I know about Ernie,” he said. “And I know what you’re thinking, but believe me when I say that his death had nothing to do with our… friendship.”

I didn’t believe him.

Why should I? After all the shite he’d put me through over the last few years, he was lucky I didn’t just throw him out on his arse. Through the third storey window.

I said, “You came all the way across town just to tell me that?”

He chuckled. “Not even an offer of a tea?” he said. “After the hospitality I’ve shown you down the years.”

I shrugged. Said, “Fresh out.” Knowing he could see the teabags and coffee-jars on top of the filing cabinet. Letting him know the score.

He smiled. Self-satisfied. The urge to smack him one came on strong.

But I resisted.

Call that progress. Maybe I was evolving. Learning how to be a better man.

I didn’t know exactly how old Burns was, but he was well past sixty, maybe into his seventies by now. His bullish build was gone, but there was still a power to his body that came naturally. You could see it in the way he moved. A predator, always on the prowl for other human being’s weaknesses. He hadn’t let himself go to seed. A lifetime of being ready for a brawl had paid off in terms of his health. Two years earlier, he’d been the victim of a particularly nasty assault. You wouldn’t know it to look at him. The way he sat, the way he smirked, you’d think the bastard was bulletproof.

In his mind, I think he was.

But all it would take was one good shot to prove him wrong.

He said, “Cards on the table, then. You’ve turned me down before, but believe me when I say I’d rather have you on the case than the coppers.”

The third time he’d offered me employment. Did he expect me to jump enthusiastically at the opportunity? Start wagging my tail like a good little puppy? Fucksakes, I’d turned him down twice before. Sure, some people think a private investigator will take on any old work if there’s a cheque at the other end, but most of us have morals.

More than you might imagine.

“It would go against the professional ethics of the Association of British Investigators,” I told him. “I’m sorry.”

It was a good excuse. I could point to the relevant paragraph of the charter with my eyes closed.

“Aye, forgive me if I don’t follow, son.”

Maybe I’d have to get out the pointer. “I mean taking money from a known criminal.”

He was silent. As though digesting what I’d just said. Burns was one of those hard-men who had become particularly sensitive about his reputation. He’d lamped a reporter on his doorstep, busting the hack’s nose, for merely daring to ask about his connections to a known London gangster.

Mind you, even I had to applaud that particular move. The hack in question had worked for one of the more loathsome rags. It was a wonder he’d even made the pretence at checking up on his “facts”.

“Never convicted, lad,” he said. “Not proven.”

Not.

Proven.

The two most irritating words in the Scots legal system.

During my years on the Force, I’d come to hate the returned verdict.

It’s an aberration.

Or, as DI Lindsay might say, a pain in the fucking arse.

Most sensible legal systems have a two tier verdict system:

Black and white.

Guilty and Not Guilty.

Fair enough. Justice cannot have room for grey areas. It must be harsh and absolute if it is to work. Which is why
Not Proven
seems such a waste of time. What it says is, “We know you did it, you prick, but there’s just not enough evidence to convict.”

It’s a verdict that more often than not lets the guilty walk free.

In my opinion, of course.

And the opinion of many coppers and court solicitors.

“That’s a slur on my name, Mr McNee. I won’t have rumours like that out in the open.”

I nodded. Not apologising.

“So I’m here,” said Burns, “to ask you to accept my cash. Because I know you, son, you’ll be all over Ernie’s murder like dog-shit on a shoe. And you can’t keep going around doing these things for free. Altruism is an over-rated quality in this world.”

“As I’m sure my secretary informed you,” I said, “I currently have a backlog of cases and can’t afford to take on any new clients at the moment without impinging on those currently engaging my services.”