04-Mothers of the Disappeared Read online

  We trudged along a relatively light slope, through ankle-high grass still wet from the rain. I wasn’t wearing the right kind of shoes for the walk, and could feel the damp soak through into my socks. I curled my toes inside my shoes with every step. As we neared the edge of fields and enclosures, Highland cows and sheep ambled forward to examine us curiously, maybe sensing that we weren’t the usual recreational ramblers.

  When we were far enough along, Burns said, ‘I hear he killed himself.’

  ‘You knew one of the children he killed.’

  ‘The cunt.’

  ‘The mother lived close to you. You knew the family.’

  ‘That boy should never have died.’

  ‘Why didn’t you do anything?’

  ‘At the time, we didn’t know that …’

  ‘I mean later. When he was sent to prison. When it came out about the other children. When that lad’s name was released. You had the power to do something. And don’t you dare deny it.’

  Of course he had the power. Back when one of the thugs who had tried to kill me in the graveyard survived and was sent to prison, he was murdered by another inmate. Everyone knew that had been Burns’s influence. Everyone knew how far the old man’s reach extended.

  Burns didn’t say anything for a moment. He stopped walking, turned to face me. ‘He should have died. He should have been fucking murdered. Not a quick death; he deserved to fucking suffer for what he did to those boys. Animals like him … No sympathy. You don’t give them sympathy. They never show their victims any.’

  ‘So why didn’t he? Suffer, I mean.’

  Burns hesitated.

  ‘Don’t play coy,’ I said. ‘We both know what you’re capable of.’

  Burns stepped forward. I held out my hands, posed like Jesus on the cross, let him pat me down. When he was happy, he stepped back. I saw tears in his eyes, but it could have just been the wind. ‘Who says I didn’t try? And that the hit was fucked. After that, security around the bastard got tight. Soon enough I had bigger problems. There are always bigger problems. You don’t deal with something right away, something else always comes up. I should have fucking done it, though. Sooner rather than later.’

  ‘What went wrong?’

  ‘The boy I sent in got the wrong pervert. Can you believe it? After that Moorehead was put in solitary himself. For his own protection. Like he was the victim. Bloody fuck!’ He shook his head. Expression on his face said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘I got him a cushy fucking job in the kitchen. Supposed to put glass, you know, in the arsewipe’s dinner. Ground glass. You eat a plateful of ground glass and it churns up your insides. Nothing anyone can do for you. Not if they don’t know what’s happening. So this particular con who owes me a favour, he does this favour, and he gets the wrong bloody pervert’s plate. Puts the glass in the wrong food. Jesus, you should have seen the shitstorm after that one.’

  I didn’t know about the failed hit. Never heard anything from anyone about some prisoner putting glass in the solitary meals. Wondered if it happened while I was in hospital. Or while I was busy feeling sorry for myself, practising my self-destructive tendencies.

  The wind picked up a little. It tickled around my exposed skin. Cold and unsettling.

  ‘Think he’s guilty, then?’

  ‘No doubt in my mind, son.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What the fuck’re you so interested for?’

  ‘There’s been doubt raised.’

  ‘Then why would the wee prick admit to—?’

  ‘To that one crime and not the rest?’

  ‘He was a psycho! They don’t need a bloody reason, lad. Surely you’ve seen enough in your time to know that.’

  I thought of a big, bearded man proudly boasting about the way he’d battered a woman, eventually bashing her brains out in the rear kitchen of an abandoned croft. A man to whom violence came as instinctually as breathing. The very definition of a psychopath. His name was Wickes and I had trusted him up to a point. Two years ago, and I still had nightmares about the violence he had brought into my life.

  ‘Moorehead was different,’ I said. ‘I’ve met psychopaths and sociopaths before. Seen them at their worst. Moorehead was … just … Did you ever actually talk to him?’

  ‘No. Why would I want to breathe the same air as that pervert?’

  ‘I don’t think I noticed it at the time. I was too green. In awe of Ernie, I guess.’ I hesitated. ‘But when I spoke to him the other week, there was … when he spoke … I don’t …’

  ‘You think he’s innocent?’

  Did I nod? Shrug? I don’t know. It was hard to put my feelings on the matter into words. Alex Moorehead was accused of a horrendous crime, and like Burns, I believed a man guilty of those crimes should suffer. But if there was even the slightest chance that Alex Moorehead was innocent, then he couldn’t simply be punished to make us all feel better, to satiate our desire for revenge. If he was innocent, he’d been harmed as much as the victims of whoever had killed these children.

  ‘You’re like a dog with a bone, son,’ Burns said. ‘Most men would just accept what they were told. But you … you’re different.’

  I wondered if this was a compliment. Or something else.

  ‘But I have to ask who it was led you to me. I have my suspicions. But then maybe I’m just a paranoid old fuck. Tell you what, you go find whatever it is you’re looking for. Because I can’t help you. But I want to know. Come back. Show me your truth, I’ll show you mine.’ He smiled, then, and I noticed his incisors, the way they stood out, sharp like a wolf’s. ‘I think you’ll find mine very interesting.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Settled for silence on the matter.

  He was goading me with something. I didn’t know what.

  ‘Come on, then,’ he said, looking up at the sky. ‘It’s getting chilly, eh? An old man can only take so much fresh air.’

  TWENTY-TWO

  I was at a dead end. No way forward.

  All Burns had told me was that, like everyone else, once the monster was caged, he’d moved on with his life.

  Anger and outrage only lasts so long. For most people.

  I thought about Susan, about what she’d said earlier. Deliberately trying to provoke me into action, but for her own reasons.

  Had she changed so much?

  Could I blame her if she had?

  The question of Ernie Bright’s guilt or innocence was thorny at best. But I did know that he had some kind of special relationship with Burns. Not quite friendship, but something else.

  Utilitarian perhaps. Aristotelian.

  I used to know a guy studied philosophy at university. Switched halfway through and became a solicitor, so maybe the ethics course didn’t take. He talked about how Aristotle defined friendship at different levels. Utilitarian friends hung out because it was to their mutual advantage. Perhaps, in his own way, Ernie had been trying to use Burns. He’d certainly tried to do so under the orders of his superiors back in the mid-nineties. Maybe he’d found something in the relationship that continued to be useful even when the operation had ended.

  Or perhaps there had been something darker at work.

  Not corruption. Ernie had been posthumously cleared of any charges of out-and-out corruption. But there were still lingering questions even a year after his death.

  Without Ernie alive to talk, or Burns himself willing to say anything, no one would ever know the full truth. That had to be eating at Susan. She had almost killed a man to clear her father’s name, and now she would never really know the truth. She had to deal every day with the knowledge of who had killed her father. Not the trigger man, but the man who had screwed up Ernie Bright’s life so completely. She knew that Burns was walking around scot-free, and she couldn’t do anything about it.

  Susan was a cop from a family of cops. Her father, her grandfather, had been on the force. It was all she knew, part of who she was. Which meant that anything she did had to be within the
system. Unlike me, she couldn’t walk away from the world of rules and regulations. She heard the voice of her father, and even if he had not been the man she thought she knew, her memories were of the good copper, the man who insisted on everything being done within the restrictions of the law.

  When she had come to me at the Howff, she was not looking for a friend or seeking to help me. She knew who I had been, and she wanted to satiate her desire for revenge through me. I could do the things she couldn’t bring herself to do.

  I was no longer a friend. I was a tool; something she could use.

  That was why she’d backed Griggs’s play to try and get me close to Burns.

  Family.

  Family.

  Where was Jonathan Moorehead? What did he say to his son?

  Back at the office, I dived back into the documents and transcripts. Went over and over the same words, phrases, looking for something I’d missed earlier. I didn’t know what it was, but it had to be there. Just one word out of place. Something that hadn’t seemed significant before.

  Anything that could help.

  Burns had been of no use to me. Just another dead end. A distraction. Part of Griggs’s scheme to try and bring us closer. Interviewing him at the time would have done no good. He had merely been the woman’s neighbour. He trusted that Ernie and I had done the right thing in arresting Alex.

  For once, he had nothing to hide.

  Which meant I needed to find something else. Anything. Or was I simply wasting everyone’s time looking for shadows?

  Two hours later, my vision going fuzzy, I re-read one of the early interviews. A few lines. They hadn’t seemed significant before, and yet now seemed somehow important; out of place in a long stream of nothing.

  20/10/06

  EB: Why did you do it?

  AM: Does it matter?

  EB: I think it does. Justin’s mother thinks it does.

  AM: I told you I did it. Why do you keep—?

  EB: Call me a curious bastard. You know we found the images?

  AM: The images?

  EB: Your private collection? (to recorder) I am now showing the suspect printouts of images found on a partitioned drive.

  AM: Where did you find—?

  EB: They were on your computer, hidden in a partitioned drive. Protected, of course. But we had some help finding them.

  AM: Help?

  EB: One of your fellow IT geeks. You know Jason Taylor, right?

  AM (agitated): Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

  Jason Taylor

  I remembered Jason.

  The final piece of the puzzle. The one who helped seal the case against Alex Moorehead. Ernie had already organized a forensic team to examine Moorehead’s computer. But they had encountered difficulties with his security. Typical IT geek, Alex Moorehead’s set-up was far from typical. His security was a custom program that none of the team had ever encountered.

  Hence: Jason Taylor.

  He had worked alongside Alex before. Had concerns about his friend’s behaviour. He had stepped forward to ask if he could assist with decoding Alex’s systems, claimed to know Alex’s methodology. They used the same security measures; unique programs and algorithms that the two of them had developed in tandem during their days at university.

  He came recommended, too.

  By DCI Wood.

  Make of that what you will.

  It was Jason who found the images. He had been the outside contractor who performed the second sweep of Moorehead’s equipment.

  The one who vomited when he realized what he had come across. Who nearly broke down in court testifying against his former friend.

  Back then, he had been the keystone in the case for the prosecution.

  Now I was wondering if perhaps he knew more than he had let on.

  Used to be that if all you had to go on was a name, you’d reach a dead end fast. Now all you need is a name, an address (even an old one) and a possible occupation. Sometimes even just the name is more than enough to track down your average citizen in the digital age. None of us really realize how much information there is out there for anyone with the barest minimum of skill to find.

  Jason Taylor was running his own web-design company these days. After a few years running anti-virus and security software, he’d clearly decided that the money was in website design.

  Redboot.

  That’s what they called themselves. I didn’t know if that was a private joke or some reference I was too out of the loop to understand.

  I clicked through to the staff page, then again through to Taylor’s biography. His picture was stark black and white, showed a handsome-looking man with big eyes and long dark hair. He was in his mid-forties, had an intense aura about him. You imagined he never wanted to leave the office, that if he had a wife and children then he was an invisible presence in their lives.

  But the biography didn’t say anything about family. Taylor was all business:

  Jason Taylor founded Redboot over five years ago from the garage of a friend’s house with little more than a laptop computer and a desire to deliver the best possible website design for a select list of local clients. Since then, Redboot has expanded under Jason’s leadership to become a national leader in web design and marketing.

  No real personal detail. No heart-warming throwaways about living in the country with a wife, a dog and the obligatory 2.4. The man with the expensive haircut and the intense stare either had nothing to say or nothing he wanted to say.

  There was some value in that. Some people like to keep their personal and professional lives separate. Who needs to know about your domestic situation when they’re hiring you to promote their brand.

  There was a contact number for the company as well as online support forms and some generic company email addresses. I didn’t use them, though. I was just doing recon work, trying to figure if my gut instinct was correct or if I had finally allowed my own paranoia to dictate my actions.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I looked back through the files that Aileen had sent me. Jason Taylor was little more than a footnote. The information was scant. At the time we interviewed him, Taylor had been working on security software he intended for commercial release. He told us it was based on something he’d worked with Alex Moorehead on before Alex decided to go freelance, work on other people’s problems.

  Taylor and Alex Moorehead had shared residences at university together for two years before moving out. They then shared a flat, started work on the anti-virus software and set up their own limited company which Moorehead left six months later. There was no real reason given other than he wasn’t fully dedicated to the idea, worried about being his own boss.

  I remembered Taylor as cocky; absolutely certain of himself in the way that only the privileged can be. He had been privately educated, had that edge of arrogance that sometimes comes through instead of the intended confidence. Not great for getting on with everyone, but fantastic for steamrollering through life. When he’d talked to us, I always had the feeling it was with barely disguised contempt, as though he figured we were a little slow.

  Moorehead used the systems that he and Taylor had developed on his own PC. At the time Taylor claimed the anti-intruder measures made Norton and the market-leaders look like kid-on safes, the kind of plastic shite a kid might keep his wee pennies in.

  Did I want to talk to him again? In case we missed something? In case he missed something?

  It was nearly six years later. I’d already fucked up by talking to the father. Was I dragging up the past for no reason?

  I killed time by re-reading some of the papers that the ABI had sent me along with the letter detailing my suspension from the organization. A knot built up inside me, and a feeling of nausea made me swallow repeatedly.

  I thought about Kellen.

  She was after me. Convinced of my guilt. She didn’t know me. Had no personal stake in anything I had ever done to the department. And yet she was still certain I was culpable i
n terms of the charges being made against me.

  In the back of my mind, the question lurked: what if she was right?

  I had killed a man. Lied to the authorities about the exact nature of his death. I had covered up the truth.

  Sooner or later I’d have to pay.

  Kellen wasn’t going to give up. All I could do was sit tight and see what happened.

  Maybe Griggs’s offer was the best option I had. Susan was right, after all: taking down Burns would fulfil a long-held ambition. Of mine. Of her father’s.

  But in the meantime, I looked like a criminal myself.

  Without the job, who was I? How did I define myself?

  I checked the clock. It was getting late in the afternoon. I couldn’t just sit around and feel sorry for myself.

  So I dialled through to Redboot.

  The receptionist asked me for my name. I gave it as ‘Detective Constable McNee. He might not remember me. Tell him it’s to do with his old friend Alex.’

  When he came on the line, he sounded hesitant. ‘It’s been a long time. You could have dropped me an email.’

  ‘It’s easy to ignore an email.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘Alex Moorehead. You know he killed himself?’

  ‘Christ!’ There was a flatness to his voice.

  ‘Mr Taylor, in the interest of disclosure I should point out I am no longer a police officer. I’m a private citizen now. I work as a private investigator. I was asked to examine new evidence in the Moorehead case before he died.’

  ‘He was my friend,’ Taylor said. ‘He was my friend and he betrayed not only me, but everyone who knew him. In the worst possible fashion. I did my public service helping to put a monster like that away.’ The formality in his tone hid any upset that might have been trying to break through. He might have been a bad actor reading from a script.

  ‘I know what you did, Mr Taylor,’ I said. ‘I’m merely trying to see if there’s anything we missed in the initial investigation.’