04-Mothers of the Disappeared Read online

  Maybe follow it all.

  That last thought a joke.

  Probably.

  Dot buzzed through from the office. ‘Someone to see you.’

  ‘You know that I’m not currently taking—’

  ‘Police.’

  I stood up, unlocked the door, opened it. Sandy Griggs nodded at me in greeting. He was still tall and rangy, as I remembered. But his fine red hair was wispy, and you could see his scalp beneath strands that looked like they’d been styled by a gale-force wind. His blue suit fitted him a little awkwardly.

  But the geek-edge of his appearance belied a quick and fiery anger that had occasionally taken him before Discipline and Complaints during his time with Tayside Police. Guess I could empathize with that. Especially given that the worst of his ire had been directed towards wife-beaters and domestic abusers. Some cops have their own personal agenda. Sandy always wore his on his sleeve. Why it was a surprise when he upped sticks to join the SCDEA, go hunt down the gangsters.

  But those days were behind him. In an official capacity, at least.

  Now Sandy was SCDEA.

  Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency. Our very own Serious and Organized. Or, if you wanted to get all sound bite about it: the Scottish FBI.

  Sandy stepped forward, one hand outstretched. I accepted the gesture, noted that he grasped just a little too long before letting go.

  ‘Ja—’ He caught himself, let his gaze drop for just a moment. Showing me he was embarrassed. Something told me it was a show. Work in the investigation game long enough, your shite detector gets a good workout. He was trying to show me that he remembered me well enough, that we were friends, even if we hadn’t spoken in a long time. ‘McNee. How you doing?’

  ‘Good. Didn’t think we’d see you round these parts any more. Thought you’d be too busy living the good life out on the west coast, keeping busy with the Glasgow gangs and all.’

  ‘Aye, doesn’t mean we’re not watching over you guys here. Mind if we have a chat?’ He didn’t glance at Dot, but he might as well have done. ‘In private?’

  ‘I can close the door.’

  He thought about that for a second. ‘Fancy a coffee?’

  Five minutes of sunshine in Dundee meant the pavement cafes were set up outside pubs and coffee houses in what was called, with some small sense of irony, the city’s Cultural Quarter. Sandy took me to one of the busier set-ups, ordered for us.

  I sat at the table with my sunglasses on and thought about what he might want to discuss.

  Sandy had been a DI back in the day. Young, possibly ambitious, but occasionally scuppered by that anger. Hence his decision to change direction and work with the SCDEA. I’d been in uniform, then. Remembered his departure as abrupt, the change in direction no doubt something to do with the shitstorms he allowed himself to get into following a friendship with another private eye. I’d met the eye – his name was Bryson – only twice, but knew that he was the kind of man who got his friends into trouble whether he meant to do it or not. Bad news followed him around like a sulky Rottweiler.

  No wonder Sandy was acting like he knew me. I had more than a few things in common with his old friend.

  When Sandy came back, he placed my coffee in front of me and kept a hold of his own mug as he sat down. ‘Sorry to drag you away from your busy day.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  We both sipped at our drinks. Keeping eye contact. Giving away as little as possible. Daring: call my bluff.

  Around us, ordinary people indulged in ordinary conversations about kids, work, last night’s TV.

  Sandy didn’t want to talk about any of that. Neither did I.

  So he said, no pre-amble, ‘That night, did you have another gun on your person?’

  I started to get up. His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. ‘That’s not why I’m asking.’

  ‘All due respect, I think it is.’

  Sandy let go of me. I sat down. Waited for an explanation. Ready to leave if I didn’t like it.

  ‘The reason I ask is that I want you to say you did. Even if it’s not true.’

  ‘You want my business to tank?’

  He hesitated. ‘You could say that,’ he said. And told me why.

  The man I killed – and I still can’t say whether it was an accident, or in cold blood – worked for London gangster Gordon Egg. Egg was old-school hard-arse, had been waging a war in Dundee against a man named David Burns. The dead man was one of Egg’s best muscle-men.

  I shouldn’t have got involved, but a client was mixed up in their turf war, and I’d managed to get noticed by both sides. Burns, claiming to recognize something of himself in me, manipulated me, made sure I wound up doing his dirty work. I didn’t agree to anything, but all the same found myself in the right place at the right time and with the proper motivation.

  Since that night, Burns and I had what you might call a complicated relationship. He manipulated me again, forcing me into a hunt for his missing god-daughter, before using the death of an old friend to once more trick me into doing his dirty work. Looking at it from the outside, you might start to think I was enjoying it.

  Which was precisely why Sandy Griggs wanted me to cosy up to the old man. To finally give in to everything he offered me. To quit being manipulated and willingly do exactly what the foosty old fuck wanted.

  ‘You’re a mental case,’ I said. ‘You know that, aye?’

  He smiled. No humour. No warmth.

  A couple took the table next to us. Oblivious to what was happening. Wrapped up in each other, laughing and sharing intimate little stories as they leaned in close across the table.

  Wonder how me and Griggs would have appeared to them if they noticed us.

  ‘Seriously. I can’t do it.’

  ‘Then what are you going to do?’ Griggs asked. ‘You’re fucked, McNee. You know it. From the minute you made the decision to kill that man, you’ve been in freefall. The pavement’s coming up fast. One way or another, it’s going to hurt when you land.’

  I massaged my forehead for a moment. Thinking about what he was asking me.

  He leaned back, sipped at his coffee.

  Sixteen months or so earlier, a good man had died because he lost track of what side of the law he was really on. Ernie Bright had been a good copper, and tried the trick of cosying up to the bad guys. It was a move that wound up killing him by inches until a shotgun blast to the chest finally put him out of his misery.

  I still believed, even if others didn’t, that Ernie hadn’t switched sides. That he’d had some grander purpose. That he hadn’t died uncertain of who he was, of who he stood for.

  Sandy was asking me to walk that same line. More than that, he was asking me to betray every principle I had ever claimed to have.

  ‘I don’t want to do this, man. But I’m down to my last hand. You’re my ace.’

  ‘Let me think about it. Jesus fuck, just give me a moment to …’

  ‘Sure, a moment.’ Griggs stood up. His coffee wasn’t even half-finished. ‘You know where I am. Just don’t take too long, huh?’

  THREE

  I spent the afternoon making phone calls. Calling in what few favours I could. Shaking proverbial trees. Trying to get some idea of just how badly I was being fucked.

  Nobody wanted to talk to me. Told me just about everything I needed to know.

  Three o’clock got me a phone call from Cameron Connelly at the Dundee Herald. Playing the concern-for-a-friend card, but just beneath the genuine worry, I could hear his reporter’s instincts angling for a story. If he was calling me, it meant his colleagues were already sniffing blood, and he wanted to beat them to the exclusive.

  I said, ‘How long?’

  ‘They’re waiting for official sources to disclose the nature of the charges.’

  ‘How much do you know? Off the record, of course.’

  ‘About what I knew before. Except the spin is different. Someone’s trying to make this about your incompetence
.’

  ‘That how you’ll report it?’

  ‘I’ll report the facts. You’ll have right of reply. But I don’t want to run this if it’s simply a vendetta, know what I’m saying?’

  ‘You’re all heart.’

  ‘Aye, it’s been said.’

  In those days, I had been angry. Recovering – slowly – from the accident that had left me ready to lash out at the whole world. When I wound up caught in the middle of Burns’s and Egg’s little turf war, I focused my anger on two of Egg’s thugs. Convinced there was no other option. Ask me today, I think things went the only way they could. Given who they were. Given who I was. Anyone trying to spin me as a have-a-go hero or a mindless thug was grinding their own axe.

  The only witness to what happened that evening – the thug who survived – refused to talk to the police, to confirm or deny my story. Took the whole ‘honour amongst crooks’ bit dead serious. Dead being the operative word when he wound up knifed in prison just a few months later. The work of David Burns. He might as well have left his signature at the scene. But of course, even if everyone knew he had been behind the death, no one could prove it in a court of law.

  So that left me. The only one who knew the truth. I had acted in self-defence. The gun was not mine.

  So the questions became, Why now? Who was re-opening the investigation?

  ‘Look, this just fell in my lap.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Talk.’

  ‘Come on!’

  Connelly sucked in a sharp breath on the other end of the line. ‘Just talk, man. Words. Here and there. I know someone who’s been hearing the whispers. What I can gather is that the word came in from an anonymous source. And given your recent relationship with the force, I guess they’d be more than inclined to look for ways to burn you.’

  It was a fair point. I’d exposed one of their top cops as a corrupt arsehole playing both sides against the middle. I’d made enemies of the personal and political persuasions. And a number of coppers still thought I’d fitted up Kevin Wood. Refused to believe the evidence that their own Discipline and Complaints department had amassed against the deceased former deputy chief constable.

  I wasn’t about to get any answers from the force. And seeking answers from the ABI or any of my private contacts was a dead end. Connelly wasn’t about to give me his source, and the way he told it, so far he was the only reporter aware of what was going on. This left my options limited. Giving me no choice but to go ask the questions I’d been too scared to ask earlier that day. Call in favours I’d never really earned.

  ‘Don’t start thinking we’re going to become bosom buddies,’ Lindsay said. ‘Just because I have a modicum of gratitude for what you did …’

  I still couldn’t get used to it. When he was in the house, he didn’t swear. His wife had tried to tell me as much when I met her in the hospital while the grumpy old bastard was in a coma, but I hadn’t believed her.

  ‘I need a favour.’

  ‘Not much I can do moping around on the couch all day. Not much I’d want to do for you, anyway.’ The barb was sluggish, more force of habit than genuine enthusiasm. You could see by the way he was sitting – back curved, head slumped just a little, arms hanging there – that he had lost something of the joie de vivre he once had. And who could blame him? Spend time in a coma, see how you feel when you come out of it. Especially when the people who put you there were people you were supposed to trust. Fellow police officers turned rent-a-thugs desperate to protect a powerful man’s secrets.

  I remember talking to Lindsay’s wife after he came out of the coma. She told me that a little something inside him had died. That he wasn’t quite the same man. Not just his quieter demeanour. There was the sense of shell-shock to him, as though his whole world had been turned upside down.

  He hadn’t been able to defend himself.

  I think that was the worst thing for a man like Lindsay. He’s always been proud. Used to take great pride in the fact that he was an outsider; granted grudging respect because of his by-the-book mentality, but never really one of the gang because of his refusal to form relationships within the job.

  Then again, I’d taken the opposite tack, and look at which of us became the pariah.

  ‘You’re bored,’ I said. ‘I get that. When I took time off after the accident, all I wanted was get out there and do something. It drove me crazy.’

  ‘Aye, turned you into a bigger arsehole than you already were.’ Just a growl, a hint of the old bastard I used to know. Brought a smile to my face. Christ, times were bad when I got nostalgic for a man like George Lindsay.

  ‘I’m not asking for much,’ I said. ‘Just a name. That’s all.’

  ‘And what happens when they ask me why I want to know?’

  ‘You can work that out.’

  ‘I just want to congratulate whoever stuck the knife in.’

  ‘Always knew you had a sneaky side.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Look, I just need to know,’ I said. ‘Something about the timing of all this seems very convenient.’

  ‘Convenient, how?’

  He couldn’t work it out? I had to wonder if the coma had slowed him a touch more than anyone realized. ‘I’ll tell you if you get me the name.’

  Another hesitation. I hoped he was thinking it over.

  Persuasion is a delicate art. Like the police interview. You have to know when to push and when to step back. Go too much in either direction, you lose the control of the situation that you crave.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said. ‘But that’s it. Anyone wants to talk, I’ll listen but there’s no fu— no way, I’m putting my own reputation on the line for you. You go down, it’s on your own. Right?’

  ‘That’s all I’m asking,’ I said. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’

  That evening, I stayed up late in the front room, sitting in the padded armchair, watching reruns on the TV. Most of them made little sense. TV scheduling goes out the window when you work my kind of gig, and with more and more TV built around story arcs and viewer loyalty, it meant that I just let the images wash over me.

  In the end, I found that it wasn’t enough of a distraction and turned off the set. I needed engagement. Something I could follow, could lose my brain in. I grabbed a book from the shelf – American Skin, by an Irish writer Cameron Connelly had recommended to me a couple of months back – and settled in.

  I finished by 2 a.m., and the idea of coming back to reality made my stomach do flips. I placed the book on the arm of the chair, and closed my eyes, thinking I wouldn’t sleep.

  But I did.

  My dreams were a mess of blood and fear.

  It was the damn book that did it; a nightmare ride with a cast of psychopaths. Much as I enjoyed it while awake, it came back to haunt my subconscious.

  Unlike the book, there was no narrative to the dream. No way I could later describe it other than as a dread feeling when I woke; a half-memory of the dead.

  They were all there.

  The innocent.

  The guilty.

  All of them. People whose deaths I was linked to, causally and explicitly.

  They were there, in my dreams, watching me, saying nothing. After all, there really was nothing they could say.

  FOUR

  I was in the kitchen, making coffee. Trying to shake memories from my brain. The mobile buzzed its way across the counter. Gave me the salvation I’d been searching for. I grabbed it and answered.

  ‘I have a name.’

  ‘You’re just going to give it to me?’

  Lindsay tried his best not to sigh. ‘You made a lot of enemies, the way you quit, you know that? Not just my friends, either.’ I’d broken his nose the day I left the force. A flair for the dramatic? Or just a dickhead move? Used to be I thought I knew the answer, now I wasn’t so sure. ‘Never mind some of the crap you pulled over the last few years.’ Point taken: my career as an investigator had meant I woun
d up standing on some serious toes. Not part of the job description, and most people wondered if I was just plain unlucky or courted the kind of reputation that most criminals would be happy to put on their CV.

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘It wasn’t Tayside. Although more than a few of the lads wish they’d been the ones to notice the alleged inconsistencies. Have to wonder what they think of me, eh? They gave it over to a new detective, name of Kellen. Don’t know her well. Think she might have transferred after my … incident. But the request itself, to re-open the investigation, came from an outside agency.’

  ‘Outside? From where?’

  ‘SCDEA.’

  SCDEA.

  They’ve gone after the biggest and baddest Scotland has to offer. But it’s tough to tell how much difference an organization like that really makes when they take so many years to build a case against the real bastards. The truly untouchable.

  Like David Burns.

  SCDEA had enough files on Burns to build another headquarters.

  But all those files were useless. Only so much paper. Because the law is reliant on evidence and proof. To take down a man like Burns you need proof of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The evidence was circumstantial. At best.

  When you tried to take down a man like Burns, you ran the risk of things going wrong. And they always did when the authorities came close to the old bugger. Key witnesses refused to talk or changed their stories at the last minute. Known associates claimed the old man to be utterly innocent. They had acted of their own accord, and he had nothing to do with it. Sometimes investigating officers with their own secrets would develop a change of heart, or those who managed to live the lives they preached would find the shite pouring in from above, from places over which they had no control.

  The old man insulated himself well. But always managed to rub his guilt in the faces of those who wanted him behind bars. Letting them know how much he enjoyed their frustration.

  To get to him, you needed to turn someone he trusted. A person who had his ear, his respect.