04-Mothers of the Disappeared Page 4

  That kind of thing, it sets alarm bells ringing. When something seems too coincidental or simply too good to be true, it usually is. Most crimes of passion, the perpetrator will go out of their way to get caught, acting in ways that draw attention to them, even if it seems like misdirection.

  That was the second strike against Moorehead in Ernie’s eyes. Not enough to take him in for questioning, but enough to make him a person of interest, as they say in the trade.

  Justin’s body was buried under a pile of leaves and grass. Six days out in the open had taken its toll on the corpse, and when the funeral was eventually held, the casket had to be closed.

  ‘He’s a cool customer,’ Ernie said, meaning Moorehead. He told me this as we watched the crime-scene technicians investigate the area around the body, while the villagers all stood at the edge of the crime-scene tape and watched with disbelief as we investigated the death of one of their own. ‘Finding that body the way he did, he should have been … I don’t know, but he shouldn’t have been cold like that. It was a performance, McNee. I know it. Feel it in my gut.’

  Still, we didn’t talk to Moorehead. We couldn’t. We’d have brought the wrath of our superiors down on our heads. You don’t accuse a man without evidence. Without something more substantial than a simple gut feeling.

  Elizabeth Farnham appeared on television several times over the next few weeks, paraded around news outlets and daytime TV like a performing animal. She looked like she barely knew where she was, and she told her story so many times that by the time the police finally arrested Moorehead, she sounded numbed and distant from the retelling.

  When she appeared, she would plead not only for any witnesses to what had happened, but for the killer to admit the truth and turn themselves in. For months, before I fell asleep, I could hear her words echo around my head: Please do this, not for me or for my boy, but for yourself. I am sure you regret what you did. I am sure you did not mean to kill him. Come forward and admit what you did.

  They say confession is good for the soul.

  But no one confessed.

  And Ernie continued to focus on Alex Moorehead as a ‘person of interest’.

  Moorehead had been out of the others’ sight when the body was discovered. A fact that added more detail to Ernie’s picture of Moorehead as a man with an agenda in finding the body.

  Alex cooperated with us. We took him to the station several times, questioned him in his home. He answered every question without hesitation. Cooperated fully.

  Said more than once that an innocent man had nothing to hide.

  But something was wrong.

  Ernie was right. Alex Moorehead was too calm and collected. Unconcerned.

  Every regret expressed for what happened to Elizabeth Farnham was mechanical. He acted like a man coached in innocence. He was too perfect. As Ernie would say at the trial, he had been ‘inappropriately distant’, given that he was the one to find the body.

  Not a crime in itself. Especially for a computer geek.

  Ernie continued to drive the investigation towards Moorehead, finally procuring a warrant to search the man’s property. Raising enough questions that the DCI in charge couldn’t continue to hem and haw regarding the strength of Ernie’s gut. We didn’t find the murder weapon – a ‘blunt, round-edged instrument’ according to forensic reports – and of course we didn’t find any DNA on the young boy’s body. The lack of evidence pointed towards someone who had planned this particular attack for a long time.

  Which was why Moorehead’s PC broke the case.

  We found several pictures of kids from the village. Nothing too disturbing, but the majority were long-angle shots clearly taken without the participant’s knowledge.

  The photographs gave us cause to check the drive for hidden and deleted data. No matter how hard you try and wipe a computer, there’s always something recoverable on there. A second, deeper sweep through Moorehead’s hard drive revealed more pictures of children, these downloaded from the darker recesses of the internet. This second sweep was performed by an outside contractor, who would later admit to an old friendship with the accused, but who had come recommended by the DCI in charge of the case, Kevin Wood. All of this would happen around the time I was forced off the case and eventually off the job by an accident that would echo through the rest of my life. Run off the road by a driver who was never caught.

  The second set of images they found on Moorehead’s PC was in a very different category to the first set. Graphic. Explicit. Appealing to a debased kind of sexuality that most people could never hope to understand.

  Moorehead pleaded innocent to possession of indecent images. But he couldn’t provide an explanation as to where the images found in his machine had come from. Not that it mattered. They were there. They hadn’t been downloaded in innocence. Too many images. Too frequent dates for that. No one else had access to his machine.

  Ernie and Wood brought the hammer down.

  Moorehead was indicted on two separate charges. The first being possession of indecent images. The second being the murder of Justin Farnham. The case was passed up to the High Court of Justiciary, where it seemed for a while that Moorehead might dispute the charges brought against him.

  On the charge of possessing the images found on his computer, he claimed to be not guilty. But then, as the proceedings rumbled forward and the fifteen-person jury was brought before the Lord Commissioner of Justiciary, Moorehead broke his silence on the death of Justin Farnham.

  Guilty.

  He broke down in court. Pled to the higher charge of murder. There was no choice left but to sentence him to life. Twenty-five years. The commissioner gave him fifteen years punishment on the life sentence. Meaning that once those fifteen years were up, he could apply for bail on licence.

  No one thought he would apply. Moorehead seemed determined to serve out his sentence. Life for a life.

  Inside, he spent much of his time in solitary confinement. For his own safety.

  Most prisoners detest anyone convicted for harm to a child. The worst and most violent sociopaths will cry and rail for the return of the death penalty for these prisoners, some even claiming that they give criminals a bad name. I understand that. Certain crimes are worse than others. Even the most hardened thug has a basic code of morality and conduct. Even they would think twice before harming a child.

  There were always going to be unanswered questions, of course. Such as why Moorehead pleaded innocent to the charge of possessing indecent images, and yet failed to provide a reasonable – or even unreasonable – excuse for the pictures found on his PC.

  But none of that mattered. They had their man. Ernie and I had talked to him on multiple occasions before I left the case. As I watched the trial unfold in the media, I was more than satisfied as to his guilt.

  Soon after Moorehead was sentenced, something strange happened. Other forces came forward with cases, child abduction, even murder. All of them unsolved. All of them taking place near where Moorehead had been staying at the time. Moorehead was only thirty-eight but the cases went back around fifteen years, just after his graduation.

  Project Amityville became a full-time job. Ernie couldn’t take it, handed the gig over to Fife Police willingly, as they had at least three cases where Moorehead was now the most likely suspect.

  Moorehead offered little or no help with these new investigations. The officers assigned to Amityville had to try and work with next to nothing to prove that he was in some way responsible for a string of murders and possible murders dating back years.

  Project Amityville was still running, nearly six years after Moorehead’s arrest. Same cop in charge. He had tangentially tied Moorehead to at least three other cases, suspected his involvement in at least six more. But, like Ernie before him, he found the work like butting his skull against a brick wall. The more he suspected, the more the evidence became circumstantial. Without Moorehead’s assistance or admission of guilt, there was often little that could be don
e.

  Occasionally, true-crime newspaper specials or TV docs would resurrect images of Moorehead for after-the-fact speculation. They had called me once or twice for comment, but I refused to talk about the case. All I wanted to do was forget it. In my mind, I equated the Moorehead investigation with the accident that led to my leaving the force. Hardly what you’d call a high note.

  Sometimes, late at night on TV, they would show footage of Elizabeth Farnham as she had been – the grieving, distraught mother, unable to properly display her grief after being put in the full glare of not only the police but also the media investigation into her son’s death.

  That was how I remembered her. The late-night TV docs that still obsessed over the unanswered questions of the Moorehead investigation froze my image of her as she had been six years ago.

  I recall her saying, with the sharp hatred that only comes from the greatest of losses, that we needed to return to the death penalty, just this once, and show men like Moorehead that there were consequences for their actions.

  And now she was telling me that she believed he was innocent?

  Why the change of heart?

  ‘All due respect,’ I said, ‘but he’s guilty. They proved that he was—’

  She held up a hand. ‘I didn’t believe it when they told me. In that shocked way that later turned to hatred. I thought, it can’t be Alex. No, it can’t be. He was a good neighbour. An oddball, yes, but a psycho? A murderer? A killer of children? But then I started to question my doubts. And I believed everything I saw in the newspapers or heard from your people. I hated Alex Moorehead. Despised him. But over the years, I thought more and more about what happened. Not what happened to Justin, but in the course of your investigation. As kind and determined as you were to find the killer, I have to wonder if maybe you weren’t a little too determined. The minute your boss questioned Alex, he was marked for the crime. And then … those pictures the media showed of him. One look at those and you’d think he really was a psychopath.’

  I remembered the images. The minute his name had leaked as a person of interest – I always suspected it had been done on purpose, to try and draw him out – the papers had photographers hanging outside his house, trying to catch the most guilty looking snap they could. And they really nailed him. Early morning, taking out the bins, no one looks at their best, and in Alex Moorehead’s case, it was the eyes that did it. He was a young man, but his eyes were surrounded by heavy bags and wrinkles. No doubt the result of sitting up late in the evening, staring at code or the flashing images of the latest console game. Or, if you believed the charges, images of children that would turn the stomach of anyone with an ounce of common morality.

  ‘We connected him to other cases, and—’

  She nodded, and I realized she’d heard all this before, maybe even made the counterarguments herself. I’d barged into the conversation, forgetting one of the primary rules of the investigation gig – let the client do the talking.

  So I stopped talking, sat back. Let her continue.

  ‘I went to see him,’ she said. ‘After all these years, I went to see him. I wanted to look him in the eye and ask what had happened to all those other children, and please, couldn’t he let their mothers know what had happened to them. Because as horrific as the truth was bound to be, it couldn’t be worse than the not knowing.’ She lifted her head, again, and took a deep breath. Her hands, still on her lap, remained perfectly still. ‘I asked him, and I looked him in the eyes. Like I said, Mr McNee, I like to think I’m a good judge of character, that I can read people’s faces. And what his face told me was that he was innocent. That for all these years, he has been saying nothing, because I believe he genuinely knows nothing.’

  SEVEN

  Much as I tried to talk her out of it, Elizabeth Farnham insisted I at least talked to Moorehead. If I thought she was crazy, she’d leave it alone. I even raised my fees a little to try and put her off, but she wasn’t backing down.

  ‘I remembered you. You hung on the senior detective’s word, but I think you had your doubts.’

  Of course I had my doubts. But I was younger then. Less sure of myself. And Ernie was a copper’s copper, the kind of man I wanted to be. I had to trust his instincts over mine.

  Could he have been wrong?

  Something about Mrs Farnham’s insistence made those old doubts resurface. And given what I had discovered about Ernie the year before, I had to wonder if he hadn’t made a few mistakes since then.

  As human as the rest of us.

  Which was how I found myself pulling on a dark suit and tie the next morning. Driving to the Category A unit at Perth Prison.

  I had some pull with one of the senior wardens. An ex-cop, he was one of the few who still talked to me. Perhaps because his new career had kept him insulated from some of my more recent missteps. When I rang his house, he asked why I only ever called when I needed a favour. I told him it was because I was a parasite and he didn’t laugh.

  But he didn’t berate me, either.

  There was a plastic wall between myself and Moorehead. Given how many people wanted to hurt him – even, now, so many years after he’d been banged up – it was safer for both of us to talk that way. When he spoke into the microphone, his voice was soft, barely above a whisper. ‘I remember you.’

  ‘My name’s McNee.’

  ‘The junior detective, right? Finally got your badge?’

  ‘I’m not police any more. I work private.’

  ‘You here on your own? Or one of them … hired you?’

  ‘One of who?’

  ‘The mothers.’

  ‘The mothers?’

  ‘Of the disappeared.’ Talking about the mothers of his alleged victims. Just being in the same room as him, I got this little shiver running up my spine. He looked like a guilty man, now. His skin was pale. He sat with his head forward and looked up at me as though he couldn’t stand to face me head on.

  Had he always been like this?

  Or had prison changed him?

  I tried to remember. To cut out the interpretation of the years, to remember with clarity the man that Alexander Moorehead had once been.

  And I failed.

  All I remembered was the media monster.

  I said, ‘I’m here on behalf of someone who thinks you’re innocent.’

  He gave a little cough. Might have been his version of a laugh. Hard to tell. All the time inside, he’d forgotten how to smile.

  ‘You used to say you were. Innocent, I mean. Always protesting your arrest. And yet never saying a word about how all the evidence managed to damn you so completely. Even now, you’ve never really talked about any of the other victims. Except Justin.’

  He remained silent.

  ‘Someone is willing to believe you. If you are innocent, I’ll find the proof.’

  ‘You put me in here. You and your boss.’

  ‘You helped us.’

  He sat back in his chair, regarded me with dark, shadowed eyes.

  ‘You act like you want to be here. You want to be locked up.’

  ‘It’s better this way,’ he said, finally giving me something.

  ‘You’re sorry for what happened to Justin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the other boys?’

  Silence

  ‘You’re sorry for any mother who has lost their child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then give them peace by telling me where the bodies are.’

  Back to the mime impersonation. Trying to look bored. But I could sense something else, too. An edgier emotion; something crying out to be released, just beneath that placid surface.

  ‘Or tell me why you don’t know. Tell me why you’re innocent. Just … give me something.’

  Was I reading too much into his new act? Buying too readily into Elizabeth Farnham’s story?

  All those years ago, I’d been convinced as to his guilt. But what convinced me was another man’s absolute conviction.


  Was I doing the same, in reverse, with Elizabeth Farnham, allowing her own absolute certainty to affect my judgement?

  ‘Are we done, now?’

  Moorehead had spent ten years stonewalling Project Amityville. Giving them nothing, not even a hint, as to the truth behind those crimes they suspected him of. What would I expect to discover in one morning? One interview?

  All I’d wanted was to look at him, see if there was even a hint of what Elizabeth Farnham said she had seen.

  Just a hint.

  A possibility.

  I wanted to see it, too. Perhaps because hopeless causes had become my personal quest in the last few years. And just once, I’d like a chance to turn someone’s bad fortune around, to redress the balance of injustice in the world.

  The detective in charge of Amityville after Ernie stepped aside was a big guy named Wemyss. He wore plaid shirts, sported a moustache, and had a weakness for mid-morning bacon rolls. Something I took full advantage of when I arranged our meeting in Kirkcaldy, near police HQ.

  We ate at a diner a few streets away from the building, drank strong black coffee. Around us, people who would never imagine the kind of things cops could see during the course of an investigation bitched to each other and their mobiles about bosses and spouses.

  ‘There was another investigator I used to know from Dundee,’ Wemyss told me after taking the first, big bite out of his roll. His teeth were stained with ketchup. ‘Bryson, I think his name was.’

  ‘I took his old business,’ I said. ‘He was looking to get out of the country. Move abroad with his partner.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wemyss. ‘Remember hearing something about that. He got in over his head. Guess that can happen, you don’t have the support of the force behind you.’

  I shrugged. I only knew the guy in passing. Time to get to the reason I was here. ‘I still try not to think about what I saw. At Moorehead’s place.’