Father Confessor (J McNee series) (4 page)

When did Ernie Bright turn from a man whose moral and ethical compasses were sharply set to a crooked cop who took money from known criminals and drank at their houses as though they were old friends?

###

“We learned the hard way, son, that you can’t deal with men like these.”

We were in the Phoenix, a pub on Dundee’s Nethergate that’s become a Dundee institution. The landlord himself was on the bar, had made his usual cracks, asking whether we expected protection money as we walked in the door.

Drinks ordered, we’d grabbed a booth near back of the bar; a small amount of privacy in a public place. The bar was dark, decorated with an appealing eccentricity. The early evening drinks crowd were buzzing pleasantly, even though the pub wasn’t quite at full capacity.

The night, of course, was young.

Ernie had been the one dying for a pint at the end of the shift. I wasn’t going to complain if a DCI wanted to reach into his pocket, and besides, the Phoenix had been, for many years, my spiritual home.

The day had been a bad one. A probable witness to organised criminal activities had been found face down in the river. An apparent suicide; statements taken at the scene confirmed he’d taken a header off the Road Bridge.

But Ernie knew better.

“It’s the way the bastard works,” he told me, the bastard being David Burns. “Deniability in everything. Not just to avoid getting caught, you understand, but so he can salve his conscience.”

Ernie knew this better than anyone. In the late eighties through the mid-nineties, he had been part of a particularly sensitive police operation that worked directly with some of the most powerful men in the Scottish underworld. The project had been doomed to failure, finally hushed up by the men at the top.

Dismissed as a bad idea, or a “fucking failure”, as Ernie once put it after a few pints.

Perhaps it was telling that no-one paid an especially high public price for the fuck-ups that were made during those years.

Ernie had told me about this early on during our relationship. “A copper does what is deemed best for public safety at any time. Sometimes you just have to go out on a limb and trust that the man at the top knows what he’s doing.”

Naïve?

Maybe. But at the same time Ernie was cynical enough to know that the copper who spoke out against the system was the copper who got roasted.

“Times have changed,” he said. “We’re getting better. Accountability is the new watchword. But that doesn’t mean there’ll be another sea-change, that someone won’t sit up and think the public good might be better served through more... grey-area tactics.”

That night in the Phoenix, he was diving right into his pint. The floater’s death had got to him. Not because he particularly cared for the witness. But because he knew that he was fighting a losing battle.

Or that’s what I believed at the time.

“What this country needs,” he said, “is someone to go up against bastards like Burns. Someone with the balls to say, no more. Look at us; we’re hog-tied, you and me.”

I figured he was talking about the fact we had to play by certain rules. Follow evidence chains and ensure our cases followed the guidelines laid down by often archaic and complex Scots law.

But in the months before Ernie’s death, I’d think differently about what he was trying to say.

Wonder if we were hog-tied in different ways.

If, in his own way, he was trying to tell me something. If maybe the pint had been less about winding down and more about trying to get up the courage to admit to some kind of truth.

Or maybe all of that’s just wishful thinking on my part.

And I’ll never know.

Never have the chance to ask him.

###

There were other inconsistencies, too.

Outgoings that made no immediate sense.

Take out all the expected.

The credit cards, mortgage payments, the monthly bills...

Check the one consistency that remained.

The pattern became clear. Irregular but apparent when you knew what you were looking for. Just like the payments from Mulvaney Enterprises.

The payout always came three or four days after a large deposit. The money moving on fast. To a personal account.

Raymond Grant
.

I figured the name for another front, wondering if Burns was somehow using Ernie as another layer to move illegal cash through the system.

Christ, but I felt sick just thinking about what I was looking at.

Not knowing where the money came from.

Or where it was going.

Raymond Grant
.

The name was familiar. Somewhere in the back of my head, I could feel the itch. Like I’d heard of Grant before, maybe in passing.

But I was grasping for any excuse I could find.

The desperation of denial.

I stood up, walked away from the printouts and the glow of my desktop’s screen. I opened the window to let the night air into the office. It had turned dark a few hours earlier, and in the distance I could hear the sounds of the city; the rumble of traffic, the distant sounds of car horns, the echoes of footsteps on the pavements below. Further down the street, I could hear the chatter of smokers gathered on the streets outside pubs.

I closed my eyes.

Lost myself in those sounds.

Anything so I could forget – just for a moment – the implications of what I had uncovered.

###

When I arrived at the flat, I noticed the Yale was snibbed, but the main lock was open. Slipping inside, I found Susan asleep on the sofa. I grabbed a spare blanket from one of the cupboards, draped it over her.

When she woke up, I was sitting across the other side of the room.

She sat up, let the blanket fall away and blinked.

“What time is it?”

“Past one.”

She yawned, lay back down again. “Why are you just sitting there in the dark?”

I didn’t give her a reply.

She didn’t press.

Within a few minutes, the sound of her breathing changed and I knew that she was asleep.

I continued to watch her for a while.

Was surprised when I felt tears drying on my cheeks.

Katie Bright answered the door in a white robe, still rubbing sleep from her eyes. She blinked a few times when she saw me, before suddenly realising who I was and why I was there.

She reached out and wrapped her arms around me. She sobbed, then, and placed her head on my chest. We stood there like that for a long time before she finally pulled back and stood straight, a stance that might have been described as haughty.

She said, “My daughter’s not with you?”

I shook my head.

She said, “So come in, Ja –” before correcting herself, “McNee.”

###

Katie was a few years younger than her husband, but her age was showing around her eyes. Maybe it was the stress of the last year or so. I hadn’t seen her since a few months before she and Ernie split. Even then it had only been in passing. She’d always been kind to me, I remembered, when I used to come round to Ernie’s for drinks and a few pointers in the fine art of applying for transfer to CID.

Katie had a pot of coffee already on. She poured me a cup and we sat in the front room. The flat was on the third floor of a well-maintained block off the Hawkhill, running parallel to the Perth Road. The area spoke of lower middle class money and better-off students.

The windows in the living room were large, let the sunlight stream through. We sat in silence for a while, her on the sofa, me in a comfortable armchair. An observer might have thought us mother and son.

Finally, I said, “When did you find out?”

She said, “Sooty came round. He’s a DS now.”

I nodded.

She said, “You could have been inspector.”

“Maybe.”

“He had high hopes for you.”

“Why did you leave him?”

With absolute determination, she put her tea down on the glass-topped coffee table. Then she sat back and looked at me with eyes that had won a hundred domestic disputes. “You should be with her right now.”

“She’s tough,” I said. “She’s coping.”

Katie shook her head and made a clicking sound with her tongue. “You were always good at dealing with people,” she said. “Ernie says… he said that about you. But he meant it in a professional sense. Like, you could observe how people were with each other, but… But he also said that you could never relate to anyone on a personal level. As though you couldn’t see what was right in front of you.” She had a strange expression on her face, her lips moving as though towards a smile they could never quite reach.

I let her talk.

Not wanting to listen. Knowing she had to say something.

Like her daughter – and her husband – she was tough. But even if she and Ernie had separated, I knew that part of her still had to love him. And that she would be grieving as much as anyone.

But there was part of me didn’t want to hear what she had to say, an impatience tugging at the front of my brain.

An itch. An irritation. I said, “You’re avoiding the question.”

“You already know.”

“David Burns.”

“I thought for a long time Ernie had a wee bit on the side. Maybe a little WPC on her way up, something like that. I think I could have coped with that. Maybe. I mean, it’s what happens, and it can happen to any marriage. It’s not exactly an experience unique to being a copper’s wife.”

She licked her lips. Adjusted her position. Not just uncomfortable in a physical sense. “But when I realised where he was going, the people he was…” She stopped, took a deep breath.

“He didn’t tell you?”

She shook her head. “He was obsessed, you know that? Always has… had been. The first murder he ever worked was tied to Burns and the old bastard just skipped off scot free. I guess Ernie always harboured the hope he’d be the one to bring the big man down.”

“And then he was sent in to work directly with him?”

“I knew about that. Eight years. He hated it. Or that’s what he used to tell me. And he hated himself, too for doing it. For not speaking up. For accepting it as his duty.”

She spat out the last word as though the very taste of it disgusted her. “When he came home at night, he would always take a long shower. Standing under the water for hours at a time. The ceiling paint used to crack with all the steam. I knew what he was doing. Washing any trace of that man away.”

What she told me tied in with what I’d always believed about Ernie Bright. That he was at heart a principled copper, that he’d done some questionable things in the name of the job, but that he had his own personal lines and that he hated himself for ever having had to cross the line.

“You don’t think he…?”

“No,” she said. She stood up. “And you can go to hell for even asking.”

She composed herself, taking a deep breath. Said, “Do you care for my daughter?” as though we hadn’t talked about anything else.

I hesitated. Waiting for a trick, sensing that somehow she wanted to trip me up here.

“Yes.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

Trip.

Crash.

Right over on my arse.

###

Everything in life comes down to the choices you make. Sometimes what you do will have an immediate effect. At other times, you wind up waiting for years see what the consequences will be.

But it’s true. Once you’ve made a choice, you’re lost if you don’t stick with it.

Maybe it’s something in my upbringing. Something in my childhood that made me stubborn and determined, a dog who won’t let go of the stick he’s just run after no matter what.

But something in Katie Bright’s question shook me.

Made me wonder whether I was displacing myself with this investigation, whether I was trying to avoid the reality of the situation.

Susan’s father was dead.

What could I do about that?

What was I trying to achieve by investigating his death?

I sat in my car for a long time thinking about this. People walking past looked at me, maybe wondering what I was doing sitting in this street, not moving, staring straight ahead, my hands not even on the wheel, my lips not even moving as though talking on some hands-free device.

Finally, I moved. Reaching out to my phone and dialling in a number.

Straight to answering machine.

“This is Susan Bright. I can’t answer right now. Leave a message.”

I left a message.

“Call me when you get a chance.”

I think my voice cracked on the last word.

###

Back at the office I started work on a speech I was preparing for an ABI conference later in the year.

Anything to distract myself. I was talking about
Technology and the Modern Eye
, discussing how an investigator needed to adapt and change to a modern world where information was allegedly available to even the most casual of civilian inquiries.

Not that I believed that to be true. In most cases, straightforward use of Google is destined to fail even the most basic of inquiries. Yes, we have the technology to do most of the work that people would have relied upon private contractors to do in decades past, but computers, for all their magic, still require a degree of skill for them to be effective. And that is where investigators can still hold the edge.

I had my central arguments planned, topics laid out and research sitting in folders. But I couldn’t concentrate on the task at hand. Found myself flicking between open windows on the computer, reading and re-reading the same material.

Finding none of it connected in my brain.

Like I was merely scrolling through word-soup.

At half-ten, Susan came up to the office, dressed in jeans and a baggy jumper of mine that she’d recently adopted. It looked good on her. Better than it ever had on me, anyway.

She said, “You called?”

I made her a coffee.

We didn’t say much.

She sat in my leather-backed swivel chair and nursed her mug. Finally: “It sounded important. The reason you called.”

“It was,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“Making this about me. For turning your father’s death into…” I let the sentence hang there.