Cry Uncle

by Russel D. McLean

  But Griggs’s dedication verged on the creep level of a stalker.

  There was something else going on. I’d seen hints over the last few months, but it was more intuition than anything concrete: whatever was between Griggs and Burns, it was clearly personal. And it went back a long way.

  As I came out of the shower, the buzzer screeched. I picked up the handset by the door and said, ‘Yes?’ figuring it was Findo again. Probably another little mission. The old man’s obsession with Nairn was nearly as bad as Griggs’s obsession with the old man himself.

  Burns hadn’t been properly challenged on his home turf in a long time. Maybe he was worried about the idea of new blood on the block. Particularly new blood he couldn’t respect.

  ‘Open up, McNee.’ OK, so it wasn’t Findo after all. Aye, but it was the last person I wanted to see.

  DS Kellen.

  It had been bad enough when I was a straight up investigator, getting hassle from DI Lindsay. But at least me and the former DI had history. Maybe even understood each other to a degree. Since he got invalided behind a desk we’d even come to a kind of mutual understanding, although it would be hard to characterize us as friends.

  But now that he was no longer a threat, I had Kellen on my case. She was a recent transfer from Lothian and Borders, the kind of DS who wanted to prove herself. Ambition ran through her veins. She had decided I was how she would make her mark. The way she saw it, I was the one who got away. A murderer who cheated the system. Back when she first transferred in, a little bird dropped a crumb on her desk implying that I had perverted the course of justice. The little bird had been Griggs. It had been his way of making sure that I towed the line and took his offer seriously. He claimed it was all part of a scheme to make my approaching the old man seem more natural. But he set the ball rolling long before I agreed to work with him.

  The evidence had been quashed as soon as I signed up to Griggs’s scheme. Some behind-the-scenes politicking. But rather than dowsing her interest, it only made Kellen more determined to uncover some deeper level of corruption to my case. She was certain I was using old contacts to bypass the law.

  She believed in truth.

  Reminded me a little of the person I used to be.

  I had the door open when she came up to the third floor. She looked at me and said, ‘Just getting up? No wonder the business closed.’

  ‘It’s temporary,’ I said. The offices still belonged to me, and my secretary was still on pay. The business was being temporarily backed by David Burns. Something that made me sick to my stomach. But both Griggs and I figured it was a necessary evil if we were to retain the old man’s trust.

  ‘Until you can convince the Association of British Investigators to let you back into the fold?’

  Kellen went into the kitchen. The coffee was percolating. She grabbed a mug without asking. Making a statement. She had the power. She had the control.

  She was right, of course.

  ‘You been in Lochee the past few days?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘Just there was a small case of a pub burning down. I’m sure you remember the Crow and Claw.’

  ‘I remember Big Ian Machie.’

  ‘Before my time.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have liked him.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Morally ambiguous. Couldn’t categorize which side of the law he was on. Good man, though.’

  ‘Everyone’s got a side, McNee. Moral ambiguity is an excuse for those who don’t have the stomach for the law.’

  ‘Liberals?’

  ‘The only party I vote for is the one that’s tough on crime.’

  ‘Nice to know you have a flexible attitude to policing.’

  ‘I’m not without compassion.’

  ‘Good to hear.’

  ‘When it’s deserved.’

  ‘Did you just come round here to piss me about?’

  She shook her head. ‘Witness statements place you and Findo Gaske on Lochee High Street prior to the incident.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Oh, indeed. Look, I don’t know what happened to you, McNee. By all accounts you were a good copper and maybe even a decent investigator. But whatever happened, whatever it is that Burns holds over you … there’s no excuse. No excuse for what you’ve become. You will pay the price.’

  ‘You came round to threaten me?’

  ‘To ask you to do the right thing.’

  ‘What if there is no right thing?’

  ‘There always is.’

  ‘That’s the world, then? Black and white? Good and evil?’

  ‘Yes. Shades of grey are for people who prefer excuses. You do a bad thing, there’s no excuse in the world for it.’

  ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘I know you killed a man in cold blood,’ she said. ‘Maybe that could be spun as excusable, given the circumstances.’ She bit at her lower lip as though thinking about what she’d just said. ‘Self-defence? Justifiable force? Your life was threatened, of course. But there’s the matter of the extra weapon. The one you say belonged to the man you murdered. You and I both know that weapon didn’t belong to either man. You deliberately concealed a deadly weapon. You took it with you. You intended to use it on these men.’

  ‘There was no pre-meditation. The dead man dropped a second, concealed weapon. I took the opportunity to defend myself.’

  ‘Tell yourself that. You were heading this way all along, McNee. Everything that’s happened to people around you, everything that happens to you, it’s all your own fault. You brought this shitestorm down on your own head.’

  I’d already reached that conclusion long ago. Made my peace with it.

  ‘Tell me what happened with your fiancé. They never did catch her killer, did they?’

  Maybe it was supposed to blindside me. The man who ran us off the road had never been found. For years I had to live with the fact that I had survived and Elaine had died. That our last words to each other had been terrible, hurtful.

  I used to blame myself. Blame the argument.

  When the truth was that sometimes the world just throws bad things in your path. And you have to deal with them.

  I said, ‘No, they never did find him. And you should be careful, throwing around accusations like that.’

  ‘No one’s accusing anyone of anything.’

  ‘Aye. Right.’

  ‘All I’m saying is that they closed the case, but I’m keeping my eye on you. Your new friends are going to send you down, McNee. Sooner or later we all get what we deserve.’

  ‘We’re done?’

  ‘I’m done.’

  When she was gone, I took the mug she’d been using and threw it against the wall. Watched it shatter.

  ELEVEN

  The fire made the news. STV covering the blaze on the lunchtime bulletins. Live updates from the scene. Either it was a slow news day or someone was using the blaze to gain maximum publicity.

  I could imagine who.

  ‘The fire at the pub has been linked to local gang activity. DS Amanda Kellen of Tayside Police has stated that the Crow and Claw was a known site of local gang activity and had been under police surveillance for some time.’

  Cut to Kellen on the steps of FHQ. Proclaiming to the assembled. I shook my head, cut her off before she had a chance to start. She wouldn’t mention my name. Her talk would be as vague as she could manage. A good soundbite. She, like so many before her, knew how to use the media by giving them nothing, but taking as much as she could from them.

  I grabbed my mobile, stabbed in a number. Waited a few rings before the gruff voice on the other end said, ‘What the fuck d’you want?’

  DI George Lindsay. My former nemesis. Now a desk jockey and hating every minute of it. As he said himself, ‘who the fuck ever locked up the bastard bad guys by pecking away at a bloody keyboard?’

  Our relationship was friendlier than in the past. Which mostly meant that he would talk to me without shouting too
loud. At least that meant we could dispense with opening small talk, get right down to business. I reckon he preferred it that way. ‘Kellen talk to you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I told her what a prick like you does is none of my bastarding business. Gave up trying to understand you a long fucking time ago.’

  ‘Thanks for the vote of confidence.’

  ‘What, we’re friends, now?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Like shite, McNee. I gave you a chance after that business with Ernie. I stood up for you when you sent the Assistant Chief Constable down on corruption charges. But these days … I don’t know what the fuck you’ve got stuffed in that skull instead of brains … but whatever the fuck it is, it’s making you dumber than one of those bastard X Factor contestants.’

  ‘At least you think I can sing.’

  ‘The bollocks who get booted off in two minutes.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I can’t tell you who to hang around with, son. I can’t tell you when you’re being an arsehole.’

  ‘Could have fooled me.’

  ‘Aye, laugh it up. Do the smartarse thing. See if I give a shite. But you’re fucking it up. Big time. Just like your pal, Ernie Bright.’

  They’d respected each other, Lindsay and Ernie. Despite their differences. For him to take the man’s name in vain like that was a kick in the bollocks. Didn’t matter how angry he was at me, I knew it was serious when he brought Ernie into the mix.

  I hung up. No goodbye. No smart-aleck last remark. Just cleared the line.

  I took deep breaths. My head was light, and there was a nauseous feeling in my gut. My hands were shaking. The world bent into the distance. It was an old sensation. As a teenager, I would take panic attacks. Over the years, they had vanished. But then a few years ago, I’d felt the beginnings of those old, helpless sensations reasserting themselves. I’d buried them for a while, but it was like they couldn’t help reminding me that they were in there somewhere, waiting for me to let my guard down.

  I took slow, steady breaths, focussed on them as best I could. Thought about my pulse, let it slow. Picturing the pumping blood as it slowed in my veins. A form of meditation. Nothing I’d been taught formally. Just a coping method. Thinking about nothing except my own physical state. Ignoring the rest of the world.

  Finally, my breathing slowed again. The world snapped back into place. I closed my eyes, took a few more slow and steady breaths. When I was ready, I went through to the living room, sat down in the armchair that faced the front window and looked out at the cold-grey sky. Remembered how Ernie always used to tell me that despite the man’s attitude, George Lindsay was the one truly honest cop you’d ever meet. He was brusque, angry, rude, hated everyone equally. But in some ways that made him more of a believer in equality than the most liberal man you could meet. And, importantly, he genuinely believed in innocent until proven guilty. He believed in the system.

  ‘You can trust him.’

  I never used to believe it. Lindsay and I had run-ins on a regular basis while I was in uniform. Culminating in the day I broke his nose before finally walking off the force. To my mind he had been a bully-boy arsehole. A relic of the old days of policing. And he never did anything to convince me otherwise. He didn’t think he had to. Until the day Ernie Bright died. Until the day he decided that rather than fight me, we could work together.

  Working with me nearly killed Lindsay. Got him attacked by a corrupt cop and left in a coma. But it made me understand what he was willing to sacrifice in the name of Truth.

  So what happened to make our relationship slide so far backwards? Why was he returning to the old ways?

  It wasn’t just being back on the force.

  Secrets.

  Lies.

  I wanted to tell him. To tell someone.

  But I couldn’t.

  What’s the old saying? Damned if you do, damned if you don’t?

  Sometimes there’s nothing like a cliché for getting straight to the point.

  TWELVE

  ‘How it works is easy,’ Findo said. ‘You go in the garden, walk round to the rear window and whistle. Like this.’ He demonstrated. ‘They drop the stash. You’re done.’

  It was a neat system. You paid in advance, you went to the meeting spot, gave the signal. The product technically never changed hands. Anyone arrested you, you said you found it lying around. Didn’t belong to anyone. No, sir. No one.

  It was a small time racket. But clever enough. Nairn was building his customer base. We were here to make a dent in it. We’d already hit a legitimate interest. Now we were showing him that nothing he had was safe.

  So how did Burns plan to take Nairn off the street for good? Did we break his business? Or did we break him?

  It was the kind of question I didn’t really want to answer.

  Burns knew that there were rules to our new-found relationship. I didn’t deal. I didn’t kill. When I told him, he nodded like he understood. And maybe he did. If I’d been overly enthusiastic about the murkier areas of his business, he’d have known something was wrong. As things were, I was behaving exactly as expected.

  ‘But you’ll rough someone up?’

  ‘If they deserve it.’

  ‘Tell me what deserving is?’ As if he didn’t know. He’d seen the kind of men I was willing to drop in the deep end. He knew where my moral compass pointed.

  That hadn’t been an act. Much as I might try to pretend it was.

  Fin got out the car. I followed. Fin had the cricket bat he’d taken from the Crow. He was grinning like a maniac. Some guys get off on strip clubs. Some on adrenaline sports. Some on all kinds of weird sexual shite. But Fin liked violence. I remembered how he was in the warehouse. How, for him, it hadn’t been about the job or even, in the end, about the girls. It had been about hurting people. In an odd kind of way, there was something pure about his attitude. With Findo Gaske, at least you knew what you were getting. No wonder Burns trusted him so much. The lad was easy to read. And loyal, too. You’d rather have him with you than against you.

  We walked round the side of the building. Fin sent me on ahead. The scouting party. The canary down the pit.

  The building was condemned, now. Built in the sixties, it had served its purpose and then quickly become a blight on the cityscape. No one really wanted to live here, and no one wanted to buy it. So it was abandoned. Weeds cracked through the paving stones that ran the exterior, and forced their way into the brickwork of the building. Glass cracked beneath my boots. Dead soldiers. Abandoned works. I pushed long branches out of my way.

  I reached the back of the building. Whistled. Would they realize I was little more than a distraction?

  Ten seconds.

  Twenty.

  A plastic Tesco’s bag dropped by my feet. Plopped from one of the second floor windows. I picked it up, looked inside. ‘The fuck is this?’

  No answer.

  ‘The fuck is this?’ Just in case they didn’t hear me the first time. ‘This is fucking short, man. Fucking! Short!’ Making for outrage. Not exactly Oscar material, but enough to get a response.

  ‘Get to shite, man! That’s the bag.’ The voice muffled from inside the allegedly abandoned building.

  ‘Like yer maw’s arse is this the bag. I want to talk to someone.’

  ‘No fucking deal, man. Get on your bike!’

  ‘Piss off! I talk to someone or …’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or I’m fucking coming back with petrol and matches.’ For good measure: ‘I know my fucking rights!’

  There was silence above. Maybe they were having a debate about whether I posed a serious threat. Whether I was even serious. I waited.

  Then: ‘Back door.’

  Maybe they planned to teach me a lesson. Maybe they really were going to work out a refund or exchange. It didn’t matter. I walked further round the building. Fin saw me, winked from where he was hiding behind the over
grown, sad bushes that lined the edges of the property. I didn’t do anything, just stood in front of the door. It looked heavy, paint faded, porthole glass at eye level shattered.

  I waited.

  The door opened. Two kids in shellsuits and peaked Burberry caps came out. Thought they were gangsters, had the cheap jewellery on their neck to prove it. They were pale, skin pitted with bad acne and eyes sunk into their heads. They blinked in the daylight. Skinny-malinky vampires robbed of their primal threat. One of them sneered at me and tipped his head. ‘The fuck’s your problem?’ Oh yeah, he thought his middle name was Danger.

  I stepped back.

  They stepped out. Into the open.

  Findo came at them from the side. No sound. No battlecry. No warning.

  The bat caught the first kid – the one with the sneer – under the chin, snapping his head back. He didn’t say anything. No noise. Just went down. The second kid did a skipping dance back into the hall. Didn’t even have time to try and close the door before Findo was in, swinging the bat up and between the poor bastard’s bandy wee legs.

  I tried not to wince in sympathy.

  We were in. Up the stairs. Behind us, the kids groaned and rolled and moaned. They weren’t getting up anytime soon. We climbed single file, the hall too small to allow us side by side. Not that it mattered. I was following in Findo’s wake. A small boat in the wake of a larger vessel. A pilot fish behind a whale.

  Two more on the stairs. Findo smacked the first one over the balcony. Only one floor, but once we were done here, I was calling an ambulance. The second took a glancing blow and folded. Findo stepped over him. But the blow didn’t take the wee nyaff completely out of the game, and he tried to get back up. I stomped on his chest, leaned over, grabbed his fringe and smacked the back of his head against the stairs. He didn’t move after that.

  Later, I’d be concerned for him. There and then, I just needed to keep things simple. The direct route.

  We made it into the supply room. Two more in there. Dressed in darker colours. One with a cap, the other with greasy hair combed forward and flat against his skull. The one with the cap dived behind one of the tables where the stashes sat waiting and emerged with a gun. He was shaking, fumbling as he tried to hold it correctly.