Father Confessor (J McNee series)

by Russel D. McLean

  “Your dad’s going to be fine,” I said.

  “Can’t blame him for being terse. Given everything that’s…” she hesitated. We hadn’t really talked about what she did for me. We’d spent months skipping around it. And now it was here, between us.

  Hanging heavy.

  Susan said, “Maybe I should go. Back home. Maybe this, maybe we…” She turned.

  I didn’t even think about it. Just reached out. My fingertips brushing her elbow.

  ###

  “Every time I see you, Mr McNee, it seems like someone has just handed you your arse on a plate.”

  I coughed.

  My chest rattled. I thought something might dislodge, that I was going to cough up some part of me I didn’t recognise but that was vital to my long-term health.

  It didn’t happen.

  “You should invest in some training. I’m the patron of a boxing club in Lochee, if you ever fancied taking a round in the ropes.”

  I pulled in a breath, sat up and swung my legs off the ratty couch. Forcing my eyes to open as I did. The room was poorly lit. Couple of desk lamps. Wooden walls. A desk that had seen better days.

  And behind the desk? The voice that had been talking to me?

  Oh, aye.

  How could it fail to be him?

  Burns ground out his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk. He smiled at me, patiently, as though he’d been hanging around for a long time waiting for a response.

  I said, “Would have been quicker to get me to the hospital.” Not sure how long I’d been here. Or even where here was.

  “How safe would you have been there?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know the prick who attacked you. What he is.”

  “A cop.”

  Burns smiled. Cold. Perfunctory. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen the man smile genuinely. Not in my presence.

  There’s always something else going on behind the façade.

  Maybe because of the life he’s lived. He doesn’t know any other way to be.

  I knew Burns’s story. He’d told me how he’d had to fight and claw for every inch on his way up, and how standard morality looked a lot different where he came from. Maybe all of that explained his past, but it didn’t justify the things he had done in recent years. Maybe he got so used to certain ideals that they no longer seemed wrong to him.

  Some days I believed that he saw himself as a man who did what he did for all the right reasons. In his head, he was the hero of the piece. Maybe he thought of himself like some kind of Robin Hood figure; the naughty man who would be exonerated in the final pages.

  What I knew for a fact about David Burns was that he had learned over the years to push his guilt away. Tuck it up in a deep, dark place where he could pretend it didn’t even exist.

  Maybe I had seen that part of him once before. Just a glimpse, a reminder of his humanity. It had been over a year ago, when he came to me and asked for help finding his god-daughter.

  The same god-daughter who had killed a man.

  The same god-daughter that Susan had lied to protect.

  What did I say about morality?

  What was right sometimes depends on the situation.

  But even that couldn’t justify some of the things that Burns had done.

  Neither of us had spoken for a long time. Like a standoff, both of us daring the other to be the first to say anything. Burns was the one to break through first. He said, “You don’t like me.”

  “I don’t like what you stand for.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know your public face. I know what you think you are. But I’ve seen what happens because of the drugs your boys sell, because of the debts people owe you, because of so many things you do without thinking, without caring.”

  He shook his head. “We’re going to go through this again?”

  “One day you might understand. One day it might penetrate that thick skull of yours. That what you do – what you are – is wrong.”

  If I got through to him at all, he acted like he didn’t notice. He pulled out a packet of cigarettes. Held them out.

  “How are you feeling, by the way?”

  Sore was the answer. My muscles ached. Turn the wrong way, I could feel the fabric of my clothes rub against open wounds, sticking to drying blood.

  I touched my face, gingerly, with my left hand.

  Burns withdrew the offer of the cigarettes.

  I said, “How does it look?”

  “You’ll clean up.” He sparked his own cig. Took a long draw. Looked satisfied as he blew out a dark plume of smoke.

  My right hand was throbbing. Another old wound. Two years earlier, someone had stomped on my hands, broken those small bones. The doctors had told me I’d never regain a full range of motion. It got worse in the winter months.

  On a small table beside the sofa where I’d been lying, there was a glass of water and two pills. I looked at them.

  “Painkillers. Just codeine.” Burns tapped ash from his cig into the ashtray. “I may take advantage of others’ weakness, but I could never condone the use of drugs myself. Not for myself. Or anyone who works for me.”

  “I don’t work for you.”

  He nodded.

  I said, “But Ernie Bright did.” The words had to be forced out. Like even saying them was an admission of a sickening truth that tainted every good memory I associated with the man.

  Burns made a clucking sound. A mother hen impersonation. “Still harping on that, McNee? You don’t get it, do you? He didn’t work for me. We were… friends.”

  “He was a cop. A good one.”

  Burns shrugged. “Keep telling yourself that. The world isn’t black and white, and I don’t know how long you can keep fooling yourself that it is. That you’re the good guy and I’m the bad one and that’s all there is to it. Christ, I expected more of you, son.” He finally stubbed out his cigarette. “I know Ernie’s history. About the bad old days. How he was supposed to get close to me so the force could use my contacts. The idea back then being if you let certain big guns do what they want, the criminal world will police itself. Not that I appreciate the description, criminal.”

  “What would you prefer?”

  “I’m a businessman. I supply services for which there is a demand. And don’t go getting all high and bastarding mighty with me, either. You know the truths out there. Better than you care to admit.”

  My body was shaking now. I couldn’t hold out much longer, grabbed up the pills and the water. Nearly choked them back up as soon as they were down.

  “You’re lucky my man found you,” Burns said. “Or else you’d have ended up like the Detective Inspector.”

  “You mean that was an attempt to save me?”

  Burns looked at me for a moment with the kind of expression normally reserved for the terminally idiotic.

  “You don’t think Constable Anderson was working for me, do you?”

  “It’s not like you don’t have a history of corrupting coppers.”

  He laughed, then. Long and hard. Best gag anyone had told him in a long time. I worried he might choke. Okay, so worried was the wrong word. More like… hoped.

  When he calmed down, Burns said, “If I wanted you dead, McNee, that’s where you’d be. Don’t you realise by now… I like you. We have a connection, you and I.”

  Aye, he’d said as much before.

  The idea still made me feel nauseous.

  Burns continued, “I like you, despite what you say about me, what you think of what I do. Because you don’t want to understand. Because you’re frightened. So you take the moral high ground where I’m concerned. And that’s fine. But I need you to understand, we share the same concerns. For example, your friend…”

  I cut in, “Lindsay’s not my friend.”

  “You’ve been pretty bloody pally the last few days.”

  “Necessity.”

  “I thought the incident between you was maybe forgotten.”


  “Laid aside.”

  Burns shook his head. “Is there anyone in this world you like, McNee? I’m surprised you have any friends at all. But how bloody magnanimous to work alongside a man you loathe. Professionalism. Nothing like it. You know Ernie was a professional. That’s what was killing him. We were friends and he was still a copper. I sometimes wonder if that’s why his wife left him.”

  I ignored the last sentence. It was deliberate jab; an attempt to wind me up. I had to keep myself in check around Burns. He was looking for a weak spot. I wasn’t sure why, but it was all part of the games men like him play.

  “In your case, there are no grey areas. I know you and Ernie grew up in the same circumstances, that you knew each other, however distantly, at school. And maybe that’s why he was conflicted. But in the end, you made him more than conflicted. You compromised him completely. Men like you have no grey areas.”

  “Aye, that’s it,” said Burns. “I’m the bad guy. The black fucking hat. The villain with the sneer. Maybe I should grow a moustache so I could twirl it in public and let everyone know how bloody devious I am.”

  I said nothing. Still trying to figure why I was here. And where I was.

  The office was sparsely decorated. Nothing on the walls. The desk itself was mostly bare except for the ashtray and Burns’s smartphone. Aye, of course he needed one of those, being a “businessman” and all.

  “You want to know what you’re doing here,” said Burns. “Aye, well, you’ve been given a wee brain shake there, so I guess I can forgive you for being slow on the uptake.” He opened a drawer in the desk, pulled out a bottle of Grouse and two glasses. Grinned. “I thought the old soak would have something lying around. Hair of the dog and all.”

  I didn’t ask the obvious question. He answered it anyway.

  “Place belonged to a man who got in over his head. Oh, don’t kid yourself, get on the fucking moral high horse. He knew what he was doing. It’s not like I’m trolling the sheltered housing looking for the mentally retarded.” As he spoke, he poured two glasses. When he was done, he pushed one of them across the desk towards me.

  I kept quiet.

  He’d get to the point in his own good time. Burns had an ego. Liked it to be massaged. One of the reasons why he surrounded himself with a certain type of thug. He was all about appearances and perceptions. Sure, he didn’t care who did the dirty work, but he did give a toss about who he was seen with, how he was perceived by other people.

  Why he liked to talk. Self-justification. Making sure other people see him the way he saw himself. I’d learned over the years that if you listened closely to what he said, sometimes you heard more than he wanted you to.

  That was the problem with the ego. In the end, it was unconcerned with privacy.

  “The man who owned this place was a gambler. Knew the risks. Liked them, in fact. The fear of losing, he got off on it. He was a junkie for risk. Just a pity he didn’t like the reality of loss, that final, inevitable moment when the risk becomes real, when you finally have to pay. Poor bugger killed himself a couple of weeks ago. Sad incident. Plastic bag over the head and…” He pointed to the roof. “See that support beam, he wound up swinging from there. Electrical cord.”

  “And he left this place to you? He was a relative? A good friend?”

  “He owed me this place. And all the money tied up here, too. It was a shame what happened, but...” He took a slug of the Grouse. Said, “But you don’t care about some sadsack shitebag. You want to know about Cal Anderson.”

  “You said he’s not one of yours.”

  “No, he’s not. Matter of fact, he’s working for a consortium of powerful men who would be perfectly happy if I were to suffer some kind of accident. Preferably the kind of accident that killed Ernie. You know, where at its very best it becomes death by misadventure.”

  “What do you know about Ernie’s death?”

  “I know that no-one who worked for me was involved. I also know that someone wanted Ernie’s connection to me to become public knowledge. That they wanted men like you to be looking very closely at my connection to your precious Detective Inspector.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a good question.”

  “Do you have an answer?”

  Burns took another slug of his whisky. Pushed the other glass further across the table towards me. The gesture almost insistent. No-one likes to drink alone.

  Which was why I ignored it.

  Burns said, “We’ve been here before, but I hope you’ll realise the opportunity I’m offering you. I was hoping to retain your services.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “We’ve already had this discussion.”

  “And even you can’t be so bloody pig-headed to deny that we could have avoided a lot of trouble by working together in the past.”

  “Is this how you got Ernie? Sweet talk? Made him doubt himself? The choices he’d made?”

  “I won’t deny the man was conflicted,” Burns said. “But the old bugger was never compromised. Not by me. Not like you think. I’ve told you before, sometimes you look at things the wrong way.”

  I thought about when I saw Ernie at Burns’s house. Just over a year earlier, the image still burned in my memory as though it was only a few hours ago: my mentor standing in this gangster’s back yard dressed in white chinos and holding a glass of wine like it was any other dinner party with any other middle class, middle-aged friend.

  The shock was a brick to the back of the head. Worse than any beating I’d taken.

  Betrayal is something that doesn’t leave. The scars may not be visible, but they linger, and soon enough you’re the only person aware of them. And you know that they won’t ever leave no matter how much you try to ignore them.

  Ernie had betrayed me. Betrayed his job. Betrayed the man I had believed him to be.

  Was that his fault? Had I placed too much expectation on him?

  I’d always believed Ernie Bright to be the model copper. The absolute ideal. I had held him to high, maybe even impossible standards.

  Why? Because he had believed in me? More than that, but it was a good starting place. It was Ernie who’d got me the CID gig in the first place. He’d helped me out of uniform and onto the fast track.

  “You’re a natural detective,” he’d told me once. “Too idealistic, aye. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.”

  Had he been trying to tell me something?

  Burns brought me out of my memories. “The last few months, Ernie told me he couldn’t take it any more, that he had to maintain a distance. That he was going to come after me hard if I dared step out of line. I think that was because you found out that he was…” Burns paused for a moment. Poured himself another whisky. Didn’t offer me anything this time. As he screwed the lid back on the bottle, he finally seemed to have found the word he was searching for, “… fraternising. It’s the old cliché, McNee. Me and him, under other circumstances, we might have been friends. We’re the same age. We come from the same place. Grew up in the same streets.”

  “What made him different to you?”

  “Luck.” Burns shrugged. “What makes anyone different from anyone else? Christ, McNee, human beings are the most unpredictable creatures on the planet. Psychologists claim to know so much about what makes us tick but the truth is all they know is shite.”

  There was something we could agree on, at least. Some common ground. But still I had to wonder if he was telling me what I wanted to hear, playing some kind of game. My paranoia was on full tilt, and I wasn’t sure if it was because I was still groggy after the beating or I was sensing a real deception on the part of this old man.

  I said, “Who would want to frame him?”

  “For one? That bastard who tried to kill you –”

  “We don’t know that –”

  “He was trying to kill you.” Burns spoke with a finality on the matter.

  I realised that I hadn’t asked what happened to Cal Anderson. The
implication was that one of Burns’s boys had saved me.

  The question was how?

  Burns was a man who believed that old cliché of fighting fire with fire. Sean Connery in The Untouchables: You send one of his men to the hospital, he sends one of yours to the morgue. And in a strange way, I knew that Burns considered me one of his men.

  He’d said it before, that he saw something of himself in me. I’d always thought of the statement as a kind of manipulation, trying to appeal to my ego. But I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t telling the truth. I’m not sure what frightened me more. The idea of his admiration. Or the idea that I deserved it.

  “He was trying to kill you,” Burns said. “Because you were close to the truth. You and Detective Inspector Lindsay.” He waited for a second, as though expecting me to fill the silence. I didn’t oblige, so he continued: “Your man Lindsay had three names. All under investigation themselves. All of them beat constables.”

  I gave him that one. “And not one of them looking at promotion,” I said.

  “And not one of them connected to Bright.”

  “Someone wanted him out of the way?”

  “There’s that brain,” said Burns. “I always said you were a bright lad.”

  “Do you know who it is?”

  “I have my suspicions.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  “It would be easy to let myself get caught up in this. To rise to the bait. Because whoever’s behind this, they’re going to be coming after me. That’s why they made it look like Ernie Bright was guilty. But trust me, I couldn’t have pushed him into dealing or holding or anything like that.

  You have to know that men have limits. And Ernie made his clear.”

  He sounded paranoid. Desperate. A catch in his voice I’d never heard before. He had always seemed so self-assured and absolutely confident in his own actions.

  I figured there was something he wasn’t telling me.

  Something he already knew.

  Men like Burns never tell anyone the whole truth.

  “I’m asking you to do what you do best, McNee. Gather the evidence. Find the man responsible.”