I thought about the woman who had walked into my office. Trying so hard to be attractive. Dolled up. Trying to retain the illusion of sexuality.
And I thought about the hardness I had seen behind her eyes. Realised there had been a cruelty there, too. Something I should have seen.
And I had to wonder whether my refusal to see that side of her hadn’t been deliberate.
“So I say good riddance to her,” Burns said. “Maybe she didn’t deserve to go like that, but a person can only push their luck so long, eh?”
I felt sick.
Said, “You keep asking what any of this has to do with me. It goes beyond my client, now. Last night I had a couple of visitors. Cockney hard bastards. They threatened me. They shot my friend.”
“I’m sorry.” My own words, my mantra, echoed back at me. With no conviction.
“He’ll live.” And, I thought, not that you care. “They said it was a warning.”
“I’m sorry about your friend. And I’m sorry about your… situation. But I don’t know why you’re here.”
“You knew Egg. Maybe you know where these men are. Maybe you can talk to them. Tell them that I don’t know anything. That my client doesn’t know anything.”
“Even if I knew where they were, why should I care?”
“Because Dundee’s your city. You’re proud to be a native son. A man who chose to stay here. Make his life here. And then these bastards come up, start spilling blood on your streets and in your property. You said the police were talking to you, and I know that you’re a respectable businessman these days. So that has to sting a little, to know these pricks are jeopardising your good name.”
Burns blew on his coffee. I saw the ripples over the lip of the mug, thought of the Tay on the darkest of nights, hiding secrets in its depths. “If I knew these pricks,” he said. “Maybe I’d have a word with them.” He set down his mug on the table. “But these days, as you said, I’m nothing more than a businessman. A humble landlord. I rent flats, I have a hand in a few pubs. All above board. I live a simpler life these days. I made my money. Paid the bloody piper. And now I just want to live here in peace. With my family. My wife. My daughter and her new husband down the street. Grandchildren coming round to see the old man. Hoping I’ll have sweeties hidden in a drawer for them. Knowing I’ve got them. The past is the past, Mr McNee. Now I’m just a family man.”
Warmed over shite. Burns was still hip deep in illegal activities. All that had changed was he had become the man giving the orders instead of taking them. He had amassed a degree of deniability.
I stood up. “Think about it,” I said. “You told me that Egg loved his wife. That he never blamed her before no matter who she slept with. But if she’s dead on his say-so, then you know that there’s going to be more blood spilt up here. And the way these fucks seem to operate, it’s all going to be on your doorstep.”
Burns smiled, cocky and confident. “That is if your wee cock and bull theory is anywhere near the truth,” he said. “And if these hard cunts know my friend. And if he asked them to kill her.”
I left it at that, saw myself out. On the street outside, I turned back to look at his house, a semi-detached ex-council property with a small front garden. It was everything Burns wanted. A veneer of respectability, the working class man done good. Even on the inside, the place was all appearance. What you saw was exactly what he wanted you to see.
Except the lie was transparent.
Chapter 25
Rachel called, asked me to meet her.
I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice.
The rain was gentle, barely noticeable. It thickened the atmosphere a little, but you only noticed it when you stood still long enough for a thin film of liquid to gather on your skin.
I came in through the east entrance, walked between the gravestones. Looked up to where the Balgay hill rolled into the graveyard. At the top of the hill, the western necropolis lurked beneath a cover of thick trees. The older graves were wild and overgrown and the world at the top of the hill seemed separate and alien compared to the uniformed regimentation of the headstones in the newer plots below.
Rachel was dressed in a heavy overcoat and carried a black umbrella. She looked up as I arrived, smiled in greeting. No emotional weight behind the expression.
I stopped where I was. Realised I would look as though I was afraid.
Maybe I was.
Rachel came to me, instead. “Last time we were here, the weather wasn’t much better.”
“Maybe that says something.”
“Maybe.” She shivered slightly. “You look ill, McNee.”
“Tired, maybe.”
“That’s it.”
“It’s work.”
“It’s always work.”
“All work and no play…”
“Makes Ja—”
I shook my head. She caught the gesture, stopped talking, But it seemed to amuse her all the same.
The moment was lost, however, when she turned to look behind her. Back at the grave where she had been standing before I arrived.
“Do you ever come here?”
I didn’t know how to respond. She took that as my best answer.
“Jesus, McNee… Do you think you’ll let yourself get over it? I’ve been up a few times. Just to come here. Talk to her, let her know how we’re doing. I think about calling you, but I think you’ll call when you’re ready.”
“What made it different this time?”
“It was her birthday. There was this gap at the table and we were all there and none of us knew what to say. And I guess I realised you were the last connection we have to her.”
“Try telling your dad.”
“Try talking to him.”
I took a step away from her.
“You don’t talk to me. You don’t talk to her. No wonder you’re walking around looking like someone’s dropped the whole bloody world on your shoulders.”
“It’s not…”
“Tell me, who do you talk to?”
I couldn’t think of a way to avoid the question.
Rachel didn’t even give me a chance. “You and Susan were good friends. But the way she talked to you… like you didn’t even know each other any more.”
“I guess we drifted…”
“And there was something else, as well,” she said. Her brow had furrowed gently. “Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
My throat was dry. I knew that even if I tried to speak, I wouldn’t be able to say anything. My heart pumped hard. Fight or flight, they call it. In my case: all flight.
“That was…”
“Only natural.”
It took me a moment to say, “What?”
“I saw it between you, whatever this thing was. I don’t know if anything happened, or if it did, but I know… I know Elaine knew you were close, the two of you. And she didn’t mind because she knew that you loved her. She was secure in that.”
I didn’t think I gave anything away, but Rachel saw something in my face. Her own features softened for a moment. “I know why you don’t want to move on, McNee. But one way or another you have to do it. You can’t just isolate yourself from everyone.”
She looked up at the grey skies. “You know, I’m not even going to ask that you keep in touch. If you want to, that’s what you’ll do. But you need to find something in your life outside of this thing that you do. Because if that’s all you are, an investigator, if that’s all that defines you, then it might as well have been you who died in the crash.”
Chapter 26
Back at the office, in reception, I stared at the dark stain on the wooden floor. Bill’s blood.
Liman and Ayer’s calling card.
I tried to look away, found it impossible. The more I looked at it, the more I felt that familiar anger building up inside my chest.
I thought about their blood spilling out on some anonymous floor. Their faces twisted in agony. Hearts slowing. Breath coming in gasps. Frantic a
nd painful and finally useless.
How good would it feel to see that? The fear in their eyes. Finally understanding how their victims felt.
I moved through to my own office. Dialled Robertson’s mobile. Left a message.
With nothing else to do, I waited. The radio played for company.
“It’s three-thirty in the afternoon, and here’s the latest news and weather with Tay FM!”
I thought about those Cockney bastards. And a woman dying alone; in pain with no one to help her.
“Earlier this afternoon, police were called to a house in the west end of Dundee following reports of gunfire. Officers have yet to confirm that two men were found dead at the detached house on…”
I started listening. They mentioned a street. I had been there earlier in the day. Details were thin on the ground, but they repeated that there had been gunfire and that at least two men were dead.
I would have hoped the two men were Liman and Ayer, but my luck wasn’t that good. And they weren’t the kind to go down so easy.
I grabbed my mobile.
Susan didn’t answer.
I swore and hung up.
The house seemed empty. A hollowed out shell. No longer the proud home I had visited that morning. If it were possible, the building seemed to be in mourning.
The police were long gone. The only remaining evidence of their presence was ragged crime scene tape and the grass out front which had been trampled while they set up a command post.
There was a light visible inside the house. It was lonely and fragile.
I walked up the garden, knocked on the front door.
The woman who answered was in her late sixties or early seventies. Her face was pale and her eyes bloodshot. Her dark grey hair was wild. The pain on her face was open and unguarded.
Burns had told me that Katrina Egg did not love her husband.
The woman before me was being eaten up by her love for Burns. A deep, unselfish concern for the man.
I thought: what does she see in him?
“Mrs Burns, my name is McNee…”
“I’m no talking to anyone.” Trying her best to sound confident and assured. Drawing herself upright. “No the newspapers.”
“I’m not a journalist.”
“The coppers already talked to—”
“I’m a private investigator. I knew your husband a little.”
She regarded me with a deep suspicion.
“I heard about what happened on the radio.”
“Then you’ll appreciate when I tell you that this is not the best time—”
“I talked to him this morning. I think that… Please, I need to know what happened.”
Tears gathered in her eyes. But she maintained her strength and said, “Then talk to him if you have to talk to any bastard. It’s his business that did this to him. And I’m having nothing more to do with any of you shites.” She stepped back and closed the door.
Gently.
But it felt like she’d slammed it.
Chapter 27
Robertson called me back. He sounded weary.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“They won’t stop until they get what they want,” I told him.
“They killed my brother.”
I was on the street outside Burns’s house. The single light seemed to stare at me, like a baleful eye. I tried to ignore it, turning my back to the building and looking pointedly at the far end of the street.
And I thought that Robertson was wrong. Liman and Ayer weren’t responsible for Daniel’s death. They hadn’t been aware of what had happened to their ex-partner.
But Robertson was scared, angry and in mourning. I let the accusation slip away and arranged to meet him somewhere he considered safe.
On the Fife side of the Tay, there was a picnic spot on the east side of the bridge. Not much to look at, but the views across the river were beautiful and on a summer’s day, families and couples stopped to admire the view and eat their lunch.
Now, with the tourist season over and the days beginning to cool, the park was empty. I didn’t have to look hard to find Robertson. He sat at one of the picnic benches. Despite the bright, crisp sunlight, he seemed hidden in shadow.
I locked up the car, walked over to the bench and took a seat next to him. He didn’t look at me. Kept his gaze fixed on the water and the city beyond.
“Its all ashes,” he said. “Everything I worked for. Everything I had.” He spoke in a flat monotone. “My wife and son are gone. My parents are dead. My brother is a suicide and now…” He turned to look at me, his normally ruddy complexion gone white and his eyes sunk back in his head; bloodshot through lack of sleep. “Christ, they came to my house. Burnt the place down. I spent the night in my car. Parked on the side of the road and dreaming of fire. And monsters. Haven’t had nightmares like that since I was a bairn. But it was just a warning, wasn’t it? The fire I mean. Their way of telling me that this isn’t a joke to them.” He looked at me and I could see the desperate panic in his eyes. “We have to give them what they want.”
Asking for my help. He couldn’t do this alone.
“They came to me,” I said. “Told me that I was to find you. If I didn’t, they’d kill me.” I didn’t tell him about Bill. He didn’t need to know.
He said, “I didn’t ask for this.”
“No one does.”
When I walked away from Lindsay, I had done so for reasons that had seemed transparent at the time. An unidentifiable anger had been enough, it seemed. But I realised now that I had walked away because I knew he could help me.
When all’s said and done, you have to help yourself.
They were after me as much as Robertson, these bastards. It would have been easy to place the responsibility onto his shoulders. Say that this was his problem. His brother. His family.
His problem.
Not mine.
It would have been easy.
And it would have been wrong.
“We don’t have Gordon Egg’s money,” I told him. Deliberately using the word, “we”. Unsure whether it was for his benefit or mine. “That’s the problem here. If we did, we’d just hand it over, watch them walk away.”
Was it really that simple? Or was I just giving him reassurances?
Whatever, I can’t say that the platitudes took much of the burden from his shoulders.
“Aye,” he said. “Although… I’ve no been exactly honest with you. And maybe I should…” He ran his hands across his bald head, as though trying to smooth down the hair he once had. “Jesus… I know where it is. The money.” He turned away again, looked at the water. His hands clasped together in front of his expansive stomach, his fingers intertwining like fleshy worms. “I didn’t tell you the truth. About Daniel. When I said I hadn’t seen him until I found his body, that wasn’t true. He came to see me earlier that night. I didn’t realise it then, but I think he was trying to say goodbye. And I should have said something, but…”
Robertson’s gaze remained fixed on the river, despite the blinding sunlight that bounced back off the silver of the water.
He took a deep breath. As he told me about the night his brother came back into his life, appearing on the doorstep like an apparition from the past, crows cried out as they circled in the sky above. Their song sounded like mocking laughter.
Chapter 28
Robertson told me the story slowly. Stumbling over words. Reluctant to let the truth out.
He said that he’d come to me, not out of idle curiosity, but out of fear. Knowing his brother was into something bad and wanting someone who could give him more information. Help him understand not only who his brother had been but why he had to take his own life.
Robertson had held back before. Not wanting to admit the truth because it scared him. Because he was afraid that somehow, just by seeing his brother for those last moments, he was responsible.
That’s what he said.
On the afternoon his brother came h
ome, James Robertson had been in his front room, drinking a large Glenfiddich. He’d attended a hunt earlier in the day, tramping through undergrowth in the countryside surrounding Perth. His companions a mix of lawyers and landowners.
The whisky was opened as soon as he arrived back home. He drank alone in a house that had never felt so empty in all the fifty-seven years of his life.
When the knock came, it toppled Robertson from his chair. He’d been slipping into sleep and the sudden noise woke him. He steadied himself and grabbed the glass from where it lay on the floor. He walked through the kitchen and out to the front door.
“To see him standing there,” Robertson told me, “even after all these years, and looking so different from me, it was a shock. Like looking into one of those funny mirrors you get at the Lammas Market. Seeing yourself, only something’s not quite right. I didn’t know what to say. And I don’t know that he did either. We just stood there. Like bloody lemons.”
Daniel was the one who finally broke the stand-off, pushing past his brother and into the house with a brusqueness that verged on violence. Robertson followed the other man into the living room. But he almost turned and ran when he saw Daniel’s coattails lift, revealing a momentary glimpse of a hunting knife tucked in his belt.
Daniel didn’t bother with any of the reunion talk. He placed the briefcase he was carrying onto the coffee table and opened it.
The contents of the case made Robertson think he was having a drunk dream. Bundles of money sat snugly bunched together. There was more cash in the case than he would ever have hoped to see in his lifetime.
Robertson’s heart hammered against his rib cage so hard he thought it would burst. The sweat poured off him and soaked into his shirt. He flopped into a chair and sat there, staring at his brother and the briefcase.
“I want you to have it,” Daniel said. His Scots accent had been corrupted by his years in London. “The money. All of it.”
“And if I don’t?”
Daniel shrugged. No big deal. As though, in his world, people got offered cases of cash in their front rooms every day. “Then get rid of it.”
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