The Inheritance

by Gabriel Bergmoser

  And that, he had told himself for a long time, was his main reason for finally saying yes.

  For the first few months, the certainty that they had done the wrong thing lingered. Every knock at the door, every ring of the phone, every tap on the shoulder – there was always the lurch in the gut that said you’ve been found out; it’s over.

  But it wasn’t, and as time went on the needling discomfort faded away. The monthly payments in exchange for updates that rarely had anything of substance kept coming in. To be fair, what came from Rook was usually just as innocuous, but every now and then he would live up to his word and give them gold.

  And so they rose through the ranks. Their superiors were impressed with the information they found, and the genius deductions that might bring down a drug dealer or standover man. Before long they were given their pick of where they wanted to advance to.

  Eric quickly landed on a murder squad. Jack almost rolled his eyes when he heard. Of course Eric would go for the showiest, most impressive-sounding job. But then he was good at it and he had the right steely constitution to walk through those kicked-in doors and face nightmares. Jack was almost willing to set his watch by the growth of Eric’s legend, and sure enough he was soon the star of the department, something helped in no small part by his brand of intense charisma and chiselled good looks.

  ‘They’re exaggerating,’ Eric told Jack and Harrison over drinks one night. ‘My solve rate isn’t any better than anyone else’s. Honestly, half the time cops are like little kids who just want a hero.’

  Murder detectives could be like that: despite what they dealt with, there was something more black-and-white in their way of thinking, a lack of moral ambiguity when you were trying to track down the perpetrators of horrors you saw first-hand.

  Jack had half-expected Harrison to tail Eric, but maybe he was sick of being overshadowed. Instead, he joined the drug squad, which, Jack initially thought, had done wonders for his disposition. In the academy days and afterwards, Harrison had been like an overgrown child, never taking much very seriously. And while the smiles and the jokes returned in the pub after a few drinks, whenever Jack saw him around the station, he seemed to be ageing at double speed. That perception wasn’t only due to the new lines on his face or the way his hair got shorter and neater by the week, but the way he held himself. Once, Harrison had stumbled along, wide-eyed and grinning, always with the slight impression of a kid struggling to fit in among the grown-ups. Not so anymore. He would stride at the head of his pack, serious and direct and with that slight weariness to everything he said and did. Jack understood. The drug squad was tough. For every bad guy who went down, you’d have to lean on some poor teenager or struggling parent who had turned to a little gear to keep their head above water. Whatever Eric said about heroes, Jack – and Harrison – knew that there were none in the drug squad.

  Jack had been uncertain about what would suit him, but a few drinks with McDonagh, a grizzled and gruff older cop who hated everyone but seemed to hate Jack marginally less, led him to undercover. At first Jack had been unsure about it but soon found that whether he liked it or not, he was too good at it to waste his talents. The qualities that made people uncomfortable around Jack were perfectly suited to looking and acting like your average criminal piece of shit, and so that was what he did. He could think on his feet and, when he needed to, talk fast and sound convincing. And for the most part his job was observation. It wasn’t easy but Jack couldn’t deny that there was something to that fear of being caught – so similar to his initial worries after the deal with Rook – but when you were unquestionably on the right side of it, it became almost intoxicating. A rush that left you trembling and grinning and ready to go again.

  Over time, buried in their work and the individual complexities of it, Jack, Harrison and Eric drifted apart. Every now and then came a polite dinner, but there was an unspoken sense that it was best for all of them if they didn’t appear too close, if they lived their lives and did what they had to do and never strayed too far into each other’s orbit. When Jack’s daughter was born – an accident after a slightly-too-long fling with a flighty local bartender – he only received a congratulatory phone call from Harrison and a card from Eric, which suited him just fine.

  Like everyone, Jack heard the rumours that Eric had become obsessed with one case in particular, a string of murders that the department was divided on. Some thought the similarities in the locations they were dumped and the wounds connected them. Others thought the connections were tenuous at best. The idea of a serial killer seemed like wishful thinking on the part of a young detective in search of some excitement. Without knowing much about the case, Jack had fallen vaguely into the latter camp, which was why he was as surprised as anyone when Terrence Adams, a drug dealer he’d once met at some deadbeat’s party, turned out to be the perp. There were some whispers about what exactly had gone down between Eric and the murdering prick, but in the end, nobody was mourning Adams, and Eric, once again, was the hero cop.

  But at his celebration drinks, he didn’t look like one. He was drawn, his cheeks pinched and his eyes ringed dark. He barely said anything when he was asked to give a speech. He gave a curt thanks and went back to join his wife, a slim, pretty woman nursing a baby. Jack didn’t know either of their names. He didn’t remember if he’d ever been told.

  ‘It’ll take him some time,’ Harrison said, when Jack found him later.

  ‘Has he had to drop someone before?’ Jack asked.

  Harrison nodded. ‘But always clean. By the book. You know, body shot. Adams got his gun off him. Eric found a bottle.’

  And Adams had died. Jack looked through the chatting crowd to where Eric sat. His wife was whispering to him, but he didn’t seem to hear whatever she was saying. He was nodding but his eyes were empty.

  Harrison and Jack had gone out for a smoke when they saw Eric and his family leaving. Eric had paused, then told his wife to go on to the car. Hands in pockets, breathing mist, he joined them. Jack passed him a cigarette and was surprised when Eric accepted it. He’d never smoked before.

  The pleasant smell of tobacco filled the cold night air, along with the buzz of voices from inside. None of them spoke.

  ‘Fucked-up world, isn’t it?’ Eric said.

  He was slurring slightly, Jack noticed. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Eric drunk before.

  ‘But we do what we can,’ Harrison replied.

  Eric nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, we do.’

  A hollow smile, then he ground out his cigarette, shook their hands and walked into the night.

  It was the last time they would all be together as friends.

  The first time Jack had encountered members of the Scorpions while undercover, he’d been worried. Enough to go to Rook about it.

  ‘They don’t know you, mate,’ Rook assured him. ‘I’m the only one who does. Just treat them like you would any other crooks.’

  But the Scorpions weren’t any other crooks. Jack now realised that he would be put in a very tricky position if he saw one of them do something bad.

  Luckily, for the most part the Scorpions just seemed to be there. Hired muscle to protect paranoid dealers at potentially dangerous meets. Their very presence seemed to be enough to dissuade attacks or ambushes, which was a good thing. If nobody gave them a reason to attack, Jack didn’t have a reason to step in.

  Jig Matthews, a small-time dealer who thought he was Escobar, liked using the Scorpions a lot. Jack even got to know the two regulars by name as they hung around Matthews like a couple of scowling sentinels – Mo and Rhys. When Matthews held court in his smoke-filled house, they’d stand on either side of him, probably loving having to do fuck-all for good money.

  At the time, Jack was posing as one of Matthews’ lackeys. He’d seen enough to get a conviction, but the department was pushing for something stronger. They knew Matthews had killed at least one person, and without spelling it out had suggested to Jack that they wanted to catch him in t
he act to make sure he never got out.

  One night Tim Leighton, a weedy man pushing forty, arrived at the house. He was stumbling over excuses, but Jig, sitting in his armchair, his mostly bald head slick with sweat and his chins wobbling with every fake laugh, wasn’t having it.

  ‘My gear is my gear,’ he said, somewhat pointlessly. ‘You lose my gear, you replace my gear, or you replace what it’s worth, with interest.’

  ‘It wasn’t me who lost it!’ Tim said. ‘I told Nils not to bring it round, I told him my girl wasn’t having it, and he—’

  ‘You blaming your missus now?’

  ‘No!’ Tim said. ‘No, it was Nils, it was—’

  ‘Blaming Nils, then?’

  This went on for a while. Jack half-listened but wanted to get home. He’d come up with an excuse to be away for a few days starting tomorrow – a few days in which he had custody of his daughter.

  Finally, they seemed to reach an accord. Matthews told Tim to get out. Jack was about to ask if he could take off, when he noticed the slight nod Matthews gave to the bikies. As one, they slipped out of the house.

  It was just a nod. It could have meant anything. But covertly returning to the station that night, he’d checked Tim Leighton’s record. A wife and two young kids.

  He’d sat there in front of the wheezing computer, trying to think. He was off the clock. It was just a nod. He had nothing actionable. The Scorpions were protection, not killers.

  But still he drove to Leighton’s house. It was well past midnight when he arrived. The place was small, surrounded by a sagging fence and overgrown grass.

  He walked through the weeds and scattered toys to the front door.

  He stopped. It was already open.

  They’d been thorough and efficient. There was no way to link the bullets dug out of the bodies to any known criminal. No fingerprints, no DNA, no witnesses. That the deaths of the Leighton family were linked to organised crime was a given, but before long they were just four more names on the endless list of gang violence casualties.

  When Jack slept, the nod appeared unbidden in his dreams. Awake, he’d see it everywhere: between friends, customers and staff at bars, parents and children.

  He considered turning himself in. Maybe that would end the guilt that tore apart his insides and turned his sleep fractured and full of nightmares. But there would be no point. He couldn’t prove a nod meant murder any more than he could prove the Scorpions had been at the Leightons’ that night. If he relayed the nod to his superiors, then at best they might secure a warrant to haul in Matthews for questioning. But that would blow Jack’s cover, make him a target for Rook and likely go nowhere.

  At one point, he tried to convince himself that he couldn’t know for sure, that maybe the nod meant something else. But he knew it didn’t. And even if he could pretend otherwise, that wouldn’t have changed the weight in his stomach that grew by the day.

  One time he picked up the phone to call Rook, to tell him. But the naivety of that move was obvious. Rook knew. The Scorpions would not have acted on Matthews’ orders so immediately if murder wasn’t part of their mandate.

  The smart move would have been to pretend nothing was wrong and use his connections to come up with some way to bring the Scorpions down from the inside. But the smart move vanished from his mind every time he thought of those kids’ bodies. Of the blood and the uncomprehending confusion on their dead faces.

  He arranged a meeting with Rook. In the same booth at The Pit where he had first made the deal, he did his best to maintain his composure as he told Rook that he was calling it, that he was done.

  Rook’s expression was all concern. ‘Why, mate?’

  ‘You said no questions asked,’ Jack reminded him. ‘That if I ever wanted out, I could go without a problem.’

  Rook leaned back. ‘That’s true. But I thought we’d got to know each other well enough to speak plainly.’

  If only that was true.

  Jack forced a shrug. ‘It’s a dangerous game, Rook. You know that and I know that. I’ve got a kid now. I can’t be playing both sides.’

  ‘Alright.’ Rook smiled. ‘Family comes first, of course.’ He extended a hand. ‘We’ll miss you, Jack.’

  He wanted to dive across the table. He wanted to tear that smile off Rook’s face. He wanted to attack until he was bleeding out on the floor just like the Leighton children.

  But he took his hand, shook once, and left.

  The day after his meeting with Rook, Jack reached out to the others. He wasn’t looking forward to this. Not just because of what he had to tell them, but because it was news around the station that the Terrence Adams case, as it was still called, was potentially being reopened after another body had been found with the same distinctive wounds. There was talk of Eric spending long hours in the bar, poring over photos and case files as he spent hundreds on whisky. Jack felt for him. He’d made his fair share of mistakes, but he’d never got the wrong guy. Let alone killed him.

  They met in a rundown old warehouse in a largely forgotten industrial scrapyard. The inside had long since been hollowed out but for a few hunks of rusted machinery sitting among the weeds that grew from the partly caved-in floor. When Jack arrived with his duffle bag, Harrison and Eric were already there. Neither spoke. Harrison sat on what looked like it might have been a large old printer, eyes on his clasped hands.

  Eric, for his part, was pacing. If Jack thought he had looked bad at the premature celebration of his closing the Adams case, that was nothing compared to now. His hair, once immaculate and gleaming, was greasy and hung in his face. His skin was waxy and he’d lost weight. He stopped moving when he saw Jack. Just looked at him with those unblinking, bloodshot eyes.

  ‘I’m done,’ Jack said. ‘With Rook, the Scorpions, all of it.’

  Silence for a moment. Harrison didn’t look up.

  Eric shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘No. You’re not done.’

  There was a cold certainty to his voice that Jack didn’t like at all. ‘I think you’ll find I’ve made that call for myself, mate.’

  ‘I think you’ll find, mate, that it’s not that simple.’ Eric’s nostrils flared. His fists clenched so tightly Jack could see the white of his knucklebones. ‘What did we say, back at the start? All of us or none of us.’

  ‘Then it’s none of us,’ Jack replied. ‘It’s past time you both pulled the plug as well.’

  ‘NO!’ The sudden, explosive violence in Eric’s voice almost made Jack step back, but he held his ground.

  Eric moved towards him, slowly. ‘You don’t get to decide for us, Carlin. You should have called. Let us talk this through. Now you’re gonna call Rook and you’re gonna—’

  ‘I’m gonna do fucking nothing.’ Jack could hear the tremor of rage in his voice. How could Eric be so goddamn dense, so blind to what he was dealing with? ‘They’re killers. The Leighton family—’

  ‘Shared your little theory with the force, have you?’ Eric said.

  Jack didn’t reply.

  ‘Nah. Nah, didn’t fucking think so. It was never gonna be that easy, Carlin. Once you were in, you were in.’

  ‘Now I’m out,’ Jack said. ‘And if you put down the bottle for five seconds, you might realise why that’s the only move.’

  A terrible stillness from Eric. ‘Want to say that again?’

  ‘Eric,’ Harrison said.

  ‘I said it once,’ Jack said. ‘You heard it once. I don’t need to retract or repeat.’

  ‘But you should,’ Eric said. ‘You really fucking should.’

  Harrison stood.

  Jack was done with this. All of it. ‘How about I clarify. You’re a stinking, drunken wreck and I don’t give a fuck what you say.’

  Eric lunged for him. Harrison tried to grab him but he was shoved hard out of the way. Spitting and seething, Eric came at Jack, only for the full, heavy bag to take him in the head. He hit the ground.

  ‘Enoug
h,’ Jack said. He dropped the duffle bag next to Eric. ‘That’s all the money I have left from Rook. Keep it if you want. I’m out.’

  He turned and walked away.

  ‘Try to take us down, you’ll be right there with us!’ Eric, trying to stand, called after him.

  Jack kept walking out into the cold grey.

  In years to come, Jack would wonder if Eric’s fury was because he was finally starting to understand that the case he was buried in was linked to that choice the three of them had made so long ago. If, like Jack, he knew without being able to prove it that they had sanctioned the reign of monsters.

  Jack avoided Eric after that, but signs of the other man were everywhere. Anonymous complaints about Jack’s conduct. Rumours of affairs with CIs, of planted evidence and violence towards potential witnesses. A constant stream of untraceable attempts to tank his career.

  Nothing ever held enough water to be followed through, but it was a relief for Jack when he finally got the inevitable call that it was time for him to move on from undercover. Cops in that department had a use-by date; the ones who didn’t burn out were found out. There was a lot of debate over which was worse.

  Over the years even the wounds that couldn’t truly heal hurt less. There was never a day that Jack didn’t think about the Leightons, but there were a few where he could think about them without the breath going out of him, without the feeling of barbed wire being dragged through his insides. He threw himself into his work, but chafed against the structures of every new department he spent time in. He missed undercover. He missed being part of the underworld knowing he was above it.

  So it was a relief when he learned that Eric had been kicked off the force and his daughter taken away from him. He considered calling Harrison and asking for details, but on reflection realised he didn’t care. Eric being gone was enough.

  He wondered at times if Harrison ever regretted their choice the way he did. Outside of the force, Harrison kept to himself, focusing on raising the son Jack had never met. By all accounts, he was the picture of propriety and responsibility. Not somebody you’d ever think might take payouts from a bikie gang.