Cry Uncle

by Russel D. McLean

  This guy – I think his name was Inglis, maybe, or perhaps I’m getting confused – was the Mr Bean of close protection. Wound up getting hit with a cricket bat, run over by a car, all kinds of crap. Finally, he suffered a massive stroke – he couldn’t have been older than thirty or thirty-five – and lost all feeling on his left side. One too many beatings and a refusal to listen to his own body. Pushing himself beyond his own endurance. Not helped by a little codeine addiction, too, from what I gathered. I hadn’t gone that far, but all the same, my physical state was beginning to leave a little something to be desired. If I was a car, I’d be worried about passing my MOTs in the future.

  Across the bridge, I slipped into the east-bound lane. My first port of call was Burns’s home. Hoping I’d ring the doorbell, drag him out in his dressing gown. Would mean that, for once, I’d be on time.

  The traffic was light. I drove past the new swimming pool, built on the site of the Old Borders building. Round the city centre, nothing seemed to stay still for long. The city was evolving, changing. Five or six years, it was going to be unrecognizable. And maybe that was the point. Dundee had been promising change for decades. Finally, that promise was, it seemed, being acted upon.

  On the Arbroath Road, I heard sirens, pulled over to let the fire engines whip past me. And the police vans, too. Got a heavy feeling in my stomach. Once they were past, I broke the speed limits to keep up.

  The burnt orange halo reminded me of bonfires from my youth. We’d head out to Balgay Park and watch the fireworks every fifth of November, wrapped up in heavy coats, heads warmed by woolly hats and hands toasted by clumsy gloves that made it difficult to hold sparklers properly.

  For just a moment, I imagined that I could see a guy perched jauntily on the roof of the house. But it was simply shadows and the blurred edges of my vision combining to create an unpleasant illusion.

  DI Duncan ‘Donuts’ was the first responder. When he saw me climbing out of the car, he shook his head, walked right over, held out a warning hand and said, ‘Get to fuck, McNee.’ He looked tired. In the flickering light of the fire, his skin was pale and washed out. He was going bald, his remaining strands of hair holding on to the dome of his head for dear life, slapped across like three dark scores on the surface of a bruised apple.

  ‘Just tell me if there’s anyone in there.’

  ‘Best the lads can say, the house is empty. Surprised it’s taken this long for anyone to try a stunt like this. Guess his rep’s not what it was. Mind you, look at the company he keeps, aye?’

  ‘Any clues as to—’

  ‘You know you’re the enemy these days?’

  ‘Just because I do some private work for the old man doesn’t mean …’

  ‘I defended you a time or two,’ the fat detective said. He wiped his brow, sweating despite his distance from the burning house. Maybe it was just the few steps over the road to meet me that had exhausted him. I wondered how he ever passed his physicals. ‘The last couple of years, I started to wonder if maybe we had you pegged wrong. And then you started working for him.’

  I didn’t have the breath to waste telling him how he had it all wrong. There wasn’t time to argue.

  I said, ‘Do you have an idea who started this? I need to know if it was—’

  ‘Oh, aye, the infamous fucking Zombie? That who you mean?’ He laughed. ‘McNee, you really need to keep the fuck up, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘Go home, you prick. Go home. Leave this shite to the professionals.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Go home.

  Except I knew one of the basic truths of life: you can never go home again.

  If there had been no one in the house, then I had to wonder what Griggs was thinking. Had he finally lost it? He’d set the fire. Had to have been him. With Bako under arrest – although the way Donuts had laughed when I mentioned his name gave me pause for thought – Griggs was the only person with the balls to make such a direct move. This wasn’t the cockroaches crawling out from the dark spaces. Not yet.

  But why?

  Was he sending a message?

  Why take my phone if he wasn’t going to use it? Didn’t need that to set a fire.

  He had to be trying to lure the old man out into the open. It’s what I would have done: sent a text message from someone the old man trusted, arranged a meeting and then … well, done whatever it was I needed to do.

  The fire was a puzzle, though. An unexpected kind of melodrama. It meant something. Perhaps cathartic. Cleansing in some way.

  I remembered the way that Gemma Fairstead and Teale had talked about fire. Their thing had become sexual, but in the beginning, I had the feeling that the fire had been a release. A way of burning out their anger. Their frustration.

  Was this what it meant to Griggs? In this moment, was he burning out all his frustration?

  But what did he want, exactly? What was the end game? Where was all this leading?

  A good investigator tries to think like their target. Attempts to understand their needs, wants, motivations.

  What was Griggs thinking?

  What would I be thinking if I were Griggs?

  I would want revenge. I would want to see the old man pay for what he had done.

  What did that mean?

  That I wanted kill the old man? No. I could have done that at the house.

  So, what?

  David Burns had to suffer. And he had to know and understand what he had done to me.

  How could I achieve that?

  I’d need a place where we could be alone. Undisturbed.

  Where?

  Where would I go if I were Griggs?

  It couldn’t just be somewhere quiet. That was only part of the requirement. It needed to be somewhere with meaning. Somewhere where the old man could not escape his guilt and complicity in what had happened.

  You can never go home again.

  The phrase was echoing in my head. Why?

  Home was family.

  Family was what had started Griggs’s vendetta. Forget the personal attacks Burns had made against Griggs. For a copper like Griggs that was business as usual. But CeeCee’s death had made it personal.

  CeeCee.

  Found dead at the back of a council house. Discarded among the trash and detritus no one wanted to see.

  CeeCee.

  Griggs had wanted to protect her. Never had the chance. He didn’t know who she had been, where she lived. All he knew of her was where she died.

  That was all he had.

  Where she died.

  I knew where Griggs was. What he was planning.

  I just hoped I wasn’t too late.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I would only discover later what happened.

  How Burns came when he got the message. Whether or not he knew he was walking into a trap, I’ll never be sure. But he showed up. Alone. As though he really believed I was the one who’d contacted him.

  Griggs watched him leave the house. He’d been parked across the street, watching the old man’s house. Waiting for his moment. He let the other car pull away and waited for a few minutes before breaking into the house. Patient. He knew that if he rushed any of this, he risked blowing his last chance. He set the fire in the living room, and walked out of the house as though he had merely been visiting. None of the neighbours realized anything was wrong until the windows at the front blew open with the sheer force of the interior heat. Shards of hot glass rained down on what had once been the safest street in the city.

  The old man’s empire was crumbling. He was vulnerable. Two attacks in as many weeks. People were getting the message.

  This was why Griggs had set the fire. A final humiliation.

  Griggs sent a second text message to Burns:

  Change of plans. Meet at new location. Security compromised.

  Burns didn’t recognize the new address. Why would he? What would he have cared about an empty building where they once found the dead body of a drug-addicted girl whose life had ended befo
re it even had a chance to begin?

  He didn’t know CeeCee’s name. He wouldn’t have cared anyway. Her choices had nothing to do with him.

  Burns arrived at the new destination maybe ten minutes later. He climbed out of the car and looked around, maybe wondering why I had chosen this place to meet.

  But he wasn’t here to meet me.

  And when he saw Griggs, he smiled.

  It was nine years since CeeCee’s corpse had been found at the rear of the property. The building had been empty for half that time. The doors were shuttered, the windows covered by metal grates to stop intruders and squatters from breaking in. Not that it made a difference. The pebble-dash walls were washed out by years of neglect. The front garden was overgrown. People dropped their rubbish among the tall grass as they passed by. Bottle shards and needles sparkled in the moonlight. The house had a grim kind of beauty.

  I walked up to the main door. The padlock had been broken, the metal cover pushed aside. I pushed it further, let the long-dead house swallow me up. The hallway was dark. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the dark. I began to distinguish silhouettes; enough to place the stairs leading up to the second level and the length of the corridor leading to the kitchen at the rear of the property.

  Bile rose up the back of my throat. The world lurched, like a passenger liner caught in a sudden swell. I reached out to steady myself, my hand touching the cold, rough plaster of the walls.

  ‘Hello? Griggs?’ My voice seemed to crack. But I couldn’t afford weakness. Once this was done, once this was finally over, I would seek medical attention. If it wasn’t too late.

  I had spent the last few years drawn inevitably to the broken places in the city; the remaining hangovers of decades of poverty that had afflicted the self-described City of Discovery. My life had not moved with a city that was trying to forget its broken past. Instead, I remained in the shadow of places like this. Meanwhile, to the outside world, Dundee displayed its culture and shining future, its achievements and its potential.

  I had to wonder: Which was the real city?

  Was it possible for both to exist side by side?

  Did we only see the city we wanted to see?

  What did it say about me that this was the Dundee I knew? That the shiny future so often seemed distant and unattainable to my mind. As though it belonged to other people. As though I did not deserve it.

  There was movement from the kitchen. I walked through. Got to the doorway and then stepped back, my hand over my face, as a torch beam exploded in my eyes. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘You’ve got a hard head,’ Griggs said.

  ‘Aye, that’s the truth,’ a second voice said. The old man. Sounding defiant. What else would I expect? ‘He’s too stupid to realize when he should just give up and lie down.’

  ‘Do you recognize the gun?’ Griggs asked.

  I blinked. The scene came into focus. Illuminated not just by the torch, but by streetlights leeching over the rear garden and through the slats in the metal covers across the windows.

  I could see the dust dancing.

  The old man was on his knees, facing away from Griggs, head bowed, fingers locked at the back of his skull. The SCDEA agent was holding a handgun.

  Sure, I knew the gun. Why he had chosen that one in particular. Although God only knew how he got his hands on it. Maybe there was no longer anything left of the old Sandy Griggs: the man of honour and integrity. The man who had once believed completely in justice. He was so consumed by his need for revenge that nothing else mattered any more. He had given himself up to that hatred that I knew so well. He had become what I had tried so long to escape.

  I said, ‘Why that gun?’

  ‘You’re not daft, McNee. You can figure it out. For all the speeches you give, I know you want him dead the same as me. You’ve got as much reason. Jesus, he’s the reason that Ernie Bright’s fucking dead. Susan’s too scared to face up to her anger, but you understand. You killed a man with this gun, McNee.’

  I remembered the way that the bald thug had been knocked back. The way he crumpled to the muddy ground like a discarded doll.

  And the way that one act of violence failed to fill the gaping, aching hole in my heart like I hoped it would.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘This isn’t how it ends. We don’t kill him. We can’t. It makes us just as bad—’

  That got him. ‘Fuck you! Fuck your moral platitudes!’

  ‘I mean it, Griggs. You’ve got so twisted up on all this you can’t see right. You have to step back. He’s finished. You’ve done your job. What you needed to do. We have more than enough to fuck him up for good. So let’s end this the right way. No bloodshed. No more death.’

  ‘I knew you were a spy,’ Burns said. ‘I knew you were working for him. But I know you’re not like him, son … I know …’

  ‘Shut up! You don’t speak, old man. You don’t say a fucking word.’ Griggs’s finger tightened round the trigger. I took in a sharp breath that stayed caught in my lungs.

  ‘Or you’ll kill me? Jesus, you don’t really have it in you. You’ll get someone else to do it, maybe. But when it comes down to it, Griggs, you won’t kill me. The only man you ever killed was your father. And you’ve never been able to live with that, have you?’

  ‘Shut up and I’ll make it fast.’

  ‘I was never afraid of violence, son,’ Burns said. ‘But it wasn’t all that I lived for. You have a tool, you have to know how to use it properly. That’s all I ever did. It was never personal. Never like this.’

  ‘Crucifying a priest?’

  ‘The message, not the medium.’

  ‘You killed my sister.’

  ‘She killed herself. I never even met her. Frankly, son, I couldn’t give two shites about some sad wee junkie whore who doesn’t have the strength of character to pull her bloody socks up.’

  ‘You gave her the means to destroy her own life.’

  ‘I never met her. Never encouraged her. Never said she should shoot that shite in her veins. I didn’t even know her name—’

  ‘Her name was Catherine.’

  ‘CeeCee,’ I said, quietly. ‘When she died, her name was CeeCee.’

  Griggs was losing it. He trembled. That finger made to squeeze the trigger.

  Burns couldn’t see any of this. But he had to know what was happening.

  I said, ‘Her name was CeeCee, not Catherine. And she killed herself.’

  Griggs let his gun arm drop. His features dropped with the shock of betrayal. He started to say something. But the words stuttered before he could form them.

  The old man moved faster than I expected. He whirled round and got to his feet. He was holding a knife. I hadn’t seen where it came from. He feinted, and grabbed at Griggs’s gun with his left hand. Griggs let go of the gun as he fought for balance. Blood arced from the back of his hand where the knife caught him.

  The old man dropped his knife. It clattered on the ground. The only sound for a moment. The gun leapt from Burns’ left hand to his right. He adjusted his position with a practised air, and shot Griggs square in the forehead.

  The silence that followed was crushing. Made me want to drop to my knees.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Burns turned to look at me. He shook his head, as though what had happened was just one of those things: a tragedy, sure, but unavoidable.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I wanted to believe you had seen the light, son. You know that?’

  ‘But you knew?’

  ‘About what you were up to? Oh, aye. My wife told you, didn’t she?’

  ‘She wasn’t surprised to find herself in a police safe house.’

  ‘But working with this prick?’ He nodded quickly towards Griggs’s corpse. ‘You believed in his cause?’

  ‘I didn’t know. Far as I could tell, his operation was on the level.’

  ‘Do you think I killed his sister?’

  ‘Indirectly, y
es.’

  He shook his head. ‘All this time, all the time we spent together … I don’t know, I thought maybe … You get old, you get soft. That’s what it is.’ He shook his head. ‘I killed his sister … so … you killed my nephew, then.’

  He raised the gun.

  I took a step back. Raised my hands. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘He’s the one wanted you dead …’

  ‘You just want me behind bars?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘All the more reason for me to kill you, too, then.’ He raised an eyebrow, prompting a response. I didn’t have any to give. ‘My nephew’s dead because you took your eye off the ball.’

  ‘Your nephew’s dead because someone hated you enough to kill him.’ Sure. Great move. Piss off the man with the gun. Something I’d made a habit of over the years. My personal version of Russian Roulette. One day my luck would run out. The bullet would be in the chamber.

  He didn’t lower the gun, but he didn’t seem in a hurry to shoot me, either. We had all the time in the world. We were alone. Just the two of us. And the corpse.

  ‘You’ve always known,’ I said. ‘That I was working with Griggs. So you must have known that whatever he told me, whatever lies he fed me, it was good enough for me to believe. Don’t claim ignorance about it, now. I know you too well.’

  He nodded. ‘I have a sentimental streak. Wide as Loch Lomond, you see. Of course I fucking knew. I knew about Ernie, too. I just didn’t know this wee prick here had such a hard-on for me. I thought it was just another investigation, another example of police harassment. Happens all the time. They get bored, eventually.’

  ‘You didn’t have to kill him.’

  ‘Really? What choice did I have? Or did you have some kind of plan? Were you willing to take a bullet for me, son? Don’t make me laugh. Somewhere in there, behind all the protestations, you want me dead the same way he did. He blamed me for the death of his sister. I blame you for the death of my nephew. You blame me for Ernie’s death. Swings and fucking roundabouts. Never ends. Sooner or later, someone has to end it.’ He hesitated. ‘In a way, I sympathize. There are nights I think maybe I was to blame. I liked Ernie. Always knew he’d turn me in if he got the chance, but all the same … I wouldn’t have had him killed. You and I both know it was the crooked cunt ordered the trigger.’