Unless panic was making him sloppy. This was one of the few times I hoped he hadn’t made a mistake.
I parked down by Riverside, took out my mobile and keyed in the number. But didn’t press send. Just sat there, staring at the illuminated screen.
Another car drew in to the small parking area. Parked a couple spaces away. Flashed its lights. I didn’t return the signal. Ignored it. Knew what was happening. Didn’t care.
All the same, someone got out of the car. Walked over. A weedy looking little pervert in his early thirties. His hair was slicked back and he had a kind of stuttering walk that spoke of nervousness. He rapped on the window.
I ignored him.
He rapped again.
I wound down.
He started straight in, voice too loud, body shaking.
Anticipatory tremors. Wondering if he was doing the right thing coming here after dark. He said, “I don’t know how it works. But that’s my bird, back there.” Jerking his head back to indicate a girl with bleached blonde hair who’d turned the other car’s interior light on.
I said, “You got the wrong guy.”
“They said that this was the spot to –”
“And I say get the fuck out!” I reined myself in, the words coming out just short of a snarl. All the same, the man reared back as though I’d snapped my teeth at his face; a rabid wolf when he’d been expecting a docile dog.
As he retreated, I said, “Count yourself lucky, pal. I could have been anyone. Next time wait for your fellow perverts to flash back!”
He had trouble starting the car, the engine stalling three times before he peeled off out the spot and back onto the Kingsway.
Another time I might have laughed.
But all I did was stare at that phone. At that number. Wondering if I was already in too deep. If I had already chosen the action I would take. If it was too late to turn back.
If it had been too late for a long time.
TWENTY-ONE
The meeting place was on the nose, but still made sense in a strange kind of way.
Burns had asked me to go to the warehouse where Ernie died.
Remnants of investigation – crime scene tape fluttering sadly in the wind, traces of fingerprint powder on the door handles – served as a reminder of what had happened here, along with the ends of half-smoked cigarettes and other human droppings.
But while the echoes remained, there was no longer any buzz around the place, no real sense of humanity. The building was quiet and deadly still. Where there once had been life, now there was nothing.
Even before Ernie’s death, the warehouse had been abandoned and forlorn. Ignored for years, probably decades, by a city that had concentrated on expansion as though it meant the same as rejuvenation. Dundee’s landscape had evolved with new riverfront properties springing up, bright and shiny, while so many old buildings off the travelled tourist tracks had been left to rot.
You’d almost think that some people wanted it that way.
Burns was waiting for me in the back of a BMW parked just outside the main doors.
His driver got out first and walked towards me. I met him halfway. He was checking me out as he walked, his eyes focussed and alert. Fair enough. Give Burns his due on the paranoia front. If what he told me was true, he had more reasons than usual to be cautious.
I recognised the driver. His build made you understand what people meant when they said, Brick Shithouse. We’d tangled once or twice in the past. Meant he was trusted. From what little I knew of him, he was the strong, silent type. Just what a man like Burns needed.
I’d done some close security work, knew the Brick Shithouse wasn’t a professional. But the kind of security a man like Burns required wasn’t likely to be vetted by the SIA. Burns preferred his own style and his own people. He couldn’t come to the professionals because they were bound by codes and rules that would prevent them doing what he wanted. So instead he hired the biggest bastard he could find and relied on intimidation to do most of the work.
I nodded a greeting to the Shithouse. He nodded back. As though we had a kind of unspoken kinship.
He moved to the back passenger door of the BMW. Opened it. Ushered. A smooth gesture, and I figured it was copied from the movies. He would be thinking, this is how a heavy should act.
I tried not to smile at the idea. Got in the back of the car.
As the door closed, Burns said, “Well?” twisting round from the passenger seat.
I handed him the papers across the divide. Said, “There’s another name on some of these documents. Wonder if they mean anything to you.”
He studied what I’d been able to grab. Smoothing out the creases in the paper from where I’d crumpled them in my pockets.
“Here’s the thing,” Burns said, “Kevin Wood was and always will be a cunt.”
I didn’t react.
“Even for a copper,” Burns said, “he’s a shitebag. Ernie had old loyalties and old friendships that complicated his job. And, aye, he wasn’t as lily-white as you and your wee girlfriend would have liked, but he knew who he was and what he was and there were lines he would never cross.”
“Wood was different.”
“I knew the bugger when he was a kid. Even called him a friend, once. And let me tell you, he frightens the piss out of me.”
###
Kevin Harold Wood.
Born to Harold and Edwina in Kirkton during the late 1950s. An only child. Like the old joke goes, his mum and dad took one look at the ugly bugger and said, no more.
Maybe it wasn’t a joke. Kevin Wood was a big kid with sticky-out ears and a bad case of the plukes that kicked in with puberty. Joke used to be that they based the character of Plug from The Bash Street Kids on Kevin Wood.
But the main difference between Kevin Wood and any cuddly kids’ comic character was that Plug wouldn’t break your nose for laughing at him. Plug wouldn’t kick your arse just because he could. Wouldn’t ask for your dinner money and then take it no matter what you said.
Aye, less Plug and more thug. In the proper sense of the word. Except Woods was more than just muscle and anger.
He had brains, too. Quickly realised that brute force wasn’t the answer to everything. He started to figure out how to get what he wanted without being caught. Woods could be ruthless. But he didn’t have to be punished for it.
At high school, he ran with a small crew who he relied on to do his dirty work. Letting them get in all the trouble, Woods concentrated on acing his exams. Because he wasn’t the kind of thug who refused to listen to his mother, and Mrs Wood wanted her son to excel, to have another life than the one she and her husband found themselves living.
That ideal stuck with their son, of course. Kevin Wood was part of a generation who would finally have opportunities, so she kept telling him.
All of this, of course, was according to what I was told by David Burns. David Burns who, for a short while, ran with Wood and his crew until he saw opportunities elsewhere, realised the kind of game Wood was playing. The kind of game where everyone else loses.
“He used people. Chewed them up. Spat them out.”
I’d heard, down the years, the same things said about Burns. Sometimes I’d been the one doing the talking. I had to wonder if men like him had any kind of self-awareness.
If they could ever see themselves in the way that others did.
But according to Burns, Wood was different from most of the lads in their neighbourhood. Sure, they had a surfeit of hard men, of kids who knew they had to be tough to survive. But Wood was a true bastard. People feared him.
“No just the other kids. The teachers, too.”
Earmarked as a potential major player, he surprised everyone when he hit his teens by suddenly walking away from the life that called him.
“He had opportunities. He’d been noticed. Back then, Kennedy Senior was the man running things.”
Kennedy had been old school. After serving in WWII, he came back home to
find that the country didn’t need him for anything any more. So he did the only thing he could, and continued fighting. Built up a life and reputation through hard graft and ruthless desperation. His sons were supposed to inherit an empire both legal and illegal, wound up grinding both into the ground and dying violent deaths due to bad choices. Burns had been one of their dad’s inner circle, but split and went independent after the old man’s death. The rumour mill often pointed at Burns as a major player in the brothers’ eventual deaths. A rumour that was never proven, of course.
Back in the bad old days, Kennedy Sr. had offered Wood a slice of his pie; knew that one way or another the ugly lad was going places. But Wood walked away from the offer. A move no-one expected. And no-one understood.
Rumours bubbled, as they always do. Maybe Wood was setting himself up to go into competition. Thought he could take down the old guard. It was the way of youth, Burns said, thinking they could do everything. In the end, people wondered was he just another eejit with an ego who thought things would be better if he was in charge.
But it seemed as though Wood really did walk away.
Wound up in college. University.
Kept his act clean. Became a respectable adult. At least, that was the way it looked to everyone. No more scams. No more violence. No more connections.
And then the move that gave some observers a heart attack.
The police force.
“It was one of those moves you thought, aye, it has to be a scam. If you remembered who he’d been as a boy, you were laughing. Either he’d gone insane, fallen off the edge, or else he was playing games. But the truth was he’d been out of the picture for a few years by then. Nothing came about connected to him. He wasn’t in the game because he’d never really done more than dip a toe in the water. And for a while, I thought maybe he really had changed. That something had happened. A trauma, you’d call it. Something bad enough to scare him straight. To make him see where the life would lead.” He shook his head. “But I should have known. His kind never really change.”
In the 1970s, drugs became a major problem. The trade began a boom period that some might argue never really ended. Burns was in on the racket. Of course, he and his kind were a precursor to the NIMBY persuasion: if any of Burns’s boys or anyone in his neighbourhood got hooked, he came down on them hard. As Burns said, “I never pressured anyone. Told my boys that the hard sell never worked. You don’t create junkies. The addiction comes to them naturally. And if they’re too weak to combat it, they don’t deserve respect or help.”
But as with any business, Burns faced competition.
Competition that didn’t share his sense of “morality” or his reservations about working with junkies. Competition that played dirty. Competition with an unfair advantage.
“The thing with bent coppers is that they’re every bit as bad as a junkie,” said Burns. “It’s always in them, this bad centre, this rot they can’t get rid of. They can’t help themselves.”
And the other thing about bent coppers: They play dirty.
“Worse than any of us,” said Burns. “Amoral shitebags with no idea when to draw that line. They don’t like you, all they need to do is claim the law is on their side and they can fuck you up and down before you have time to realise what’s happening.”
As during his high school days, Wood kept himself clean, kept himself removed from any hint of wrongdoing.
“But he was responsible – more than anyone else – for what happened to this city. You remember the bad old days, McNee. When the industry was gone, when unemployment hit the roof, when the city was going to hell. When men like me stepped forward and tried to do something, anything to help a city that was in danger of imploding. Like I said, if you deal in drugs, if you deal in anything, you play fair and only sell to those stupid enough to buy without any other pressure.”
Listening to Burns, I knew that he was rewriting his own history. His own policies. His own methods. Self-delusion. Came naturally to men like Burns. There had to be where even he was unsure of which lies were even close to the truth.
But he had one thing right: Kevin Wood was more of a threat, more of a villain, than Burns.
It came down to which side you fell on. David Burns was a self-deluding psychotic arsehole who had ruined so many lives that I could only imagine the ledger on his conscience. But despite his continual protestations, he knew what he was, and the role that he played in the game. He fooled people only insofar as he wasn’t going to be caught, arrested and punished for the things he had done.
Kevin Wood, on the other hand, was supposed to be one of the good guys. A copper. Supposed to protect ordinary citizens from men like Burns, the man who ensured that decent people were free to live their lives without fear or without threat. The thin blue line.
I knew the truth, of course: that the police were often forced to tread lightly, making difficult decisions in regards to process that sometimes the people would never understand. But there was always a line and if what Burns was telling was true, Kevin Wood had, for decades, been so far over he probably couldn’t see it any more. It was a memory, something in the far distance, lost to the horizon.
What made it worse was, if Burns was to be believed, Kevin Wood had essentially been fucking the city for decades and no-one had batted an eyelid.
“So if you’ve known about him for so long,” I asked, “why is he only making a move against you, now?”
Burns smiled. Opened the car door and made to get out, gesturing for me to follow him.
TWENTY-TWO
As the warehouse doors slid open, they made a low rumbling sound; an ominous, thunderous echo that caused me to involuntarily shiver.
Inside, the building was dark. Burns pulled a torch from inside his coat to illuminate the interior, but the light seemed comically inferior against the encroaching shadows. Somewhere up in the rafters, there was the flapping of wings.
Every small noise echoed.
Burns said, “If it came down to the wire, I have no doubt that Ernie Bright would have locked me away for good. He was a good policeman. An honest man.” As he smiled in the backwash illumination of the torch, he took on a ghostly hue; the devil stepping out from the shadows to offer a deal for which the only price would be my soul.
“Don’t patronise me,” I said.
“Check the conduct records if you don’t believe me. Your friend was clean as a whistle. Like I said, he was merely conflicted. But I had no hold on him. Not even a sentimental one.”
“So how did he end up dead? Why was he a guest at your house?”
“Over the last few years he had been asking about Wood. Trying to find out what I knew. He was onto Wood’s game. While it’s possible for a man to change, in the case of a man like Wood someone’s always going to have suspicions.”
We walked into the warehouse. Our footsteps echoed in the air around us. The torch illuminated the dust on the floor and floating in the air.
“Your man Ernie had come to notice little things about his colleague. I got the impression they’d never been friends, but something finally put Ernie’s nose out of joint…”
Was this the whole truth? Burns’s sins were often those of omission and I was coming to realise that he would only ever tell me as much as he needed to in order to ensure my complicity.
“You’re saying that Ernie had a grudge against Wood? That was why he came to you?”
“More than that. Ernie was the kind of cop who needed proof, evidence. He was by-the-book. You know that, even if you came to doubt yourself. He’d seen irregularities that tracked back to Wood. He knew the man had a past and did some digging.”
“And you helped him?”
“He came to me. Because it was mutually beneficial. Remember we worked together in the old days.”
Ernie used to say the attempt by the police to work with men like Burns was the worst idea he’d witnessed in all his years of policing.
But he’d done what he was told. Be
cause he was a good copper. Because he had trusted that someone, somewhere had a plan.
Hard to think of him as ever being that innocent.
“There were problems, of course. The more I told him about Wood –”
“– the more you told him about yourself.”
Burns made a little noise from the back of his throat that I guessed was an agreement. “No-one likes a grass, McNee. Not on our side. Not on… theirs.” I figured he’d been about to say yours, but stopped himself at the last moment.
And he was right to do so.
What was I any more? An ex-cop, sure. And most of the time I guess I still sided with them. Morally speaking, at least.
But I’d done things over the last few years that were at best ethically ambiguous. And I’d dragged other people – like Susan – down with me.
If I stopped to think about it, I don’t know if I could really say what I was.
Maybe there are no heroes in the world. No good. No evil. No black hats. No white hats. Just people who make decisions, right or wrong. The only lines drawn are artificial ones, created through some desperate need to make sense of the world, to mark out behaviour and attitude in a way that is easily categorised.
We walked up a set of metal stairs, onto a gantry that ran across the perimeter of the warehouse. Burns told me what he knew about Ernie’s death. “You want to know why he died? He died to send a message, McNee. He died because he was getting close to Wood, maybe had started flirting with your beloved Independent Police Complaints Commission or just put the man on notice. I don’t know, but I know that he wouldn’t be dead if Wood didn’t see him as a threat.”
Burns seemed to be taking Ernie’s death as personally as I had. Or maybe I was just projecting. Looking for an ally where I was afraid I had none.
We hit the upper gantry.
“How’s his daughter taking it? You and she are close.”
He was vague about the exact nature of my relationship with Susan, as though uncertain what the situation was.
Which made two of us.
“She’s taking it hard,” I said. “Her father’s dead. His reputation has been brought into question…”
Father Confessor (J McNee series) Page 12
