The Good Son

by Russel D. McLean

  He didn’t give much away.

  I wasn’t there, of course. All I had to go on was his version of events. And even if he told me something of how he felt, he stuck rigidly to the facts. No meandering. No asides.

  Had he rehearsed this tale?

  The Speedwell Bar on the Perth Road is more popularly known to the locals as Mennies after the family who owned the pub from the early 20s through to 1995 when it was finally sold on to a private owner. Robertson had chosen it as a meeting place. Because he didn’t want to be alone with this woman. And because he knew he’d need a stiff drink.

  Real beer. Proper whisky.

  The kind of drinks Mennies had built its reputation on.

  Robertson had a photograph of himself and his brother as teenagers, before all the trouble had broken out with their father; back when they had been inseparable. He hadn’t looked at it in decades. It had been kept in a box, packed away like other remembrances.

  He had brought it with him to the pub. Laid it on the table in one of the quieter side rooms while he supped at his pint and waited for Kat to arrive.

  So she’d recognise him?

  Or for his own comfort?

  The bar was hoaching, he said. The crowd made him feel more at ease.

  Maybe I understood something of that, how it was easier to disappear into a crowd. You could let them distract you from yourself so easily.

  Finally a woman’s hand placed itself across the photograph. The index finger touched against his brother’s right cheek; a caress.

  Robertson looked up and saw Kat standing at the table.

  “You look like him,” she said, sitting across from him. “I mean, you’re bigger, and I think maybe life’s been a little kinder to you, but still, you can see it.”

  “You were his girlfriend?”

  She giggled and then placed her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s all a little much sometimes, yeah?” She composed herself. “I was his girlfriend, his lover, however you want to say it.”

  “He never mentioned you in his letters.” He shrugged. “Well, never mentioned much in his letters.” Then, standing up: “You want a drink?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’d be nice. Vodka and Coke, love, if you’d be so kind.”

  When he got back to the table Kat was holding the photo, studying it with a dedicated intensity.

  He set down her drink in front of her. She reacted like his arrival had shocked her out of sleep.

  “I was just thinking about him. How much he meant to me.” She forced a smile. “That photo, you were both very handsome boys.”

  “How long were you and my brother…?”

  “Two years. On and off. Our lives didn’t make things easy.”

  Looking at her, Robertson tried to see some sign that she hadn’t loved Daniel. And the more he looked in her eyes, the more he saw a deep sadness. He paused in his story and stared at me. The more he looked in her eyes, he said, the more he found he hated her.

  I nodded. I sort of understood.

  He continued: “He never told me much about what he did,” he’d said to Kat.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Not surprising, I guess. You do what you can to get by.”

  Robertson was worried by this; a sick feeling in his gut like she was about to finally destroy any hope he had for his brother.

  “And what did he do?”

  Kat put the photo face down on the wooden table, took a deep breath and then told him about the life of Daniel Robertson.

  Robertson looked like he couldn’t go on. Just remembering what she had said was enough to upset him.

  “What did she tell you?”

  He started to say something, but stumbled.

  “What did she tell you?”

  “She told me about how he worked for this man in London. How he broke people’s arms when they didn’t pay debts. How he killed men because they interfered with his boss’s business. She told me about his jail time.”

  “I’m sorry…” The words my mantra of the past few days. Everyone’s life going to shite, and all I could do was repeat two meaningless little sounds.

  “Aye, like hell, you parasitic bastard. How much money were you going to bleed before you finally told me the truth?”

  “These things take time. I needed to verify—”

  “Save it. Bloody leech!”

  “That was all you talked about? Your brother, his life?”

  “Aye. Now would you tell me…”

  There was no way to break it gently: “Last night, someone killed her. Her body was discovered in a dingy wee flat in the east end. She’d been assaulted and murdered.”

  Blood drained — as best it could — from his face.

  “She was stabbed. And finally, a bullet through the head. The police know about your meeting.”

  “You told them?”

  “At the scene, they found one of my business cards. It had been left there. Deliberately, I’d say.”

  “…who…?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you tell the bloody police I killed her?”

  I shook my head. “If you say you’re innocent, then I believe you. But you have to be prepared. You were in the right place at the right time. You have a credible motive in the eyes of the police. You—”

  “I’m not a killer.” Spitting the words.

  “They’ll want to talk to you,” I said. “To know everything that happened. It’s not going to be easy on you. They make sure it never is.”

  “I’d have no reason to…”

  “I need you to be honest with me. When she told you about Daniel… did you…?”

  “Lose the plot? Aye, bloody right I did.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  He pushed the half finished bacon roll across the table.

  I waited.

  “We had a wee barney at the table,” he said. “I called her a few names.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “It was bloody Mennies, of course there were witnesses.”

  “Did you leave together?”

  “I left before her.”

  “You left the bar first?”

  “That’s what I just said.” He hung his head forward and rubbed his palms hard against his face.

  I sat back and looked at him. Trying to gain a full picture of the man. Trying to understand him.

  Old instincts and training took over.

  Interview techniques:

  Consider the facts.

  Line them up with your gut feeling.

  Catch your suspect out in a lie.

  If you can’t do that, then re-asses your position.

  Analyse everything.

  Detach yourself.

  Whoever killed Kat had done so with deliberate care and attention. This was not the work of an amateur.

  Mennies was to the west of the city. The flat where her body had been discovered was to the east. If her death was a crime of passion — and if Robertson was the killer, I could think of no other explanation — then the body dump made no sense. The distance between the two locations was such that she had either gone willingly or been taken by force.

  And then there was the question of why that flat? Why that location? Robertson had no connection to the building.

  So who did?

  Knowing how easy it had been for Kat to trace Daniel to Dundee, I began to wonder if perhaps someone had followed her.

  I was watching Robertson, not allowing myself to empathise. Just observing.

  “I need to know if you noticed anyone else last night.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In the pub. Anyone who stood out. Who showed an unnatural interest in you or Kat. I mean if they were just watching or if they tried to talk to you… or if you saw anyone talking to her after you—”

  “There was no one! Jesus Christ, there was no one, all right?”

  He tried not to cry in front of me. But his skin reddened and his body sho
ok.

  And a flash of familiarity burned across my brain as I watched, but I pushed that away until there was nothing left but the cool, uninvolved observer, who did nothing but watch, analyse and consider.

  Chapter 12

  We walked along Riverside. A cool breeze blew in from the west.

  Robertson said, “Do I just hand myself over, then?”

  I shook my head. “Wait for them to come to you. You’re the last person to be seen with her. That makes you a suspect. It doesn’t make you guilty. You shouldn’t be acting like it does, either.”

  He laughed at that. “Come on, you can’t be that naïve.” His face creased. Close to tears. “I’m not a bad man. All I ever wanted was to keep my father’s farm running.” He dug his hands deep into the pockets of his padded green jacket. “My son doesn’t want anything to do with it, of course. Different generation, aye? He lives with his mother and her fancy man in Glasgow. He was a real farm lad when he was young, but since she took him out there he grew soft. Wants to be a musician, now. His band, they’re no actually all that bad. For what they are. But music’s no life for anyone. And that noise they play, it’s all drugs and pissing away your good health.”

  I didn’t say anything, thought of my own wasted youth.

  We passed a small parking spot where two fishermen had set up their equipment against the dyke. They cast their lines into the Tay, watching the waters closely, neither man saying a word to the other.

  Robertson looked at the men as we walked past and a faint smile played across his features. “Me and Daniel, when we were bairns, we used to go fishing at this wee pond near the house. A puddle, really, but to us it was amazing. Fish used to come in off this stream. Piddling wee things, but it didn’t matter.” His eyes took on the glaze of nostalgia.

  There was a ringing from Robertson’s pocket. He scowled, answered. The conversation was brief and one sided. Robertson listened, mostly. When he hung up, he turned to me and said, “You were right. That was one of the lads who works on the farm. The police have been round asking after me.” He took a deep breath. “That woman was a tramp. A bloody whore. No question about it. I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but you could see it all over her. She didn’t love my brother. No matter how much she tried to tell me otherwise. All the same, she didn’t deserve to die.”

  I noticed for the first time how tired he looked.

  Robertson turned away from me, looked out at the Rail Bridge. A train was passing over, away from the city. Robertson watched it leave.

  “Nobody,” he said, “deserves to die.”

  I offered to accompany Robertson back home, but he refused. Saying he’d deal with this on his own. Still angry with me. He wrote out a cheque to cover the work I’d already completed.

  I watched him closely as he signed his name, this fat farmer with his bunnet and his scowl.

  I’d treated him as cordially as possible. Maybe even felt sympathy. But none of that detracted from the fact he was a prick.

  His brother’s life as a gangster only worried him because of the way it made him look. In his mind, the worst case scenario was: what kind of shame can Daniel bring to my name and to my family?

  And his reaction to Kat: shame. This was not a woman Robertson could ever have approved of. His brother’s whore.

  Even his attitude towards his son was old fashioned and disappointed; one sentence away from calling the boy a hippie, saying he should get his hair cut.

  I should have been happy to get rid of him.

  Except there were still unanswered questions.

  One of the most important was why Daniel killed himself.

  There was no adequate explanation. If I believed Kat, he just didn’t have it in him.

  Besides, a suicide didn’t fit the image of the unrepentant hard man, and it seemed strange that his actions had taken his lover so completely by surprise.

  His lover, who was now dead.

  Murdered. No question, there.

  After I left Robertson, I took the long route back to the office. Hoping the walk might clear my mind.

  I tried thinking about other cases. Insurance jobs. Internet traces.

  The Robertson case was at a dead end. It was a police matter, now.

  Except I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Rachel had called. Asked me to meet her at Mickey Coyle’s on the Old Hawkhill, round the back of the university campus. An old brick building that was in danger of being swallowed up as the university expanded.

  We sat in a nook near the window, ordered lunch and drinks. She drank soda water and lime.

  Elaine’s drink.

  We sipped slowly. Over the stereo, Rod Stewart and the Faces played at a low volume.

  I tried to think of something to say. An opening gambit that would dispel the awkwardness we both felt.

  She sat on the inside, underneath the window. If I looked past her I could see the outside world between the slats of the blinds. The skies were grey and the city illuminated by a dull light.

  Finally, I asked: “How is he?”

  She took a moment to respond. “Harry? He’s good. All things considered.” There was some accusation in her voice. But I couldn’t pick up the specifics.

  Some fucking investigator I was.

  “He’s a changed man, you know.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I nodded, as though I believed her.

  “He grew up in a tough place. And he got out. He became someone else. He paid the price for what he did when he was young. And he got over it. Even if some people never believed that.”

  When Rachel had lost her baby, I’d believed that Harry was responsible. I’d known about his chequered past. He’d spent a few years in prison for assault. And I held it against him.

  I remembered seeing him in the hospital, looking at her with such love and adoration and feeling myself burn inside when I realised what I’d thought him capable of.

  Because I knew when I saw that look on his face that I’d been wrong. I saw the way she looked at him and realised that she had been telling the truth. It was no one’s fault she had lost her child.

  And maybe that made it worse on her.

  I thought of myself as cool, calm and detached. Put up a good front, too. And then I did something like that, judging a man in a moment. Letting anger dictate my actions.

  Outside the station, I’d almost done it again. Assuming he was guilty.

  Rachel never assumed. She loved her husband, seeing past who he had been to the man he really was.

  Rachel and her sister: so close, so alike. Elaine had done the same for me. Seen something no one else could.

  “Aye, everything sorts out,” I said after a pause that went on too long. And instantly hated myself for doling out platitudes to someone I cared for.

  Rachel looked at me strangely, as though I’d just given away something she’d never expected.

  But I was saved by the barman bringing over our meals.

  I dug into the steak pie. Rachel ate her chilli with deliberation while the air between us settled.

  “I guess you sorted things out, you and Harry.”

  She shook her head. “We moved on. That’s what you do. You deal with things and move on. And what happened, in the end it was nobody’s fault.”

  “He’s alright. For a Weegie prick.”

  She smiled at that. The smile turned into a laugh. Her eyes sparkled and her lips parted, displaying perfectly formed teeth. Then she stopped and frowned as if puzzling over a particularly tricky problem. She looked at me with her head cocked to one side. That same look she’d given me just a few minutes earlier. “I never really got it. What she saw in you.”

  “Neither did I. I was just grateful.”

  “But right there,” she said. “Just for a moment, maybe I saw something.” She looked at the surface of the table, her expression that of an embarrassed schoolgirl. “Sometimes, McNee, I might believe you’re as human as the rest of us.”

  Cha
pter 13

  Driving past St Michaels you would hardly notice it, except for the pub that sits on the junction right at the heart of the hamlet. The St Michaels Inn has a local reputation, well deserved, for good food and a relaxed atmosphere.

  Other than that, there isn’t much to the place. A few houses nearby. The forest just across the way. A smattering of houses with a main road running between them.

  I parked the car outside the inn as the weather began to clear. The sun wasn’t looking to show its head, but the temperature was pleasant.

  Walking into the lounge, I noticed a middle-aged man in a checked shirt and blue jeans playing darts on his own. Tucked into a corner table, a young couple dressed in walking gear shared a quiet pint.

  The barman was in his early twenties, maybe even late teens, with fair hair gelled into the approximation of a hedgehog. His face was open, honest and welcoming. The kind of face a family pub like St Michaels probably relied on. He was soft spoken, polite and deferential when he said hello. I ordered a Stella. As he pulled my pint, I said, “You know James Robertson?”

  “Thought that story was dead.”

  “Sorry?”

  “You’re a reporter, right?”

  I shook my head, pulled a business card from my wallet. He examined it closely, pursing his lips and nodding.

  “So what has this got to do with Mister Robertson?” he asked, handing me my pint and slipping the card into the breast pocket of his shirt. His eyes lit up. For this lad, there was whiff of danger and excitement about a job he’d only seen people do on the telly.

  “I’m working for a private client. Clearing up a few loose ends.” Conspiratorial.

  “Aye? Like what?” The lad bought it without question.

  “Like why Robertson’s brother committed suicide.”

  He nodded. “It’s a puzzler. I didn’t know he had family. Except his son and ex, like. All I know is he likes to come in for a pint every now and then. I think he takes a wee walk across his fields, just to check everything’s okay, you know, and pops in for a quick pick-me-up.”

  “But you know him well enough?”

  “Local man,” he said. “In a place like this you get to know everyone in a ten-mile radius.”

  “But not too well?”