“But I didn’t.”
He thought about that for a moment. Came to a conclusion: “Hardly worth a fucking victory dance.”
We could have talked about Liman and Ayer. He could have asked me what David Burns had told me. But he didn’t. After all, what use was I? A third-hand account of second-hand information would never stand up.
Nothing would ever connect the violence up at the Necropolis to Gordon Egg except rumours and hearsay. The coppers would get nothing on the big man. Mathew Ayer wasn’t going to break down, even taking into account the death of his friend.
“You’d better pray that prick doesn’t contradict what you’ve got to say for yourself.” Talking about Ayer. An idle threat, of course. Nothing behind it. No enthusiasm even.
Lindsay sat back in his chair. His limbs flopped. The top buttons on his shirt were undone and his tie was loose. I wasn’t under arrest. I’d merely been detained. Unless I gave him a good reason, I was gone in a few hours. Without charges, Scottish coppers can only detain a suspect for six hours barring requests for extension. He’d keep me in for the full six. Consider it some kind of payback.
All the same, he had to say something, make it look good. “One thing I still don’t get: you just happened to be there? What, you stumbled across them taking a midnight walk through the Necropolis?”
I shook my head. Told the story again.
He waited, even though he wasn’t really listening. He just wanted to piss me off, wear me down. When I was done, he said, “You didn’t think to come forward? Through all the intimidation, all the threats, all the shit you knew a man like you shouldn’t be handling, you just didn’t think that maybe the professionals could have helped you? I mean, if you were an ordinary bloke on the street, maybe I’d understand. But you were a trained copper. What, since you became a citizen again you just turned off your brain?”
I stayed quiet. Didn’t mention that I’d tried to talk to him earlier.
“Once in a while, McNee, I like to be disappointed. I like it when some cocky eejit turns around and surprises me. Does the right thing for once. I guess you don’t have it in you to disappoint, eh? We could have caught these bastards, done it right. By the fucking book. No deaths, no unnecessary violence. We could have prevented your client from placing himself in danger. Now he’s no longer the victim. Thanks to you, he’s as much a criminal under the eyes of the law as those two Cockney bastards.”
Did I say I thought he might have a point?
But nothing could have stopped Robertson. He’d been on the path before he stepped in my office. I gave him a direct line to the people he could blame for his brother’s death. If he hadn’t found me, then it would have been someone else. He’d been seeking revenge. He wasn’t a killer. But he wanted to be. Gone over the edge long before I got involved.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
I shook my head.
“Maybe why your wee prick of a client thought it was a good idea to try and stick a knife in a couple of hard bastards who wouldn’t think twice about snapping him in half?”
I sipped at the coffee, slowly. “No idea,” I said. “But grief’ll do funny things to a person.”
Lindsay digested this. Considered it. Ignored it.
“Tell me something,” I said. “You showed up mighty bloody quick.”
“Like the cavalry, aye?”
“Sure. You were following me?”
“You were under surveillance.”
My heart jumped. I thought about the gun I’d taken with me to the meeting. How I’d told Lindsay I’d taken it from Liman, thinking it was a detail Ayer wasn’t really going to dispute. Not when he had other matters to consider.
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
I nodded.
“One more thing,” he said, and if I didn’t know him better I could have sworn he was doing some half-baked Columbo impression. “There was a third gun.”
“Aye?”
“I mean, we’ve got the one you were pointing at the Cockney prick’s head when we came in. And the shotgun his wee friend had been carrying. And then this third gun that comes from nowhere…”
“So… the prick had a backup weapon.”
He smiled at that. “A backup weapon? Do you spend your days watching fucking American police shows?” He snorted. “A fucking backup weapon.” The unasked question: If that’s true, how did you get hold of it?
I shrugged, trying for nonchalant.
He didn’t mention it again.
We sat there in silence for a while. It was the kind of quiet you find among old friends. Neither of us showing discomfort with it.
Chapter 41
Lindsay had wanted to make me responsible for the bloodbath at the cemetery. But I was nothing more than a bystander. The only reliable witness he had. He may have kept me in interview one for the full six hours, but that was more out of petty revenge than any real suspicion.
I was still worried about the gun.
I knew why Lindsay had mentioned it. Even if he had no proof that I had been in possession of an illegal firearm, he wanted to make me sweat.
Mission accomplished.
Susan was waiting for me when I left the station. Out of uniform. The harsh yellow light of the early evening sun seemed to soften when it fell on her.
In the car, I lolled in the passenger seat, watched the city roll past outside. In the aftermath of the storm, everything seemed quiet. The streets were almost empty, the glistening pavements reflecting the light from above. The walls of buildings were darkened with the rain, and the windows of parked cars were beaded with tiny droplets of water.
My body became heavy. The movement of the car and the peace of the city was enough to lull me towards sleep. After all, I thought, I deserved it. To close my eyes if only for a moment.
I barely remember arriving at the flat. I have only a vague memory of climbing the stairs, my arm around Susan’s shoulders.
What I do remember is being in the living room, sprawled out on the sofa, Susan asking how I was doing.
And then: “Would you have killed him?”
“What?”
“Would you have killed him?”
“I wanted to.”
“Is that really an answer?”
“No.”
It was strange to hear myself talking. The painkillers were having their effect and I felt like an observer of my own life, surprised by my actions as much as anyone else was.
After Susan left, I went to bed, but stopped short of climbing in and collapsed on top of the covers. I didn’t sleep. But I didn’t want to move.
Except…
People thrive on closure, on the illusion of order in a chaotic world. I’m no different.
Loose ends make me uncomfortable.
Like James Robertson.
My client.
He had attacked two hard men. Killers. So full of primal rage, he’d taken everyone by surprise.
I knew that he was a changeable man. Had a temper. I’d witnessed his judgemental attitude towards other people, even his own family. But there was a great deal about him that I don’t think I ever understood.
A great deal I’d seen and simply ignored.
If I hadn’t become distracted by other events, I might have been able to help him. All of this could have been avoided.
I was missing a connection. Something had made him attack two men whose business, whose very nature, was death. Was it out of character? Or merely some part of my client I had blinded myself to?
What had I said to Lindsay in the interview room? Words slipping casually from my lips in the manner of a well-worn platitude: “Grief’ll do funny things to a person.”
And I wondered whether the grieving process had started for Robertson on the discovery of his brother’s corpse, or if it had begun some time before even that.
I was pulled from sleep by my mobile ringing. Hadn’t even thought about turning it off. Who was I expecting to call?
I answered; groggy.
Robertson said, “I killed him.”
Sleep and painkillers made me slow. “What?”
He said it again.
When I didn’t answer, he told me where he was. Said he wanted to talk.
Driving over the road bridge, I kept the window wound down. The wind blew hard into my face and kept me awake.
With my busted right hand, I found it difficult to control the car. Changing gears was the worst, letting go of the wheel and leaning my right forearm forward to try and keep it straight.
I should have stayed at home. Called Lindsay, told him what I knew.
I could claim that I wasn’t thinking straight. That adrenaline, anger and painkillers were what kept me from picking up the phone.
But that was a load of shite. Because what stopped me from picking up the phone was the need to see this through to the end. The same stupid pride that had led me to kill a man.
The same stupid pride that convinced me I was the only one who could tie up the loose ends, set the world right.
Maybe I was already too late. Maybe I had the whole situation wrong.
I thought that I understood what Robertson was thinking. Finally knew why he had walked into my office that day. He had been looking for someone to blame for his brother’s death. That was why he had come to me. A private investigator wouldn’t step on his toes.
I should have seen all of this straight away, but for some reason I’d chosen to ignore it. Perhaps because something in his desire for revenge mirrored my own needs.
At St Michaels, I almost ramped up onto the embankment, as I turned onto the old farm roads. The car rumbled on uneven surfaces. Eventually, I came across an abandoned Mitsubishi Shogun, mud spattered across its tyre arches and the windows in need of a wipe-down. I parked behind the other vehicle, climbed out the car and slipped through the undergrowth.
James Robertson stood beneath the skeletal tree where his brother’s life had ended. At his feet, a length of rope was coiled like a sleeping snake. The man’s back was to me, and he stood perfectly still.
My feet cracked dead leaves and he turned. The movement near shocking, as though a statue had unexpectedly come to life. The whites of his eyes were red-raw roadmaps. He’d been crying.
I stepped forward.
“I think I get it now,” I said. “The truth, I mean.”
He stood his ground, his body language challenging me.
“You made him kill himself,” I said. “That was why it looked so convincing. Did you plan that? I mean, was that how you thought you would avoid complicity? Was that how you avoided feeling like you had nothing to do with his death? Was that what made you think you weren’t really a killer?”
“No.”
“Then why?”
“He had to understand.”
I nodded. “Make me understand,” I said.
He hesitated. Then he told me everything.
Chapter 42
Robertson’s living room the afternoon his brother came home:
“I want you to have it,” Daniel said. “All of it. The money.”
“And if I don’t?”
Daniel shrugged, like it was no big deal, like people got offered cases of cash in their front rooms every day. “Then get rid of it.”
That had been where Robertson’s story ended the first time he told it to me. Daniel had walked out. Either upset by his brother’s refusal to accept the proffered gift or so ashamed of his life that he couldn’t stand to face judgement from all that remained of his family.
I should have picked up on the lie. Robertson’s version begged the question of how he knew where to find the money when we agreed to meet Ayer and Liman in the graveyard. Begged a lot more than that. Had I deliberately blinkered myself to the holes in his story because, on some level, I connected with what I saw as a man in mourning?
In the shadow of the tree where his brother’s body had been found, he told me the truth.
“Why?” Robertson had asked.
Daniel snapped shut the case, took a deep breath. “I made a mistake. Fuck it, I made a lot of mistakes. Took a lot of stupid fuckin’ risks. And now I’m going to have to pay for them.”
“Where did the money come from?”
Daniel shook his head. “Can’t say, won’t say. Bloke like you wouldn’t understand. Wouldn’t get it. It’s not important. It’s not hot money. Not for the police, anyway. No one’s gonna notice you spending it.”
“But they’d notice you?”
“It’s not the money that’s marked.”
Robertson thought about this. He said, “Aye, all right. Then do this for me: tell me the bloody truth. All these years, for what you’ve told me, you might as well have been in a coma. I’m your brother. Christ, I deserve better than that.”
Daniel hesitated. For a moment Robertson thought he might turn and walk out the door. But instead he took a breath and told Robertson the whole story. Who he was, what he had become, the terrible things he had done not only to others but also to himself.
Robertson only half believed what he was hearing. His eyes were opened to another world; one he knew existed but had never properly accepted as real. Robertson had known something of what his brother told him through newspapers, TV shows and what he had read in books. The effect of realising that it was suddenly so close to his own life was devastating.
When Daniel finally finished, any connection between the two men was lost forever. People talk about how you can forgive your family anything. That evening James Robertson realised what a crock of crap family was.
He had wanted his brother to return for so long. What had finally come home was some twisted parody of the boy he had once known; a disgrace to their father, to their family.
“I could have murdered him,” he told me. “I mean, for all that he’d done he deserved to die. Aye, Christ, I should have. But I’m no killer.”
I had to wonder who he was trying to convince.
He had asked Daniel whether he intended to do anything about his life, whether the man felt any remorse for the terrible things he had done.
“I’m fucked,” Daniel said. “There’s nobody left.” His eyes dropped to the floor. “After mum died, you know, I think I began to realise something. I never really grew up. When I took off like I did, I wasn’t running away from them. I was running away from myself. I could never have been a farmer. Couldn’t have lived the life you have. Too fuckin’ different, yeah? I always was. I was looking to make a point when I went to London. That I was different from you and from them. I wasn’t just some farmer boy who had nowhere to go in life. I was gonna be somebody.” He moved to the fireplace, let his fingers reach out and touch a framed photo of their parents. In the photo they were a young couple standing in some field together. Their father’s arms were wrapped around their mother’s waist. Her hair was long and dark and her face was unlined. She looked radiant. There was nowhere else in the world she would rather have been. Their father was strong and proud, his eyes twinkling with a joy neither son could easily associate with the man he would become.
“And somewhere it all went tits up,” said Daniel. “I didn’t become somebody. At least not like I wanted. I became a criminal, a fuck-up. Told myself I was happy. Even believed it, too. Except that… when you wrote and told me about mum, it was like I could feel her dying. Like a part of her had been inside me and I knew when she was dead, because it crumbled to dust and blew away on the wind. I was empty inside.”
He shook his head, blinked away tears. “I know I sound like a poof, but it’s true, every fuckin’ word. We all have to come home one day, right? I thought I’d missed my day and I could never come home again. Felt like a fuckin’ failure. The things I’ve seen, the things I’ve done and what was it that finally fucked me up? Ink on paper. My mother, who I barely even remembered and it was still like some bastard stuck a knife in my guts and twisted.”
He clenched his fists, his knuckles whitening with the
pressure. “Nearly two fuckin’ years it ate at me, and I thought I could ignore it. Because that’s what hard bastards do, yeah? They ignore things like that. They’re men. Real men, like Lee Marvin, John fuckin’ Wayne. Ray Winstone. He’s fuckin’ right there, he’s the daddy. Because that’s what it takes. Emotions, all that shit, it’s what gets in the way. Never get attached to nothing except the money and the respect. Fight to keep every inch of both of them. For two years this shit ate at my insides. Chewed at my gut. Made me think of the fuckin’ cancer that killed our mum. I couldn’t take it no more, picked up the blower. Called Dad. You sent me the number when he moved house. Hoping I’d call him, right? And I did. I had to. Tell him I was sorry our mum was dead and say I would cry for her, but I wouldn’t give a shit when he died. It was fuckin’ stupid, like I’d regressed. Should have left the cunt behind a long time ago. Thought I had, too, until I heard his voice on the other end of the line. A fuckin’ empty shell. He’d been the bogey man for so many years, yeah? Everything that made me frightened and ashamed and suddenly he was such a disappointment.”
“You called him?”
“Yeah.” Daniel couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes, knew what the other man had realised and couldn’t deny the truth.
“That was the night he killed himself, wasn’t it?”
“I didn’t mean for him to…”
“He didn’t leave a note. We never knew what was going on his head. He left everyone to guess what had happened. Making me feel like the one who did something wrong. I hadn’t been the good son after all because he wasn’t able to open up to me, to tell me…” Robertson stopped talking, his stomach churning. His fist lashed out instinctively. Daniel staggered backwards, clutching at his face. His eyes were wide with shock.
Robertson remembered who his brother was and his anger became fear. He stepped back, shrinking into himself. For protection.
Daniel Robertson simply stood there. “Everything I am,” he said, “it’s all been about running away from him. From myself.”
“So you came back to offer me this money, to make amends?”
The Good Son Page 16
